How to create B2B social media policies

November 24, 2009 by Chris Koch

One of the cornerstones of a social media strategy is having a clear set of corporate social media guidelines or policies. The best documents don’t just tell employees what not to do; they also tell them what they should be doing to further the marketing goals of the company. Here are some recommendations based on a cross-section of social media policies from B2B companies, including social media policy examples from some leading B2B companies. (Thanks to Kent Huffman for giving me a great starting point for this post):

Invite employees into the process. Employees will feel much more comfortable adhering to policies if they feel that they have had a voice in shaping them—as IBM’s and SAP’s employees did. But don’t provide them with a blank slate. Develop a draft that corporate and legal are comfortable with to make sure all the bases are covered. IBM and SAP put their draft guidelines on wikis, where employees were invited to make comments and suggestions.

Reference the employee code of conduct, if you have one. The code of conduct is the “umbrella policy” for your social media policy; it does the heavy lifting for the more serious aspects of employee conduct (e.g., obey your local laws, behave ethically, etc.) so that your social media policy can focus on the specific issues that arise from social media.

Determine a policy for direct contact with key influencers. For example, some companies allow employees to communicate generally to the social sphere but require that any direct communications to analysts, the financial market and/or members of the media must be conducted only through corporate communications.

Require a disclaimer—and provide the boilerplate. “This [Choose. Blog, Space ...] is the personal [Blog, Space …] of [Name] and only contains my personal views, thoughts and opinions. It is not endorsed by [X corporation] nor does it constitute any official communication of [X corporation].”

Require that any use of the company logo or name be approved. Disclaimers aren’t enough if the blog is plastered with company logos or the company name is part of the blog title. It should be clear that this is a personal effort, not a corporate one.

Have a “don’t be stupid” clause. Guidelines are not guardrails. People need to know that taking personal responsibility for their actions is the best guideline of all. Here’s an example from one company’s policy: “Please be aware that, although [X Corporation] is providing you with these guidelines, the overall and final legal responsibility for any statement made by you will reside with you personally. Therefore, you should exercise caution and thoughtfulness to statements you make online.”

Spell out what stupid means—both internally and externally. Being sure to include the “including but not limited to” phrase, make sure employees know that blogs are not for communicating policies to other employees, negotiating with third parties, or releasing material information about company strategy or financials (or as Sun puts it in its social media guidelines, “it’s not OK to publish the recipe for one of our secret sauces”).

Encourage openness, honesty and transparency. The social media sphere punishes people who don’t disclose their affiliations or pretend to be someone they aren’t (e.g., the Whole Foods CEO using an alias to bash competitors or the Wal-Mart bloggers who didn’t disclose that they were being paid by the company). Require employees to disclose their affiliation with the company at all times and avoid using aliases.

Encourage community through sharing and attribution. Social media is not just a place for broadcasting opinions. Employees should be encouraged to become part of the community by doing research and linking to other relevant content—not just their own.

Separate opinion from fact. The best retort to criticism is factual evidence to the contrary. But employees need to check those facts for accuracy and attribute them rather than passing along something they aren’t sure about.

Demand respect in all interactions. When people make nasty comments in social media it’s tempting for employees to respond in kind. But bad behavior inevitably makes its way back to the brand, while good behavior demonstrates that a company is able to handle negative feedback gracefully and builds empathy. Make it clear: no disparaging remarks about third parties—ever.

Remind them of their day jobs. Employees are not doing the best thing for the company by letting social media take over their workdays. Emphasize quality rather than quantity in social media interactions.

Encourage them to write what they know. Employees may feel passionately about the possibility of life on other planets, but unless they work for NASA, it’s probably not worth getting into on a blog.

Provide a channel for questions. No matter how good your social media guidelines are, employees are going to have questions—especially those who are new to social media. The guidelines should include a place to go for advice. For example, Cisco has an e-mail alias called “internet postings” where employees can get help.

Ditch the legalese. Social media is supposed to be fun, informal, conversational and open. Take whatever language legal gives you and translate it into English; otherwise, you risk scaring off or offending employees.

Make it public. Nothing demonstrates your openness and commitment to social media more than making your policy publicly available. Big companies like Cisco, HP, IBM, Intel, SAP, and Sun, all do it. Invite comments and update the policy as needed. Making your guidelines public also gives you license to borrow from others (ask permission first and give credit where it is due).

Here are links to the best examples of B2B corporate social media policies that I found:

Also, check out the non-profit Social Media Business Council’s Disclosure Toolkit

Sources: Kent Huffman, Cisco, HP, IBM, Intel, SAP, Sun.

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Six factors driving B2B social media marketing adoption

November 20, 2009 by Chris Koch

We’re all getting constant advice—hectoring, even—about how we need to make social media a key part of our B2B marketing strategies right now. Two main threads underpin the logic behind these urgings:

  1. Your customers are becoming more active in social media, so you’d better get with it.
  2. Your competitors are adopting social in their marketing strategies, so if you don’t do it, they will.

While I believe that these two threads are accurate, I haven’t seen compelling data to back them up—at least as it relates to B2B. So I’ve assembled some research, from both ITSMA and other sources that examines the case for social media. How strong do you think the arguments are?

Customer factors
Customers (the younger ones, anyway) are adopting social media. IT and business buyers are flocking to social media more rapidly than anyone would have imagined even a few years ago. Our latest annual survey of 355 buyers of complex IT solutions, How Customers Choose Solution Providers, 2009: The Importance of Personalization, Epiphanies, and Social Media, shows that the door to the C-suite is opening up. (You can download an abbreviated summary here.)

We found that usage of social media among IT and business buyers of technology rose 50% over 2008 and finally pushed to majority status—55% said they use social media as part of the technology buying process in 2009 versus just 37% in 2008. More importantly, we found that executives in large organizations use social media more than in smaller organizations, and C-suite executives actually use social media more than their lower-level buying peers. Just 15% of CEOs and directors said they did not use any form of social media at all, while 34% of manager/directors and 26% of VPs/Assistant vice presidents said they ignore the stuff.

However, age trumps rank in terms of social media usage. For example, a Forbes/Google survey of 354 top executives found that more than 50% of executives under 40 maintain a work-related blog, Twitter their thoughts, and visit online social networks frequently. Meanwhile, fewer than 5% of executives over 50 share their thoughts via social media and a whopping 38% said they have never been to a social networking site.

Search is becoming increasingly dominant in the buying process. Even for buyers who fear stepping across the social media threshold, search will draw them in through the back door. ITSMA research shows that 63% of buyers proactively seek information about providers themselves, and the Forbes/Google survey found that 79% of executives perform at least three web searches per day. The pool of information they are sifting through contains an increasing amount of social media content.

The trade press is dying. Trade magazines are imploding as marketers continue to pull out of print advertising. Revenues for B2B publishers for the first five months of 2009 were down a total of 26.3% and ad pages by 30.3%, according to American Business Media, a B2B trade association. Meanwhile, revenues from online advertising are doing little to stanch the bleeding. For example, when you add in digital revenues, total advertising revenues for the first half of 2009 are still down by 19%.

B2B magazines are shuttering by the hundreds–literally: 137 in 2007, 120 in 2008, and 130 through the third quarter of 2009—twice the rate of new startups (yes, they still do start print trade magazines), according to MediaFinder, a database of magazines. Those titles that remain have cut staff and have many fewer pages to fill.

Online-only publications don’t have it much better. The need to maximize page hits means that trade journalists are being pushed to create more shorter stories that appeal to the largest possible audience—not a fertile ground for in-depth analysis of complex B2B products and services. Customers and prospects looking for content are going to see more of it coming from social media by default.

Marketing factors
Social media requires fewer hard dollars. In ITSMA’s social media survey in April 2009, 42% of marketers cited “reduced cost of marketing” as a top benefit of social media—second only to “increased website traffic.” Though the degree of cost savings of social media is controversial—many of the tools may be free but the labor to manage them certainly is not—marketers tell us that social media costs less to manage than most other programs.

Digital marketing has reached the budget tipping point—with help from the recession. B2B marketers have been shifting dollars away from offline programs (mostly trade shows, print advertising, and print collateral) to digital marketing in eight of the last nine years, according to ITSMA’s Annual Budget and Trends survey. But digital has always been a relatively small component of the overall marcom budget—until now. By the end of 2009, marketers predict that digital (which, besides social media, also includes more traditional categories like e-mail newsletters and the website) will become the largest category of their marcom budgets at 13%.

And the recession is speeding up the shift to online. For example, in early 2009, 44% of marketers said they were responding to the recession by shifting dollars online. By October, 77% were using online as a recession fighter. Overall, more than 77% of marketers say they plan to increase their online spending in 2009-2010, according to ITSMA’s Marketing Pulse survey.

Marketers are building online communities—fast. We’ve seen a dramatic rise in the percentage of B2B marketers that say they’ve built online communities themselves or through third parties such as LinkedIn and Facebook. In ITSMA’s social media survey in April, 43% said they had built their own communities and 54% had built group pages on Facebook or LinkedIn. By October, the percentages were 70 and 79, respectively.

Does this research make the case for social media in B2B marketing, or are you skeptical?

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Social media strategy for B2B: what’s required and what’s optional

November 13, 2009 by Chris Koch

Despite all the breathless hype about social media these days, what I hear most from B2B marketers is frustration. Most of the marketers I talk to are trying to reach a few top executives in big organizations who make buying decisions about big, complex products and services. For these marketers, the pool of customers and prospects is small and many of them do not want to engage publicly in social media or are simply ignoring it altogether.

ITSMA research shows that there are other ways to reach these people that are much more effective than social media, such as small, thought leadership-based events, content-rich websites that are optimized for search, and robust reference programs, to name a few. For these target executives, peer relationships are everything, but for now anyway, most of those relationships are happening offline.

For many companies, this translates into a wait-and-see approach to social media.

I think that’s the right decision—up to a point.

For these companies, there is little reason to twitter into the wind. If you’re strapped for resources (who isn’t?) and you can invest in other things that are more effective for reaching your target audience.

But the mistake I think many companies make is assuming that if there is no reason for actively marketing the company through social media then there is no reason to invest in a social media strategy.

I think that’s short sighted.

Here’s why: In marketing, we have a traditional bias towards being active. After all, that’s how we’ve always done it. We push messages out and try to stir up attention. We could control the public conversation because our audience had few public outlets for giving or receiving information. But social media is a vast public platform where eventually the conversation is going to get around to our companies—if it hasn’t already.

So even if there is no reason to have an active social media strategy, there is every reason to have a passive one. By that, I mean monitoring the cacophony of public conversation on the web to determine whether any of it is applicable to your company—and if it is, what you should do about it. This is why every B2B marketing leader needs a social media participation strategy even if he or she does not intend to actively market through social media.

I divide participation strategy into three pieces (I go into each in more detail in this post):

  1. Monitor. Listen for conversation about your company or about relevant issues for you and your customers.
  2. Engage. Develop a strategy for responding to customers and influencers who talk about your company or relevant business issues.
  3. Manage. Decide whether to take an active role in creating conversations and fostering a community.

Though I will probably get some arguments about this, I think the participation strategy is a linear process—i.e., you need to know how to monitor well before you can engage well, and you certainly need to know how to engage well before you can start building community.

We have reached the point where monitoring is an absolute requirement in any B2B marketing strategy. Even if it doesn’t seem that your customers and prospects are actively conversing on the social web, you need to confirm that fact. And even they aren’t talking, there’s no doubt that someone is having a relevant conversation about business issues that are important to your customers—and that you should be monitoring.

This week, Jeremiah Owyang published a great framework of things that marketers have to do to listen well—including a list of vendors who help marketers listen. The only disagreement I have with his framework is that it is about more than listening. Stages 1-3 of his framework are true passive listening and every B2B marketing group should be doing them—regardless of whether they decide to actively market through social media.

But moving from stage 3 to 4 is moving from passive to active participation. There’s a chasm there that many B2B marketers are unwilling to cross. It seems companies are comfortable (in theory if not yet always in practice) up to Stage 3 but beyond that they are terrified. They see the resource commitment ramping up and the potential for mistakes (risk) amplified because now they have to actively engage with people in social rather than just track and listen.

And there’s good reason to be terrified. As effort increases, resource allocation and ROI become issues. Larger companies can shift budget from dying categories like advertising and trade shows into social media without affecting other programs, but many smaller companies never had much budget in those areas to begin with. So social media becomes a larger strategic decision that some would just rather not make right now—so they don’t do anything.

I think we need to parse that decision more. Listening is a requirement, but active participation remains optional.

What do you think?

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Want to understand your customers’ business needs? Give them an award.

November 6, 2009 by Chris Koch

Like most marketers, I spend most of my time desperately seeking to understand my target audience (B2B marketers) and delivering content that they find relevant and engaging. It’s a struggle.

But once a year around June, my life gets a little easier. That’s when I get to sit back and watch the submissions for our Marketing Excellence Awards (MEA) roll in. It’s a beautiful thing. Marketers from around the world tell us in great detail about the campaigns and programs that have netted them the most business results.

We have five different categories for the awards that cover important areas of focus for B2B marketers. The number of entries we receive in each category and the quality of those entries give us a sense of marketers’ shifting priorities from year to year and reveal general strengths and weaknesses of the profession (for example, we’re great at sales enablement and demand generation; we suck at metrics—just not in our blood, it seems).

Everybody wins with the MEAs. For us, it’s an opportunity to build a closer relationship with the winners and generate some great thought leadership. The winners get serious recognition for their work that helps their companies and their careers. If you haven’t considered creating an awards program for your target customers, you should.

I wish I could take credit for the MEAs, but it was developed long before I got to ITSMA. I also wish I could take credit for the excellent eBook that oozes with best practices from this year’s winners. You have to check it out. It was developed by my ITSMA colleagues Pam O’Rourke and Maria Lindberg.

However, I can share some of the best practices we’ve developed for separating the wheat from the chaff in the MEAs. The guiding principles we use to determine the winners are the same ones that guide the success of any marketing program: innovation, execution, and business results. We ask a series of questions designed to reveal how well the entrants have fulfilled those three key principles:

  1. What is the story? We humans are wired for stories. What is the narrative that explains what you are trying to accomplish with this program? Creating the narrative helps project members focus their efforts and will help sell the effort to others inside the business and with customers.
  2. What are the motivating factors? Successful marketing programs always have a compelling call to action. But marketing programs are themselves calls to action. There should be an important business justification that causes marketing to create the program. That justification can come from inside, such as wanting to enter a new market or shore up sagging sales, or outside, such as a new competitor entering the market.
  3. What is the customer need? The depth and creativity of your research can be the deciding factor in whether the program rises above the noise in the marketplace. Research provides the supporting evidence for a new insight into customer or market needs. For example, segmentation could reveal a market that you never knew existed. Role-based research can help personalize your message to the needs of the specific buyers and influencers involved in the purchasing decision.
  4. How do you quantify the need? Research also provides the quantification of the need and the benefits of your solution that are most worth highlighting for customers, such as:
    • Improve efficiency
    • Increase customer satisfaction
    • Increase profitable revenue
  5. Where is the innovation? To be sure, one of marketing’s primary roles is to support sales. But marketing should also be helping drive the business strategy and execution of the company. One of the ways to do this is through programs that challenge the current ways of doing things, both internally and with customers. Marketing programs should help the business stand apart from competitors in the segment. The best signal of success is when competitors feel compelled to respond.
  6. What are the constraints? Of course, all marketing programs come with constraints. Budget is the overriding limiter, but it’s important to quantify as many constraints as possible because the limiters help define the ambition of the project.
  7. How do you measure success? Establishing clear metrics before you start provides guard rails for the project and makes it easier to provide progress reports. Of course, knowing the metrics before you start also makes the data gathering process much easier.

Do you have an awards program with your customers? If you already have one, are you asking the right questions to find the best of the best (and make your life as a marketer easier)? Please comment with a link to your awards program and tips for making the most of them.

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Want proof that the C-suite is into social media? Here it is.

October 30, 2009 by Chris Koch

There are two rivers of content at conferences. One is the river of planned content—the conference theme, the presentations, etc.; the other is the river of conversation that flows through the event at breaks, meals and receptions. This is where you get the dope on the shared challenges of the attendees.

We just wrapped up our ITSMA Annual Marketing Conference this week and the strongest current driving the river of conversation was social media. Specifically, frustration over how to use social media to reach the C-suite. Most of ITSMA’s clients are B2B marketers from big technology companies that sell big, complex products, services, and solutions. That means that the people buying those services—or at least playing a key role in the decision—tend to be high up on the corporate food chain—the C-suite or just below.

These are not the people we imagine Twittering about their need for complex enterprise IT services. In fact, it’s hard for most of us to imagine these people using social media at all.

CEOs Use Social Media More than Other Buyers
And yet our latest annual survey of 355 buyers of complex IT solutions, How Customers Choose Solution Providers, 2009: The Importance of Personalization, Epiphanies, and Social Media, shows that the door to the C-suite is opening up. (You can download an abbreviated summary here.)

We found that usage of social media among IT and business buyers of technology rose 50% over last year and finally pushed to majority status—55% said they use social media as part of the technology buying process in 2009 versus just 37% in 2008. More importantly, we found that executives in large organizations use social media more than in smaller organizations, and that C-suite executives actually use social media more than their lower-level buying peers. Just 15% of CEOs and directors said they did not use any form of social media at all, while 34% of manager/directors and 26% of VPs/Assistant vice presidents said they ignore the stuff.

This has big implications for marketers. It means that social media is taking hold within your biggest, most valuable accounts at the highest levels. Sounds like a business case for investment to me.

Another surprise was that the big shots use all of the different social media tools pretty evenly. However, CEOs did show a specific preference for the range of social networking sites—LinkedIn, Facebook, and Plaxo—over Twitter or blogs.

Use Social Media to Drive Peer Connections
This makes sense when you consider what our IT buyers have been telling us for years: that their peers are by far their most preferred and trusted choice for information during the buying process. This year, our research showed that most buyers go to colleagues inside their own companies for referrals of people to talk to about a purchase. No doubt, they would like to expand that circle beyond the company—30% say they rely on peers from councils and communities they belong to, and 29% say they speak to colleagues at other companies for referrals.

Right now, I have to believe that the biggest potential for social media within this elite audience is as a tool for expanding the circle of trusted peers that they can call upon when they’re about to make a big purchasing decision.

What do you think?

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Where should your corporate blogs live?

October 16, 2009 by Chris Koch

Earlier this year I surveyed B2B marketers about their approaches to corporate blogging. Their strategies take two basic approaches.

Onsite. These marketers take a direct role in finding and supporting internal bloggers and in helping them develop content. The blogs are an integrated part of the corporate marketing strategy and are usually hosted on the corporate website. Most say that they try to suggest topic areas that fit with the company’s overall thought leadership strategy.

Offsite. Whether through choice or through necessity, these marketers take a more hands-off approach—the “let a thousand flowers bloom” approach. They encourage subject matter experts to blog, track what they write about, and offer blogging guidelines and help when needed. They do not set up or tend corporate blogs. The subject matter experts have independent blogs or speak through third-party platforms like Linked-In, etc.

I don’t think that one approach is necessarily better than the other. But I’d like to hear your opinions. Here are some strengths and weaknesses of both approaches.

Onsite advantages:

  • Built-in traffic. It can takes years to build enough word-of-mouth to build a marketing worthy audience for a blog. The corporate homepage can direct a fire hose of traffic to the blog from the start.
  • Integration with other marketing. Blogs are only part of a thought leadership marketing program. Surrounding the blog with links to other sections of the site gives the blog credibility and helps build interest.
  • Brand respect. Impress visitors by having a summary page of your blogs set against the corporate backdrop.
  • Incentives for bloggers. Being on the corporate site is a good way for bloggers to raise their visibility inside the company and promote their careers. It’s also easier for marketers to justify spending their time supporting bloggers when the blogs are on the corporate site.

Onsite disadvantages:

  • Suspicion. You can’t have a disclaimer on your corporate-hosted blogs. Readers will assume that corporate bloggers will sanitize their opinions and do what they can to promote their companies. That runs counter to the spirit of the best blogs. Of course, a good blogger can break through that suspicion with content that is interesting, unbiased and altruistic.
  • Content inflexibility. Bloggers will feel more irresponsible taking flights of fancy on their corporate-sponsored blogs than on their own personal blogs. And visitors will frame their expectations of the blogs through the expectations they have of the company. For example, visitors may not feel that an executive from a computer networking company should be writing about tangential topics, even if he or she is qualified to do so.
  • Technology inflexibility. Corporate websites are complex beasts that are difficult and expensive to change and require going to another department, IT. Meanwhile, social media technology is changing constantly. Corporate-hosted blogs won’t be able to take advantage of the latest social tools that complement blogs without going to IT and getting some custom coding.
  • Life sentence. It looks bad when corporate-hosted blogs shut down unless there are others to take their place.
  • Failure runs deep. A bad blog with little traffic and no comments reflects badly not just on the blog but on the corporation hosting it.

Offsite advantages:

  • Resource savings. Letting bloggers do their own thing requires little support from marketing. A blogging policy is generally enough.
  • A degree of separation from mistakes. Gaffes by independent bloggers generally don’t lead back to their employers.
  • Thought leadership farm team. Marketers can spot and encourage budding subject matter experts and re-purpose their content as thought leadership.
  • Half-life is less important. Independent blogs can appear and disappear without reflecting badly on the blogger’s company.
  • Technology flexibility. Independent blogs can take advantage of new technology quickly and easily, because most independent platforms are built on standard internet technologies.

Offsite disadvantages:

  • Building traffic takes longer. The search engines don’t pay much attention to blogs with little content. Building up that foundation of content takes time.
  • No integration with marketing goals. You take what you get with independent bloggers. You can’t pick the topics.
  • Limited incentives. Marketers won’t be able to do much for their independent bloggers.

What do you think? How are you handling your corporate blogging strategy?

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I’ve moved to a new domain

October 12, 2009 by Chris Koch

No, my house hasn’t been foreclosed on, I’ve just graduated from a free wordpress.com blog to my own hosted site. The old domain is http://chriskoch.wordpress.com/. The new one is http://www.christopherakoch.com. If you wouldn’t mind re-subscribing to my RSS feeds and e-mail feeds through the new site and bookmarking the new site, I can retire the old one with honor.

I’m still on Wordpress (though with a new, more flexible free design or “theme” called Room 34 Baseline) and am continually amazed at how intuitive and easy to use it is and how good the support network is for something that is free. You really should consider it if you’re thinking about doing a blog or would like more traffic from your existing blog. It’s an incredibly powerful tool. Wordpress has a list of hosting services on its site to help you get your site started. I went with Bluehost because it had a live 24-hour chat window on the front page where I could ask questions as I migrated my site. Made it very easy.

I’m happy that my blog has grown to the point where I can justify having my own site. And that’s due to you. So thank you.

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We’re missing the real social media revolution

October 12, 2009 by Chris Koch

We’ve all heard a lot of debate lately about whether social media is an evolution or a revolution. Lots of statistical analysis about the relative growth rates of Facebook and Twitter and the slowing of uptake for both.

Look at it this way and social media inevitably becomes evolution, as social media researcher Josh Chasin convincingly argues here.

But I think we lose sight of the revolution by looking at social media in isolation. Social media is tightly tied to something that is undergoing a revolution right now: media. We’re all looking for the revolution to happen within the tools, but where the revolution is occurring is in the content that feeds those tools. We all like to share relevant, credible content through social media, and until now, most of that content has come through traditional media sources—mostly print publications that are pretending to have a viable business model online.

The destructive side of revolutions
We like to look for constructive creation from our revolutions. As Americans, we think back to the American Revolution as a constructive spark that led to a powerful nation instead of focusing on the decades of weak, chaotic, violent, and ineffective government that actually followed it—and that nearly collapsed many times.

Today’s real media revolution is in its destructive and chaotic period. Our traditional business model for media is imploding. Advertising-supported media is becoming an unsustainable business. There won’t be nearly as much to link to through Twitter in the coming years, and that’s the revolutionary subtext that’s going on behind the evolution of Web 2.0. What happens as thousands of small and medium-sized newspapers and magazines disappear? How does social media fill that void? Will it be replaced by spending our time reading Shaq’s tweets?

The five percent of Twitterers who actively use it are probably the only ones who are going to try to fill this void with something useful. In tracking B2B marketing through Twitter, I find a ton of great content being shared through blogs whose creators have already swamped the output of trade magazines. But what about the rest of social media’s audience?

Social media tools are imperfect for informing people
This is where the constructive part of the revolution will come. What thoughtful readers like about a good publication is that it filters out all the noise and it tells readers when they know enough to move on. You reach the last page of the newspaper and you’re done for the day. You realize that you don’t know everything, but you can walk away knowing that the day’s events haven’t totally escaped you. Social media doesn’t do that for us right now. Twitter is literally an endless stream of information, much of it repetitive. The tools are imperfect for informing us.

But as the traditional tools for informing us disappear, we need social media to play a role in rebuilding the channel of informed public opinion that is being destroyed right now. This is no evolution.

But social media tools can alter relationships
I keep coming back to how social media tools have the power to reshape relationships, much as the American Revolution (eventually, many years later) reshaped the relationship between a government and its people. That’s why I’m so intrigued by the viral relationship model invented by Twitter.  The ability to follow someone (offline I think we call it stalking) is perhaps Twitter’s most powerful feature. This idea of viral relationship building (following followers of others) is what Facebook and MySpace look at and get really jealous about. They’re stuck in the model of making relationships the old fashioned way: through permission-based trust and experience. Twitter has created a sandbox where those rules are mitigated by technology and people are liking it because they know everyone else is (or should be) playing by the same rules.

In this sense, I think the comparisons between Twitter and Facebook are less valid than those between Twitter and another phenomenon that changed the way we relate to each other: eBay. You can’t deny that eBay is a revolution. Tens of thousands of people make their primary living from it now on a global basis. Twitter has all sorts of options for expanding based on the viral relationship model it has created. Sure, now it’s 140-character updates, but the viral social model has potential for other things, too, including content creation (not just sharing).

When does social media take on a social responsibility?
So at what point do we begin ascribing the same responsibility to social media that we have to traditional print and TV media: that of educating and informing the public? It sounds crazy, but at some point (if not already) many people are getting most of their information through these social media channels. At what point does Twitter stop Twittering about its latest features and start offering public service announcements? Probably not anytime soon, because Twitter’s business model isn’t any more certain that traditional media’s is right now. Someone else may come up with a way to make money from the viral relationship model that Twitter pioneered and we may not even remember the name in a few years. Sounds like a revolution to me.

Meanwhile, a new revenue giant has emerged in social media for the same reason that the old media empires emerged back in the 19th and 20th centuries: it can charge a tax. Of course, I’m talking about Google, which sucks cash out of businesses just like the newspapers and magazines used to. Businesses believe they have nowhere else to go to get their messages out other than through Google paid search, so they pay through the nose for it, just like advertisers used to with newspapers and magazines. So when do we stop viewing Google as a software company and start viewing it as a media titan with a responsibility to the public? When does Google stop linking to the New York Times (and sucking all of the paid search revenue that the Times would get if people just went to the site instead) and start building its own news division, just like the TV networks did in the 50s?

Sounds nuts, right? But if you’re going to be the source where everyone gets their information, you have some responsibility to those people at some point don’t you? As a people (and as a government) we’ve certainly had that expectation of media empires in the past.

What’s happening here is that we are completely altering the relationship between media consumers and media producers. Social media is part of that because it is altering the relationships that people have with each other online. Put those two things together and you have a revolution. We are in the chaotic period where the walls have come down and no one’s quite sure where or how the new ones will go up. Sure sounds like a revolution to me.

What do you think?

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What are your best practices for "recession marketing?"

October 8, 2009 by Chris Koch

Okay, so I’m not an “A-list” blogger. But I’ve been at it long enough that I’ve earned the right to call in a favor now and then. My web analytics tell me that there are at least 100 people who care enough to let me into their e-mail boxes before deleting me. So I’m going to go all Chris Brogan on you (I mean that in a nice way) and talk to you directly and ask you to be part of my community and talk to me.

If nothing else, do it because you feel sorry for me. My CEO at ITSMA, Dave Munn is looking for stories about how marketers have come up with innovative ways to actually do things better during these tough times. And he wants me, Mr. Research, to find them. Now we do have some research data about the impact that the recession is having on marketers and actions they are taking. And we have lists of marketing best practices that we can rattle off.

But we’re looking for something more human. We need stories.

I’m taking up your time with this because I’m also looking for these stories to be in context. This has been an awful year for a lot of people. I don’t know a friend who hasn’t experienced some kind of loss—whether it be layoffs or job cuts. (Most of my friends are or recently were in journalism.) So I’m looking for two things: stories about ways to do things better and stories about how you’ve kept your sanity and sense of humor at work during these times.

I’ll give you our working proposition: This recession is part of a trajectory that began in 1999, when the dotcom crash set us on a course of cost cutting that seemed temporary until last Fall. Until last Fall, I think many of us thought that somehow those wonderful days of the 90s were going to return: Fat bonuses, full staffs, discretionary options. But now we know that the sense of the temporary that had us looking back to 1998 for our definition of normal is gone for good. Worse, the fat that existed in 1999 did not exist last Fall when companies made more big cuts on top of all the incremental cuts we’ve seen over the years.

The “new normal” as Dave calls it, is one of very small marketing staffs and a network of offshore support. On the one hand, it’s depressing. But there’s also something perversely liberating about it. We can shake off the sense of limbo that comes with the expectation of regaining past losses. We can stop waiting now. And there’s some comfort in that.

And there’s something positive in the idea that we can view this as a clean slate to do things differently. We won’t have the resources of the past anytime soon, so we can look for new ways to do things.

Social media is one new way. Many of the tools are free so the time we devote to them becomes the thing that we need to innovate on and improve.

How are you doing that? What else are you doing to improve marketing? How are you surviving these times?

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Why marketers must become the new publishers

October 6, 2009 by Chris Koch

One of the great trends were seeing at ITSMA is increased automation of the lead process. It’s great because the software acts as a battering ram for alignment between marketing and sales.

But this trend has an unintended side effect: it exposes our content development processes (or lack thereof). If we now have a system measuring how long it takes marketing to nurture a lead until it is sales ready, we will now also have a measure of whether the nurturing period increases or decreases over time.

That metric is going to be critically important as we automate the lead process because nurturing is marketing’s special sauce. It’s how we move people tantalizingly close to a sale—without ever putting a salesperson in front of them.

We accomplish this feat through content. And if our nurturing metric is going to improve over time, so must our content.

Improvement through relevance
By improve I don’t mean that we all have to learn to write like Tolstoy. By improve I mostly mean that we need to make the content more and more relevant to target buyers. I’ve spent the last two days as a guest at Marketing Sherpa’s B2B conference in Boston and the many excellent speakers used publishing metaphors constantly. And I think those metaphors are useful for simplifying the content process (and for improving it) because most of us are familiar with the publishing model.

The publishing model is also relevant because as a business model, it is dying—especially for trade magazines. The ad revenues that once funded coverage of every arcane niche of technology have dried up, and so has the content that could have mentioned our companies. Demand for that content hasn’t gone away however, and companies that can provide an adequate alternative will grow their businesses more than those that can’t.

How to adapt the publishing process to marketing
To fulfill an ever-increasing demand for content you need a process. And the publishing process works better than the marketing content development process because the publishing process developed without an overlord (e.g., salespeople screaming for a brochure today or an event tomorrow). The publishing process is intended to identify a target audience, develop an understanding of that audience, and deliver targeted, relevant content. To consistently beat competitors, that content needs to remain relevant and targeted. If it doesn’t, circulation drops, ad revenue drops, and the publication goes out of business.

In other words, relevance is the primary measure of success.

That’s how we should think about our marketing content process. Here are some aspects of the publishing process that drive relevance:

  • Identify the target reader. Publications fail if they don’t grasp exactly whom they are trying to reach and why. Marketers need to do a similar kind of segmentation.
  • Create an editorial calendar. Every good publication has an editorial calendar. When I was at CIO, we despised the calendar process because it was the primary instrument that our salespeople used to demonstrate relevance with potential advertisers (and our competitors could see it). But looking back on it I think we despised it more because it revealed the gaps in our coverage and in our knowledge of readers and their needs. The calendar planning exercise always gave us a ton of ideas that wound up driving much of our coverage for the year—especially since we weren’t a newsmagazine and most of the topics were evergreen. Much of the content we offer as marketers is also evergreen, so there’s no reason not to have a plan for content. If nothing else, it gives you something to wave in salespeople’ faces the next time they come screaming about a brochure.
  • Research the reader. Most magazines do annual reader surveys to ask subscribers what they think of the magazine and what could be improved. Through these surveys, they construct archetypes of the typical reader. Marketers can replace offers with survey questions once in awhile to help build an understanding of timely issues to drive future content.
  • Interview the players and the experts. Journalists aren’t experts in the fields they cover, but they’re experts at finding those that are. They’re also good at finding the people who live the stuff they’re writing about every day. All good journalism comes from expert insight and real-world examples. Marketers need to talk to subject matter experts inside the company, influencers outside the company (analysts, academics, bloggers, journalists), and customers. All you need to do is ask questions and the content will flow out of these people.
  • Audit content. When surveying readers, magazines also ask whether readers like specific articles and subject areas covered in the magazine. Marketers need the same feedback from customers and from salespeople. If you don’t have the money to do research, consider adding a review button or comment feature to content.
  • Diversify content. Most magazines are a mixture of long and short, graphic and text-heavy stories. Marketing content needs to be similarly diverse.
  • Cycle through top reader interests. Magazines develop a short list of topic areas that matter most to their readers and hit those topics regularly as part of the issue planning process. Marketers need to develop a similar list as they plan their content calendars.
  • Be timely. Editors always try to leave room in the planning process for the timely, exclusive scoop—the story that identifies an important trend before others do. For marketers, being timely means having content that matches every stage of the buying cycle, so that you have a chance for an “exclusive” at each stage.

What’s your publishing process for content? What have I left out?

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