Because profitability for any business comes from human beings making the decision to invest in you or your company, I believe that the old school is now officially backwards and can almost be hurtful to your cause. In the last year or so, the concept unearthed, thanks in large part by the social aspect of the web, is that companies need to spend more time using their market research and user group studies to construct a strategy around presenting their offering as an integral part of someone’s life, rather than as a “great product or service at a great price.”  The “Hey look at me! Look at me!” syndrome that so many companies and business people fall into when they don’t know what else to do with their time and budgets and feel like nothing else was working, is no bueno.

Like It Or Not, Warm Fuzzies = Revenue

I’m not saying the quality of the products or services aren’t a priority. Hell, they have to be if they’re are to successfully become a part of someone’s life, solidifying their purchase decision to make that initial investment in their relationship with you, ensure customer loyalty and retention, and increase the frequency of word of mouth (now more valuable than ever). I’m just saying that assuming quality is already there, the next step is to make sure you are a part of your customer, not just someone they handed over money to for products or services.

If you want to know what I’m talking about, just watch Apple. Love them or hate them, Apple knows how to create the notion that their technology products are seamlessly already part of who you are as a person. The concept of the iPad, and the iPad itself, is a perfect example. It doesn’t matter if you are selling car insurance, lamp shades, financial advice or skateboards, make sure that the presentation layer of your marketing plan does the following:

• Think about a meaningful situation or experience that is most common among your market segment.
• Assess which vehicle (YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, blogs) they use most to consume information about your product/service type.
• Storyboard a campaign that revolves around said meaningful situation/experience.
• Keep your product (and even sometimes your brand in certain cases) as a background focus of your campaign, the whole time.

The above is how I would handle marketing/campaign methodology in this day and age. Catering to people’s emotions is nothing new in Marketing. Catering to segmented human emotion in a way where they can also interact with you and quickly, followed by easily doing business with you immediately, is new, thanks to the technology and tools. Pull your weight in the relationship with your customer and they’ll stick it out with you, even when your industry or company hit some rough spots.

Onward.

Twitter list-making has almost turned into a sort of technological modern day scrap booking. People can now organize and categorize their interests and influencers and easily share them with others. Twitter lists have also created nice clean SEO-friendly URL’s to keep all the search engines happy and thriving. When it comes to your business on Twitter however,  there’s much more going on here…

Customers (Humans) Are Control Freaks

Businesses should pay a little attention to the plain list numbers (quantity) but really should be paying to attention to more than just how many lists they are on. The number of lists is an ok high-level metric and is always good for business/SEO. However, the quantity of lists is, in my opinion, irrelevant when it comes to the real benefit. It is irrelevant in the same way the number of followers became irrelevant on Twitter after it exploded early last year. When your company is added to a list on Twitter and eventually (and hopefully) 100′s and 1000′s of lists, you immediately get insight into what people and partners are thinking about your company, how they are categorizing you in their minds, and are essentially giving away their perception of where your company stands inside their heads. Humans need to assign categories to everything based on how they feel about it emotionally and Twitter lists are no exception. Because of this, businesses should be paying close attention to these lists as they continue to grow.

As you expand your Twitter footprint, continue the ongoing perception analysis as the social media expert for your company and clients, I highly recommend including Twitter list analysis into your overall marketing/social media dashboard.

Onward.

One of the hottest topics in social media as it pertains to corporate, is how to incorporate social media into a company’s currently existing B2B strategy and initiatives. I’ve witnessed several discussions about this topic. The bottom line is that the solution is NOT in the tools available (Twitter, Facebook). The solution is not hiring some agency to set up an account on every social site.

Social media strategies and proposed solutions should only be created based on analysis. There are companies and agencies that have come to this conclusion on their own (a good thing), however the main issue still exists. Most of these entities are analyzing the wrong things to generate their strategy. Of course it’s important to know your audience/segment/demo…whatever you wanna call it. It’s important to understand what your top 3 competitors are or aren’t doing. That’s all standard blah blah blah…

The fruits of social media for any business, any type of business, in any industry, come from the enhancement of interactions. Enhancing the key interactions are the core of all social media successes in my opinion. Those key interactions are the ones that catalyze the rest of your efforts across the board.

Where Should You Start?

With B2B, it’s a little different. Don’t waste your time focusing on the hype of the currently popular tools like you would in the consumer world. B2B is a different beast because B2B customers, relationships and conversations are NOT typically the type that you share with the general public. When you are thinking about how to deal with your distys and the sales channel, remember that Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and the zillions of other tier 2/tier 3 sites were not created, nor have they thrived, because they had the nature of B2B in mind. It’s hard not to wince when I hear companies say stuff like, “I know we NEED social media in our B2B strategy, it’s the latest thing and we don’t wanna miss the boat.” What people should really be saying is, “I know we need to enhance our relationships and interactions with our customers on the B2B side. If social media has a place here, let’s use it.”

A Scenario

As the top social media person in your company, you are approached by some inside sales people that manage the big accounts. They heard about social media, have heard of Twitter, Facebook, and so on. They want to incorporate social media into their B2B program/marketing roadmap but aren’t sure how to go about it.

Here are some simple steps to get started that I’ve been using:

1. Discovery Time. Set up a meeting with your new stakeholders so that you can discuss the entire process for the way they communicate and interact with their customers. Find out all points in the process with a customer that they have a direct interaction, human to human. Find out if there’s a site/application that they interact with where feedback or communications with those customers happens, like Salesforce.com, etc. EVERY touch point of interaction needs to be noted whether it’s a person OR a process that interacts with them. An accurate picture of this will help you get closer to identifying the gaps that need to be filled. Also it’s important to ask them if they know what their customers currently need and have, and what they need but don’t have. Your stakeholders should be able to answer those questions quickly. If they can’t, then they have approached you too early in the game.
2. Get More Feedback. Your stakeholders will know a lot about their customers. If social media is new to their fold however, I don’t think it hurts to give them some homework. Have them pick out 5-10 of their most difficult and opinionated customers. They should let those customers know that they are exploring introducing some social media concepts into the relationship and process and would like some feedback on ways they could improve on communicating/interacting. Based on those results, it’s time to begin the construction of your plan.
3. Choose Your Drug. You now have a list of interactions to take a look at, know who their audience is, and what their needs are. The next steps are to assess with the stakeholder what kinds of interactions seem to really work and which ones seem to fall on deaf ears (which we will throw out of the equation immediately for this new social media plan). Zoom in on the good stuff and research if there’s currently a social tool, site, or product offering that could help augment those things that currently work. Keep in mind that there may not be. Most social media sites were initially designed with nimble, chaotic, public conversation/interaction in mind so I can tell you right now that trying to bend and sculpt the public consumer factor of something like Facebook and Twitter, is not the right approach and will fail (unless of course Facebook/Twitter decide they want to change their whole model and reason for existence to serving enterprise level B2B marketing initiatives – probably not gonna happen). If you found something out there that works, then congrats and move forward with an execution for testing it out. If you cannot find a solution in a pretty little package with a bow on it somewhere then you may have to explore spending some budget on custom apps/sites that will serve your specific purpose. If you go that route, your risk better be pretty calculated as that path can get costly.
4. Testing 1, 2, 3. Is This Thing On? Testing your new idea in a live environment is crucial and exciting. Remember that since this may be uncharted territory for your company’s B2B effort, you may run into surprising results. In some of my experiences, I’ve set up expectations and not only were they not met, I witnessed something completely new about my customers that I wasn’t aware of, just based on how they interacted. Take that stuff seriously folks. Those are the nuggets of social media decision-making right there.
5. Execute. Analyze. Tweak. Repeat. If you are an experienced marketer, you know this routine well. If you don’t know this routine well, you shouldn’t be in marketing or any other line of work that requires analysis and ROI.

Go On With Yo’ Bad Self.

I hope some of this stuff helps you. These are some things that I’m doing right now and they seem to be working well as a fundamentally basic approach. I know that the variables in play for every company are so vast and at times amorphous. As I learn more and more through my experiences, running through these exercises with my current company and other clients, I’ll post the meat of what went down, regardless if what I tried succeeded or failed.

Onward.

I started thinking about this when I was typing my previous blog post about Google having the Holy Grail. As a marketer, I’m always trying to figure out human behavioral patterns and how I can maximize my company’s profit from the understanding of this.

I had an interesting thread going on Facebook the other day. I was eating sushi at a restaurant and was watching the people around me, talking to each other, responding to conversations with various facial expressions, hand gestures, and vocal tones that varied in intensity. All of these ways of expressing themselves were based on emotion that was being outputted as a physiological response to conversational input they had just received from whoever was sitting across the table and having lunch with them.

I had posted a Facebook status stating that “Emotions are still math.” It was interesting to see people’s responses to this. The vibe I got is that it almost was considered offensive that I had said that. My only point was to acknowledge the fusion between the two concepts, not to minimize the importance of one over the other. Maybe my choice of words made it come off that way, “flattening” the value of emotion. [...stealing your descriptor Andy ]. This definitely was not my intention.

If you know me, I’m far more emotional and dramatic than your average person, half the time it’s to my detriment.

Patterns

While I’m not necessarily referring to my friends on Facebook that participated in that conversation in my next statement here, for certain people I think it strokes a chord with them, like my statement was disregarding humanity on some blunt robotic level, not validating peoples emotions, converting the organic human aesthetic, all the things that mean so much to people, into 1′s and 0′s, basically saying that our entire population is just an abbacus made out of living tissue. My point with it was just that you can plug in formulas to patterns of human behavior. Patterns, whether abstract or linear, are still patterns, no matter how random we think the activity contained within those patterns actually is. I’m not the first person to say this and certainly not the last. Everyone learns this in Psych 1A their first year of college.

Is Business/Marketing Inherently Evil?

What I’m about to say here excludes non-profit organizations.

Successful marketers know that you need to recognize and understand behavioral data to make sound marketing decisions. This requires that on some level you convert what you see in human beings into a formulaic pattern so that you can run some numbers and calculate a risk. The goal of all that is to make more money. Period.

In reference to my “Emotions are still math” statement that kicked off the colorful convo on Facebook: If you are a marketing genius at a company that wants to grow, employ other human beings, beat your competition, understanding how to convert human emotion into dollars, does that make you evil? Smart? Shrewd? Heartless? All of the above?….or just someone trying to pay their bills?

I’m don’t know the answer…that’s why I’m asking.

[image courtesy of duke.edu]