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13 questions about social media and idea marketing

October 1, 2010 by 6 Comments

Earlier this week I participated in one of MarketingProfs’ TechChats (just do a Twitter search on the #TechChat hashtag to find the dialogue).

It’s a warm-up for the great dialogues we’ll be having at MarketingProfs’ SocialTech conference later this month in San Jose, where I’ll be speaking about social media and the B2B buying process. If you’re in B2B marketing, you gotta go to this thing. All the top social media pros will be there and the focus will be all B2B. I can’t wait.

MarketingProfs’ Megan Leap came up with some excellent questions for me about thought leadership and social media for this week’s TechChat. My answers sparked a lot of debate, so I’ve put them together for you here to see if they will spark the same kind of discussion here. (As an extra added bonus, due to Twitter’s typical evening queasiness, we weren’t able to post all the questions during the appointed hour. So they are all here for your enjoyment.) Please add your thoughts!

Q. Let’s get back to the basics. What exactly IS thought leadership?
A. Ideas that educate customers and prospects about important business and technology issues and help them solve those issues—without selling.

Q. Why should B2B companies try to be thought leaders in their industry?
A. Because online search has become so important to the B2B buying cycle. Content is replacing salespeople in the earliest stages of the buying process. If buyers find your content you’re a step ahead.

Q. What are some ways B2B marketers can position themselves as thought leaders?
A. Marketers can never be thought leaders! Especially in social media, their subject matter experts need to take center stage. But marketers must lead and support SMEs in the development and publishing processes. http://j.mp/8YsPBg

Q. What are some ways B2B marketers can improve their thought leadership?
A. By investing more in the idea development piece of thought leadership. Marketers today are too focused on the publishing part. Another way is by picking themes to help guide your TL development. Smarter Planet helps SMEs at IBM focus. http://j.mp/dzaioo

(Note: At this point, we had a lot of discussion about how ITSMA divides thought leadership into two pieces: development and publishing. Some people thought that publishing was too limited a term for describing the process of getting your ideas packaged up and out into the market. My feeling is that it is apt, because the best model we have for doing this is publishing—i.e., traditional media companies. Just because their business model doesn’t work anymore, that doesn’t mean that their model for developing ideas and getting them out into the marketplace should also be tossed out. It works.)

Also at this point, participants started a really interesting debate about the qualities of a thought leader—but that dialogue is too long to reproduce here—you’ll just have to check out the hashtag!)

Q. Who should be in charge of developing thought leadership? Marketing? PR?
A. Marketing. Marketing has more peer relationships with thought leaders inside the company than PR. Marketing is helping develop offerings.

Q. What social media vehicles are best for promoting B2B thought leadership? Video, blogs, Twitter?
A. Whichever channels your prospects are interested in receiving it and at the stage of the buying process they are at. Research them!

Q. How can marketers integrate thought leadership with traditional marketing tactics?
A. ITSMA research shows that nothing comes close to peer networking and small-scale events. So we should find ways to use social media to support and enhance the live meetings. IBM does that. http://j.mp/c9fWuX

Q. What are some qualities of a good social media voice? (Yes, stole this one from your blog 😉
A. I see 15 qualities, but if it had to pick the top one it would be authenticity. More about it here: http://j.mp/cdcbo9

Q. What are some examples of B2B companies who are successfully using social media and thought leadership? Companies who aren’t?
A. I think B2B companies that have social media policies are ahead of the game in using social media and thought leadership. Companies that don’t let their SMEs talk are going to fall far behind.

Q. Let’s say you market a highly commoditized industry. Would you say thought leadership is even more important?
A. I think it’s important for any B2B company. Anywhere there’s a business process you have the possibility to create thought leadership. That’s where the trade magazine explosion of the 60s-90s came from. Heck, I remember a trade magazine about coin-op laundromats! Everyone wants to improve what they do and how they do it. .

Q. Where will social media and thought leadership be in 2 years?
A. More integrated. Companies and customers and prospects will have a more continuous relationship than they do today. Marketing is still very episodic today, even with social media.

Q. What works better: a blog with a multi or single author approach?
A. I think single authors work best, but it’s much more work and can distract from the brand. I see companies adopting multi-authors for that reason (brand defense). But in B2B, people want to connect with other people, not with brands. Most multi-author blogs are really boring, with few posts and even fewer comments.

Q. How can B2B marketers measure their thought leadership investment?
A. There is no measurable ROI from thought leadership. Period. You will never track it through to a sale and if you do, you’ll never be able to separate it from other factors affecting the sale. I wish the pundits would stop selling that fiction. But I guess it keeps consultants in business. Thought leadership has a role to play, but it’s more to do with building a relationship than making the sale. Content builds intimacy between the company and the prospect until you can put them in touch with a salesperson.

Like these answers? Hate them? Have something to add?

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  • Lee Frederiksen

    Chris-
    Sounds like a very lively discussion in preparation for what should be a great event.
    You have so many interesting points I almost don’t know where to begin. While I agree with almost everything you have said, I think there is an important perspective that many folks setting out to demonstrate thought leadership overlook. That is the issue of who is their audience.
    I see many (perhaps most) thought leadership directed at the wrong audience. One classic mistake is to write for your peers and not the decision makers. Showing that you have technical competence may feel good for an SME. But most buying decisions (based on our research) are not based on technical superiority, but the ability to solve client problems. These are often more related to your understanding of a client’s business situation than to technical excellence. Consequently, thought leadership, from a client’s perspective, is the ability to translate technology into business solutions. It is not the ability to demonstrate more advanced technical knowledge.
    Most clients (except the most sophisticated) assume you have good technical competence. After all, your the expert. What they don’t assume, and consequently you must demonstrate, is that you understand their situation and can provide practical solutions to their problems.

    Thanks for the post…lwf

  • Hi Lee,
    Great points. A friend and former colleague at ITSMA, Jeff Sands, put it to me best: “You’re not a thought leader until the people you’re trying to reach say that you are.” In the view of customers, thought leadership is not necessarily the latest, creates, most unique idea, it’s something that help them see an issue or solve a problem in a way they hadn’t thought of before. Our research also shows that few companies do research to understand their target audience for thought leadership and that same scenario is now being played out in social media. Thought leaders need to apply their expertise in the context of their target audience for it to mean anything to the people that matter most. Thanks for the great insights!

  • B2B is business-to-business, right? I’m not really in the industry and I’m not a consultant, but I completely disagree with the last statement about ROI and thought leadership. Had to comment.

    If marketing is involved in TL, and the stated benefits of TL are improved search positioning, and TL is all about building relationships, and, in your own words, “Because online search has become so important to the B2B buying cycle. Content is replacing salespeople in the earliest stages of the buying process. If buyers find your content you’re a step ahead,” how can TL *not* be tracked through to a sale?

    This blows my mind.

    In a corporate setting, there are budgets and accounting to track exactly where the money is spent. Investing in a TL program – budgeting time for marketing, for SMEs, content generation, publishing, and maintenance of the chosen channels – means the investment can be quantified.

    Now, I would suspect B2B is more about relationships than B2C, as businesses likely purchase greater quantities at a time and, depending on consumption rates, likely have a shorter buying cycle, since they either run out of whatever it is or need to replace obsolete or worn-out equipment.

    If anything, I would think B2B would have an easier time figuring ROI. There are many levels of relationship between content providers and consumers, but when an organization is moved to enter into a business relationship with you as a result of your TL activities, and the sales team is involved in completing the transactions, how is that not a measurable return on the investment?

    Over time, as search results improve, the content becomes more pervasive, and the program yields results – perception in the market as a true thought leader, the company that’s doing it right (whatever it might be) – aren’t there going to be more relationships built through the social initiatives? These relationships will translate into sales, which produce revenue, which can then be compared to the investment.

    I’m all about building the relationships; the connection of people and ideas, and global collaboration in pursuit of mutual benefit, so I agree with the concept of thought leadership. The increasingly social aspects of our virtual world provide exceptional opportunities for truly innovative industry leaders to publish their thoughts online to prove themselves as such.

    True thought leadership means providing the content potential customers need to make decisions at every step of the buying cycle. It means introducing outliers to general information, empowering potential clients to make sound decisions to purchase, selling on features and benefits, and finally closing the sale. It’s the same thing a professional sales rep does, only to a larger audience, over a longer period of time.

    I’m just a passing gearhead with an interest in connecting people and ideas, but if the only way to convince the clueless, antiquated dullards in the corner offices that sharing information and empowering the market is by showing them how it pays off in the end, then let’s do that and let’s do that right.

  • reminds me of the famous quote by a mid-20th century labor leader:
    “Being powerful is like being a lady – if you have to say you is… you ain’t!”

  • Brian,
    Thanks for the passionate response. I’m in violent agreement with you that thought leadership is absolutely necessary to building relationships and that relationships are the key to making a complex B2B sale. But what you will never be able to do is go to a CFO and say this white paper led to a $20 million sale. There are too many steps between when a prospect engages with you and when the sale occurs to be able to do that. This is why the demand that marketing be able to show specific ROI from its thought leadership programs is a fool’s errand to begin with. Content is part of the relationship that leads to a sale, but it is not the only part.

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