Tag: social media for b2b

The Feedback Loop: Social Media’s Lost Child

Posted by Rich Harris – March 18, 2010

You Can’t Cross An Unfinished Bridge

Social media is just another bridge. Often times in SM we can feel like we are ahead of the game, on top of the new world order of communication. We are on the cusp of a new way of doing things and now we got it nailed. We’ve created strategic Twitter accounts, Facebook Fan Pages, Feeds, Blogs, and more. We watch them for perception, tone and feedback, interacting with the customers that engage with us through them. You’ve seen feedback from some customers saying, “Wow they’re really paying attention to us, they are innovators!” You are rad. Pat yourself on the back.

Some of us have also been able to attain that other golden jewel of getting our companies to understand the value of what we do as social media managers/owners and what it can do for our companies and clients. We’ve battled through pitch after painful PowerPoint pitch to our investors and execs to get them on board with understanding the value of something that can feel so nebulous for business…..but you did it. If this was a challenge for you and you pulled it off, congratulations. Another rung on the ladder grasped. Another step towards converting your company and it’s culture to the social media occult.

However, if you think you got it dialed by only having man-handled the two big challenges I mentioned above, you may have forgotten the one battle you must fight and conquer to win the war. The missing link.

Process Makes Perfect

Most up and coming young buck marketers that are out there doing the social media thing, love it because it’s free and nimble and expressive and unfettered and nebulous and amorphous, catering to their every random emotional whim and conversation. I will say that there is some business beauty in that. It can help your customers feel like you are real people. It’s a good thing and I dig that part of it too. However, I think one of the caveats that most business leaders new to social media have with it is that no one has explained to them how it fits into their internal business processes and why. How nice it will play with processes that have been established over several years (and that work really well) in various cross-functional organizations and departments?

All is well and good when your company responds to a tweet right there on the fly. Everyone is feeling like a warm fuzzy bunny rabbit when a question is posed on Facebook and you know the answer and can respond right there and be done with it. But what happens when a question is posed to your company that you don’t know the answer to? What happens when you don’t know who has the answer and you gotta do some digging through your org chart and email a few people. What happens when you finally find that person and they answer with more questions for the customer who posed the original question over Twitter? With all the projects that are most likely on your plate, by the time you find the right person, get the final answer you need, just like when you drive a brand new car off the lot and it loses $2k in value within seconds, the value of your conversation risks losing it’s value because in the social media world, interactions can become old news fast and people on the interwebs feel left out in the cold quickly (us web fanatics and consumers are a sensitive emotional bunch).

There needs to be a solid process in place to support the feedback loop required to add value to your social media initiatives. If that loop is dysfunctional, unorganized, or under developed, or worst case – straight up missing, then the real intrinsic value of your customer interactions will suffer.

If You Are Gonna Do It, Do It Right

There’s no value in just being able to address the quick questions and convenient conversations that are going on. If you are going to offer social media as a real part of your company’s culture, as a real solution moving forward, as a mechanism to engage with and listen to your customers, do it right and integrate it into your business top-to-bottom in a way that is efficient and part of the big picture. Make sure there is a stable, well thought out feedback loop so that when a complex question comes in via Twitter, the loop/process guides it to the right people quickly and you can then respond quickly back out to the customer in a way that makes them feel like you personally actually do know everything there is to know about your company. :-)

Onward.

[Hoover Dam images courtesy of The Goat Blog]

Twitter Lists & Business: Perception Analysis

Posted by Rich Harris – January 15, 2010

The List Goes On…

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.

Social Media: B2B, It’s About Interaction Analysis Silly!

Posted by Rich Harris – November 30, 2009

Dude, Social Media for B2B, Everyone’s Talking About It, Bro.

b2b-technology-marketing-agency-wordle-3One 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

237303-main_FullAs 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.