The Appeal of B2B Social Networks

Eric Schwartzman and I are wrapping up the manuscript for Social Marketing to the Business Customer, which will be published by John Wiley & Sons in January. This following excerpt is from the chapter on B2B communities. I welcome your feedback by e-mail or by commenting on the blog entry.

Online communities are a bit of a paradox. They are both the oldest form of social media and also the newest. Forums and discussion groups date back to the late 1960s and have been a staple of customer support operations at technology companies for 30 years. Internet newsgroups, CompuServe, The Well and other early communities had membership in the hundreds of thousands a decade before anyone had heard of a Web browser.

Those early online outposts looked little like the Facebooks and LinkedIns of today, though. The modern features that have made social networks the fastest-growing consumer phenomenon in history have created all kinds of new use scenarios, including some compelling B2B examples. Communities are the convention centers of social media. They are flexible gathering halls that can fill a wide variety of purposes ranging from product development to lead generation. The key is to get members to want to participate.

Friends and Fame

The great innovation in online communities came in 1998, when Classmates.com introduced the concept of personal profiles and friends. Those metaphors are now a staple of every social network and provide a powerful incentive for participation. Profiles are a member’s personal homepage. Everything the member contributes, from establishing contacts with others to joining groups to posting status updates, is captured in the profile. The more active the member is, the higher his visibility and the greater the value of the network to his personal success.

Friends are a virtual version of their real-world equivalent. When people create friend relationships, they exchange information that is not visible to others and they form persistent connections based upon trust. That’s actually how it works in real life, too. At their simplest level, friends connections are an efficient way to stay in touch. Members can always learn each other’s current address or job situation by searching within the network.

In B2B communities, personal profiles are a way to register areas of expertise that others may find useful. Activity is also a validation point. It’s one thing for someone to say he is an expert in direct marketing, but it’s more powerful when he can prove it by solving the problems of other direct marketers.

That proof is stored in the person’s profile. Online friendships also translate fluidly into real-world connections. “Community isn’t just about discussing products but about getting to know each other and making friendships,” says Nicholas Tolstoshev, a Spiceworks community manager.

Online friends in B2B communities frequently arrange meet-ups at trade shows and events. Successful community managers we spoke to invariably augmented their online worlds with physical events to meet and thank their most active members.

Prior to the introduction of personal profiles, it was difficult for participants in online networks to build visibility.

Recent experience has shown that visibility is the single most powerful driver of participation. Many communities use a recognition system that ties a member’s status to contributions. A few, like SAP, celebrate their most active members at physical events.

Spiceworks awards points to members who post well-regarded answers to other members’ questions. Valued members of the community are invited to participate in conference calls with Spiceworks developers. Their contributions are rewarded with low-cost swag like T-shirts but more importantly with inside information. Community managers also publish occasional interviews with featured members, highlighting their contributions and career accomplishments. “Online status drives a huge amount of activity without our sending money out the door,” says Tolstoshev.

FohBoh.com, a social network for food service professionals, highlights new contributions by its members on its home page and invites others to congratulate them on their celebrity. TopCoder, a contract software developer that hosts programming competitions and licenses the best solutions to commercial customers, applies an elaborate algorithm to the code submitted by its members to compute the quality of their work. Leader boards are maintained for the major competitions and quality ratings are reflected back to individual profiles. Top coders win money and also visibility that leads to jobs and lucrative contracts.

The most prolific contributor to LinkedIn’s “Answers” forum is Dave Maskin, a New York-based event marketing specialist who has answered an incredible 25,000 questions. Maskin refers to himself as “Mr. Lead Generator,” indicating that the value he provides to the community is good for his business.

How to Integrate E-mail and Social Media Marketing

As hot a topic as social media has become, the fact is that most of us still live in our inboxes. The challenge for e-mail marketers is to incorporate new tools into their programs as a way to gain subscribers and deliver messages through additional channels. I just finished creating a brand-new presentation on this topic entitled “Social Marketing With Email.” Click her e to see it on SlideShare. I’d be pleased to present it to your e-mail marketers or local professional organization either on-site or remotely. Please contact me if you’re interested.

Meet Me In NYC

I’ll be in the Big Apple a lot in June and July. Here are some upcoming events where I’m on the program. Please come and say hi:

• The Future of Social Media Marketing: PR’s New Paradigm – Bulldog Reporter’s Media Relations Summit, June 28.
• Social Media for Social Good – 2010 National Conference on Volunteering and Service, June 29
• Word of Mouth Supergenius Conference, July 20 (use code Gill25 to save 25%)

Tip of the Week: Maximixing Follower Value

Most people send Twitter messages whenever the spirit moves them, but that may not always be the best time to get those coveted retweets. To maximize the impact of what you say on Twitter, schedule your tweets to coincide with the times when you have a lot of followers online.

Twitter Analyzer is a great tool for analyzing follower activity. It can show you the times of day when your follower count is highest. Then you can use a tool like HootSuite or the latest version of TweetDeck to schedule tweets for the times when your messages are most likely to be seen (and forwarded). If you have international followers, you may find that they cluster around different times of the day than your working hours, so scheduling tweets for the middle of the night Milwaukee time may be just the tick et to reach that cluster of fans in Norway. Start with Twitter Analyzer and see what times work best for you.

Just for Fun: Eight Years in 103 Seconds

When we see people regularly, we don’t notice how much they change. But they do change a lot in a short time. JK Keller proved it. He took a picture of his face every day for 8 years and lined them up one after another in this video montage. This 1:43 video might leave you feeling a little old. Take your mind off it by looking at Photos That Will Never Be in Your Wedding Album.

Facebook Grows Up

The race to socialize the Web got more intense this week with a major new announcement from Facebook that plays to its strengths at Google’s expense. This is shaping up to be an epic battle and the good news is that users stand to benefit regardless of who wins.

On the surface, Facebook’s move to make its famous “Like” button a fixture on many other websites seems unremarkable. But it’s really the tip of the iceberg for future services that Facebook calls “Open Graph” which will strengthen its position as the power broker of the social Web. Moreover, the way Facebook is approaching its strategy is a notable evolution from its past behavior. This company is growing up fast and Google had better be on its toes.

What does it mean to “socialize the Web?” As I’ve written in the past, the next great evolution of the Internet will be to move beyond static websites and toward services that travel with the user. The most important of these will be persistent connections to members of one’s social circle. Basically, the experiences and advice of the people we trust will become part of our information-gathering process, influencing and guiding us whenever we choose to consult them.

Facebook’s new features are an important first step. Visitors to a partner website will now be able to register their recommendations by pressing the famous thumbs-up button and having that endorsement added to their Facebook profile as well as to the destination website. Their friends will then be able to see that opinion when they visit the partner site or check the person’s profile or news feed on Facebook.

Services that choose to partner with Facebook will benefit from immediately adding content from Facebook’s 400 million-plus members with minimal effort. They’ll also enjoy easier cross-enrollment with the social network. Facebook, Google, Twitter and LinkedIn have all been nibbling around the integration issue with features like Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect, which enable people to log onto one social network using credentials from another. Now Facebook is making this cross-registration so easy that it says it will discontinue Facebook Connect entirely.

Services like the consumer review site Yelp, which is one of Facebook’s early partners, are positively bubbly about these new developments. Yelp believes that the addition of Facebook friend recommendations will deepen the quality of its reviews and juice its membership. Yelp members will benefit from having their friends’ advice appear next to that of the strangers who now contribute most of the site’s content. Another partner, CNN, stands to gain from having Facebook members recommend stories and drive traffic to its website without any additional promotion on CNN’s part. Meanwhile, Facebook made it clear in its announcement that the “Like” button is just the first of many possible extensions of its service to other partners.

Good Citizen

One aspect of this week’s announcement that particularly impressed me was Facebook’s decision to work with partners. CEO Mark Zuckerberg (left) declared that “In the first 24 hours alone we’re going to serve one billion ‘Like’ buttons on the Web,” meaning that Facebook has done its homework to enlist partners that will give its strategy instant legitimacy. This is an impressive evolution for a company that has a history of being arrogant and difficult to deal with. It also demonstrates that Facebook is aware of the need to add value to other services instead of trying to steamroll them.

Contrast that with Google, which has appeared positively inept in some of its recent Web socialization attempts. Google Buzz has none. Google Wave, which sounded good in theory, has been a flop in practice. I don’t know anyone who uses it. Knol, which was once seen as a competitor to Wikipedia, is all but invisible. Sidewiki attempts to integrate friends’ recommendations into the Web browsing experience, but implementation is awkward and website owners may see it as more of a threat than a benefit.

In short, Google’s reputation as a good partner seems to be giving way to the kind of go-it-alone approach that’s typical of market dominators. This is happening just as Facebook is learning the value of collaboration. All in all, this is not a good omen for Google. While a company with 70% of the search market is in no immediate trouble, history has shown that even dominant companies can fall fast when the rules change. Facebook is trying to change the rules.

Why is Facebook’s initiative good for Joe and Jane Web user? Because it continues to move the value equation toward quality content. The more that online success is tied to peer endorsements, the more incumbent it is upon content providers to deliver value that others can recommend. The influence of marketing dollars continues to ebb while the influence of good information grows. What could possibly be bad about that?

B-to-B Audio Wisdom

Eric Schwartzman and I are nearly halfway through the process of writing our forthcoming book, Social Marketing to the Business Customer (Wiley, Jan., 2011) and we’ve been recording many of our interviews for posting on Eric’s popular On the Record…Online podcast. Here are some of the recent insights we’ve gleaned from experts in all aspects of b-to-b marketing, ranging from search engine optimization to community management. There are more in the pipeline, so consider subscribing to OTRO’s RSS feed or just keep an eye on future issues of this newsletter.

• Community-Building Tips from HR.com founder Debbie McGrath;
• B2B SEO Strategy and Tactics with Search Guru Lee Odden;
• Corporate Social Media Policy Development with SocialMediaGovernance.com founder Chris Boudreaux;
• Trust and Loyalty through B2B Social Networks with Dell TechCenter’s Scott Hanson.

C’mon! Take the Survey!

I’ve STILL got a couple of new giveaway promotions to entice you to take my survey on multiplatform social media practices:

The first is collectible trading cards featuring prominent entrepreneurs. There are 33 business greats featured in the series and all the profits go to Kiva, an organization that loans small amounts of money to business owners in Third World countries.

Take the survey and get a limited edition Steve Jobs or Steve Wozniak card in a Lucite case. What have you got to lose? Ten minutes of your time for a card that your kids will look at and say, “Who?” Do you really want to deny them that?

Or you can get a free copy of How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. I need to read this book myself, since I’m still having trouble influencing people to take the survey.

The only requirement is that you must be a marketer or business owner and mustfill out the survey. Do you need the link again? Really. Think of the children.

Tip of the Week: Tools for Travelers

I’ve been on the road a lot lately, so these tips are inclined toward services that help the frequent traveler. Here are a few of the sites I use:

Tripit - Once you set up an account, you simply forward your airline, hotel and ground transportation arrangements to plans@tripit.com and the information magically appears in an itinerary organized by trip. Tripit has an uncanny ability to parse confirmation e-mails and figure out where, when and how you’re going. I keep all my travel arrangements there. There’s a social network underlying the service, but I don’t use that. It’s just great for collecting information you need.IPhone and Android apps make the details available on the road.

SideStep – This is the best of the reservation aggregators, in my view. Sidestep collects information from most major travel sites and permits you to search across them to find the best deals. It then sends you to the source site to complete the purchase. You can also set up monitors for things like falling airfares.

Priceline – This service has been around forever and it’s still the best for travel bargains, particularly hotel and car reservations. I was recently able to reserve a rental car for one third the cost of the best deal on any site. The key is to watch the prompts; Priceline will often tell you when your bid is too low so you can bring it up a couple of bucks.That’s important, because failed bidders may have to wait as long as 24 hours before they can try again.

SeatGuru – At 6’ 3”, I don’t fit well into airline seats. SeatGuru can be a useful source of advice on where to how to find seats that provide the most leg and elbow room. It has an exhaustive database of different aircraft and airline configurations.

Just for Fun: Advice for Evil Geniuses

Why does Goldfinger lower Bond slowly into the piranha tank instead of just dumping him in and getting it over with? Why does the evil scientist post a map of the control room in a convenient place where the hero can find it? And why does every villain seem compelled to share his plan for world domination with his victims when he’s about to kill them, anyway?

If questions like these have ever vexed you, you’ll appreciate “Things to Remember If I Ever Become an Evil Overlord,” a clever collection of absurd behaviors that always frustrate movie bad guys. There are 101 items on the list, and fans of everything from Star Wars to Harry Potter will find something to identify with.

The Web Goes Social

If you’ve signed up for more than a couple of social networks, you’ve undoubtedly experienced the syndrome of seeing your mailbox fill up each morning with notifications about messages, invitations or comments you’ve received from other members. This deluge can become so annoying that you may simply choose to relegate many of these notices to the black hole of your spam filter.

Welcome to the dirty world of the early social Web, a time of chaos and incompatibility that is stifling the real utility of these marvelous new networks.

If you’ve been around for a few years, you may remember a similar state of affairs from the pre-Web days. Back in the early days of electronic mail, users of CompuServe, America Online, Prodigy and other branded networks were unable to exchange e-mail with non-subscribers. Even after Internet e-mail had been broadly accepted, America Online clung to its members-only prohibition for some time in the foolhardy belief that it could force members to stay within the fold.

Today’s social networks suffer from some of the same limitations. Each has its own profiling system, internal messaging, collaboration features and applications. Some aggregators like FriendFeed gather up member activity from multiple sites, but such services are mainly limited to collecting RSS feeds. There is no such thing as an integrated online profile.

This profusion of information smokestacks won’t last. Two competing standards – one from Facebook and the other from Google – are duking it out to create a standard single identity that travels with Web users. If you’ve signed in to Google and looked up your own name recently, you’ve probably noticed that Google now prompts you to fill out a profile. This sketchy self-description is the beginnings of a broader reach by Google to make the entire Web into a social network.

In the socialized future, people’s identities will travel with them and details will be shared selectively with others within their social network. Profiles will develop incredible richness as details of each person’s preferences, connections, memberships and activities are centralized. It will probably be a year or two before this concept begins to take shape. Regardless of whether Facebook or Google wins the standards war, the social network metaphor will become ubiquitous.

Social Colonies

Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang has called this next stage of evolution the “era of social colonization.” Once every website takes on social network characteristics, the utility of the Web will change dramatically. We will increasingly rely upon the activities and recommendations of others to help us make decisions. Sites like Yelp, ThisNext and Kaboodle already provide a rudimentary form of this functionality, but they are limited by their closed nature.

One social bookmarking service I use – Diigo.com – provides a glimpse of what the social Web may look like. Diigo (and a similar service called WebNotes) enables members to highlight and comment upon Web pages or passages and share them with others in their network. Visitors can read and add to existing comments in the same way that editors annotate and build upon a draft document. Imagine if the capabilities were expanded to include star ratings, multimedia, discussions and other interactive features. That’s when the social Web really gets exciting.

The ripple effects of this shift should be dramatic. Imagine a future in which your company homepage becomes a giant group product review. Forrester’s Owyang sees marketing being remade around customer recommendations. There will be no choice. Companies may lose control of the messages on even their own websites as visitors share impressions with each other.

Owyang also believes companies will have to customize their Web experiences as visitors selectively share information about their interests and preferences. This information will become a kind of currency. We will grant brands and institutions selective access to information about ourselves in exchange for discounts and specialized services. The shift from mass to custom will take a giant step forward.

Today’s social networks are no more representative of the Internet of the future than Prodigy was of the Web we know today. These will be incredibly exciting developments to watch. We just have to get past the necessary evil of a standards war in order to appreciate them.

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Traditional Media Malaise Spreads

It’s generally acknowledged that the newspaper industry is dying, but now the troubles have spread into other segments of the mainstream, too. Of 118 US magazine titles tracked by Media Industry Newsletter (MIN) Online, only eight saw year-to-year growth from 2008 to 2009. The rest continued a pattern of decline that began in 2007, and the rate of drop-off is accelerating. Newsweek just halved its circulation in a last gasp effort at survival and Wired, which is the poster child of new media integration, showed the third worst performance among the titles tracked by MIN. Read more of the gory details.

Also, a new report forecasts that spending on direct mail will tumble 39% by 2013 as marketers move their dollars into e-mail campaigns. “Direct mail has begun spiraling into what we believe is a precipitous decline from which it will never fully recover,” says a new report by Borrell Associates that’s summarized on Marketing Charts. Local e-mail is expected to grow nicely at the expense of traditional printed mail.

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Recently Quoted

• I was pleased be quoted in The New York Times last week in a story about using Twitter to find a job.
• Sean Daily produces a very slick new podcast called AdChat Café about advertising trends. We recently spent nearly a half hour talking about trends in social media, and he asked some of the best questions I’ve heard from an interviewer in a long time.
• I also recently spoke at some length to Target Marketing magazine about how social media is impacting the direct-marketing business.
• Finally, I suggested in this month’s BtoB magazine column that Staples should get into the publishing business. Why? Because continuing declines in the fortunes of mainstream media have created a trust gap into which corporations can step with trustworthy Web publishing operations.

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Why Social Networks Work

Last fall, I shared a lunch table with a group of Twitter enthusiasts at a social media event. One of them said something that crystallized perfectly the reason that social networks have taken the world by storm.

My lunchtime companion was a career public relations professional who had grown up reading an assortment of daily newspapers. They were his principal news source. Since adopting Twitter, however, he had stopped reading newspapers almost entirely. The service they had historically provided — directing him to the most important stories of the day — had shifted to his network of online friends. He now relied upon his contacts on Twitter, Facebook and other social media sources to tell him what was interesting and what should matter.

Bolt From the Blue
This insight was a bolt from the blue for me because it summed up the reasons people are shifting so rapidly to friends networks and away from conventional media. Think of your own reading habits. Chances are you get several newsletters each day from various trusted sources. You also probably get the occasional e-mail from your friends pointing you to interesting stories on the Web. Which of these messages are you likely to open first? Which are you faster to click on? If you’re like most people, the message from the friend is always going to get your most immediate attention.

We trust our friends because we know them and they know us. Whether we’ve shared a workplace, a living space or some other experience with them, we have given them insight into our interests and motivations that no institution can match. Professional editors are very good at assessing relevance, determining importance and creating hierarchies of information, but they don’t know us as people. We’ll never let them in like we let in our friends.

Life Feeds
Facebook pioneered a concept called the News Feed that has been widely adopted by other networks. When you log on to Facebook, you’re treated to an immediate stream of information about other people in your network. You immediately know about changes in their lives, where they’ve gone on vacation and what project they’re working on. You also know what they’re reading, what conferences they’re attending and what they think you should be reading and attending. By virtue of their familiarity with you, they have a higher priority in your life. Other services like FriendFeed have expanded this idea to a broad range of online services. Twitter adds immediacy and certain intimacy that the other services don’t.

The “friending” feature of social networks is the single most important factor underlying their success. This is both a challenge and an opportunity for marketers. The challenge is to get behind the many walls that people have thrown up around themselves to screen out marketing messages. The opportunity is to find a way to connect with them at a level that grants us admission to their inner circle. As we know instinctively, that’s a very good place to be.

Five Fearless Predictions for 2008

It’s been a wild year on the Internet as social media has taken the Web by storm. Some people say this is a bubble waiting to burst, but I think we’re in for another year of innovation, turmoil and strategic posturing. Here are five fearless predictions for 2008:

The year of social search - Google’s great, but it isn’t perfect. Its inherent weaknesses (the inability to search by date, for example) and the explosion of new online content spark interest in a new class of search engines that incorporate user recommendations. Projects like Mahalo and WikiaSearch are early proofs of concept, and new players pile on as prototypes show promise.

A social network privacy backlash – A scandal erupts in 2008 as news headlines tell of people being harassed, stalked and fired because of information revealed in their Facebook accounts. The lurid details are shocking, and politicians quickly move to call for government limitations on social network disclosure policies. The furor prompts Facebook, which is preparing for an IPO, to scramble to revamp its service and tighten its policies. The incident becomes the first great crisis of the Web 2.0 era.

Facebook‘s IPO – Facebook weathers the privacy crisis and stages a successful public offering that values the company at $25 billion and positions it as the number one suitor to Google’s market crown. A power struggle ensues as Facebook immediately leverages its market capital to buy up rivals and solidify its position as the most comprehensive social network. Google continues its acquisition binge (see below).

Blogosphere bust – Technorati reports that worldwide blogging activity is declining for the first time. This sparks a predictable round of tongue-clucking by people who said the whole thing was a fad all along. In fact, the blogosphere is simply entering a normal cycle of maturation in which early tire-kickers fall away. Meanwhile, more corporations launch blogs in 2008 than in any previous year.

Google buys Skype and Second Life – eBay has had enough of Skype and it sells the Internet phone service to Google for a bargain basement price of $750 million. Google is more than happy to make the purchase. It has new technology that delivers ads based upon words spoken in phone conversations. Google also moves to snap up Second Life, which has struggled to find a mission and a business model. Google immediately announces its intention to open up the Second Life program interfaces to support third-party applications and to integrate virtual worlds with its Google Earth and Google Maps products.