Tag: Social Media

When does content need to be mobile?

March 5, 2010 by Chris Koch

We got a question this week from an ITSMA client asking about developing a business case for creating mobile applications for their website content. I said that I haven’t seen any of those business cases yet. And I don’t think I ever will.

We’re seeing mobile be part of an integrated approach to social media, not as a standalone. In fact, I’m working on two case studies this week of websites that have mobile applications, but the mobile applications are a small part of the whole. And they both lead to content that benefits from being mobile.

The attributes that seem to matter so far are:

Location. Could other users of the application get value from knowing where others are?

Continuity. Do they feel that they will miss something by being away from the content for even a short amount of time?

Timeliness. Will content appear in the application that needs to be acted upon immediately?

One company’s mobile application is tied to a wiki-based sales enablement website that lets salespeople generate actions and updates and get updated information from the road.

The other company has a mobile application for its private, gated online community so that mobile members can keep up with message boards and forums that change frequently (there are over 100 subject-oriented communities within the site).

Creating a mobile application that leads to static content on a website isn’t going to build much interest or loyalty because there’s no real urgency to connect. The only reason I can see for creating a mobile application in this context is if the application makes the content easier to look at and interact with than on a web browser. Apple claims the iPad will make content look better than it does on a web browser. If that’s true, then it will be worth making an application that connects to static content. But not until then.

What do you think?

Why B2B marketing will become more visual, vocal, and mobile (christopherakoch.com)

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Tags: Apple, B2B marketing, Business, Content Management, ITSMA, marketing, Mobile Computing, Mobile Marketing, Site Management, Social Media, social media management, social media strategy
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How social media will change lead generation in B2B

February 26, 2010 by Chris Koch

The era of the sales process beginning with a lead is over. The number of B2B buyers who are ready to buy as soon as they engage with our marketing is small—and social media will make it even smaller.

We have to come to terms with the fact that there is a stage of the buying process that comes before the buyers we are pursuing are ready to become leads.

We call it the epiphany stage.

This is the stage that occurs long before any discussion of products, services, or RFPs—indeed, it occurs before customers have even begun to think about a purchase.

However, there is something important that happens at this stage: It is the point at which customers come to the realization of an important business need.

This is where social media comes in. As social media expands our opportunity to reach people who have never heard of us or our services, we need to be prepared to engage them during the epiphany stage. We are trying to generate demand during this stage, not create leads, because these people aren’t ready to become leads. We have to generate demand before we can generate a lead.

The best way to do this is with thought leadership. We need a content engine capable of gaining the attention and respect of people who have never heard of us before. These people are not leads—they are not ready to be contacted by anyone. But they may be open to building a relationship that could someday lead to a sale.

These people are prospects, not leads. The way we turn prospects into leads is to gain their trust. We gain their trust by reaching out to them with smart, engaging, educational content. The trust leads to a more personal relationship and hopefully, a purchase. As I said in my last post, social media simply makes starkly plain what we’ve known for some time but haven’t had to face yet: We don’t have a lot of content capable of generating trust and relationships. We need to create that content.

But getting to that realization requires that we first acknowledge that there is a whole world that comes before a lead and before the interest phase of the buying process. We need to see that we are ignoring many people who aren’t leads. If we ignore them, they may never know that they need something that we have to offer.

What do you think?

Before Nurturing a New B2B Lead, Ask the Golden Question (thecustomercollective.com)
There is no social media strategy, only marketing strategy (thecustomercollective.com)

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Tags: B2B marketing, Business, Customer, Interpersonal relationship, ITSMA, Lead Generation, marketing, Request for proposal, Sales, Sales process, Social Media, Thought Leadership
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How Forrester is squandering its leadership in social media

February 12, 2010 by Chris Koch

Social media experts often chide marketers about control. The experts say that in the new era of social media, marketers need to stop delivering tightly-scripted, one-way messages and start engaging in uncontrolled, transparent conversations with customers and prospects wherever those conversations happen.

That’s why a change in the policies of perhaps the leading voice for social media, Forrester, has bigger implications than it may seem.

Recently, an analyst relations consultancy, SageCircle, broke the story that Forrester management will require its analysts to take down their personally-branded blogs or redirect readers to a Forrester-branded blog.

The most powerful example of one of these personally branded blogs is Web Strategy by Jeremiah, by Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst who left Forrester prior to the policy change. Owyang’s blog is one of the most highly trafficked, most influential social media blogs today, as it was when he was at Forrester.

Another example is Experience: The Blog, by Augie Ray, who is Owyang’s replacement at Forrester. Ray is one of the analysts who will be taking down his blog. (Forrester is quick to point out that it will begin allowing individual analysts like Ray to have their own blogs behind the firewall.)

No doubt, the success of Owyang’s blog is due in part to his former role at one of the most respected analyst houses in the world. And this is the crux of Forrester’s argument in defense of the policy change. Another prominent Forrester social media analyst, Josh Bernoff, who was a co-author of perhaps the most influential book about social media to date, Groundswell, puts it succinctly in his blog post about the controversy: “If you’re creating content for a content company, that company ought to host your blog.”

All of Forrester’s commentaries about the policy change so far have focused on this idea that content companies are special and have a special need to protect their IP—which is words. No wonder they all steer the argument in this direction; it makes it seem like Forrester is the aggrieved benefactor being sucked dry by selfish, ungrateful employees who insist on giving away the IP that Forrester pays them to create—and whose powerful brand opens the doors for them with the sources they need to help create that IP.

I have no doubt that Forrester is a powerful, valuable brand. And I can certainly sympathize with Forrester’s argument about IP. “Information yearns to be free” is utter nonsense uttered by people who don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. Yes, crappy information yearns to be free and is worth what we pay for it, but good information, such as that provided by Forrester, cannot and should not be free.

It takes time, money, talent, and innovation to create good information. No doubt you’ve seen research showing the degree to which most web content leads back to a few, dependable sources like the New York Times—whose reporters do all the work (which, contrary to popular belief, very few people could do even if they had all the time and money in the world) so others can benefit.

So at this point you must be wondering why I am bothering to write this post. Here’s why:

Forrester doesn’t take its own advice (no really). It’s maddening that Forrester doesn’t acknowledge the fact that while it actively preaches to clients that they should give up control, Forrester is exerting tighter control over its employees—specifically in social media! Bernoff addresses this offhandedly by saying, “Groundswell says that your employees will be blogging—it doesn’t say that content companies should have their content creators blog anywhere they want.” Oh wait, I forgot. Content companies are different. C’mon. IBM has as much IP to protect as Forrester, if not tons more—and it allows employees to have personal blogs.
Forrester controls the message. In another Forrester blog post in defense of the move, analyst Nigel Fenwick acknowledges that there was controversy within Forrester about the change. Indeed, I’ve been a journalist too long not to know that stories don’t get leaked to outside sources unless someone inside the company isn’t happy about what’s happening. What about hearing from people inside Forrester who oppose this move? Isn’t that what social media is supposed to be about? Openness? Transparency? Not from a company that tries to put strict controls on the ways its social media content is cited by others.
Forrester is shocked, shocked. Ray tries to spin the controversy in his post by calling it “a minor tempest in the research industry teapot.” The worst way to fend off controversy is to downplay it (as Forrester also regularly counsels its clients). And it insults the intelligence of those of us who are fans of Forrester. As one of the leading lights of social media, is Forrester really surprised that a change in its policies would invite thorough scrutiny? Please.
Forrester loses IP. It’s clear that by controlling its employees, Forrester will lose IP in the long run. Big thinkers who have built up personal brands through their blogs will think twice about coming to work at Forrester because they will have to cut that thread (even if it can be reconnected on the other side of Forrester’s firewall).
Forrester loses R&D. Forrester swears up and down that analysts will able to say and do whatever they like related to their jobs on their personal Forrester blogs. I don’t think that’s true. Not because I think that Forrester will become Big Brother, but because analysts will police themselves. Places like Forrester are full of smart, talented, competitive people. It’s going to be harder to look stupid and ask for help from behind the firewall. Personal blogs are more fertile ground for testing half-baked ideas than those that have your employer’s logo next to yours.
I should know; it’s one of the reasons I set up my blog outside of ITSMA’s firewall. I want to be able to experiment fully and freely while reducing my own sense that I could potentially do harm to my colleagues who have given me the time to do this (but who in no way have ever tried to control what I say). I think it’s easier for everyone this way (and it absolutely feels better than when I used to blog from behind the firewall at CIO magazine). If Forrester’s analysts feel the slightest trepidation about posting something on these new personal blogs, everybody loses. So why not just let them start their own? It all leads back to the mother ship in the end—via reports and presentations that are better and more fully informed than they would have been.
Forrester loses a piece of its supply chain. I never visited Jeremiah Owyang’s blog posts on Forrester unless he sent me there from his own blog. Forrester thinks that’s a loss for them. But in fact, it’s a gain. Social media isn’t about companies (as Forrester will tell you); it’s about people connecting with one another. Owyang drove more traffic back to Forrester than it ever would have gotten on its own because he was a recognizable, solo voice, rather than one among many. When you lose traffic that way, you lose a valuable piece of your content supply chain—the customers, prospects, and influencers that you need to help develop and sell your ideas.

Look, I love Forrester. For 13 years as a journalist covering IT I was constantly blown away by the quality of the firm’s insights and by the approachable, friendly, patient nature of its analysts. But I fear for the future of the brand with this move.

What do you think? Am I being too hard on Forrester?

Forrester’s blogging policy misses the IP point (socialmediatoday.com)
Why Forrester Made The Right Call About Employee Blogs (socialmediatoday.com)
My Thoughts on Forrester, Analysts, and Blogging (thecustomercollective.com)

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Tags: Experience: The Blog, Forrester Research, IBM, ITSMA, Jeremiah Owyang, New York Times, Social Media, social media management, social media policy, social media strategy
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Why the volume and quality of interactions with customers has to pass for social media ROI

January 22, 2010 by Chris Koch

: Image by LollyKnit via Flickr

I wish I could say that social media leads to sales. I really do. But I can’t. And I haven’t encountered anyone else who can either, have you? So when we think about social media ROI, we need to make a leap of faith. We need to believe that more engagement between our companies and the people we want to reach is a good thing that ultimately leads to sales—but down a long, narrow, winding path with a few jumps between cliffs thrown in there.

To make ourselves feel a little more comfortable with this idea, we may need to categorize social media with something whose hazy ROI we’re more familiar and comfortable with: PR.

There have been research attempts made to uncover and evaluate methods for measuring the ROI of PR. But you’re not going to like them.

Jumping through ROI hoops
Techniques include measuring the:

Value of impressions. We track the marketing mix (including PR) over time against trends in sales. Lots of variables there.
Return on media impact. This is the number of articles or blog posts that mention the product or service measured against the trend in sales. Again, tough to isolate PR’s role.
Value of earned media. This is what it would cost to place an ad in a magazine vs. the cost of getting the story placement. The PR cost is usually less and the value is usually larger, but by how much? Old beliefs about the relative value of earned media vs. advertising are all over the map—and probably need to be revised in the age of social media.

But ROI has to be there, right?
Still, we know in our bones that positive word of mouth has a positive effect on sales. We just have a hard time proving it. The only effective argument I’ve heard recently is that we embed calls to action in social media that drive readers to a landing page where we capture their information and start nurturing them as leads. But without good systems for tracking those leads from social media all the way through a sale, it’s difficult and expensive to do. And it leads back to the problem we have with PR. Did the social media impression really lead to the sale?

As with PR, perhaps all we can do is establish that social media was at least a guidepost along that narrow rocky path to a sale.

Volume and quality of interactions
So if you buy that leap of logic, let’s say that blogs are another channel, like PR, in a marketing mix designed to familiarize customers and prospects with our companies and us. And if that’s true, then we should try to increase the volume and quality of interactions with have with customers and prospects through social media, no?

That’s when things start to get easier. We can more easily measure engagement in social media. Especially on blogs.

For this reason, I think we need to think about blogs as the center point of a social media strategy. Aside from the corporate, a blog is the mother ship of social media interaction and content. And blogs are really measurable. In fact, we can do a lot of it for free. Here are some metrics, mostly for blogs, that help build engagement with customers and prospects. Please tell me what I should add or take away. And if you have the magic sauce for social media ROI, please douse us with it!

(For much more on the social media ROI topic, see this terrific list of resources compiled by Robin Broitman at Interactive Insights Group called the Social Media Metrics Superlist.)

Connect to your most important keywords. SEO is really a fancy term for constructing your sentences carefully—especially your headlines. If the intention of your blog is to drive traffic to your main website for lead generation, then you should be using the keywords on your blog that matter most on your website. To oversimplify it, if you want to sell more ERP software, you should use keywords like “enterprise software,” a lot on your blog so that Google associates your blog with your company’s area of expertise.
Grow the number of influential referral sites. “Owning” a keyword term in Google searches is nice, but building traffic to your blog through references on other blogs and websites is the key to sustained, long-term growth. Obviously, the more influential the referral site the better. But we’re not talking just sheer numbers here. For example, being listed on the blogroll of a highly respected blogger, analyst, or journalist not only generates traffic; it also establishes you as an authority among the people who care most about the subject you’re blogging about. That authority begins to have exponential effects over time. You and your posts are referred to more often as the network of referrals grows. The growth in traffic then confers its own authority—you get lots of visits so you must be smart. It becomes a virtuous cycle.
Don’t forget the outbound links. We all tend to obsess over the number of mentions with get in blog rolls or our influence rank in Technorati. But we often don’t stop to think about whether we’re linking to anyone else’s blog. One of the cornerstones of social media is sharing. Be generous with links to other blogs and websites and others will return the favor and build your traffic for you.
Understand the location of your audience. In Google analytics, you can drill down by country—even by city—to see where your traffic comes from. Comparing the geographical distribution of your blog to your company’s website should give you a sense of whether your blog is hitting with the same areas of the world as your website. It could also reveal potential new areas of focus for your salespeople.
Measure endurance. Good blogs hold people to the page they’re viewing. So time spent is metric to track to see if people spend more time reading over time. Bounce rate is a good metric for websites because it helps show whether people are finding what they’re looking for. But it’s not so good for blogs because blogs generally only have one or two pages—a page for the posts and a page for “about me” or “contact me—so the bounce rate is going to be higher for blogs by default. You read the post, you leave. Google analytics also has a metric for loyalty—the numbers of repeat visits over time—that shows whether people are sticking with you.
Find and nurture your VIPs. It’s hard to measure the number of people who care about and are really influenced by your blog. So I apply the old subscription model. If people care enough to want to know when your next post comes out, they are engaged. If they also comment on your blog, they are friends. Make a list of the people who subscribe to your blog through RSS and e-mail and match them up to your comments. Those who both subscribe and comment regularly are your VIPs. RSS+comments=VIP. These are the people who matter; they should receive responses to all their comments and an e-mail thanking them for being such a valuable collaborator. If they happen to also be customers, then all the better. But just don’t try to sell them. They know where to find you.
Use Twitter for blog PR. If Twitter isn’t one of your highest-ranking referral sites, you’re not using it properly. Twitter is the logical front end to a blog post. It’s where you distill the post down to a nugget and put a link next to it. There are even tools like Tweet This, that can be set up to send a tweet based on the title of your post automatically. Or a tweet can be the inspiration for a blog post later on. Regardless, blogs and Twitter accounts should be joined at the hip, because Twitter is a powerful traffic builder to blogs.
Use URL shorteners to gauge subject interest. By using a URL shortener like bit.ly within a Tweet, you can track how many people click on the content link you offer in your tweets. Sure, the language of your tweet counts in building interest, but if you link to content that is directly related to your tweet, it’s a good gauge of how popular the subject is among your followers.
Use social networks as water coolers and newsstands. LinkedIn and Facebook have groups where you can post elements of your blog post as a question, or post the entire thing as a news item. Track the number of comments and views to the things you post. The numbers aren’t too big here generally, as the group tools on these sites are crude and many group leaders don’t spend much time filtering out the self-promoting jerks that litter these things with spam. But it’s a way to expose your blog to new faces and engage in dialog away from the blog.
Build cross-referencing across social media tools. No social media tool is an island. All should cross-reference each other at every opportunity. So for example, your blog comments on other’s blogs should contain your Twitter handle and a link to your blog. The communities you belong to should all Your LinkedIn profile should display your most recent posts and tweets, and your blog should display all of the above. There’s no real way to measure all this from what I can tell, but it isn’t hard and it can’t hurt.
Embed and measure calls to action. If we can get people to a landing page, we should. Social media offer plenty of opportunities for doing that. And sometimes social media becomes the end in itself. For example, the landing page could be for a LinkedIn group you manage rather than the traditional white paper, newsletter, or Webinar. Social media gives us ways to build relationships with customers that white papers or newsletters can’t.

What do you think?

10 Tips for Beginning Bloggers (edtechpower.blogspot.com)
When is the right moment to start promoting my blog? (startups.com)

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Tags: Add new tag, Advertising, B2B marketing, Blog, Blogging, blogs, Business, Google, Google Analytics, Marketing ROI, RSS, Social Media, social media strategy, Technorati, Twitter
Categories: Blogging, Marketing Metrics and Analytics, Social Media • View Comments

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:

Your customers are becoming more active in social media, so you’d better get with it.
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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Tags: B2B marketing, Marketing Strategy, Social Media, social media strategy
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Five reasons why B2B marketers should be in social media even if their companies are not

June 25, 2009 by Chris Koch

To be successful with social media marketing, we are going to have to become social media guinea pigs. We are accustomed to creating programs and campaigns and then standing back and observing them. Social media will demand involvement that is much more personal. That’s why it’s important for us to start building our expertise in social media today, even if social media isn’t yet at the top of our marketing agenda (and our research shows that among B2B marketers, it is not).

Here are five reasons why you need to get good at this stuff before your company does:

Social media is real time. Social media is always on. Conversations about your company don’t stop when your call center closes or you empty your email inbox. Much of the thrill for Twitter users is the synchronous, real-time nature of this streaming flow of conversation. The river of words flows by and you can jump in or watch it disappear around the bend. That presents a big challenge for marketers trying to monitor what’s being said about their brands. You need to be involved in social media to monitor it.
Social media is two-way. Social media is conversation and community through sharing. Social media is, by definition, two-way. That’s very different from our traditional marketing campaigns and programs, which are based in unilaterally developed messages that are broadcast—and then abandoned to fend for themselves. Social media marketing does not emerge fully formed, ready to go out and conquer the world; it is the needy kid parked on the couch who talks back and requires constant attention and support. You need to learn how to develop messages from within social media, not from outside it—and then you need to nurture those messages continuously over time.
Social media disrupts marketing structures and processes. When you construct and control the messages and programs yourself, you can go home at the end of the day with a clear conscience. Hierarchical structures and linear processes work fine because everything has a timeline and a beginning, middle, and end (launch). Social media launches every week, or every day—and sometimes, when you least expect it. Few marketing groups are creating dedicated social media teams or roles, so most marketers will see social media intrude upon and disrupt the work patterns and expectations we have all come to understand. Developing a personal understanding of how it all works will make it less disruptive.
Social media is a social—not a business—phenomenon. Marketing and business are joined at the hip. Changes in one automatically affect the other. But social media is developing in a separate world: popular culture. The effects on business and marketing are less direct and harder to predict and absorb. Mark Zuckerberg has made more progress in socializing the web in the last two years with Facebook than Ray Ozzie has in 20 years (anybody remember Lotus Notes and groupware?).
The real innovation in social media is happening outside of the worlds of business and IT—and then pushing inexorably into the enterprise as employees fight to bring the ease of communication they have at home with them to work. The line between our business lives and personal lives have never been blurrier. Developing a personal presence in social media will bring that line into better focus and make your social media marketing efforts more effective.
Social media causes fear. Buried beneath our demands for an ROI accounting of the value of social media is something more primitive: fear. Anything that has the power to destroy industries (journalism) and redefine politics (the Obama campaign—actually the Howard Dean campaign, but nobody remembers him) has the power to inspire fear. That’s because humans are hard wired to resist change (the unfamiliar could get us killed in our caveman days).
Longtime social media evangelist Stowe Boyd points out that businesses had the same concerns about putting telephones on the desks of employees in the years after WWII (they’ll just waste people’s time, they’re a security threat, the direct link to revenue isn’t there) that they’re voicing about social media today.
Of course, those concerns were and are legitimate, but no doubt they are also rooted in our fear that perhaps this stuff really will change all the business habits we’ve grown so comfortable with over the past century. (And for the record, the definitive ROI study on the use of telephone communications in business never arrived—the telephone moved directly to unquestioned necessity within a few years.)
Don’t stop waiting for proof of social media ROI, but question the logic that resists doing anything until that proof arrives. Don’t assume that your company or your marketing group is being smart by waiting; assume that at least some of that resistance is grounded in fear and complacency. Even more reason to build your personal expertise while others wait.

What do you think?

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Tags: B2B marketing, Marketing ROI, Social Media, social media strategy
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Why Twitter is for old people

June 16, 2009 by Chris Koch

Like many, I’m a late convert to Twitter. I avoided it for defensive reasons. I’m one of those boring people that eats the same thing for lunch almost every day. So I figured I wouldn’t have much to twitter about. I also figured that Twitter would appeal mostly to young people interested in flirting with one another in 140 characters or less.

But then I tried it and I realized that the hidden power of Twitter is in another kind of human appetite: learning.

Twitter doesn’t just add another one of those annoying Web 2.0 verbs to the English vocabulary (by the way, the co-founder of Twitter, Biz Stone, says the correct form is “to twitter”) it adds new meaning to an oldie: to follow.

Now for an old fart like me, the concept of following someone in Twitter has a much different context and meaning than it might for, say, my daughter, who is a tween and is not on Twitter. To someone her age, the concept of following immediately conjures up the issue of personal relationships—who you hate and who you like—and status—who is popular and who isn’t.

Viewed in that context, my reaction to Twitter is the same as her’s: “Yuck.”

Follow to learn
Thankfully, adults have another context for developing relationships: communities of learning. And it’s in this sense that Twitter is a goldmine for B2B marketers. Think about it. You can seek out the best thinkers in marketing—people that you’ve paid money to go see at conferences—and listen to what they have to say anytime, for free. I quickly discovered that I didn’t have to twitter about my lunch (PB&Js most days—hey, I’ve loved them since I was 5 (see how boring this is?)) and that the people I want to hear from aren’t doing that either (though the air travel tweets get a little old—travel twittering seems to be one of the few “what I’m doing now” things that people feel is worth telling everyone about, perhaps because people generally think that traveling demonstrates importance and coolness and also because its something that some people just do an awful lot of).

The two subject areas I’m most interested in in my role at ITSMA are B2B marketing in general and social media in particular. I started following people whose blogs I like in those areas and things took off from there.

An entrée to the cocktail party
The wonderful thing about following (in the business context) on Twitter is that it’s like being at a cocktail party where you see a circle of people having an interesting conversation that you can just break into—without having to know any of them or having to say something interesting. You can just listen. Even better, you’re able to send those people a signal that you think that what they have to say is interesting enough to follow. And that can be a nice ego stroke for them (if they don’t already have 40,000 followers).

Indeed, I was surprised to see that some well-known social media and marketing experts who I think have interesting things to say followed me back after I followed them. Very cool. It gives me a way to gradually get to know them and for them to get to know me—and it’s an ego stroke to think that they might actually think I have something to teach them (or they could have their Twitter accounts set up to automatically follow those who follow them). But if they don’t follow me, who cares—it doesn’t have the same social weight attached to it as getting snubbed by the popular kids in middle school (not that that ever happened to me). Nobody knows but me. And I still get what I want most out of the relationship, which is to learn.

And I’m learning a lot. Twitter for business fills a learning gap that blogging used to fill but from which most good blogs graduated from early on: linking. I don’t think much of blogs that just post links to other stuff, unless the links are organized into useful lists, which take time. I think blogs are for thinking, not linking.

But Twitter is limited to 140 characters, so linking is pretty much the only way to add real value. And now when I do my morning research and find something interesting—but not interesting enough to spark a full blog post—I can twitter it so that others can learn what I’m learning.

Create your own ad hoc community
And to my relief, that’s exactly what others are doing with Twitter, too. Like any good social media tool, Twitter’s foundation is conversation and community through sharing. I’ve already developed what I think is a powerful network of B2B and social media thinkers that is in essence an ad hoc online community.And I have lots of people working to build that community for me. As I follow more people and more people follow me, I get constant suggestions for new people to follow who I’ve never heard of before but who have interesting things to say.

There is a nice spirit of sharing among the people I follow that is self-perpetuating and contagious. For example, after shamelessly sucking content from the people I was following for a few days, I started to feel an obligation–and a challenge–to start contributing. There’s an element of competition driving this, too. You start thinking, hey, I can find some cool stuff too, you know!

Linking to learn
I immediately started to feel a responsibility to start Twittering links that I think could help others in my position. The news, advice, and references I get each day from my Twitter “friends” is better than any Google news or blog feed. Furthermore, by seeing the occasional comments about the links, I can start to develop a point of view about the content.

Every B2B marketer interested in learning more about their profession should have a Twitter account. It’s the first step to creating a personal social media platform. More about that next time.

Have you tried Twitter yet? Tell me about your experiences so far.

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Tags: B2B marketing, Blogging, Social Media, social media strategy, social media technology, Twitter
Categories: Blogging, Social Media • View Comments

Ten Rules for Getting Started in Social Media from SAP's Steve Mann

March 19, 2008 by Chris Koch

Steve Mann is creating and implementing a social media strategy for B2B software giant SAP. He agreed to talk to me about what he’s doing for SAP and how B2B marketers should approach getting started in social media. With his personal interest in science and sociology, Steve also has some insightful views on the human side of implementing a social media strategy. I’ve summarized Steve’s top-ten ideas below. I first discovered Steve through this excellent interview that Mike Moran did with Steve on Mike’s blog.

To read my full interview with Steve, see my next post.

10 Rules for Getting Started in Social Media from SAP’s Steve Mann

Audit your organization to find social media efforts that already exist within your company.
Assess your culture: Are you a command-and-control culture? Can you tolerate negative customer feedback? If not, then start small with external social media—or stay away from it altogether.
Examine your organizational structure: Highly stovepiped or diversified companies should use social media internally first to build collaboration capability before going external.
Don’t strategize in a vacuum. Ask customers what they want to talk about.
Build the internal processes and infrastructure necessary to follow-up on social media interactions with customers.
Don’t pick a social media technology, pick a business goal and use social media to pursue it.
Learn how different generations like to consume online content. Consider hiring an “inter-generational expert.”
Talk to your IT department about restrictive social media policies. Millenials and other digital natives will not tolerate being barred from using social media.
Examine your leadership style. Social media, as a means to support collaboration among your Millenial workers, requires an implementation that supports coaching and listening, not rules and edicts.
Steal tactics from B2C marketers. They have a head start on social media and many of their their tactics are applicable in B2B.

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Tags: B2B, millenials, SAP, Social Media, social media strategy, social media technology
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