Archive for July, 2009


Social media time shock strategies

Jul 16th

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This is Part 4 of my interview with Dr. Ben Hanna, former eBay exec, online marketing pioneer and VP of Business.com.

One of the things most people learn is the tremendous amount of time it takes to effectively manage a social media campaign. How are you personally managing the time shock on top of your other traditional marketing duties?

Just like SEO, social media has a reputation as being “free” but both require a significant, ongoing time commitment to deliver a tangible impact on the business. The short answer to your question is that it is possible to manage the social media time commitment through a combination of pre-launch research, clear focus on goals and active project prioritization.

We researched the current state of B2B social media before we launched our blogs and Twitter accounts, and the time commitment issue came through loud and clear – the B2B social media success stories involved dedicated, consistent focus on initiatives over time, and the complaints about social media not working typically involved one shot campaigns which didn’t work as intended or consumed time/resources far beyond their value.

With about two FTEs worth of time to dedicate to the effort, and knowing the risk of over-commitment, we chose to launch a blog and Twitter account for each side of our business — @whatworks and the What Works for Business blog for general business challenges/solutions, and @B2BOnlineMktg and the B2B Online Marketing blog for B2B online marketing challenges/solutions. We felt we could learn most quickly by comparing performance of the blogs and Twitter accounts but, if driving immediate business results was more important, we would have focused more narrowly.

After launching our social media initiative, clear focus on goals and active project prioritization kept the time commitment manageable (with an emphasis on the “manageable” part – there are still times where the team and I have no choice but to power through an unforeseen time sink).

For example, it quickly became clear that the What Works for Business blog was performing much better in organic search results than the B2B Online Marketing blog, one reason being 2-3 new posts per day for What Works for Business vs. one post per week for the other blog. It’s easy to look at that as a problem and start putting in the considerable extra time necessary to keep both blogs at 2-3 posts per day. Our goal, however, wasn’t to maintain performance parity between the blogs, or hit certain performance targets in the initial phase – it was to learn from the differences between the blogs. Seeing how content volume can affect organic search performance is valuable input for future project planning and resource allocation, but it isn’t a “problem” to get sucked into fixing at this point.
Tomorrow: The final part of our interview — The next evolution of B2B marketing
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Business Twitter initiative in trouble? Here’s how to get it back on track!

Jul 16th

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More thoughts from online marketing pioneer Dr. Ben Hanna from his just-published report on his first 120 days of social media experiences at www.business.com.
Research shows 60 percent of those who try Twitter quit in the first week. It can be an incredibly frustrating experience, especially if you’re trying to build momentum in a corporate environment. Thoughts on getting your Twitter initiative back on track …
Be tenacious. Twitter is a viable business communication channel, end of story – “From what I’ve seen in the past four months, Twitter has a role as a business communication channel for most B2B companies,” Dr. Hanna said. “Whether Twitter figures out a way to monetize its business or not is irrelevant because, if Twitter fails, some other micro-blogging platform will take its place. If you’ve already tried Twitter for your business and struggled to make it work, it’s most likely because the B2B social media rules are still being written. Don’t give up.”
Twitter for business should be approached as mass communication - Conventional wisdom among many Twitter-advocates is that you are building a “community.” That is not necessarily so, according to Dr. Hanna. “If you plan to use Twitter for business, and you have more than a few hundred prospects/customers/influencers combined, you’re kidding yourself if you think interpersonal norms can govern how you use Twitter or other social media for your business. Why? Because Twitter is incredibly inefficient for forming interpersonal relationships. For the vast majority of businesses out there, “mass communication” is the model you should follow as you plan your Twitter strategy.”
You have a business contact list, so use it – As a business on Twitter, you don’t need to build a following like an individual would. This is a key advantage for business Twitter users who have either have forgotten or, more likely, ignored, this advantage out of some combination of a misplaced desire to not disrupt existing communication channels and the sheer revulsion many B2B marketers feel when considering how a P2P or B2C trend may apply to their business. Get over it. Establish a basic Twitter presence, make your prospects and customers aware of this new channel, and let them use it.
Focus on tweet quality over tweet quantity – Research shows that tweeting interesting things (e.g., tweets with links that more people click on) has a much bigger, positive influence on follower growth rate than does tweet volume (e.g., making sure you tweet very frequently to keep your tweets in front of your followers). The best practice for getting people’s attention and interest on Twitter is the same as it is across other business communication channels – talk when you have something important to say. Blanketing your followers with tweets doesn’t work any better than does blanketing the media with press releases about non-issues or hammering a direct mail list with irrelevant offers — One more reason to look at Twitter as a mass communication channel for business rather than a medium ruled by strict adherence to norms of interpersonal interaction.
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Two approaches to attain large, engaged Twitter groups

Jul 16th

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This week I’ve been featuring the insights of Dr. Ben Hanna and the provocative findings of the social media strategy he is revealing month by month on his B2BOnlineMarketing blog. He just released information from his fourth month of experience. Some highlights:
What is the fastest route to a large, engaged group of Twitter followers? To research this, his team followed experienced B2B Twitter accounts with 5,000+ followers and started watching for patterns. There were two starkly different groups, and strategies, in terms of Twitter follower-friend ratio.
The Interpersonal Approach — equal ratio of followers-to-friends
“The follower-friend ratio caught my eye,” he said, “because there are two very different, and often conflicting, perspectives on the right way to engage in social media. The first is a view of social media as an interpersonal medium governed by interpersonal rules. For example, if someone wants to be your friend, the polite thing is to shake hands, say “hi”, and try to be friends – most people would consider it just plain rude to walk away. Those pro business tweeters with a follower-friend ratio around 1 seem to be following this norm and with automatically following someone back. Since there’s no obvious, objective benefit to blocking a follower if you decide not to be their friend, follower and following counts grow together.”
>> Hallmarks of Interpersonal Approach: Probable use of spam-and-cull approach to building a following; wide range of people in follower base, attract followers interested in tweet content.
The Mass Communication Approach — 5x more followers than friends
“The other group with a follower-friend ratio on the 5+ range seems to be viewing social media as a mass communication medium governed by mass communication rules, and the pro business tweeters in this group are often larger companies, business media and/or experienced execs at mid- to large-sized companies. From a mass communication perspective, its perfectly acceptable and even expected for the relationship to be one-sided or interactive only on demand (such as when a customer has a question). After all, it’s utterly impossible for someone to follow 5,000+ other Twitter users, let alone 500, and pay attention to all their tweets. If you think reading and processing 100 emails a day is a challenge, try 5,000 tweets.”
>> Hallmarks of Mass Communication Approach: Attract people interested in tweet content only since it is unlikely they will follow you back; may be big brands or long-established Twitter users; don’t tweet a lot of thoughts/observations — mostly just relevant content.
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Developing a social media strategy when the rules aren’t clear

Jul 15th

2 comments

M.C. Escher
This part 3 of my interview with B2B marketing pioneer Dr. Ben Hanna, VP of Business.com.
Part 1: Four breakthrough Twitter research insights
Part 2: Essential B2B social media start-up strategies

You’ve decided to lay bare the evolution of your social media campaign — warts and all. It’s a fascinating read. What made you decide to expose your strategy to the world?

It was a simple decision, really. Business.com is focused on helping people find actionable solutions to business challenges, and what better way to add to the “solution set” for B2B social media than to chronicle our own challenges, insights and solutions?

We also took this approach to accelerate our learning about the value of social media for business, and for our business in particular. If we blog about the evolution of our B2B online marketing Twitter account with updates every 30 days, will we get useful feedback from other business people using social media? What does it take to get a discussion going around a topic of interest that produces real, valuable answers?

You’re a company executive but take an extremely hands-on approach to your social media initiative through blog entries, tweets and presence on SM platforms. Is this typical of your style, a new demand of social media, or something you just do for fun?

It’s a combination of the three, united by the requirements of the situation. In my experience, the fastest way to develop effective marketing strategy and tactics for a new channel where the rules are still being written (as is the case for B2B social media!) is through a combination of the following, which form a nice acronym – REAP:

Research – Collect as much of the current “best practice” info as possible and triangulate findings, in the context of your unique business and business goals, to establish an initial position on where to focus and what to do. At Business.com, we started with an overview of the current state of B2B social media.

Experience – Immerse yourself through direct experience, taking existing best practices as hypotheses to be tested rather than inviolate rules to follow. I personally took on a decent sized chunk of the work on our new blogs and Twitter accounts so that I could get a feel for the medium, test assumptions and get a jump on cross-channel strategic planning. I can’t, and won’t, be as directly involved as we transition from tests to regular programs but the early direct experience is essential.
Action – Act before you think you have all the answers. In a rapidly changing marketing channel, relying too much on the research or experience of third parties will often lead to over-analyzing and inaction. Instead of watching from the shore for the perfect opportunity, get your boat in the water so you can start actively observing, testing, learning and adapting.
Perspective – Engage multiple people in the new marketing channel and share insights to learn more quickly. Ideally, you’d like a combination of experts and novices in the new marketing channel, other marketing channels and the business. Our initial social media initiatives at Business.com involve myself, an experienced social media marketer, corporate communications expert and our editorial director (a long-time small business journalist).

Tomorrow, Part 4: Executive tips for managing the social media time commitment

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