Posts tagged competitive advantage


Five reasons B2B companies should reject social media marketing

Sep 15th

19 comments

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?)

2) The strategy doesn’t make sense. In these economically-urgent times, the focus is probably on generating short-term sales through established channels. There is nothing wrong with that – in fact, it’s an entirely appropriate strategy. If your company is burning the furniture to heat the building, it’s probably not the right time to start an internal battle to create a Facebook page.
3) The resources simply don’t exist. If you’re working in PR or marketing for a large B2B today, it’s likely that you’re doing a job that used to be two or three jobs a few years ago. Who really has the incremental time to take on social media and do it well? Maybe when the economy turns your company can free up the resources, but in the near-term, you may need to stay focused on only the most important customer initiatives. Be patient.
 
4) You don’t want to be social. Let’s say you work for a defense contractor. You really don’t want to conduct business on the social web, do you? So hanging out on Twitter is not for every business situation. I recently put a slide presentation out on the web that was promptly picked up and copied by my competitor. Will it hurt me? Not really. Could a similar situation hurt a company like Boeing? Yup. It might be more prudent to establish internal, secure collaborative efforts instead using the social web.
5) Your customers don’t care. I was at a gathering of about 15 B2B executives last week. All VP’s or higher … very influential to the purchasing decision at their companies. None of them were involved in social media. Nada. Wouldn’t know a tweet if it poked them in the nose. If these folks are your customers, you’re wasting your time on social media, aren’t you? In fact, I would say this is the number one issue facing B2B social web marketing: The customers aren’t engaged. Yet.

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!

My job is to consult and help businesses, and I actively recommend at least some social media component to the marketing plan of almost any customer. But I’m also practical and sympathetic to the needs of businesses that are just trying to survive right now. While there is almost certainly a place for social media in even traditional B2B situations, we need to realize that resistance may make perfect sense in the context of a lousy business situation. It might just be a matter of timing.
And although there may be real business situations that could delay social web engagement, there are also plenty of lame excuses. I will continue my schizophrenic journey tomorrow with some of these beauties!
OK, your turn. Let ‘er rip!
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Building meaningful business connections through social media

Aug 4th

6 comments

This is the second in a series exploring the keys to achieving business benefits in social media:

Connections + Meaningful Content + Authentic Helpfulness = Business Benefits.
Now, we’re going to dive into each element to build a strategy for YOUR social media success! Today we start with CONNECTIONS.
Think of the social media landscape as a garden … being planted in a desert! To get something to grow, you need to plant a LOT of seeds, which are your connections. Then you’re going to water those connections with meaningful content and authentic helpfulness, which I will cover in subsequent articles.
I’ll give you seven delicious ingredients for the business connection recipe, but before I do, I’d like you to consider two things 1) What is the profile of your best customers, and 2) Where are they likely to be hanging out? If you can answer those questions, your quest for great business connections will be so much more successful! Here are two resources to help you out (click links)
CUSTOMER PROFILING
FINDING YOUR CUSTOMER “TRUCKSTOP”
OK, let’s mix up a fresh batch of social media business connections:
1) The Advanced Search feature on Linked-In is your best connection-finding buddy. You can find high-potential connections by location, company, industry, even business title. Offer to link with these people as a first step toward building your targeted audience.
2) Participate in Linked-in groups and forums. What better way to build relationships than to get involved with online groups of like-minded professionals? So many people sign up for Linked-In and forget about it. Get your skin in the game and actively ENGAGE new connections. A new national contract of mine began with a lady who liked my answers on Linked-In!
3) Find online journals related to your industry. Look for comments that interest you. In the comment section, note who is there – their comments often point readers to their Twitter name, Facebook or Linked-In page. Connect to them. Engage.
4) Use Twellow to find targeted industry connections who are actively involved in Twitter. There is a related app on this site that you can use to search people by state or city, which is so important if you are a small business serving a targeted geographic area.
5) Steal contacts from your competitors. If you can find your competitors on social media channels, you can also find their links and followers. This is public information for all to see and so it is perfectly acceptable. P.S. They can do the same thing to you!
6) Use http://my.peoplebrowsr.com/ to do high-powered searches for relevant Twitter users by just about any demographic category you can think of.
7) Have you participated in Twitter “discussions” on subjects related to your area of interest? These discussions are demarcated with a hashtag (#) so you can search for the term and follow the trail of the discussion, whether you are following the people or not. Here’s an example. In the search field in the right hand column of Twitter, I searched for #SMROI because I want to find people who are talking about social media and ROI. I will see a timeline of the discussion and all the people who are participating. Follow them!

There are hundreds of ways to build targeted contacts but these are a few ideas that have worked for me and my clients. What is working for you? Please share in the comment section below.

This article is part of a series on creating business benefits through social media. Other posts:
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Your social media ROI shock treatment

Jul 21st

14 comments

Today, let’s do a very simple calculation to determine how much cash your social media strategy should be generating to justify its existence. I think this might just blow your mind.

I’ll have to make some broad assumptions because every company is different, but you can insert your own numbers and do the math for your own organization.

Let’s assume you are a medium-sized company, and have one person working full-time on social media marketing. We’ll assign that person a salary of $60,000.

In a typical company, health, 401(k) and other benefit costs equal another 50% of the base salary, or in this case, an additional $30,000.

We’ll assign another 20% of base salary for overhead such as office space, shared services support and technology. That’s $12,000. We’re on a tight budget so we will forbid our new employee to do any travel, training, or company entertaining. And forget about bonuses this year. No whining, either!

So, our full-up cost for one social media professional is $102,000.

Let’s assume your company has a moderate profit margin of 15%. So, to break even and just cover the incremental costs of your new social media initiative, this professional would have to produce quantifiable new sales of $680,000. In other words, you would have to make that amount of money to have an ROI of 0.0% on a year’s worth of social media expense and effort.

That’s a lot of money for a lot of nothing, isn’t it? There are two reasons why I needed to shock you into social media de-tox.

First, I wanted to bring home the point that social media is not “free.” Even a modest effort at a small company takes a lot of time, which must be funded through the sweat of your manufacturing and sales efforts.

The second reason is this: For now, some companies may be willing to experiment with social media, but at some point the big boss is going to sharpen her pencil. If you can’t accurately and logically measure what you do, your marketing initiative will be in peril, as it should be.

The other day, I heard an “A-List” blogger tell his audience, “If your company is not expecting you to account for your efforts with financial measures, well, that’s just great — do whatever you want!”

And for a short period of time, you might get away with it. But to gain credibility as a company leader in a B2B environment, you must hold your activities accountable to the same standards as an engineer trying to get funds approved for a new production facility. You should be able to demonstrate a business case and that business case must be built on hard dollars … eventually.

In the mean time, the softer side of metrics may be the only thing available. Tomorrow we’ll start taking a look at the importance of “non-financial indicators” that can influence brand equity.

This is part 2 in a series addressing social media marketing measurement issues.

Part 2: Social media ROI shock treatment

Part 3: Irresponsible social media measurement research

Part 4: Social media impact on brand equity

Part 5: The most important question to ask in social media marketing

Part 6: A double standard for social media marketing?

Part 7: Yes, it IS about the money!

Part 8: Creating a measurement plan

Part 9: Measurement is like a bartender

 

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Two approaches to attain large, engaged Twitter groups

Jul 16th

No comments

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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