Tag Archives: Social Media
A Call for Mandatory Social Media Upskilling
- 15th February 2013
I listen to conversations about the merits and future of social media and networking for b-to-b. I sit across the table from b-to-b executives who don’t believe that social is impacting or will impact their buyers’ behavior. The most common myth repeated over and over again to me is: C-level decisionmakers don’t have time or are just too important to use social media. To be honest, it feels like déjà vu -- it’s the exact same dialogue the industry had about impact of the Internet on b-to-b buying. And I’m pretty sure that, down the road, we won’t be having this conversation anymore, and social won’t be a issue; it will be just an ubiquitous component in the marketing and sales ecosystem, just as the corporate Web site has become over the past two decades.
Continue Reading....Improve Your Next Product Launch: Engage Customers Through Social Media Channels
- 7th February 2013
One of our most frequent inquiry topics is how to improve product launch. An important boost to the commercial success of an offering, this process often becomes mired in tactical details and spreadsheet checklists. Most marketers think of launch as an event instead of an opportunity to engage in conversation with their target customers. Unless you are entering a new market, communicating with existing customers should be a priority. Consider who needs to hear about what you are offering and how are you going to reach them. To engage customers in a product launch, social media is a valuable addition to the traditional mix of press releases, emails, newsletters and sales calls. It can be used before, during and after the launch date.
Continue Reading....Looking for Social Media Success in All the Wrong Places
- 6th February 2013
I admit it; I haven’t been paying much attention lately to what’s happening in b-to-b social media land for the simple reason that I haven’t seen anything interesting and practical that can help our clients. Instead, I see the same people trotting out the same ideas and case studies, mainly around gaining more leads, increasing customer satisfaction and, everybody’s favorite, “driving engagement.” Do I sound jaded and cynical yet? Actually, I’m not at all. These days, I find that most innovation is happening at large tech-company clients — even some with three-letter-acronym brand names — companies that most people view as somewhat conservative.
Continue Reading....Salesforce.com Launches Marketing Cloud
- 20th September 2012
Salesforce.com announced the launching of Marketing Cloud, on Wednesday, September 19, during the company’s Dreamforce 2012 event in San Francisco. This should really be called the “Social Marketing Cloud,” as it combines the two recent social acquisitions made by Salesforce.com – Radian6 and Buddy Media – to form a new social marketing software suite. The Marketing Cloud uses the Buddy Media interface for content publishing and the Radian6 tool for monitoring and measurement. How can this combined solution benefit b-to-b organizations?
Continue Reading....Social Strategy: What’s Your Policy?
- 17th September 2012
We’ve gotten many questions lately about what types of documents are required to support a social strategy. What I typically see, at first, is a single, lengthy social strategy document that tries to cover as much ground as possible. Over the course of our work and review process, this is broken down into the following three types of working documents, each with a clear intention, target audience and unique set of inputs and components.
Continue Reading....You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby
- 6th September 2012
Marketing, over the past 10 years, has undergone a women’s-lib-esque transformation – shifting from a focus on brand and production value to demand creation and lead generation. The tools and technologies that support the modern marketer are less about design and more about measurement. We operate less on gut instinct and more on predictive outcomes. We’ve come a long way, baby…. There is a dangerous non sequitur in this evolution: the implication that a tactic’s measurability is directly proportional to its value and impact. This type of thinking not only puts almost all reputation-oriented spend at risk, it also reinforces old habits that many organizations are hoping to change, such as the shift from traditional marketing to a more inbound-oriented approach. Philosophically and intuitively, most marketers understand the value of inbound in terms of efficiency and effectiveness but remain stuck in their old patterns of behavior because traditional marketing is easier to measure.
Continue Reading....CMOs See New and Changing B-to-B Marketing Roles
- 28th August 2012
Earlier this year SiriusDecisions tapped into its CMO and marketing leader network for a snapshot of the b-to-b marketing roles they had either created or eliminated in the past year. Social media, customer marketing and marketing technology were the newly created roles cited most often.
Continue Reading....Social Media Monitoring Isn’t Dead, It Just Smells Funny
- 22nd August 2012
We’ve long advocated that monitoring and listening to social channels is the foundation of any social media strategy. Without at least a minimum understanding of how your customers, prospects, competitors and influencers use social media – and the sites they frequent – you’re at a definite disadvantage. With the availability of many free or low-cost monitoring tools, there is really no excuse not to employ some type of monitoring solution internally, even if you rely on an agency for listening. I guarantee that most of your competitors are doing social listening, regardless of how conservative or regulated you may believe your market to be. But social media monitoring alone will do little beyond give you a lot of data that still requires some level of effort to uncover the gems within. A social media monitoring tool may provide some structure and dashboards for this data, but does it provide analysis and insight to raise your level of social intelligence?
Continue Reading....Social Strategists: Movin’ On Up
- 15th August 2012
What we’ve seen over the past five years of social evolution has been nothing short of radical. It’s the relatively quick shift from the perception of Twitter as a silly, frivolous task for interns to muck around with, to the realization that social media can and should be integral to the way we operate as marketing professionals. What I’m beginning to see now is even more interesting – and extreme: the emergence of more and more social strategists, with a wide variety of titles, outside of marketing (and sometimes even in senior-level management). For a role that just four years ago was largely filled by transient intern populations, this is a noteworthy shift.
Continue Reading....Balancing Governance and Enablement
- 6th July 2012
For too long, brand governance functions have been viewed as bottlenecks to be avoided instead of resources to be sought after. This has never been a productive approach, but at a time when many organizations struggle to inspire employees to be active on behalf of the brand, it is now downright counterproductive.
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