Learning and sharing... by Zoe Sands

The IDM is currently running a content marketing experiment today, there’s quite a few articles written by thought leading B2B marketers on a range of subjects. Check out John Bottom’s article on B2B social media opportunbities and threats. Here’s my thoughts on the B2B social media research conducted:

“Great synopsis regarding the future of social media from some senior B2B marketers. For me the main opportunity is social media opens up a new two way communication channel with customers, prospects, brand enthusiasts and influencers that transcend all parts of the business from marketing to sales to customer service. Although, I do think the main threat to social media is where it should live within an organisation, what function should take charge of social media? PR, Marketing, Customer Service, Legal etc? Whilst this is still undecided organisations are often running many diverse social media strategies or should I say social media tactics, which aren’t in sync with the brand messaging and goals and are often fragmented diluting the effort put into social media to create engagement.”

What do you think the B2B social media opportubities and threats are? Post your comments on my blog or on the main IDM page.

I recently presented a B2B social media case study at a recent B2B Marketing training workshop on “Create the best social media strategy for your business” during the session I shared my top 10 B2B social media tips with the delegates. So, here’s a summary taken from my own experience of running integrated B2B social media campaigns:

1. Understand - in order to truly understand social media you need to be actively participating in the medium. As digital marketers you should be able to market and create your own personal brand presence within the major social networking sites. Being active in social media will help you understand the opportunities and limitations of social media.
2. Purpose - before rushing full steam ahead with a social media strategy, stop and think about your purpose. Are you using social media for awareness, brand engagement, research, crowd sourcing ideas, listening to customers or watching your competitors? You need to be clear on your objective before starting out.
3. Research - so you now understand social media and have your purpose identified, you now need to identify your audience and where they are. Please don’t start with technology first, as you will fail. Your audience may not be active in Facebook or Twitter, your top influencers may be in a niche social network or discussion forum. Hence you need research to identify this. I would recommend that you spend at least 4 weeks in this stage of your social media planning.
4. Resource - social media campaigns won’t succeed unless you invest in resource, to be successful you need to allocate resource to execute the campaign either by allocating someone internally to manage your social media or commissioning an agency to develop and create your campaigns.
5. Sponsor - for social media to succeed within an organisation there needs to be an executive sponsor who really understands the benefits of social media and drives through social media organisational change without this you won’t get the organisation to commit to social media.
6. Plan - make sure you create a social media plan before starting your social media campaign, including how your are going to measure and monitoring the campaign. Your measurement goal and social media monitoring software should be in place and tested before the inital pilot project is launched.
7. Pilot - start off with a social media pilot; initiate a small project once successful then plan out a more advanced social media strategy. Always allocate about 20% of your project time to pilot new techniques as you find them so that your social media presence evolves over time.
8. Test, test and more testing - it is so important to test and refine your social media campaigns, don’t just let your campaign run on its own, continue to test and make adjustments to obtain the best results.
9. Integrated - don’t run your social media as separate campaigns, to get the best out of your campaign integrate with your other digital outputs.
10. Investment - contrary to what most people believe social media is not FREE. Yes, it is free to open an account on most social networks, but in order to create engagement you need to invest in appropriate content creation for your target audience, for example, video, premium content, competitions, games etc.

If you found these tips really useful and wnat to hear more I’ll be presenting some of my B2B social media case studies and offering advice at the forthingc B2B Marketing Magazine’s seminar: Create the best social media strategy for your business.

For my latest digital finds and thoughts, why not follow me: @zoe9?

I was recently asked to debate the following topic: “When it comes to using social media effectively, once again B2B marketers are behind their B2C counterparts” and take the opposing side with Steve Kemish. I’m fortunate enough to have worked both in the B2C and the B2B arena so can see the plus points for both sides of this debate. My first initial thought on the debating subject was that B2C has so many well know case studies, which are often bounded about at conferences and events, so I had an idea what Debbie Williams and Mark Mason would be talking about to put their “for the motion” argument across.

Undeterred and rather competitive I set out to research and use some of my own B2B social media experience to investigate and document some world firsts in social media from the B2B community rather with my aim to discredit the statement that B2B is always following B2C. On reflection it wasn’t that difficult I had 2 world firsts, which I had already worked on myself, but rather than this being about work which I had done I wanted to add some other examples, these were:

• IBM’s Seer Wimbledon augmented reality app with a live Twitter integration (World First)
• Cisco’s Social Media Advertising campaign using Google’s Feed burner Ads (European First)
• Sage’s repositioning campaign using peer to peer advertising with LinkedIn (World First) and
• Juniper Networks’ Mobile Community using the Lithium’s platform (World First)

So, with all my research and preparation in hand, I awaited the social media debate with much anticipation that I would probably lose the debate, as most people would be able familar with the B2C examples and may have actually used some of the applications/environments/games created.

First on was Mark, who eloquently spoke about the how B2Cs were way ahead of the B2B community and in fact were much more effective. He also pointed out that B2B brands often lagged behind their B2C counterparts, as they were slow to take up opportunities. Inparticular he noted that Twitter was not being used as a thought leadership piece by B2Bs. He also highlighted that some B2B brands had fallen short on some rather bad experiences with corporate blogging. My thoughts on this was that it really doesn’t stop you in your tracks when considering social media.

Second up with Steve, with some rather bold statements to the audience telling them to make up their own mind from the examples he will now demonstrate. He explained a great example on VMware, where product demonstrations and how to guides are all recorded on video and hosted on YouTube (the world’s second largest search engine). He also argued that social media for B2Bs was more about targeting and finding out where your customers are. B2C knows where people are but not who they are, it really is more about mass marketing for B2Cs in social media. B2B is more targeted and therefore can be more effective. Steve micley countered Mark’s statements.

After Steve’s feisty argument Debbie was next up, her opeing statement was impressive withover 320 B2C brands active on social media. She spoke about many of the well known B2C social media examples; Absolute Vodka, Avon, Coca Cola, Harley Davidson, Ford and Blend it. All valid examples, but nothing outstanding or world firsts discussed. From her speech I summarised that most consumers using social media are Avon ladies riding Harley Davidson motorbikes and sometimes driving Ford Fiestas, blending and drinking lots of Black Russian cocktails.

By now I was a little nervous, being the last person to speak and having to surmise my fellow debating speakers’ points. Well, I presented my 4 B2B cases all being world firsts, as detailed above. In my summary I concluded that B2B Innovation = ideas + innovation + risk and that we as B2B marketers are only limited by our own imagination.

What followed was an interactive questioning and thought sharing session, concluding in Steve and myself wining the debate. I guess the audience appreciated our side of the argument. I think presenting some of the world firsts in social media also helped win.

The debate was hosted by ABBA (Association of Business to Business Agencies) and held at RSA, London a lovely building with a treasure cove of vaults below the main building where drinks and canapés were served after the debate, kindly sponsored by Equifax. Photographs were taken by John Wilkinson.