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5 Ways to Win with B2B Content Marketing & Social Media

Posted on 09. Apr, 2012 by Lee Odden in B2B, B2B content marketing, B2B Social Media, Blog, btob marketing, content marketing, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, Social Media

In the world of B2B online marketing, content and media have been used in a variety of forms to educate and persuade customers across long buying cycles with great success. Over the past few years I’ve heard from many B2B marketers that prospects are leading themselves through much of the initial phases of awareness, interest and consideration by consuming useful content discovered through social channels and published by the brand.

The result of smarter content and social engagement is a more qualified and educated consumer by the time they get to sales discussions which can mean a shorter sales cycle and even an impact on order volume and referrals.

Content marketing on the social web is a hot topic in many areas from SEO to Public Relations. Despite growing popularity, many marketers think “more content” is content marketing. What matters with content marketing is the thoughtful creation of information designed for a particular audience and specific outcomes as an individual object and as part of an overall strategy.

Content is educational and a tool of persuasion that can guide prospective customers in the journey from awareness to advocacy, across the entire customer lifecycle.

For a more qualitative approach to content, here are tips on how to make the most out of your content marketing efforts on the social web:

1. Planning

While experimenting with social media applications and platforms is a practical first step, many B2B Marketers seem to think that it’s a strategy. Goals, audience, and approach can allow for social experimentation but also provide companies with some structure and accountability toward achieving business outcomes with social content.

Social content plans don’t need to be set in stone. In fact, with social media content, it’s important for such plans to be adaptable and capable of analytical input and iterative improvements as data increases through growing network participation. A plan will help marketers better evaluate and scale their social media initiatives as well.

2. Prospect Centric

Companies that view social media platforms simply as a distribution channel for self-promotion often fail to create value for the very customers they’re trying to reach.

People don’t typically use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, blogging, Pinterest, and other social applications for keeping tabs on corporate press releases, product announcements, and promotions. Reasons for social media usage are most often personal. According to a Pew Research Center study, “two thirds of social media users say that staying in touch with current friends and family members is a major reason they use these sites.” With engaging on personal networks, consumers certainly connect with the brands they like, but contrary to how many brands behave with social content publishing, those connections are part of the social web experience, not the reason for it.

B2B marketers can achieve much better success with social content by empathizing with customer needs, interests, goals, and pain points across the buying cycle. Seeing things from the prospect’s point of view will help B2B marketers develop a content and social media approach that serves as a solution or facilitator to creating the kind of social content that resonates, engages, and gets shared. As prospect-centric social content gets shared, many of those who engage will refer or become customers.

3. Give to Get

Along with self-promotion, B2B marketers have a tendency to expect social communities to behave the way the brand wants them to. The guideline I like to share with B2B marketers that want to foster community and engagement is: “Give to get.” That doesn’t mean, give a sales pitch to get a sale.

Instead, provide something of value before expecting anything in return. In fact, it’s smart to find out more specifically what consumers and those who influence them find valuable as inspiration for a social content plan. Deliver useful information, listen to how audiences respond, and make adjustments. Then repeat.

The investment in creating value that is thoughtful for both customers and the brand’s business objectives is where consumer and corporate needs are met with social content.

4. Promotion

A lot of B2B marketing budgets have invested in creating content for companies, but many purists feel that great content should be left to attract attention based purely on the quality of the information. There’s a feeling that if content is really good, it will attract traffic and engagement all on it’s own. That’s a naïve perspective, especially in a competitive category and it also makes some strong assumptions about whether there is a preexisting community for the brand, or not.

With a hub and spoke publishing model, themed content is published into a repository that represents a “go to” resource for topics that the brand wants to be known for. At the same time, that content can be promoted through spokes or social channels among communities that are interested. People often rely on content promotion to discover what’s new. Promotion can attract traffic, social shares, and links, which can all serve as useful signals to search engines and improve standard and social search engine visibility.

Promotion works best with content that deserves to be shared. That kind of content makes a promise to social networks that it’s good. If a B2B brand can consistently create, optimize, socialize, and promote great content, the community will respond with shares, referrals, engagement, links, and even sales.

5. Analyze and Optimize

As they mature in their social content journey, B2B companies develop social profiles, publish descriptions, and contribute content at various intervals as part of their social media participation. They may even actively optimize social content with search keywords and social topics as a way to empathize with what consumers are looking for and talking about on the social web.

A missing piece of this puzzle is the importance of ongoing monitoring and analysis. There’s a process I call, “The cycle of search and social improvement” that involves creating and optimizing social content. As useful content is created and promoted, it gets shared and attracts fans, friends, followers, and subscribers.

As the community grows, even more sharing of links and traffic is involved with brand content. The increase in engagement, search visibility, and social sharing provides a rich set of data with which the brand can improve content creation. It’s a cycle of hypothesis, implementation, and analysis that can improve how effectively a brand is able to refine social content effectiveness at inspiring business outcomes.

A version of this article originally appeared on my ClickZ Social Media Smarts column.

If you’d like a deep dive on these topics with plenty of how to’s, then check out my new book: Optimize published by Wiley and available this week.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2012. |
5 Ways to Win with B2B Content Marketing & Social Media | http://www.toprankblog.com

Building B2B Online Communities – Why, How & Where to Start

Posted on 04. Apr, 2012 by Jolina Pettice in B2B, b2b marketing, B2B Social Media, Blog, community building, Online Communities, PR Conferences, public relations, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing

This week at the PRSA Digital Impact Conference Vanessa DiMauro, CEO of Leader Networks talked to attendees about the benefits of online communities as part of a B2B social media strategy.

According to DiMauro, nearly 2/3 of organizations surveyed are engaged in private, online communities hosted by companies that sell them computer hardware, software or services.

The average visit in an online B2B community is 10 minutes, with 1 visit every 5-7 days.

What B2B organization wouldn’t want roughly 40 minutes of time per month with members to help solve problems, learn how they are using tools and what topics they are most interested in?

Building an online community gives organizations an opportunity to strategically connect with its audience in meaningful and sometimes deeper ways through private interactions.

Many companies continue to respond chaotically to social chatter. With this, they can end up with what Vanessa calls social media muddle.

Part of that muddle is due to baseline measurement such as number of  fans/followers. Vanessa recommends going beyond such measurements and make sure someone in the organization is responsible for reviewing social interactions so that they can be strategically brought back to the organization and impact future marketing decisions.

Online communities can help companies shift from chaos to focus. Specifically moving from a set of discrete interactions to a dynamic, meaningful relationship which can impact business outcomes.

Benefits of online communities can include deepening customer relationships, building greater brand equity, providing better customer care, shortening product innovation cycles, extending and accelerating product and service delivery and delivering improved financial returns.

Which companies need online customer communities the most?

Those where customers are:

• open to sharing information with other customers
• purchasing a platform product and need to communicate with each other about how to capitalize
• willing to participate in off-line user groups or in-person customer summits

And where customer problems are:

• critical, ongoing and ever-changing
• such that knowledge for solving problems becomes obsolete quickly
• those where other customers can gain major value by learning from the experiences of other customers
• urgent

Here are 3 models for communities:
1. Gated

• select, narrow target audience
• acceptance criteria established
• protected dialog
• managed topical agenda
• supported by the organization

2. Public

• open call, all interested
• member directed
• public forum
• ad generated support

3. Hybrid

• tiered membership
• consensus/trend driven
• public forum with private areas
• thought leadership
• hybrid revenue

An example online community is the Palladium Group’s Execution Premium Community. The audience includes senior strategy professionals from organizations worldwide.

The case for the community included; helping increase customer intimacy, raising awareness of products and services, tapping into leading trends in strategy execution and creating a new revenue-generating service line.

Results to-date include more than 50% of the membership from non-US countries and its ongoing revenue, which it started generating at month 6.

Then she reviewed the online community LexisNexis Investigators Network (LNIN). The audience includes federal, state and local law enforcement and currently has more than 7,000 registered members.

This site aimed to bridge the gap between different law enforcement agencies.

Results to-date include over 4,000 members in the first year, members from all 50 states and 3 new product enhancements implemented.

The following are 3 Operations Processes communities need to succeed:

1. Expert community facilitation
2. A healthy balance of Institutional Content and User Generated Content
3. Persistent and programmatic outreach

For B2B communities to work, they need to solve a problem, accelerate a process and/or make something easier.

To get members interacting, know the types of members and what motivates them.

• Fame Seekers – seek opportunities to grow reputation and showcase thought leadership
• Motivators – seeks opportunity to be valued. Connect people with each other and with content
• Problem Solvers – reticent participant but overcomes this in order to get answers to their questions

A member who uploads a photo of his/herself is 7x more likely to post a comment. Be sure to pay attention to the members who join and upload a photo first. These people are likely fame-seekers and can be encouraged by member spotlights, shout-outs or in discussions.

Understanding the members of the community, their individual goals and what drives them to share and engage are all critical to building a successful community.

Online communities may be the right next step for organization’s who want and need to connect with customers who have persistent needs and can learn from the collective wisdom of others.

Supporting users as they transition to customers, and across the customer life cycle, is a key message in TopRank Online Marketing CEO Lee Odden’s new book Optimize available in for Kindle and Nook now, with hard cover copies shipping starting on April 17th.

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2012. |
Building B2B Online Communities – Why, How & Where to Start | http://www.toprankblog.com

Social Pros 9 – Christopher S. Penn, WhatCounts

Posted on 29. Mar, 2012 by Jay Baer in B2B Social Media, Blog, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing

This is Episode 9 of the Social Pros Podcast : Real People Doing Real Work in Social Media. This episode features Christopher S. Penn, the Director of Inbound Marketing for enterprise email company WhatCounts. Read on for insights from Chris, and Eric’s Social Media Stat of the Week (this week: social media as a B2B lead generator!).

Listen Now

Click the play button to listen here:

Download the audio file:

http://socialpros.podbean.com/mf/play/xk4avf/SocialProsEpisode9.mp3

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Find us on iTunes: http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/convince-convert-blog-social/id499844469

Please Support Our Sponsors

Huge thanks to data-driven social media management software company Argyle Social for their presenting sponsorship, as well as Infusionsoft and Jim Kukral at DigitalBookLaunch. We use Argyle Social for our social engagement; we use Infusionsoft for our email; and Jim is our guest host for the podcast and a smart guy).

Social Pros Transcript For Your Reading Enjoyment

Jay: And we are back with Episode Number Nine of the Social Pros podcast. It’s Jay Baer with my trusty sidekick Eric Boggs. Eric, what is going on my man?

Eric: Hello, Jay. It’s a bittersweet day in North Carolina. Tarheels exited the NCAA tournament, so there’s some sad Argylers today.

Jay: Some sad people. Explain to the folks at home why your company is called Argyle Social.

We should get a social media software company named after these!

Eric: We’re called Argyle Social in large part because the Carolina Tarheel basketball team has argyle trim on their uniforms.

Jay: So it does justify a sad day in your organization when you name the company after a basketball team uniform and that basketball team is defeated. I’m surprised you’re actually working today.

Eric: Well, you’ve got to move on.

Jay: That’s a good attitude.

Eric: It’s 200 days until “Midnight with Roy“, so the countdown’s already beginning for the next season.

Jay: Midnight with Roy, that sounds like a terrible time.

We have an amazing show today. One of my personal mathematical heroes, Chris Penn from WhatCounts is joining us on the Social Pros podcast today. A genius by any measure. We’re looking forward to talking to him.

There goes Chris Penn standing on a tree. N-I-N-J-A-I-N-G

Eric: And also a ninja. People joke about marketing ninjas and developer ninjas. Chris Penn is literally a ninja. That I always think is one of the funny parts of Chris’ personality.

Jay: Yeah. We don’t just mean he’s really good at math. He’s actually a ninja, has like a ninja card and all that.

Eric: Exactly.

Jay: He actually has a throwing star during this podcast. It’s going to be fantastic.

Quick shoutout to our sponsors, Argyle Social, named after the North Carolina Tarheels basketball team. Our friends at Infusionsoft, as well as Jim Kukral from DigitalBookLaunch.com.

Jay’s Thought of the Week

Jay: Let’s get right into it. Here’s my thought of the week. I feel like I have trod this ground before, perhaps not on the podcast, but it’s ground I’ve trod. But I feel it merits some additional trodding, which is there is no secret sauce in the social media software business.

I get into lots of conversations with clients and perspective clients who say, I’m paraphrasing but not so much, “We need to get good at social media measurement. So we need to buy Radian6 or Argyle Social or Involver.”

People are confusing the wizard and the wand. The software is just a vessel. It is a cipher. It is something that you can use to gather data, but gathering that data doesn’t create measurements necessarily. It just gives you the raw material to create those measurements, right?

You have to be your own middleware in social media. You can’t just buy a license and press a button and have all your mathematical problems solved. I wish it were true, but it is not true, and it drives me crazy.
Eric, I’m sure being in this game, this is something that you struggle with all the time.

Eric: Where do I begin? Jeez, you are absolutely right. We see the same thing with our customers. What blows me away is in sales conversations, which are very similar to the conversations you have with your clients and prospective clients, people kind of have their head wrapped around this number that they need or this set of data that they need. When we really probe and ask them about the business problem they’re trying to solve, that’s never nearly as clear as their need to know number XYZ or metric 123. When you really try to map these conversations to the business issues, people have a really hard time with that.

I think what’s good for guys like me that are in the social software business is that people don’t have a clear sense of the business objective, and so they reach for these tools as the crutch or . . .

Jay: A lifeline. Phone a friend.

Eric: Yeah, like an aid to help them get there, help them find the answers.

Jay: Do you think it’s because the people who are making social media consulting or social media software decisions, aren’t really involved in business level decisions in their organizations? It’s just above their pay grade, or is there something else afoot here?

Eric: I think that you’re on to something there. There’s definitely the macro trend that we see, and you could even see it just by having conversations at South by Southwest. Previously, social wasn’t getting visibility into the executive team or the management team level. More and more, social is getting visibility at the strategic level.

I think that in the past, people have had a hard time mapping social to business objectives because social is kind of off in a corner. Today it’s getting more integrated into the marketing and sales and product.

Jay: It’s more like customer service. I think one of the ways that social media gets elevated in the C-suite is its customer service and customer satisfaction role.

Eric: Yeah, exactly. That’s kind of the easy way in through the backdoor. When you’ve got a volume of customer requests coming through Twitter, suddenly Twitter’s important. Once you’ve validated it’s important for one thing, you can start to make the case for other pieces.

Jay: Nice. We’ll continue to hit this theme on the Social Pros podcast and try and clarify this for some folks out there. What is your social media stat of the week?

Eric’s Social Media Stat of the Week: Social Media is the Best Source of Leads for 11% of B2B Companies

Eric: The stat of the week comes from a February 2012 survey from the marketing magazine B2B Magazine. It was about lead generation. It’s not surprising that for most B2B marketers, 59% actually, of this survey said that lead generation is their greatest online marketing challenge.

I’m wondering what the other 41% of the survey’s online marketing challenges of B2B organizations . . .\

Jay: Where to have lunch.

Eric: Yeah, that’s another question for another time. Of the people that participated in this survey, 57% said that email marketing was the online channel that contributed to the most qualified leads. 13% of the people actually said social media, which was surprising. I would have actually thought that number to be a little bit smaller. It’s encouraging to me that 13% say that social is the most effective lead driver for their organization.

Jay: Yeah, even more so than email in a B2B circumstance. That is an interesting finding, and I wonder what that would have been last year. It would have to be zero or nearly zero.

Eric: Yeah. If you had asked me to ballpark these numbers, I would have said 5% or less.

Another interesting nugget from this survey is that 30% of the people that responded felt that their email programs were well optimized, which is a number I think is awfully small. I would think that a lot more people would have figured out email marketing by now.

Jay: Well, you know, it’s new. This email thing just came out. We haven’t had a whole lot of time to optimize it.

Eric: Transport to 1993, hit AOL email, exactly.

Jay: That stat on the other hand has probably been the same forever.

Eric: Yeah. Maybe that is, maybe only 30% of the market can actually well optimize a channel. Maybe that’s the ceiling.

Jay: I think on the email side, and as you know, I come out of the email side of the business as do you. I think it’s that only 30% of the people give a damn enough about email to actually spend time optimizing it.

Eric: That’s true. That’s a good way of looking at it.

Jay: I just think it’s people are like, “Meh, it’s good enough.”

Eric: Of these same people, 5% said that their social efforts were well optimized, which I find to be encouraging. The vast majority, over 55%, said their social efforts were early stage, but showed promise, which makes sense. That’s kind of where most of the market is based on our conversations.

Overall, I thought this was a good piece. We got it from emarketer.com. We’ll link it up in the blog post.

Special Guest: Christopher S. Penn of What Counts

Jay: Excellent. Speaking of somebody who knows a little something about email and social media and B2B, see how we did that? It is our friend Christopher S. Penn from WhatCounts. Mr. Ninja, welcome to the Social Pros podcast.

Chris: Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, depending on when you’re listening to this.

Jay: Not to mention the fact you are a legendary marketing podcaster in your own right. Before we get into your business, why don’t you tell folks about your own podcast?

Chris: I have been doing a show with John Wall called Marketing Over Coffee, now in its fifth year. Out of a donut shop in Natick, Massachusetts. We record every Wednesday and do what’s on our minds.

People have likened it to just eavesdropping, fly on the wall talks as John and I banter about the latest things with bitter cynicism and deep skepticality about all things marketing.

Jay: You’ve done more than nine episodes?

Chris: We have done more than nine episodes. I believe we’re coming up on either 250 or 300 episodes by now.

Jay: Holy mackerel.

Eric: Jeez.

Jay: Eric, I don’t know if we can survive that. How many North Carolina losses can we take by the time we get to 300 podcasts?

Eric: I was going to say, Chris, it’s surprising you still like your partner after all that time.

Chris: Yeah. It works really, really well. That’s actually not the greatest number of shows I’ve done. Back in the podcasting heyday, I did a financial aid podcast and that reached 937 episodes before it came to the end of its run.

Jay: It’s like Gunsmoke, but for financial aid. I love it.

Eric: Did you guys do big retrospectives for your 100th and 200th episodes? How does that work? I need something to keep pushing toward.

Jay: Are you planning for the tenth episode retrospective show next week? Greatest hits and highlights already?

Eric: Exactly.

Chris: We did for the 100th, and then after that we were like, “We’re just going to keep going.”

Jay: It’s like the 15 year class reunion, right?

Chris: Exactly.

Jay: Yeah, whatever, close enough. Chris, tell the folks at home about WhatCounts and what you do there, and how you have seemingly a lot of irons in the fire.

Chris: Okay. I guess the briefest way to do this is I started out as customer of a company called Blue Sky Factory, way back in 2006, when I met the founder, Greg Cangialosi, at an event I created with Chris Brogan called Pod Camp.
He offered a free account for us to try out, because the company was still trying to ramp up at the time. I was a customer of this company for a while. After the student loan industry got beaten up pretty badly and lost a lot of profitability, I ended up having to move over to a new career. I just jumped right over to Blue Sky Factory to become the VP of strategy and something or other over there.

Ted: Ideas Worth Spreading at ted.com

Then thanks to things like social media, email, and inbound marketing and all that wonderful stuff, the company became so successful that we actually got acquired last year by a competitor called WhatCounts, where I am now the Director of Inbound Marketing.

In addition to that, I have “Marketing White Belt,” which was the book I published last year. I’m almost done with a sequel, which is “The Blue Belt Book.” There’ll actually be a series of five of these corresponding to the belt grades in the ninjitsu system that I practice.

A whole bunch of different other little things going on all at the same time.

Jay: You have, as you said, in addition to your own books and your own blog and your own podcast and your own Twitter program, Google+ and everything else, you also create a substantial amount of the content and thought leadership that WhatCounts puts out.

How do you balance that personal versus corporate thought leadership and content creation, especially in your case, where some of the things that you talk about really cross over between industries?

Chris: At the most basic level, and I kind of joke about this, whenever it comes to making the decisions about who gets what, it’s whoever’s credit card is being used to pay the expense report, or whichever paycheck is being used to pay stuff.
Typically, I will not delve particularly deep into email marketing on my own properties, because I figure that belongs very much to the day job. Likewise, I don’t do a whole lot with social and some of the advanced stuff with WhatCounts, because its core competency really is shipping an awful lot of email.

Beyond that though, it’s an interesting situation because WhatCounts works with some of these Fortune 500 companies and even a couple of Fortune 50s. Yet in terms of footprint in social and online marketing, just looking at the web traffic alone, my own personal website has about three times the traffic of the corporate site.

I bring almost as much audience into the company as I create for it in my line of work. It’s definitely murky, but as long as I’m providing value and working to the benefit of people, no matter what I’m doing, it seems to work out pretty well. I’m not trying to write books just for one or the other. I’m not trying to move audience from one to the other. It’s a combined, big thing that says we want to be helpful to people.

Jay: You mentioned that on one side you talk more email and WhatCounts and more social on your side. You are one of the foremost experts I can say firsthand, because we talked about and I’ve seen you present about it on a number of occasions, on the synthesis of search and social.

You probably heard us talking at the beginning of the show about the magic number syndrome and trying to use social media software to achieve mathematical nirvana. But it requires you to actually stitch together metrics from social media, from Google Analytics, things like that. You obviously have books about this. Could you encapsulate that thinking for people a little bit?

Chris: Going back to the tool discussion earlier, I think you guys are at a very, very good place when it comes to your perspective. In the martial arts, there’s this concept, it’s a Japanese concept called shuhari, which means “preserve the form, vary the form, break the form.”

The same thing applies to social media marketing, and especially when it comes to any kind of social tool, whether it’s content creation or analytics. You get the tool first. You understand it, you use it, you use it a whole bunch, you figure out what it’s supposed to do, you follow all the best practices, and you get competence in using the tool.

Once you are competent at using the tool, then you start to vary it. Okay, can it be used for this? Can it be used for this? That’s where things like Google Analytics come into play. Where because of the tool’s tremendous amount of flexibility, once you understand things like event tracking or multi-channel follows or an event flow or conversion flow, now you can start to get squishy with it and say, “What can we use this tool for that is not in the manual but would still be a good idea? What can we use custom reports for? How can we build a custom report that ties together the things that are important?” Then after you’ve varied it, after you understand the full capabilities of the tool, you transcend it.

That’s the third part where you break the form. You don’t need a best practices handbook anymore because you are the best practice at that point for your organization. You’ve gone so far out of cookie cutter land into baking your own custom things that if someone were trying to take what you were doing and copy/paste it to another enterprise, it would fail miserably because it’s so customized to what you’re doing because you’ve transcended the need for a recipe or cookbook.

Exactly the same way that you go to a restaurant and there’s a master chef, someone who’s got 30 years under his belt. He doesn’t need to measure tomatoes and salt to put together an appetizer. He just does it from decades of experience.
It’s tricky for us as digital marketers to wrap our heads around this, because in order to even get to the part where you should be doing variation and you should be approaching mastery, you’re talking about at a minimum of ten years of practice if not more. Social media is just approaching that. Blogging is not much more than 20 years old at this point.

Jay: How long has anybody been using one particular tool, either? Because your staff changes.

Chris: Exactly.

Jay: The tools change. The staff that uses the tools change. People switch vendors, things like that. I would be amazed if there’s any people out there who have been using one particular piece of social software consistently for more than three years. There’s probably not too many of those folks out there. Salt has not changed a lot.

Chris: Exactly. So the converse side of that is be very careful of people who go around billing themselves as experts or gurus or whatever on something, because it’s really hard to be an expert at something that’s only been out for two years.

Jay: Unless you’re looking at expertise on a comparison basis.

Chris: I suppose. You can be an expert in something. You can be an expert in communications. You can be an expert writer who’s been writing for 20 years. 20 years ago you were on a typewriter and now you’re using WordPress.
The skill and craft of writing is something that you’re working to refine. People who go around touting themselves as “tool masters” are missing the point. The tool is there to help you become a better craftsman. You don’t really ever go out into the yellow pages and see “hammer expert.” I want to hire a guy to build my house. I don’t care how good you are with a hammer. Give me someone who can build my house.

Jay: I used to, back in the day, be in the web design business. My first two online startups were Web Strategy, Web Dev. I had a rule that we would not hire anybody for front end work who didn’t have an actual arts degree from a major university, because you had lots of people who could theoretically design a site, but they were masters of whatever the particular software du jour was at that time in the evolution of the Internet.

They were great at the software, but when you said, “Why does this look good, or what’s the aesthetic or theory behind it,” they couldn’t do it. They just didn’t have any training in the philosophy of design, they could just push buttons. I think it falls apart, and I think we’re at the same space again. History is repeating itself.

Chris: Absolutely. Before you go out and try and become a black belt, you really should try getting your white belt first.

Jay: Yeah, but that’s no fun.

Chris: It’s no fun, but it’s important. It’s like handing a four foot razor blade, known as a katana, to the guy who just walks in the door. At some point someone’s going to lose a limb.

Eric: Chris, what was the analogy that you made about learning fighting by going to a bar? I think you sent that in an email or I saw it in a blog post.

Chris: Yeah. There’s this bizarre conflict that Tom Webster was talking about.

Eric: That’s right. That’s where I read it.

Chris: About on the one hand there’s people who say academia and ivory tower stuff is completely irrelevant to the real world, only experience counts. Then the other side, the academics are saying those folks over there are just spinning their wheels. They don’t have any basis for what they’re doing. It’s just trial and error and hoping it all works out.
They’re two opposite camps. One’s bashing people who have degrees, and one’s saying people who don’t have degrees are worthless. In the middle is reality, where you put together knowledge plus practice. Eventually it leads to wisdom.

The joke was if you want to learn how to fight, you can go to a martial arts school, but at a certain point you need to take it out on the road to become effective, whether it’s testing or whatever.

The alternate version is you could go to a bar, go to the nearest dive bar, walk in, shout some racial slurs or something like that, experience the action of the fight, repeat that a few times, pay your dentist, and you will have a rudimentary grasp of how to fight. It’s not the most efficient way of doing it, and that’s the counter argument to people who say you don’t need an MBA.

You don’t need an MBA. But if you don’t want to be learning with the school of hard knocks, it might not be a bad idea to get some of that basic training so that you have more to fall back on.

Eric: Well said. Or you could just be like you and be really smart and be able to go a local dive bar and win all the fights.

Chris: My lawyer advises me to avoid dive bars generally, which I pay very careful attention to.

Jay: Chris, we were talking about social for customer service earlier in the podcast. How much do you get involved with customer service provision for WhatCounts? Do you oversee that part as well, or is that handled elsewhere in the organization?

Chris: There’s a huge customer service division. I would say probably service and support are the lion’s share of our staff, actually. Everyone’s got their own dedicated account manager and stuff.

On the social front, I front end the listening. Myself and our CEO Alan Nance, we just keep an eye on stuff. When stuff comes in, we just escalate things as quickly as possible. Just pop into Salesforce, okay, who’s this person’s account manager? They’re complaining.

It’s funny. People will complain on social networks when we think we’re not listening, like on the weekends, or they will complain when it’s not serious enough to bring to their account manager, even though they have one. They are usually surprised and occasionally slightly creeped out that we are listening, and their account manager seems to call them out of the blue saying, “Hey, I heard you were having some trouble. What’s going on?”

It’s good for them and it’s good for the business, but I don’t do a whole lot of the problem resolution myself, mostly because we want people’s account managers to know what’s going on with their customers.

Jay: Are you saying that social media gives succor to the passive/aggressive element of society?

Chris: Yes.

Jay: It’s so well said. I see this all the time. They like to complain when they think we’re not listening. I love that.

Eric: My favorite is the someone complains, and then they don’t get the response that they want, or they don’t get the white glove treatment that they want, and then they complain some more about how they were treated after they complained.

Chris: If you guys ever want to see epic legion complaining, go check out the World of Warcraft forums that Activision-Blizzard has. I mean, the number of people who complain about things that are clearly first world problems is just legendary.

Jay: Yes, the World of Warcraft forums. That is a first world problem, no question about it.

Social Pros Shout Out

All right, Chris. This is the time of the show where we ask you to give a Social Pros shoutout to other people, things, animals, vegetables, minerals that you believe are worthy. Where do you get so smart? What do you listen to and read and things like that to become Chris Penn, marketing ninja?

Chris: I read a lot of economics blogs, believe it or not. I tune into the Bureau of Labor Statistics. They publish their data fairly often, and as flawed as some of it is, at least it’s consistently flawed in the same ways, so it’s predictable.
Tom Webster, who you’ll find at @Webby2001 is one of my favorite minds to debate with. So is Bryce Moore, who is @abiteofsanity on Twitter. Both these guys are very unique to me, in the sense that when we chat privately, they are completely unafraid and thankfully so of calling BS to my face, saying, “Dude, that was completely off. Your math is wrong here, here and here. Fix it up.”

One of the hallmarks I like to say of a good practitioner is you surround yourself with mentors, teachers, and people who are smarter than you so that they can constantly help you challenge and improve your game.

Other people that I find extremely important, Chel Wolverton who is my business partner for a lot of my speaking stuff and things is constantly finding the newest and coolest things. You’ll find her @ChelPixie on Twitter.

Social Pros 7 – Cindy Kim, JDA Software

Posted on 15. Mar, 2012 by Jay Baer in B2B Social Media, Blog, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing

This is Episode 7 of the Social Pros Podcast : Real People Doing Real Work in Social Media. This episode features Cindy Kim, the Director of Marketing and Social Media for JDA Software. Read on for insights from Cindy, our “Work It Out” advice segment, and Eric’s Social Media Stat of the Week (this week: does Pinterest drive more traffic than all other social networks combined?).

Listen Now

Click the play button to listen here:

Download the audio file: http://socialpros.podbean.com/mf/play/f4t5hg/SocialProsEpisode7.mp3
The RSS feed is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/socialprospodcast
Find us on iTunes: http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/convince-convert-blog-social/id499844469

Please Support Our Sponsors

Huge thanks to data-driven social media management software company Argyle Social for their presenting sponsorship, as well as Infusionsoft and Jim Kukral at DigitalBookLaunch. We use Argyle Social for our social engagement; we use Infusionsoft for our email; and Jim is our guest host for the podcast and a smart guy).

Social Pros Transcript For Your Reading Enjoyment

Transcription services provided by Speechpad.

Jay: Hey everybody, it’s Jay Baer and Eric Boggs live, a live episode of
the Social Pros Podcast from soggy South by Southwest in Austin.
Eric, I haven’t seen you in full rain gear in quite a while, and
it is a sexy, sexy look on you.

Eric: Yeah. I’ve been on the ground in Austin for three hours now.

Jay: And it’s rained 14 inches in those 3 hours.

Eric: Yeah.

Jay: It’s the big typhoon edition of the Social Pros Podcast.

Eric: So it’s bearable, but it’s going to get nasty when the sun goes down
and it’s going to get colder.

Jay: As I saw on Twitter the other day, the killer app of South By is an
umbrella, which is less digital than you would expect. We have a
great show. Live here at the SpreadFast Social Lounge is our
good friend Cindy Kim, Head of Social Media for JDA Software. We
are going to talk to her about their supply chain business and
the amazing things that they’re doing in social. They’ve come a
long way fast, and it’s going to be some pretty interesting
stuff, and I think a lot of people will be amazed by and will
learn from.

Jay’s Thought of the Week

So let’s get into Jay’s thought of the week, and I tell you,
it’s weird. I feel like we have this commoditization of social
networks, that we have a diminishing level of distinguishing
characteristics. So here’s what I mean. Twitter announces last
week that they are going to do a new iteration of brand pages on
Twitter so that companies can actually have Twitter apps. They
can have contests within the Twitter platform themselves. So
essentially, you will have a Twitter page that will be somewhat
similar to a Facebook page.

And Facebook just announced and
actually rolled out Interest Lists, so you can actually
subscribe to topics on Facebook and get in your news stream
things about dogs or, in my case, tequila or, in your case,
North Carolina Tar Heels basketball failures. And Google+ is
the same thing, right? Google+ has half of their features came
from Facebook, and the ones that Google+ innovated, like
circles, Facebook copied in 30 seconds. And so, if all three of
these guys end up doing the exact same features, what the hell
is the point? Why do we have all these different social networks
if they’re going to have the same functionality?

Eric: Yeah. You even left off Facebook’s new ad platform, which is,
effectively, exactly Twitter’s ad platform.

Jay: Which, actually, Twitter’s ad platform is actually Google’s ad
platform in many ways. I understand that good ideas should be
copied, but I feel like, instead of truly innovating,
everybody’s playing “me too”.

Eric: Well, it’s kind of they’re all sort of approaching the mean. They’re
all kind of becoming the same thing.

Jay: Yeah. But is that based on they think that they understand what people
actually want, or is it like, “Oh my god! These guys have a
feature. We need to roll out something similar.” I think it’s the latter. I think it’s more competitive pressure as opposed to
some sort of in-depth market research on consumer demand that
says, “Oh, we have to have Interest Lists.”

Eric: I think it’s driven by the need to become the biggest social network that they could possibly become. When you look at what Facebook has done and they’ve kind of built every feature under the sun, and you look at what sort of the strategy that Twitter looks like they’re taking where now there are going to be brand pages, they’re headed down that path.

Jay: And that, in particular, is the one that really bothers me because
I’ve always believed since the very beginning that Twitter’s
genius was that it did one thing and did it extraordinarily
well. And, to me, every time they hang more ornaments on their
Christmas tree, it takes them away from their competitive
advantage, not giving them new competitive advantage.

Eric: You and I did a great webcast this week about niche networks, and three or four years ago, Twitter was a niche network. Today, it
is without a doubt one of the top three with Facebook, Twitter…

Jay: 400 million users or whatever the number was.

Eric: Yeah. And I think this is kind of the price they’re having to pay.
You look at something like Pinterest or Instagram, these niche
networks that may or may not cross that transom and become
mainstream, they are the ones that are doing one thing really
cleanly and really simply. The big difference is that Facebook
is making a kajillion dollars a year, and Twitter seems to be
ramping up to be making a kajillion dollars a year, and
Pinterest and Instagram are making zero dollars per year. So
it’s all driven by ad dollars. I don’t know that that’s best for
the user, but I think there are a lot of people that have
invested a lot of money in these companies that want to get
their money back.

Jay: Yeah. It’s going to be fascinating to see where we are a year from
now, when we basically just have Twacebook and Fwitter, right,
and it’s like the exact same thing. I think we’re going to get
that day, maybe not exactly that, but we’re headed that
direction. What do we have on the math front?

Eric’s Social Media Stat of the Week: Does Pinterest Drive More Traffic Than All Other Social Networks Combined?

Eric: We have a couple stats of the week, actually, this week. First stat
of the week is 50, in that it’s 50 degrees in Austin, Texas,
which is…

Jay: 50 degrees in Austin, Texas.

Eric: And rainy. I think there’s a 70 percent chance of rain tomorrow,
which is not what the South by Southwest organizers hoped for,
and certainly not what the South by Southwest attendees had
hoped for. That said, the party will go on.

Jay: The party is going on.

Eric: The actual stat of the week comes from our dear friend, Tom Webster.

Jay: Tom Webster. @Webby2001.

Eric: VP of Marketing at Edison Research. He writes one of the best blogs
on the Internet, BrandSavant.com. One of the few blogs where I
read every word that is written. He just launched sort of the
second piece in his media empire, which is DataSnob.com. And Tom is a self-admitted data snob. So he wrote his first blog post on site and it’s going to be a great site, I can already tell you. Basically, he took a report from Shareaholic,
which is like an onsite sharing system, and basically, these
guys put together a report. The report surmised that Pinterest
drives more traffic than Google+, YouTube, and LinkedIn
combined. And Mashable got a hold of the report and that was the
headline, is that Pinterest drives more traffic than these other
networks combined and Tom’s point is: You know what? That is a
valid outcome, but only when you put it in the context of
amongst Shareaholic users, amongst this set of data, we found
this outcome.

Jay: You can’t assume that Shareaholic users behave the same as a larger
population.

Eric: It’s not representative of humanity.

Jay: Well, it may be. We don’t know that. But you can’t assume that.

Eric: Exactly. Exactly. And this type of content is classic Tom Webster and…

Jay: And that kind of study is classic modern marketing.

Eric: Yeah, exactly.

Jay: That’s why we have a social media stat of the week on the Social Pros
podcast because this kind of thing happens consistently, and the
desire to get clicks and win the content marketing game tends to
get in the way of either nuanced reporting, he says, former
journalism major, or legitimate market research.

Eric: Yep. And I’ll tell you, we do this at Argyle. We’re a data driven
company. A lot of our marketing…

Jay: You’re part of the problem, not part of the solution, honestly.

Eric: I disagree. I will admit it is a tough line to tow, and we just try
to be as absolutely upfront and transparent as we can be. I give
a lot of talks at conferences, and I spend way more time than I
should probably…

Jay: Disclaiming, yeah.

Eric: …describing the context…

Jay: Verbal asterisk.

Eric: Yeah. The context of the dataset and sort of empowering everyone
with, “Use this, but your mileage may vary because this is our
data and this is what it tells us.” So DataSnob.com, a Tom
Webster joint, it’s going to be a great blog.

Special Guest – Cindy Kim, JDA Software

Jay: Awesome. So let’s bring in our very special guest, live at soggy
South by Southwest, Cindy Kim from JDA Software. Cindy, my
friend, how are you?

Cindy: Good. How are you? Thanks, Jay, for having me.

Jay: We are delighted to have you. Tell the folks at home or in the car or
on the treadmill, wherever they happen to be, a little bit about
JDA and what you guys do.

Cindy: So JDA Software is one of the leading providers of supply chain
management software. They’ve got global offices everywhere, and
we’ve got large enterprises that we serve in the retail
manufacturing and travel transportation markets.

Jay: So, if you need to create some sort of, I don’t know, portable,
disposable raincoat for South by Southwest attendees, you need
to make sure that those raincoats are here for this conference.
JDA Software can make sure that those raincoats are manufactured
and shipped in time.

Cindy: Yes. And I’m sure a lot of our clients were responsible for
bringing in a lot of the food, all of the items for South by
Southwest in terms of the supply chain.

Jay: Well, thank you, for making sure that we have beer to drink at South
by Southwest because of your software. Congratulations.

Eric: Exactly. We’re all going to be huddled indoors drinking together, so
it’s important that we go on.

Jay: So, as I mentioned in the show intro, it wasn’t that long ago that
you were actually hired as the Head of Social Media at JDA
Software, but yet, the company had no social media program,
which I think is one of the greatest feats of getting a job in
history. I’d like to be your Director of Social Media despite
the fact that we have no social media, which is really quite
fantastic.

Eric: Lots of smoke. Lots of mirrors.

Jay: It’s genius, right? You need to open a recruiting business. But now,
fast forward like 18 months, and you guys are all over the
place, I mean blog and everything else, social networks. How did
you do that? It’s a big company with big company issues, about
trust and turf and all those kind of things. How has that journey unfolded?

Cindy: When I started, I think JDA was ready and we had a good
leadership there who understood the need for social media as part of the marketing mix. So, I was really glad to take that
role and look at the company’s culture and the needs of our
culture, not just to fast track and adopt social media as part
of our marketing strategy, but really to understand what is it
going to be in terms of really benefiting our brand and building
our thought leadership and really engaging with some of the
supply chain folks that are out there.

Jay, I’ve had the pleasure of bringing you onboard and working
with you very closely and looking at our company culture, and
really asking the question, “What’s going to really work for
JDA, and what are some of the objectives and goals that we want
to achieve?” So I think with that in mind, really understanding
the intent and the commitment by the executive team, we were
really able to lock down a policy where we got really good
engagement from HR, Legal, and all of the core stakeholders, and
then really looking at putting together a very solid, powerful
social media marketing strategy and program.

Another key thing that we did was we did bring in an agency that
I trusted. We really looked into the digital experience and
really used them as the extended branch of our brand and to get
our voice out there. So I think that has helped quite a bit, and
that firm is Lois Paul & Partners, obviously you know. I think
one of the success factors of really being able to be successful
is understanding that we are going to focus on the core
channels, like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, not Google+. But
we understood, even from me speaking with you, was really
getting the blog as the essential hub of content. So really
being able to invest and get buyer insight and really get the
approval from our executive team to launch that.

Jay: I think the executive team part of that is so critical. I mean, we
talked a lot about that, of course, in The NOW Revolution, and
Amber, my co-author, now is doing a lot of consulting around
corporate culture and social business transformation. But I
don’t think you could have gotten to where you are today without
cultural alignment and true executive support for social. I
think people believe that to be true, but you’ve lived that,
right? If you didn’t have the sea sweet drink in the social Kool-
Aid, this wouldn’t have gotten off the ground, I presume.

Cindy: That’s exactly it, and I think one of the things that I did
was, when I put together the social media strategy and program,
I tried to really do the social selling to our executive team
and not to just our legal, our HR. They really bought into it
and they started to evangelize within their own business units
and within their own management that this was a good thing for JDASoftware. When it came to the blog, it was very unique. We
actually had the executive team excited about it, but we
developed a buddy blog program. We really shared with them how
we were going to make this successful.

Jay: How do you mean a buddy blog program?

Cindy: We had our social media team from LPP and myself really look at
our bloggers and say, “We’re going to be your blog buddy. We’re
going to provide you the content and topic recommendations. We’re
going to review your blog. We’re going to give you links to
blogs and articles where you could comment and link back to our
blog.” So that has worked. It’s been very successful. But after
our executives saw the plan on how we were going to go to market
and how we were going to make this successful, they were very
confident that we could actually pull this off and sustain the level of success that we had supplied.

Jay: Do you then circle that back and give those execs and other content critters on the blog, “Hey, here’s how many page views you generated,” or sharing behaviors of that kind? Do you reinforce their good behavior with data?

Cindy: Exactly. The first month it launched, we had a very successful traffic flow on a page basis and stuff like that. And so I would send weekly updates to our EVP of Sales and Marketing, Tom Dziersk, to show its success. And really, even the unique page views, but also time on site as well as the clicks on each of the blogs that we posted. And so he could see the success or what’s resonating in the market. We’ve been actually linked from some of the industry blogs as well, and now we’re getting really closely tied into the industry influencers. We’re really headed in the right way, and I’m very excited about what we’re doing.

Eric: I want to go back a couple of questions. You were talking about the
pitch that you made to the executive team. I know you can’t
share all of the details of the pitch, but what do you think was
the hook? What do you think was the angle or the pieces of data
that got the executives to…

Jay: It was free beer. It was like a South By thing.

Eric: I need you to sign this document, but first have a six pack.

Cindy: We had cocktails. You know what’s so funny is a lot of people said, “You’re going to have to do a lot of upfront work to get the executives to buy in.” That wasn’t the case. We, as acollective team, came together and said, “We have a strategy. We
have a plan. And I know how I’m going to sell it.” I first sold
it to the EVP… I actually sold it to the CEO. In my hallway
conversation, I said, “Look. The blog, content is your new
currency, and if you want JDA to be… we’re the best kept
secret in the market. We’ve just got to break out of that. So
the way we do that is through the blog, and the blog is our new
social newswire and we’re going to be clicking out from the blog
to Twitter and Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+. And that’s how
you’re going to succeed in this content distribution and
dissemination.” So he was all for that. As soon as he bought
into that, it was all about the blogger education, how we were
going to roll it out, the content flow, how we were going to
match up the blog buddies to the executive team. And you know
what? Once the CEO bought on, that was it.

Eric: Speaks to the power of selling high, right?

Cindy: Yeah. It’s been great.

Jay: You talked about the content, having multiple authors of the blog.

How many writers do you have? Contributors?

Cindy: We had about, I believe we had eight to start with and the CEO,
Hamish, he was so excited about contributing content because he
really attached and got connected with the customers. So he was
one of our key bloggers to start with. Now we have over, I
believe, 20 bloggers that are on staff. They just love
contributing content, but now our job is to make sure that
content is premium, it’s unique, and it’s really going to serve
the customer audience.

Jay: How do you do that? Do they say, “Hey, Cindy and team, I have an idea
for a blog post,” and you say, “That is a good enough idea”? Or
do they give you content and then you’d say, “Yeah, that blog
content maybe doesn’t quite work”? Or do you say, “Hey, we need
to create content about this topic because it’s good for
search,” and then you assign it? What’s that process?

Cindy: We have a great blog with Lois Paul & Partners. We have a blog
process. So we have our blog buddies. Any content that they
write, they submit it to blogreview@jda.com and our team takes a
look at it. The blog buddy would communicate out, read their
blog post, and say, “It doesn’t make sense. You should link to
this. You should look at this article. You should include this
author.” So they really provide that guidance. But I think in
terms of making sure they’re educated on what they come back
with, we just work closely with them to make sure they’re really
linking to events and relevant news or relevant influence or…

Jay: So they can pretty much write what they want, and you just make sure
that goes through our quality control process…

Cindy: Yes. Exactly.

Jay: …to make sure that it’s good enough.

Cindy: Exactly.

Eric: And these bloggers are employees from different departments
throughout the organization?

Cindy: They’re subject matter experts as well as folks who engage
directly with the customer. We wanted to make sure that we had
equal representation across JDA Software, so that’s what we did.
We made sure that we just didn’t approach just experts. We
wanted to make sure that we get war stories from the field. We
wanted to make sure we got the right mix of content. So I think
our bloggers are just really representative of that.

Jay: Then you were using your social channels at some level to support the
blog. Obviously, you’re talking about other things in social as
well, but what you say in social, in some cases is, “Hey, we’ve
got this interesting content.” So you’re using social to promote
content, not just social to promote the company, which I think
is an important distinction. It goes back to what we’ve talked
about a lot of times, Eric, that content is the fire and social
is the gasoline, right? It’s not the other way around.
Otherwise, what are you tweeting about? How awesome you are?
That’s going to run out of steam pretty quickly in a lot of
circumstances.

Anything on the visual side? Are you guys thinking about doing… last episode, we talked to Jon Wichmann from Maersk Line,
and they have an amazing Instagram program with a giant global
shipping container company, which is not immediately what you
think of when you think of Instagram successes, and it’s an
amazing story and they’re doing a lot of photo stuff in social
media. Have you guys thought about kind of breaking out of the
text mold and going photos, videos, skywriting, magic tricks,
whatever?

Cindy: I think that’s where we’re headed. We would love to have more
infographics, and we’d love to have more ideas on how to get our
people more engaged with a conversation that’s happening. I
think that’s where we’re headed, but right now, we’re really
just trying to really ensure that we can be successful in the
things that we do and that we are putting out the right
conversation starters.

Jay: Is the audience for the blog intended to be potential customers or
current customers?

Cindy: Both.

Jay: Both, OK.

Cindy: And I think the content really shows that we can go both ways.
But they’re all educational. They’re non-JDA promotional. And
really, the purpose of educating these bloggers was to say that,
“You don’t want to put out content that’s going to promote JDA.
It’s really about informing the market on what’s coming up or
really stating the expectations of how to use best practices to
move the business forward.”

Jay: So the helping, not selling thing that we talked about before.

Cindy: That’s exactly, Jay.

Eric: Talking about what your customers care about.

Cindy: Yes. And that’s at the heart of what you’re trying to do with
content, right? So that’s exactly where we want to be.

Jay: Awesome. Well, we’ll make sure that we link up the JDA blog and other
social channels in the podcast transcript.

Work It Out

We have a Work It Out segment on the podcast today, and today’s
Work It Out is from Julie, a Social Pros listener, and Julie
says that she’s got a company with 15 or so salespeople, and
those salespeople are clamoring to do more in social media, do
more Twitter. Give me more of that Twitter! And LinkedIn and
Google+ and whatever or whatever. She is a little concerned
that, if she gives the salesforce the opportunity to kind of go
batshit crazy in social media, that there could be problems.
Sometimes salespeople have been known to lay it on a little
thick.

Eric: Salespeople are salespeople.

Jay: Right. Yes.

Eric: And I say that as a salesperson.

Jay: Yes. There you go. So, Cindy, Eric, what advice would you give to
Julie, the listener, about how to make sure her sales team does
this the right way? You just talked about it a second ago with
the blog, about being educational and not necessarily overtly
promotional.

Cindy: Yeah, and I agree. And I think of that, what we do is we send
out daily e-newsletters on the content that you can share via
Twitter, Facebook, Google+

Jay: To employees?

Cindy: To employees, and that includes sales as well. So they take a
lot of guidance in terms of re-posting the content that we share
with them. But I think education is key. Work with the sales
guys to really go through an education Webinar in terms of do’s
and don’ts. We also recommend top LinkedIn groups that they
should look at by vertical so that they can engage in
discussions and follow some of the influencers on LinkedIn
versus just posting nonsense stuff. These guys are desperate to
get leads. That’s all they want to do is look at the new shiny
object, use it to get leads or conversation starters.

Jay: The thing about us as marketers is we’re not on to you yet. So people
will say, “Oh, sales guys.” But you know what? We get paid
regardless. They get paid on commission, at least partially.
It’s a different dynamic.

Eric: So we have a pretty big sales group at Argyle, actually 13
salespeople, and our…

Jay: Are you Julie? Did you call in?

Eric: I’m not Julie, but I’ve…

Jay: You’ve walked a mile in Julie’s stilettos.

Eric: I wouldn’t say we’ve wrestled with this issue at Argyle, but we see
it and we have just made it very clear that, if it is a
conversation related to @argylesocial, that is marketing’s turf,
and we did not want salespeople invading marketing’s turf.
Salespeople, tweet with your prospects, by all means. If you
already have a relationship with someone, you should be tweeting
with them…

Jay: But that’s almost a replacement for email or a replacement for
voicemail more so than a replacement for direct mail, right?

Eric: Right. So you’re talking about Twitter in terms of a lead gen or
prospecting. That sits very clearly under marketing at Argyle,
and we’ve maybe had to slap some wrists to get people to back
off a little bit. It’s good to see hungry salespeople, but you
have to find that balance…

Jay: Well, when everything you tweet is public, right, and customer
service and sales, frankly, is a spectator sport now, you have
to realize that, if you lay it on a little thick, that can have
ripple in the pond ramifications for the brand, not necessarily
for that individual salesperson. That stands to reason. But for
everybody else on the team too. I guess the way to say it is
you’re only as cheesy as your weakest link. That’s
really what it comes down to.

Eric: This is a question I’ve heard many times, we hear from our customers.
You make a list of 10 social media questions and it starts with,
“When is the best time to tweet?” Somewhere in that list of 10
question is, “Should my sales guys be tweeting?” There are a
number of ways to answer that question, but no question, a hot
topic.

Cindy: I think that it’s also letting the sales guys know what are the
best channels to engage, because I’ve seen examples where the
sales guys have seen customers come back and ask questions via
LinkedIn, and I think the key thing to note is they need to know
who to go to, to really get that final guidance and approval
before they post anything. And that’s been great with some of
the folks at JDA where they go, “Oh my god! This customer is
talking about something. What do I do?” And then you say, “Look.
We’ve got an expert who is going to go on there to respond and
just monitor that group.” So I think that’s important as well,
understanding where you should engage versus being everywhere at
anytime, being everyone, being just present for everything. Just
investing their time wisely.

Jay: I’m a big fan of SocialToaster. Do you know those guys? SocialToaster
company, actually?

Eric: I’ve heard of them.

Jay: SocialToaster.com and it’s really interesting software. It doesn’t
get a lot of run, but you can have employees, or it’s actually
built for fan advocacy, but you have employees do it too. And
Cindy, you were talking about the message of the day email that
gets sent out. Same premise, but the way it works is that it’s
software driven, so when you get the email, you go off your
account, so as part of it, your Twitter, your Facebook,
whatever. So, if you’re with the sales team, yeah, I do want to
force amplify this message from the company. You just click a
link in the email and it automatically re-broadcasts on your
account, your Twitter, your Facebook, your LinkedIn. So it is
sort of a geometric multiplication opportunity. It’s a neat
concept.

Eric: Yeah.

Jay: You guys should buy them.

Eric: I don’t know how much cash you think we have in the bank account.

Jay: I thought you guys were going to go public or do something amazing.
I’m not just doing this podcast just because I like you. I
thought that someday there was going to be a velvet smoking robe
for me.

Eric: Jay, the friends and family equity grant will be coming.

Jay: Excellent. Thank you. Thank you. Excellent. Next time I’m in North
Carolina, the drinks are on Eric. All right. That will do it for
Episode 7 of Social Pros Podcast from here in soggy South by
Southwest Land, Austin, Texas. Thanks very much to Cindy Kim,
who joined us in person. Of course to Eric Boggs. Our sponsors
Argyle Social, Eric’s company, who we use for all of our social
media stuff at Convince & Convert, and InfusionSoft, who we use
for all of our email, and our good friend and fill-in host Jim
Kukral from DigitalBookLaunch.com. We’ll see you next week with
Ian Greenleigh from BazaarVoice.

Eric: Which is based in Austin, Texas.

Jay: Also based in… I saw Ian yesterday in the line for the nametags.
So we’ll jump on his case next week at Social Pros. Thanks for
listening.

If You’re B2B, What Day You Tweet Doesn’t Matter

Posted on 23. Oct, 2011 by Jay Baer in B2B, B2B Social Media, Blog, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media research, Twitter, webinar

(at least on weekdays)

On Thursday October 27, join me and my friends at Argyle Social for a valuable (yet free) Webinar that puts some of the big questions about social media timing under the experimental microscope.

Register here

We’ll cover a lot of ground about when’s the best time for Twitter and Facebook communication in different scenarios. We’ll dispel some myths, and probably create a few new ones.

One of my favorite findings from the research (which analyzed more than 250,000 social media messages sent via the Argyle Social platform in 2011), is that despite what you may have heard, for B2B companies it really doesn’t matter what day you send your tweets.

Our analysis finds no statistical basis for tweeting more on any particular weekday, with only very slight increases in engagement on Monday and Tuesday (and those increases are correlated with increases in volume of tweets sent on those days).

The Right Answer is No Answer

Sometimes, like in this case, despite how hard we look for it the answer we seek just isn’t there.

I find this piece of B2B “non-advice” interesting, because dating back to the early days of email marketing, we’ve always wanted to believe that message recipients’ behavior differs enough through the week that we should stage our communication accordingly. We used to send emails on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday because more people are on vacation Monday and Friday. Then, everyone starting sending their emails mid-week, and we flooded inboxes so much, engagement rate plummeted.

This particular dataset (B2B, Twitter, Weekday) found no discernible pattern that you can act upon, but that’s not at all true for our entire study. We’ve got some very interesting findings about B2C, Facebook, Weekends and more, that will get you rethinking how and when you communicate in social media.

For those, you’ll need to tune in on Thursday. We’ll also teach you how to run legitimate testing experiments on your own data, in your own company. I hope to see you logged in at 1pm eastern.

(note: Arygle Social is a Convince & Convert sponsor, and I use their tool for my own tweeting, etc.)

4 B2B Social Media & SEO Blunders to Avoid

Posted on 18. Oct, 2011 by AshleyZ in B2B, B2B Social Media, Blog, business-to-business, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, Social Media, social media marketing, Web Analytics

There are some things that you can’t take back: including what you release on the Internet.  With over 93% of B2B marketers using social media, online sales has very much become a social business. As marketers we need to do our best to present as well online as we do in person (if not better).  Creating an effective online marketing plan amongst all the changes on the social web isn’t easy, but here are a few things you may want to avoid.

#1: Flying By the Seat of Your Pants

A “lets throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks” approach will only take you so far in social media.  Consider your internet marketing plan to be just as essential as your traditional sales and marketing plans.  Below are some questions you may want to ask yourself when creating your social content marketing strategy:

• What is the goal of the campaign?
• Who am I writing this content for?
• What are they interested in?
• How do I plan on reaching my goals?
• What results am I anticipating?
• What actions need to be taken in order to create the most favorable results?

#2: Whoops! We Forgot to Optimize Our Social Media Profiles

Consider your social media campaigns your offsite SEO.  What does this mean?  Create content for your social campaigns the same way you would for your website.  This means determining which keywords your audience is searching for, create relevant content utilizing those keywords, and be sure to adapt these as needed.  Some things you may want to keep in mind.

• Is your company profile optimized with proper keywords?
• Are all of your social media profiles leading back to the same URL?
• Is your contact information clearly highlighted & easily accessible?

#3: Avoiding Reacting to Negative Feedback

It is unrealistic to assume that there will never be negative feedback about your company.  The internet is a sounding board for users to share their opinions, experience with companies or feedback on products. Pretty much any thing you can think of people have something to say about it.   While you can’t control every detail of a users experience (or who they share it with) you can control how your business responds to their feedback.

• Utilize social media tracking tools so you can deal with issues as quickly as possible.
• Respond to the commenters directly and work to mend the relationship if possible.
• If necessary, invite the dissenter to discuss the issue offline.
• Share and reward positive comments to build even better relationships with satisfied clients/customers.

#4: Failing to Measure the Success of Your Campaign

You’ve dedicated time, money, and resources to creating an online presence but what do you have to show for it?  Effective measurement is key in running a successful social media marketing program.  There are many free and paid tools on the market that will assist you in properly measuring your success from Google Analytics to Trackur.  What are some of the metrics you should always make sure you’re watching?

• The number of conversions your company has generated from a social marketing strategy.
• Which social sites resonate best with your prospects and clients.
• The topics that seem to generate the most interest.
• The level of engagement and interest your prospects and clients show in your company.
• Sign-ups, inquiries, leads and sales.
• Length of sales cycle.
• Revenue per order or deal.

Social Media is becoming more and more essential for B2B companies of any size. When you look at the trends and data, it’s easy to think of social as the new normal.   Are you confident in your corporate social media strategy?  An important step in the right direction is to determine your corporate social media readiness. Is your B2B business ready to be a social business?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. |
4 B2B Social Media & SEO Blunders to Avoid | http://www.toprankblog.com

B2B & Social Media, Not As Different As You Think: Autodesk, Caterpillar at #DF11

Posted on 01. Sep, 2011 by Lee Odden in B2B, b2b marketing, B2B Social Media, Blog, Marketing PR Conferences, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, Social Media

One of the big questions in the social media marketing space is whether social media is the place for B2B marketing. As companies begin to understand for every B2B company, there’s also a “C” aka people behind the business (@garyvee).

Once B2B companies realize that buyers discover, consume and share information on social channels just like any other “human” they seek to understand how social participation and marketing fits.

The session, “B2B Social Media: Not As Different As You Think” at Dreamforce in San Francisco aimed to help answer that question with presentations from three B2B Social Media Marketing practitioners. The speakers included: Gordon Evans from salesforce.com, Brian Stokoe from Caterpillar, and Maura Ginty from Autodesk.

Godon did introductions and opened things up with an audience poll, asking how many people were on Twitter, blog and have a social strategy.

First up is Maura Ginty from Autodesk, Senior Manager of Strategy and Innovation. Autodesk provides 3D software for architecture, engineering, manufacturing and entertainment industries. Maura has initiated search and social media programs at Autodesk. If you’ve sat in a building, used a product or watched a movie, you’ve probably been touched by Autodesk software.

How did Audodesk start with social media? Starting with individual tactics, they wanted to look at social a bit differently. They use a multiple hub and spoke model. Social Media Vision in the long term is to foster social media innovations.  This isn’t just in marketing, but across the organization.

The focus is social from product to marketing to sales and went experimental with 20 people to over 100 and a more formal social strategy in 2 years.  They added social features into a consumer product, they monitor Twitter for customer service opportunities and engage with a community on Facebook with over 500,000 fans.

Social isn’t about shouting, it’s about “answering the phone” from your customers

Next up is Brian Stokoe from Caterpillar who is responsible for all public facing social media there. Caterpillar has over 100,000 employees and revenues of over $40 billion. They have 24 brands and over 20 customer industry segments, so there is a diversity of considerations for how they participate on the social web.

Caterpillar started by creating a social presence on sites like Facebook and Twitter, which worked well because people familiar with the brand expected them there. But they had to take a step back and start to consider the variety of needs for their different customer segments. Previously, they would promote a message to Facebook, but that wasn’t necessarily relevant to all customer groups.

They look at each customer segment and decide what mix of social presence is appropriate: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Forums, etc. vs. publishing one destination for the whole company. By creating unique social destinations for each segment, Caterpillar better serves it’s customers with relevant information and experience.

Q and A on B2B Social Media:

Neither Brian or Maura are part of PR and Communications departments, which is in contrast with how social media is governed in most organizations. Maura mentioned that Autodesk social media efforts worked with PR from the start.

Brian mentioned one of the customer segments his social media efforts addresses are the the audience for PR and that Caterpillar has embraced PR use of social monitoring and engagement.

Gordon: Are your goals at your company to empower all employees to be ambassadors for your company?

Maura: We want to tap into that enthusiasm. We have guidelines for participation. It helps you

Brian: It goes back to the policy we have for employees regarding social media. We want employees to show their expertise, be smart about disclosure and proprietary information. On centralized sites like Facebook or Twitter, the expectation is that the message of Caterpillar be managed through a company spokesperson. But when it comes to forums, employees can jump in as appropriate.

Gordon: What’s a good listening strategy for B2B?

Maura: The first thing you can list for are brand keywords. What’s happening with the brands and other identifiers like the tasks prospects want to complete. There’s some back and forth between what words customer are using and how you want to be known for. Understanding the how customers see things is important.

Brian: With Caterpillar, there were challenges because of “cat” and “Caterpillar” meaning different things.  As for listening, attention is paid to the differences in customer segments.

Gordon: Do you monitor your competitors?

Brian: Yes

Maura: If you’re going to listen, why not listen to the industry?

Gordon: What are you measuring?

Brian: We have an extensive metrics program. We look at it as a value funnel. We gather info for awareness and put some context to it to identify value. As the interactions get further down the buying funnel, that’s where the rubber hits the road. It’s important to tie social media metrics to business objectives, not just reputation.

Maura: Our social media center of excellence collaborates to determine what we should measure.

Gordon: How important is your video strategy as a B2B company?

Brian: For us yes, much of what we do is very visual. One thing we’ve identified is that there’s no reason to re-create the wheel with video hosting – people watch videos on YouTube, so that’s what we use.

Maura: We determined that YouTube was a great place for use to participate through Net Promoter score. We have almost 14 million views on YouTube so far.

Brian: A lot of organizations come from a world of high video production and we’ve found authenticity is more important. Actual experiences and the rugged reality of using our product better connects with the audience.

Gordon: Can you give advice on how to evolve your channel or dealers through social media propgrams?

Maura: We include them in social media training. There’s more work to do there

Brian: Dealers are a critical part of Caterpillar. They carry their own brand in dealing with customers. It’s important to us that dealers have training and guidelines so customers have a congruent experience.

Audience Q: Do you actively pursue and engage key influencers?

Brian: Yes, especially in forums who help out. Whether it’s tossing them a CAT hat or publicly recognizing them, we strive to keep them involved.

Audience Q: How did you segment social media efforts by customer segment?

Brian: I borrowed somewhat from an Enterprise strategy that had similar considerations for the differences in customer groups.

There was more Q & A but I needed the time to wrap up this post so I’d have time to work on the morning keynote post.  A great session overall and good insights into how B2B companies have actually implemented social strategies in their companies. Along the lines of this topic, here are a few good posts that share specific resources for B2B social media: infographics, reports.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. |
B2B & Social Media, Not As Different As You Think: Autodesk, Caterpillar at #DF11 | http://www.toprankblog.com

5 Ways to Deliver B2B Marketing Content that Sells (Without Sabotaging Sales)

Posted on 15. Jun, 2011 by Carmen Hill in B2B content marketing, b2b marketing, B2B Social Media, babcock and jenkins, Blog, carmen hill, content marketing, content strategy, Guest Posts, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing

Guest post by Carmen Hill, Social Media and Content Strategiest for Babcock & Jenkins, an integrated B2B marketing agency in Portland.

Could giving away too much great content actually sabotage sales? As unlikely as it sounds, this is exactly the concern that recently came up in a discussion about B2B content marketing.

There’s always a risk that prospective customers will take the information you give them and then use it to buy from your competitor instead. But the bigger risk is that they never find you or consider you in the first place, especially when 70% of the buyer’s journey is complete before they ever contact sales (SiriusDecisions).

Here’s one more thing to consider: 95% to 99% of people will bail rather than fill out your registration form. And of those who do register, the majority will not provide a correct phone number.

“Sales cannot step in and educate your audience until the audience is willing to hear from sales,” says my colleague Eric Wittlake, senior media director at Babcock & Jenkins. “Based on these figures, somewhere between 98% and 99.8% don’t want to hear from sales even though they’re interested in your information. You need to let the content do the selling.”

Here are 5 ways to do just that while ensuring a smooth handoff to sales when buyers are truly ready to talk to them.

1. Talk to sales early and often

This not only assuages any concern that you’re stealing their thunder, but also gives you the inside skinny on what buyers need to know before buying your products. What questions do they ask? What objections do they raise? What content might get you in the door ahead of your competitors?

2. Get your stories straight

Marketing and sales may not be telling the same chapters of a story, but you are reading from the same book. Be sure to follow a consistent narrative that deepens over time and leads to a happy ending.

3. Identify the “pivot point” when sales needs to step in

At a certain point in a complex B2B purchase, you absolutely need a sales rep or sales engineer to meet with the buyer and scope out the right solution for their specific needs. Tag content that might indicate strong interest or intent to purchase and include a compelling reason for prospects to share their (real) contact information and/or agree to a meeting. For example, the next step for someone who uses your online product selector might be to talk to a sales engineer for a customized configuration or ROI report.

4. Make it easy to take the next step

Don’t ruin a good story with a lame finish. Provide a simple stepping-stone to the next stage of the buyer’s journey—and remove the friction. No one wants to fill out a long registration form with a bunch of questions a telemarketer or sales rep will ask again anyway. As Ardath Albee notes in a recent post, “The way in which online dialogues are transitioned into 1-to-1 sales conversations can either keep your prospects’ buying momentum moving along or stop it cold.”

5. Measure and share success

Once you’ve mapped content to each stage of the buyer’s journey, use a Web analytics tool such as Omniture to track how well it performs:

• Is your audience responding?
• How much time do they spend watching or reading your content?
• Do they click through to the next level of information?
• Does a prospect that engages with a particular asset eventually buy something?

Ultimately, the best way to answer the question of whether or not your content is giving away too much (or not) is to directly map that content to pipeline revenue or closed sales.

How much information do you think a buyer should get to see without talking to sales? How do you or your clients strike the right balance? I’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions.

(Babcock & Jenkins is a Convince & Convert client)