Category Archives: B2B

Help Wanted: Insight for BtoB Mag Articles

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I’m writing the social media section of BtoB magazine’s annual Interactive Marketing Guide. I’m looking for business-to-business marketers who can talk about the successes they’ve had in the past year and the challenges that they face going forward. I’m particularly interested in how marketers are wrestling with the issues of coordinating multiple platforms and setting policies that cover all the employees who may be using these platforms, whether on the company’s behalf or their own.

I’m also looking for questions you would like to ask an expert in the area of b-to-b social marketing. What problems are you trying to solve? Where do you most need guidance? I’m even taking applications to be the expert!

The copy deadline is very tight: March 19. Please contact me ASAP if you can contribute in exchange for exposure in the leading b-to-b marketing publication! Tweets also welcome.

What Makes B-to-B Communities Unique

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Eric Schwartzman and I are deep into the research for our forthcoming book on business-to-business social media and lately we’ve been learning what makes communities tick. Online gathering places for business professionals actually predate the commercial Internet by more than a decade, having established themselves as an effective form of peer support back in the days of Compuserve and Usenet. With the addition of profiling, friending and other features of modern social networks, there are more opportunities than ever to use communities to bind customers closer to your company.

Communities have a lot of value outside of support. They can be used to test new product ideas, generate feedback, spread a message and enlist new customers. I’ve recently spoken to people who administer such successful b-to-b social networks as Spiceworks, element 14, AuntMinnie, the SAP Developer Network and others to learn what works with business professionals. In the process, I’ve learned to understand the difference between consumer and business communities. Here are some highlights.

B-to-b customers are motivated by professional, rather than personal interests. This may seem obvious, but when you think about it, there are big implications for the way you approach a community. The essence of many consumer social networks is playfulness, chitchat and commentary on popular topics in the news. Much of this content doesn’t play well in a b-to-b environment. While some community administrators report that political and even sports topics spur conversation, by and large the membership has problems to solve and little time to waste. Keep the navigation simple and the gimmickry to a minimum. I’ve always liked LinkedIn’s look and feel because it reflects its utility so well. LinkedIn’s look is almost aggressively boring, but the message is that it’s a place to get work done, not to mess around.

Engagement is difficult. The term “engagement” has become almost cliché in its role as the Holy Grail of social media marketing. Facebook is an engagement machine. The company claims the average user spends more than 55 minutes per day on the site. That’s great for Facebook, but most businesses would fire an employee who did that.

Business professionals are focused on solving problems, and that makes their social network behavior quite different from consumers’. In its “Social Technographics of Business Buyers” study published about a year ago, Forrester Research observed that “buyers will participate socially when they need to solve problems or evaluate progress; otherwise they are off running their companies.” In other words, a network that has a high “time spent on site” number may be attracting the wrong people (or may just be difficult to navigate). When building a b-to-b community, accept the fact that a lot of people may register once and never come back. Factors such as search engine performance and unique visitor growth may be more important than time spent reading because they indicate that your community is providing content that other people are discovering and finding valuable.

It’s all about the job. Back in my tech publishing days, I used to joke that when a CIO approached us offering to author an article, it almost invariably meant he was looking for a job. That observation was later validated by prominent business magazine (I think it was Fortune) that suggested that the acronym CIO actually stood for “Career Is Over.” I would later learn that CIOs were in almost constant job search mode. They were in visible and pressurized situations and frequently took the fall when things went wrong.

Today, a lot more people are in that boat. Layoffs are everyday occurrences and unforgiving markets have made job security a joke. Forget allegiance to one’s employer. Business professionals today are constantly on the lookout for opportunities to network, showcase their stuff and be ready when the ax falls. Keep this in mind and give people ample opportunity to connect with each other. Which is one of the reasons you should…

Enable people to build personal brands. Nearly every successful professional social network I’ve encountered has some kind of a points system or other tool for elevating the status of individual members. In extreme cases, such as that of TopCoder, the most innovative and productive members of the community can win cash prizes. However, it’s remarkable how much people will contribute to the collective simply for the visibility. As Tabrez Syed, director of products at the 800,000-member Spiceworks community said, “It’s amazing how much people are willing to give back.”

Part of this is human nature, I suppose, but there’s a practical element as well. Visible contributors gain status that leads to jobs and consulting assignments. A few years ago, it was almost impossible to build one’s reputation this way, but social networks have created a way to build status based solely on a person’s contributions. SAP, which has one of the most impressive communities programs I’ve seen, recognizes its most valuable members at annual conferences. These people are rock stars, which has all kinds of benefits to them.

In the coming weeks, I’ll be talking to owners of successful communities aimed at doctors, human resources professionals and food service managers. I’m sure there’ll be more to report.

UPDATED: Draft Outline B2B Social Marketing Book

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Here s a first-pass topical outline for the book Social Marketing to the Business Customer, by Paul Gillin and Eric Schwartzman (John Wiley & Sons, late 2010). This outline attempts to define all the major issues to be addressed in a book targeted at business-to-business marketers. Your thoughts are welcome. Use the comments area to tell us what we’ve missed and where we should devote the most attention. And if there’s anything that shouldn’t be here, let us know that as well

Note: Practical advice will be interleaved with case studies, vignettes and quotes from practitioners. We are very interested in identifying candidates for case studies. If you have a good story to tell or tips to share, contact Paul or Eric at paul{at}gillin{dot}com or eric{at}ericschwartzman[dot]c0m.

Update: This outline was revised and reposted on March 3, 2010. The most recent revision appears below. Earlier revisions have been deleted. Many of the comments refer to items that appeared in earlier versions.

Update: This outline was revised and reposted on Jan. 5, 2010 based on earlier feedback

1. The Changing Rules of B-to-B Marketing

  1. Traditional media in decline
  2. Rise of the unofficial spokesperson
  3. Proliferating channels to customer or, from a marketers point of view, audience fragmentation.
  4. The importance of peer-to-peer communications: the impact of markets as conversations.
  5. Assessing most effective platforms for B2B social media marketing
  6. Contrasting b-to-c and b-to-b audiences
  7. Creating a strategic framework for platform assessment.
  8. Promoting responsible edge work through corporate social media policies. If there’s no formal policy in place empowering employees to do the edge work, why would they risk their jobs to engage?

    1. Assessing value of end-customer pull vs. business partner push
  9. Estimating staffing requirements

2. 10 Ways You Can Use Social Media for B-to-B Marketing

  1. When social media is and isn’t appropriate
  2. Risk/reward matrix
  3. Applying social media to the traditional sales cycle
  4. Researching audience needs

    1. Listening and engaging
    2. Inviting feedback
    3. Market research
  5. Shift from demographic to psychographic profiling
  6. Product development
  7. Customer/channel relations
  8. Peer-to-peer marketing
  9. Cost-saving opportunities
  10. Applications of crowdsourcing

3. Getting Buy-In and Resources –

  1. Explaining value to stakeholders
  2. Adopting the mindset
  3. Test and revise
  4. Overcoming popular objections

    1. Top 10 arguments to make with legal and HR
    2. Convincing the CIO

4. Organizing for Social B-to-B

  1. Empowering employees to speak
  2. Integrating social media with conventional marketing
  3. Re-skilling the organization
  4. Marketing department organization
  5. Building bridges to other departments

5. Protect Yourself: Creating & Enforcing Social Media Policies

  1. Defining “transparency”
  2. Coordinating with existing corporate policies

    1. HR code of conduct
    2. IT policies
  3. Social media Policies vs. Guidelines

    1. Legal issues to consider
    2. Do you need a policy?
    3. Start fresh or build on existing policies?
    4. Issues to address

      1. Disclosure
      2. Private vs. Business Personae
      3. Privacy and confidentiality
      4. Respectfulness, diplomacy and conflict resolution
      5. Crisis considerations
  4. Enforcement and penalties
  5. Regulatory considerations

    1. Tweeting through an IPO

6. Lead Generation

  1. Building social media into the selling cycle
  2. Stages of the funnel
  3. Quality vs. quantity leads

7. Getting Starting: Easy Low-Risk Opportunities

  1. Identifying high impact applications for quick results
  2. Demand pull vs. supply push
  3. Choosing tools
  4. Analytics and metrics
  5. Worksheets
  6. Selecting participants
  7. Campaign lifecycles
  8. Budgeting
  9. Allocating resources
  10. Beyond the first campaign – next steps

8. Listening to Customers

  1. Listening through filters
  2. Embracing popular language
  3. Dealing with negativity without losing your cool
  4. Going “off message” in search of relevant conversations
  5. Keyword research primer (contributed by Lee Odden)
  6. Keyword validation
  7. Quality vs. Quantity tradeoffs
  8. Conversions
  9. Advanced search
  10. Competitive analysis
  11. Research alternatives
  12. Ratings systems
  13. Assembling a rapid response team
  14. Policies and procedures
  15. Building internal feedback loops

9. A Customer Is Not a Transaction: Deepening Relationships

  1. Incorporating social media into customer care and support (Social CRM)
  2. 360° listening scenarios
  3. Building a listening dashboard
  4. Creating customer testimonials and endorsements
  5. Integrating social media and customer events
  6. Brand ambassador programs

10. Profiting From Customer Communities & Social Networks

  1. Value of communities
  2. Branded vs. public communities
  3. Public vs. private
  4. Where do branded communities make sense?
  5. Best practices for encouraging activity
  6. Do you need a dedicated community manager?
  7. Skills requirements
  8. Employee involvement in customer communities
  9. Platform selection

11. B-to-b Uses for Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter

  1. Features and audiences
  2. Organizational versus individual value
  3. Using the platforms in combination with each other
  4. Behavioral standards and community values

12. A Non-Techie’s Guide to Choosing Platforms: Beginning, Intermediate & Advanced

  1. Securing the right infrastructure: Web 2.0, Licensed Software, Open Source and SaaS
  2. Matching platform to objective
  3. Overview of major platforms
  4. Public versus private platforms
  5. Selection grid and decision tree
  6. Examples of best practices
  7. Staff assignments and responsibilities
  8. Integrated campaigns
  9. Mobility (contributed by Christina Kerley)
  10. Risks: Data Portability, Back-up, Support, Service Level Agreements and Attention Siphons

13. Metrics and ROI

  1. How practitioners are approaching ROI
  2. Strength/weakness analysis of major metrics
  3. Working backwards from the goal
  4. Revision cycles
  5. Suggested ROI methodologies
  6. Multiplatform multiplier effect

14. What’s Next for B-to-B Social Media

  1. Expanding internal stakeholder involvement
  2. 2. Creating branded customer communities
  3. 3. Multichannel campaigns
  4. 4. Internal/external program integration
  5. 5. Creating a social media-aware workforce