business relationships


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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Social media imperatives for small businesses

Jul 1st

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My friend Nathan Egan recently gave an interview to Business Week describing the imperatives for small business to engage in social media marketing. Here are some of the highlights:
1) Social media is new but it’s not going away. It’s a valuable new extension of traditional business communication. Jump aboard!
2) Your competition is going to be doing it, if they aren’t already. You need to make a start and take the time to learn it, now!
3) For many small business owners, social media is an excellent way for virtual networking, providing a highly-efficient method for finding new customers and business contacts.
4) Social media is highly-customizable to fit your business needs. It’s not just about getting a Facebook page. There is no cut-and-paste blanket strategy. Tailor to your existing communication strategy and customer needs.
5) Take a slow, strategic, approach. Before you begin, take some time to learn. See what’s out there. Monitor activity. Listen before you start engaging. Set aside at least 10 minutes a day to read and become familiar with your options.
6) Set up RSS news feeds to help you define your strategy and learn about what’s going on.
7) Setting up social media initiatives takes time, but keep an eye on the long-term costs-savings. A highly cost-effective way to go to market compared to traditional media.
8) Take advantage of short-cuts and automated systems. There are many free applications to help you work more efficiently once you get started.
More from Nathan Egan:

Website

Blog

Full Business Week radio interview

Egan: Facebook — The New PR

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Lessons from a marketing strategy gone wrong (mine!)

Jun 29th

1 comment

The theme for the blog this week is “strategy” and the first thing I needed to do is turn the microscope on myself.
It’s ugly. I have not been following my own rules … but let’s see what you might learn from my mistakes.
Something I have preached relentlessly: When you start a social media strategy, it needs to be integrated into your overall business objectives … which hopefully are aligned with customer wants and needs. Remember, social marketing is still MARKETING. Same fundamental rules apply.
My traditional core business is providing low-cost marketing services to businesses in the Southeast U.S. When I started this blog a few months ago, I had that objective and those customers firmly in mind. But then it all went wrong.
Here’s what’s happened:
  1. Over time I have been writing less about small business marketing fundamentals, and more about B2B and social media. It’s what’s interesting to me right now, so I went with it!
  2. The people who read my blog and follow my tweets now come from all over the world — relatively few from my core market.
  3. Based on my social media presence, including the blog, Twitter, and my web page, I am getting new customers from California, Switzerland and Australia — not what I originally had in mind.

In a matter of weeks, my core business competency and customer base changed dramatically, because my message and audience changed dramatically. Isn’t that interesting? I wasn’t consistent and now I’m challenged to match my STRATEGY to my inconsistent MESSAGE!!

How did this happen? I lost sight of my core mission because writing the blog became so much fun. I wasn’t “marketing.” I was being me. And it worked out fine. I didn’t choose my audience. My audience chose me.

What did I learn? Perhaps in social media, “being me” IS the strategy.

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How do you handle a crowd of followers?

Jun 25th

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My article on “Why do I need 10,000 followers” seemed to tap into the frustration and anxiety of many people who are struggling with the meaning of our new Twitter relationships. One Twitter friend, who I have never met, called me and discussed the issue for an hour!
If you haven’t read some of the blog reader comments, please do — they’re great! The article also enabled a lively debate on Linked-In. I wanted to cross-pollinate the conversations and those folks allowed me to re-print just a small selection of their insights:

Steven Soshea

“If I happened to accumulate 10,000 followers through organic growth, I would consider that to be a good thing. There’s no way you can have “an effective, reasonable connection” with everyone … Like a famous musician, actor, or even writer, you’re not going to be able (or want) to spend all of your time connecting with your fans.
“To be quite blunt, I’m only going to spend a certain amount of time with them, collectively and individually. So my engagement with Twitter isn’t going to scale proportionally to the volume of my followers … I’m very happy to have this asymmetric relationship …”
“Once I was following 400+ I found that it was just too much to keep up the same quality level of interaction. That web page just seemed like a huge wave of noise coming at me. One approach I’ve found helpful is to segment and to create individual Twitter ID’s for different sectors with which I work … I also use Tweetdeck or Seesmic to review the multiple accounts independently or collectively at a glance.”

 

Nancy Scott
“Before I follow, I read somebody’s blog carefully to see if I can connect with their knowledge and their perspective. I started out primarily following marketing bloggers, but have expanded to following all manner of folks who interest me.”

 

Mark Ruvelson
“I’m not sure what the magic number is as far as how many followers you should have, or how many people you can actually keep up with following … I have a friend who’s tweeting on behalf of his business, and his approach is to follow as many people he can and grow his community through follow backs. OK, so he has close to 2,000 followers, I have just around 300. Is his group more valuable than mine? Larger yes, but maybe not better, as I’m not so sure how relevant some of his followers are. I’ve chosen not to follow his approach; I feel like the right thing for me anyway is to keep on posting clever, interesting tweets, and let the community grow at its own pace.”
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