Posts tagged business relationships
The REAL math behind your followers, Mr.Twitter Bigshot!
Oct 26th
REALLY?
I dissected his follower list (public information) and estimated HALF were “trash,” meaning they were spam-generated, get-rich quick spammers, or porn. Those followers are not going to be effective in receiving or re-transmitting any message of “influence.” So that brings us down to 40,000 potentially effective followers in TK’s community.
The Harvard study goes on to say that 90% of the tweets are generated by 10% of the users — a user concentration even higher than Wikipedia! So, let’s define these leading Tweeters as the “thought leaders” we are all trying to connect to. This would imply that, on average, TK has just 406 (0.5% of his followers) who represent people who actively contribute to the conversation.But wait a minute — we need to rule out kids, right? In a business setting, let’s assume we want to connect and influence people over 24. That represents just 33 percent of the population on Twitter. Adult, meaningful follower total: 135.
Let’s further assume 15% of all these folks are on vacation or away from their connection for a day (45 people left for TK) and they spend just two hours per day on Twitter where they could actually see and process a tweet from this guy. According to data on Sysmos, about 4% of your users will be active during any one hour of the day. That leaves one person actually seeing and processing your tweet, Mr. Bigshot.
And that would be me. So now who’s boss?
Photo credit: This is an ACTUAL photo of the species Twitterus Poppycockus appearing at a social media forum last week.
Harvard released a study this month showing that among the people who don’t quit, the median number of lifetime tweets is one. I think it’s reasonable to define an “active user” as somebody who tweets at least once a day (less than 15%). Applying that reasonable logic, the number of ACTIVE users this media mogul brags about is actually 4,060.
Studying U.S. keeps East European marketer a step ahead
Oct 20th
I decided it would be fun to feature some of the great people of the {grow} community from time to time. You’ll probably recognize the name Kimmo Linkama as a regular contributor who has distinguished himself with his insights and perspective.
Ever since I connected with Kimmo there have been two things on my mind: How did he get such a cool name and what’s it like to work in social media in Estonia. So I decided to ask him … and share it with you!
Mark: How has your career path led you to your interest in social media?
Kimmo: I’ve had the good fortune to see marketing communications from all sides. I’ve worked on the agency side and the client side, in advertising and in PR, and have had assignments with both national and international audiences. Finnish marketing communications works on pretty much the same principles as in the US, so now that social media is clearly becoming the next “big thing” in marketing, especially in my B2B niche, I need to know what’s happening and what are the best strategies.
Mark: And how’s business in Estonia?
Kimmo: Let me first give you a little background. I’m originally from Finland and moved to Estonia about four and a half years ago. Business is difficult in Estonia, especially with the recession, and I still work almost 100% for Finnish clients.
Europe, in comparison with the US, is extremely fragmented. There are 50 countries and 230 languages (although the official European Union languages only number 23). Estonia, where I live, has a population of 1.3m, about the same as Philadelphia. Finland’s population is 5.3m, a little more than Los Angeles and is the most sparsely populated country in the European Union.
From where I live, Otepää in south Estonia, it is only some 160 miles “as the crow flies” to Helsinki, Finland, where most of my clients are located – although there’s a two-hour boat trip across the Gulf of Finland in-between.
Mark: Sometimes I feel like the social media trend swamped marketers here in the U.S. and we’re still recovering. You are in a unique position of being able to watch for what is happening in the rest of the world BEFORE it hits your region and your customers. How does that help you or hurt you?
Kimmo: It definitely helps. Although most ideas that are taking off in the U.S. reach even my remote corner of Europe very quickly, there’s still a slight delay. That’s why I am – as you said – in a unique position to get on board a little before a new trend becomes mainstream here. The benefit, of course, is that I’m able to get some hands-on experience in social media, so when it begins to really catch on as a marketing ideology, I will know better what I’m talking about and be able to help my clients in a relevant way.
Mark: What social media platforms are being used in Eastern Europe? Are entrepreneurs developing regional-specific platforms or are you seeing global apps like Twitter take off?
Kimmo: We have the whole spectrum: blogs, forums, chats, microblogging. There are regional-specific platforms, but on the whole I think the global applications have so much critical mass that they will eventually come to dominate. For example, the development of the Finnish Jaiku microblogging app, roughly similar to FriendFeed, began almost concurrently with Twitter. When Google bought Jaiku a couple of years ago, it has gradually stagnated, and now a new development, called Qaiku, is trying to take its place. I have my doubts about the chances of survival of these regional developments against the big globals, though. It is more probable that a bigger player will buy them in the end.
Mark: What is social media adoption like in your region? Is it being used for business? What are the hurdles?
Kimmo: Finns have always been pretty tech-savvy. Blogs are proliferating, and Facebook is very popular. A fair number of companies have adopted blogging as one of the ways to get their message out, but for example Facebook seems to be mostly for personal-type contacts. I haven’t yet seen many serious attempts at business use, although some companies do have a Facebook presence. The company pages, however, seem to be mostly of the press release type, publishing company news rather than encouraging dialogue.
Microblogging is done more by individuals; so even if they are clearly associated with their employers, the messages mostly have a personal point of view. I think the biggest hurdle for wider business adoption – if we rule out lack of knowledge – is exactly the same as everywhere else: businesses are so used to traditional push marketing that the idea of losing control of the message is frightening. It takes time to alleviate this fear, but as the trend grows stronger, everyone will have to go with it one way or another.
I also don’t know how many agencies really know how to go about this “new way of marketing” when it comes to recommending the best ways to their clients. I’m hoping my social media experiments, if you will, enable me to fill that void for my part.
Mark: Kimmo, you have such a cool name. Is it a family name or just a common name in your homeland of Finland?
Kimmo: Thanks for the compliment! Kimmo is not a very common first name. I looked it up and there are about 18,000 men with that name. Its roots are sometimes traced back to the Greek St. Evdokimos, but I don’t know how scientific this is.
Feel free to ask Kimmo additional questions in the comment section …
In addition to his contributions to the {grow} community, Kimmo’s blog, “Marketing Communicator” can be found at: http://linkama.wordpress.com/
Five reasons B2B companies should reject social media marketing
Sep 15th
In yesterday’s post, I demonstrated that even in the case of the most extreme B2B sales situation (one customer, long sales cycle, few competitors), there could be a place for social media marketing. Today I’ll tell you why it isn’t that simple.
Does my schizophrenia seem strange? I’ve been around long enough to know that even when there’s a slam-dunk business case for something, it doesn’t mean a company will do it. This has been quite apparent in B2B where hard-dollar social media successes have been few and far between, despite a lot of hype. Here are five good reasons why some B2B’s should NOT adopt social media right now:
1) The economy sucks. Unless a customer is screaming for social media, it’s not likely a struggling company is going to voluntarily get into a brand new marketing effort in the teeth of a recession. Even though most social media is “free,” it still takes valuable time and resources many companies don’t have right now. (On the flip side, your competitors are in the same boat – why not get a jump start on this now?)
OK, please let me pre-empt a few hot-blooded retorts bound to show up in the comment section … I’m not saying DON’T do social media. You know me better than that. I know that every one of these reasons I listed could be turned around as a reason TO DO social media marketing!
The case for social media marketing and "Extreme B2B"
Sep 14th
At one point in my career, I had one of the largest (if not THE largest!) sales positions in the world. I had just one customer and they bought more than US$1.5 billion of goods and services from my company every year. That’s what I call Extreme B2B. Long sales cycle. High stakes. Extraordinary power in the hands of the buyer.
Is there a place for social media marketing even in “Extreme B2B?” Before applying any tactic like social media — in any situation — you first need to consider the strategy. In my position, there were four strategies I employed to keep and grow this mega-customer:
Apply high-touch throughout the organization. With a customer that large, you can imagine that operations were dispersed throughout the world. So my contacts were broad … and they were also deep – from the CEO to the machine operator on the floor, from Purchasing to R&D. There were dozens of people who influenced the purchasing decision and I had to earn trust with all of them! It was also a challenge connecting all the communication synapses between the two companies: executive, manufacturing, R&D, etc.
Raise switching costs through service innovations. Not only did I want to grow my business at this customer, I wanted to do it at the most profitable plant locations. To achieve this, I wanted to provide some extraordinary service that would make it painful for the plant to switch to a competitor. For example, at our most profitable customer location, we designed a special truck that could haul away their waste material after delivering a shipment of finished product, saving them waste hauling fees. Those trucks made us a lot of money!
Improve profitability through incremental cost savings. With an account that large, the purchasing power is extreme and that keeps margins low. It was always a challenge to find small ways to save money, especially if it also provided a win for the customer. With revenues that large, even an improvement of a fraction of a cent per unit could have a dramatic impact on profitability.
Listen better, act faster. Listening to my customer was serious business. We actually conducted formal “listen to the customer” visits using trained facilitators. Information from these visits, conducted throughout the world, was carefully compiled, thoroughly analyzed and used to create our marketing and R&D plans.
In summary, my strategy was: Be accessible, innovate through service, lower costs, and listen effectively. Hmmm … doesn’t that sound like a PERFECT business case for social media applications? Even in a case of extreme B2B there are likely applications for these new tools, right?
Yes … and no. I’m sure you can think of many great social web applications to support these strategies, but that doesn’t mean that B2B companies will necessarily act on them. Why not?
Even with a strong business case, there may be very good reasons why a B2B company should reject social media marketing (gasp!). More on that in the next post!
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-Mark SchaeferFollow Mark
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