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The four components of social media management

April 3, 2009 by

Marketers need a simple, clear way to think about deploying a social media strategy that does not start with technology. Here’s my view of the four main components of social media management for marketers:

Monitor
Monitoring is finding and tracking the conversations that are occurring about your company in social media and online. Even companies that have no intention of pursuing a social media marketing strategy must monitor what’s being said about them. It’s important to know who is saying good things about your company but it’s even more important to know who is saying bad things. Negative comments-especially those that expose a legitimate flaw in a company’s products or services-can snowball and be picked up by the trade and business press.

Monitoring is also the foundation of a social media marketing strategy. Before companies begin talking, they have to listen. They need to identify the most important influencers in their markets and track those conversations. Understanding the tone and subject matter of the most popular conversations in the market will help companies develop and fine tune their own social media voices.

Engage
Engaging occurs when companies decide to take an active role in social media by engaging with customers and influencers in the various forums where conversations are taking place. Examples include public blogs, social networks, and industry communities. The goal in social media engagement is to influence participants to have a positive impression of the company through factual, verifiable contributions from company employees and subject matter experts.

Marketing should monitor social media carefully and assign subject matter experts to track particular blogs and influencers. There should be an escalation process for pushing issues around the company to the people most qualified to respond to them (all practitioners, not marketing or PR people).The key to engagement is that providers do not try to control the conversation, as in traditional marketing, but that they influence the conversation in the following ways:

  • Find relevant online communities and blogs and build relationships with discussion leaders and members
  • Become regular contributors to influential blogs and be willing to weigh in on issues not directly related to the company’s products and services
  • Respond to customer complaints
  • Link customers to more information and offer to follow up directly

Manage
Managing means that companies take an active role in creating conversations about the company. Examples include:

  • Corporate blogs. If companies can break their traditional habits of trying to control the conversation and squashing criticism, corporate blogs can help improve perception and awareness. Corporate blogs can be managed by marketing, but shouldn’t be written by marketing. Customers want to hear from subject matter experts and influencers.
  • Public and private online communities. Besides creating online communities in business-oriented third-party hosted social media venues like LinkedIn, companies can start their own communities, both public and private. For example, Indian outsourcing and consulting company Infosys developed points of view about four emerging trends in global business: the growing impact of emerging economies such as India and China, demographic shifts in age and working populations around the world, technology ubiquity, and increased regulations. It then created multiple hosted forums, both public and private (C-level executives often prefer private communities because they fear speaking up about their companies in uncontrolled public communities). These communities have both online and offline components, and Infosys’ marketing group works to build participation by publicizing the communities and inviting key customers and influencers to participate.

Integrate
Social media efforts need to be integrated into a company’s more traditional marketing channels such as conferences, events, reference programs, and websites. Social media is notoriously difficult to measure and ROI is unclear. Therefore, social media should be used as a platform to drive traffic to the channels that are easier to measure and have proven ROI. There should also be a way to get customers and prospects from social media into systems for tracking and managing interactions (e.g., CRM).

As I mentioned in my last post, social media can also become a supply chain for the development of thought leadership.

The integration of social media with more measurable channels—downloads of the white paper that lead to a sale, or the conference presentation that result in a sales call, for example—is the most reliable way to demonstrate the value and ROI of social media.

What do you think?

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Integrate social media into your idea marketing supply chain

March 26, 2009 by

I know from our research that marketers are sick to death of hearing about Web 2.0. But at the same time they acknowledge that they haven’t done much with it.

I know why people are so sick of it. It’s because it’s presented to them as a bunch of technologies that seem disconnected and overwhelming. Podcasts, Twitter, linkedIn, Facebook, videos, blogs—right now it seems like the path to marketing hell is lined with Web 2.0 tools.

But if you start thinking of these tools as a supply chain for the development of thought leadership, they start to sound a whole lot more useful and less threatening.

For example, point of view is the essence of good blogging. Readers expect strong opinions backed up with research and experience. Find out who inside your company is blogging on their own and you may find some new subject matter experts who can help develop and refine thought leadership. Record internal subject matter experts giving conference presentations and release them as podcasts and use the transcripts as fodder for blog posts. Use research results as the content for a time-boxed blog. Run the results on the blog and see how subject matter experts and customers react. Use their reactions to refine the content further. When you run out of results, shut down the blog and put out the summary report or whitepaper.

Blogs are still so young that we haven’t yet seen that they are going to have lifespans like anything else. As I’ve said before, I think a lot of marketers look at blogs as life sentences: How the heck do I keep this thing going for the rest of my life? The answer is you don’t have to. Most people find blogs through searches rather than subscribing to them anyway. If it’s useful content, people will appreciate finding it even if the blog hasn’t been updated in a long time.

But the point is that thought leadership doesn’t need to be finished before getting it out there. The process of developing a point of view, research, and case studies takes time. The advantage of the new forms of social media is that they are informal and episodic by their very nature. The phrase to be continued is in the DNA of all this stuff. You can come back around to the same idea endlessly in a blog as long as you have something new to say each time or a different twist on it.

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How marketers should handle the second wave of social media participation

March 20, 2009 by

Social media is moving up the demographic ladder, zeroing in on the sweet spot for B2B marketers: the 35-49 age group. A report from Nielsen confirms it. That new friend of yours on Facebook may control a multi-million dollar IT budget.

The demographic change is driving a new wave of newbies inside corporations to look at social media. Since this second wave is likely to be more influential inside the company and with customers than the first, twentysomething-based one was, it’s worth looking at how B2B marketers should position themselves both internally with employees and externally with customers.

Let’s look at internal first. There are some important prerequisites that need to be in place if marketing is going to be able to serve as a source of information about social media to employees—and be thought of as a competent manager of the organization’s social media presence. I see two big ones:

  1. Know what your employees are doing with social media. Responsibility for what employees are saying about the company will eventually make its way to marketing, so marketing needs to find out what employees are doing with social media. Think of yourself as a venture capitalist rather than a cop (though every company should have a social media policy). Seeing how social media happens organically among employees can give you important insight into potential new thought leaders, as well as a handy test population for gauging which tools employees are most comfortable with and, therefore, which ones might be best for integrating into conversations with customers.
  2. Create permission. Having a set of social media guidelines is important, but those guidelines should be simple and shouldn’t patronize employees with a lot of detail. The policy should demonstrate trust in employees rather than trying to CYA. Rather than saying “Don’t lie,” say, “We ask that employees conduct themselves as they would in any business situation—with honesty, integrity, discretion, and respect for their audience.” That’s about all you need. Companies should also ask employees to post a disclaimer on their blogs and offer suggested language for it, but should not punish those that fail to do it.

    However, permission isn’t just about setting rules. It’s also important to demonstrate permission through action. The CEO should blog to employees, and a few top thought leaders and subject matter experts should start their own personal blogs to set the tone and demonstrate that the corporate culture is ready to give up the iron grip of control over the conversation both internally and with customers. A few showcase social media examples from important individuals inside the organization will energize others and help set the tone for dialog that matches with the culture of the organization. Customers buy from you because of who you are as an organization as well as the products and services you offer. So the tone of your social media communications should match your organizational personality.

    You also need to get permission from IT. Again, this isn’t meant in the literal sense—there are plenty of ways to get around IT with social media. But social media is not very secure. So involve IT in the planning of a social media strategy. Don’t let IT dictate what employees can and can’t do with social media (they may want to ban it altogether), but collaborate with the IT leader on policy and keep him or her informed about what employees are doing. Remember that many of these tools start within the IT community, so IT can be a great source of advice and a bellwether for new trends.

What have I left out? How do you “manage” social media at your organization?

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Create an idea network

March 6, 2009 by

Time and again, I see companies relying on their marketing departments to develop and disseminate what they think is thought leadership. And marketers think they are doing a great job because they are so good at disseminating the stuff. They put those case studies out there on the web site, push them out through PR channels and reuse them in all sorts of different forms, from podcasts to videos to conference presentations.

The dissemination is great. But what we need is more focus on the content generation. Of course, not all of this is under marketing’s control. I’m sure many of you have pleaded with your businesses to offer up content and they haven’t stepped up. But you have to try harder. Thought leadership should be managed by marketing, but it can’t be sourced from marketing.

I’ve offered up an example of how you could create a thought leadership engine inside your company in the slides from a (free) presentation that I link to at the bottom of this post. If you do nothing else, get a budget for creating internal knowledge share sessions.

Any company should be able to get executive commitment to make employees present their latest hot projects or thinking that is coming out of work with customers. You can have weekly or monthly presentations and sweeten the pot by setting it up as an awards program, with the best submission receiving stock options or a gift card.

The other key elements are research with customers and among competitors and some kind of external check and balance, whether it’s creating alliances with academics, research consortia, and/or analysts. There needs to be a way to test your thinking with third-party experts to make sure that your ideas are worth pursuing.

The idea here is to create a closed-loop cycle that includes internal subject matter experts, customers, external resources like academics and analysts, and primary and secondary research. You start with a nugget of a POV and you put it through this cycle and refine it with all those constituencies. And then send it around again. There no reason why you can’t do this in stages-build upon the POV and report it—then report it again when you have more to say and more proof points.

http://www.brighttalk.com/webcasts/2656/attend

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Does your idea marketing have a point of view?

February 13, 2009 by

We at ITSMA a broad, inclusive definition for what constitutes thought leadership. All you want it to be able to do ultimately is spark interest among the people you want to reach with ideas that map with your ability to deliver.

To do this, you need to do research with customers and across your target markets. You also need to cultivate a group of internal subject matter experts to collaborate with customers and third parties to develop and refine a point of view. Finally, you need to implement this with customers so that they can provide corroboration that the idea is valid and practical.

These are the core elements of thought leadership marketing. Think of any of the best articles you’ve read in the Harvard Business Review, for example. Each has:

  1. A relevant business issue of interest to a lot of people
  2. A strong point of view
  3. Grounded in some kind of market research
  4. Validated by case examples

Now, I really don’t think this point of view has to be especially new or creative. It doesn’t have to be something that no one has thought of before. But it has to crystallize a point of view that is of interest to people and makes them stop and think.

Look, Al Gore had nothing new to say about global warming when he did An Inconvenient Truth. But he packaged all that stuff up in a very strong, clear point of view that said that we can’t continue waiting to make the sacrifices necessary to stop all this because if we don’t, we’re going to harm our children. It’s going to be hard to do what we have to do but we have to suck it up and do it now for their sakes.

What I see so often in thought leadership content is that there is no point of view linking it all together like that. At the top, you have broad research surveys and at the bottom, you have case studies of customers implementing a particular solution. But what’s missing is the point of view to take the customer from that broad research down to the case studies, the proof points. There needs to be a link.

I’m going to be giving a presentation next week on how to use thought leadership as a marketing tool during a recession. It’s being hosted by a web conferencing company called BrightTalk. It’s free and I hope you’ll attend. I’ll be talking about how to develop a thought leadership content engine inside your company and how to create a thought leadership dissemination supply chain to develop and refine the ideas and point of views that bubble up through the content engine. Here’s a link to sign up:

http://www.brighttalk.com/webcasts/2656/attend

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The Secret to Getting People to Read Long B2B Content: Formatting

January 9, 2009 by

Some time ago, I was helping a consulting firm write a whitepaper. I asked the consultants I was working with to send me an example of a previous whitepaper written by their firm that they liked, so that I could get a sense of the kind of writing style and presentation that they preferred.

The next meeting I had with the consultants didn’t go so well.

“I’d be surprised if anyone read that paper all the way through,” I told them.

Now a marketer wouldn’t be shocked to hear that, but these consultants were. And they had some reason to be. The whitepaper—it looked more like a coffee-table magazine, actually—was gorgeous. Four-color, thick paper stock, elegant design, and high-budget photography. And it was well written: stripped of marketing and consulting jargon, focused on educating and informing the reader rather than pitching any specific services. It was organized as well as any special issue of a business magazine, with an overall theme that had universal appeal and four articles packed with useful and unique information (including survey data) that each related to the theme and to each other.

But there was a fatal flaw.

First They Skim, Then (Maybe) They Read
Now, before I tell you what that fatal flaw was, I need to tell you how people read whitepapers. The first thing they do is skim. They read the headline, then they scan the rest of the opening page for similarly digestible content—e.g., a secondary headline or “kicker” that explains the point of the story in slightly more detail, pictures (and captions), etc. Often, readers will make a decision about whether to continue at that point, without having read any of the actual text of the article itself. For B2B readers, this is especially true; they aren’t curling up on the couch with this stuff. They do it to become better informed or because they have been asked (i.e., ordered) to research the topic. Whether it’s a printed whitepaper landing in their mailbox, a link in an e-mail newsletter, or an organic search on Google, this whitepaper is either standing in the way of getting other work done, or is part of a pile of similar content that they are wading through to glean some new insight.

The Curse of the Big, Gray Slab
Can you guess the fatal flaw in the whitepaper? When you stripped away all the beautiful surroundings and just looked at the text of the articles, each was one long, gray slab. There was nothing to break it up, nothing to give the busy reader’s eye and brain a break. Not a single subhead, not a single informational graphic (a cardinal sin when you have survey data, as this company did) or a bullet-list sidebar-not even a drop-cap to break up the sections of the text.

That whitepaper was a beautiful, five-figure waste of money and talent.

Good B2B Thought Leadership Has to Be Loooong…
I’m still waiting to read a good B2B technology whitepaper that really breaks new ground and is fewer than 1000 words. I just don’t think it’s possible. We sell very complex products to highly educated people who expect at least some degree of intellectual rigor in their reading materials. That’s not a formula for brevity. So we need to find ways to make readers more comfortable on their long journeys through our content.

…But Formatting Makes It Seem Shorter
Formatting is the best tool we have to do this. I used it to make this 7000-word tutorial on ERP software navigable—to the point where as of last year it was still getting 20,000 web hits per month. I set it up like a tech FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions). I tried to think of all the questions that someone new to ERP might ask (as well as those they might not know to ask, but should) and we listed them all at the top of the first page (and each page thereafter). Every weary researcher clicking through to it from Google can see at a glance what he or she is in for. Don’t have time to read it all now? Come back and click on the questions you didn’t read yet. The piece became so popular that college IT programs began creating permanent links to it on their websites (which partly explains why the traffic is so consistently high-professors are assigning it every term).

Of course, the web makes the need to format well even more important. However, unlike print, where the natural tendency is to make everything long and unbroken, on the web the tendency is to clutter the page with as many options as possible. The goal for both types of media should be to present readers with a clean, thematically unified page with unified elements.

Formatting That Shortens the Story
Here are some formatting elements to consider online and in print:

  • Write headlines that instruct and inform. When I joined the staff of one magazine, our impressively educated editors tried to outdo one another with clever puns and literary references to the point that the headlines were unintelligible. They were writing for each other, not the readers. Every headline has to answer the question: why should I spend any time reading this? And remember to get keywords in there for the Google monster.
  • Tease the point of view with kickers. Just beneath the headline, there should be a couple of sentences that explain what they can expect to learn (also good for feeding Google). Most readers still haven’t decided whether to read the story after reading the headline. Use the kicker to hook them.
  • Tell a story with sub-heads (as I’ve done in this post). Every few paragraphs, there needs to be a sub-head to give the reader a visual break. Use those sub-heads to tell the story of the text in shorthand. They may be the only things that anyone reads all the way through.
  • Highlight your stars with call outs. Call outs (or pull quotes) are indispensable because they add a nice graphic element to the piece. It’s also a great way to sell your practitioners and subject matter experts to the audience by quoting them. But as with subheads, they need to tell a coherent story within the story.
  • Break up the text with bullet lists (like the one you’re reading). Okay, how many of you skimmed this post down to this bullet list before starting to read in earnest? Lists give the reader value without making them plod through the whole piece. Lead each bullet with a short, highlighted introductory sentence to pull the reader in. Use action verbs and make calls to action wherever possible.
  • Keep sidebars short and self-contained. Thought leadership needs to be long, but sidebars really do need to short, without exception-never longer than 500 words, but more like 200 or less. Sidebars should be self-contained. No one should have to read the main story to understand the sidebar.

The Formatting Should Tell Its Own Story
Before sending your next whitepaper to the copy editor, check your work by reading just the formatting around the story. It should tell a story, offer facts and statistics, and outline calls to action. In other words, the formatting should offer some of the same value to readers that they would get if they actually sat down and read the piece from beginning to end. It should offer so many points of entry to the main story that skimmers go back to the beginning and become readers.

We can’t expect people to read all that we write in B2B. But we have to impart a sense of value with everything we do. That’s why formatting is so important. Don’t let the skimmers turn the page without giving them something to remember you by.

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