By Linda Forrest
Let’s face it: there’s a delicate balance between cool and commerce. New media arrived on the scene like an irreverent, insouciant prat, thumbing its nose at the “old” way of doing things, and this includes marketing. That new media would spell the end for traditional media has been a much ballyhooed topic these past few years. While the death of traditional media has been overstated, the adoption of so-called 2.0 communications modes certainly shook things up from a marketing perspective.
No longer are customers – whether B2B or B2C – content to have information solely pushed at them, rather they want to participate in the meaningful exchange of information and, in most instances, pull the relevant information to them. It’s up to marketers to make sure that the pertinent information is available on all channels that make sense, and to respond quickly to reputation-threatening information.
One thing that most definitely hasn’t changed is that businesses need to make money in order to survive. Twitter is no different.
Having survived for several years on no revenue, it was time for the company to fish or cut bait and so it took a page from its media predecessors and started to sell advertising. No longer was one’s Twitterstream the providence of the free-thinking and radical sticking it to the proverbial “man.” It became a marketing channel like any other, where companies, for the right price, could promote their Tweets to prospective customers.
While users might complain loudly about this interruption of their streams by corporate raiders, or roll their eyes at the suggestions for who to follow, Promoted Tweets represent a great opportunity for brands, and here’s why.
The recent noise level on Twitter reminds me of MP3.com in its heyday. It was a free-for-all where there was so much content and no way for content creators to effectively market their wares. As a result of the amplification of everything, it was very difficult for users to hear anything. With the adoption of a Promoted Tweets option, there’s a mechanism for brands to rise above the noise. The reputation management opportunities presented by Promoted Tweets are phenomenal.
Examine Twitter’s old way of doing things. Let’s say a brand experiences a potentially damaging incident that effects numerous consumers. The brand could issue a Tweet that suggests they’re working to rectify the problem, what reparations are underway, where users can seek more information, etc. Problem is, with no way to make those Tweets “stick” to the top of the Twitterstream, they can be quickly overtaken by user-generated Tweets with relevant keywords and hashtags that contain potentially negative and damaging information. With Promoted Tweets, brands willing to pay the associated price can control their messaging on the channel, at least to some degree.
In my personal opinion, the suggestions for who to follow, just anecdotally, don’t pass muster, at least yet. Safe to assume that I will never follow AT&T’s @shareatt. Ever. It really makes me wonder what I’ve ever Tweeted that got me put on that list…
Product placement, when done poorly, is hideous. Agreed. The same will be true on Twitter. Brands looking to use this advertising (and let’s not mince words; this is advertising) to its fullest potential, should, as with any other channel, use it wisely. Target relevant information to actual prospects and customers. Spamming will get you nowhere.
Many are quick to jump on this initiative as Twitter having “sold out” but it will be interesting to see if indeed this move will save or destroy Twitter in the long term. With consistent revenue coming in and with brands able to better use the channel as part of their marketing budgets, my money’s on save.
By Alexandra Reid
To everyone who stopped by on Tuesday to read part one of this series, welcome back. For those of you who are just jumping in, you can read part one here. In summary, I examined how social media could benefit the entire B2B revenue cycle by enabling businesses to attract and nurture anonymous prospects and maintain and develop customer loyalty.
Today, I’ll explain three other ways that social media can benefit the B2B revenue cycle, namely by facilitating social validation, inbound marketing and advertising.
Social validation
A huge number of prospects are directed to businesses through word-of-mouth recommendations. According to a Wall Street Journal study, 92 percent of respondents have more confidence in information found online than they do in anything from a salesclerk or other source. As social networks allow individuals to vote, rank and comment on products and services online, they play an integral role in influencing B2B purchasing decisions through social validation. Always bear in mind the important role that word-of-mouth recommendations throughout your social media activities can play in helping to increase the credibility of your brand and to dispel the uncertainties of your prospects during the buying process.
Engaging a community around your brand through social media is an excellent way to encourage individuals to speak well of your products and services and highly rank them within their networks. Note that the key word here is “engage,” not “broadcast.” Your community will be immediately turned off of your brand if you use social networks to broadcast only your own messages. Instead, spend time listening to the comments and conversations of prospects, customers and other individuals in your marketplace, reflect on helpful and relevant suggestions that could potentially solve their queries and respond in a timely and respectful manner.
It is also important to understand that even brands with big communities have their critics. Despite what many people believe, opening up your sites to receive criticism is a good idea. As I mentioned in a previous post, you should not be afraid of “bad” comments, because if they’re not saying it to you, they’re likely saying it to someone else. By engaging with these critics, you are better equipped to make things right. Furthermore, by allowing individuals to rate and review your products on your website and social media sites, you’re demonstrating that you value transparency and are open to criticism, which are great ways to show your prospects that you can be trusted as a vendor.
Inbound marketing
This practice focuses on getting found by prospects through channels such as social media, word-of-mouth recommendations and search engine optimization, or SEO. Inbound marketing is particularly valuable because prospects coming through these channels are usually already interested in the brands they are seeking. Businesses that actively engage in social media increase their chances of turning prospects into qualified opportunities on two fronts:
First, because search engines rank sites based on traffic volume, businesses that actively engage with online audiences through social media have higher SEO. The higher your page rank on search engines, the easier it is for prospects to find you.
Second, once these prospects have found your business, social media plays another role in addressing their perception of risk during the buying process. Providing prospects with information outside the traditional sales or marketing context can help dispel their uncertainties about your brand.
Advertising
Social networking sites such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook offer tremendous opportunities to advertise your brand organically through status updates. Although some businesses have deemed social networks to be a big waste of time for employees, teaching your employees how to responsibly manage their social media presence among various sites can actually be good for business because you can access a wider audience through your employee’s connections.
Each time you have an important announcement to make about your business, or you publish new content on your corporate blog, get your employees to Tweet it, or mention it in an engaging way on their Facebook and LinkedIn accounts. As these status updates are likely to be posted from personal accounts, it is a good idea to have someone oversee this process. A community manager can be useful in both educating your employees on social media best practices and overseeing social media activity. inmedia currently has a community manager for hire who can help you with your businesses’ social media endeavours.
In promoting your brand through social media, it is imperative that you be transparent in your intentions and only share content that engages your following and encourages interaction. For example, instead of simply broadcasting your business’s achievements, ask your followers a question related to the achievement to encourage their response. Make sure someone qualified is available to receive and offer comments to these responses to develop an intriguing conversation.
Now it’s your turn. Do you have any additional suggestions on how social media can benefit the B2B revenue cycle?
By Alexandra Reid
As online activity rapidly moves towards social media, it seems that B2B is beginning to catch up with its B2C cousins in getting onboard. According to a Forrester study, 77 per cent of B2B technology decision-makers are now active in social media. With the immense opportunities that social media provides businesses for brand building, customer relations and lead generation, social media platforms and tools are becoming increasingly unavoidable if B2B businesses are to maintain relevancy within their marketplaces. Although online marketing through more traditional digital methods like email, pay-per-click advertising and dissemination of press releases are all still part of the marketer’s toolbox, social media sites such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube and Slideshare are responsible for an increasing amount of the B2B interactions on the web.
However, the great majority of B2B businesses are still novices when it comes to social media, as another report shows that 73 per cent have less than two years of social media marketing experience. With limited experience comes fear of the unknown and avoidance of social media tools that might appear to be more complex. As reported by eMarketer, half of business-oriented marketers are avoiding blogging and Tweeting altogether. As prospects are more likely to get word-of-mouth recommendations by clicking through to third-party reviews or blog postings, avoidance of any widely used social media tool could cause you to miss out on leads, important comments about your products and services and the ability to establish thought leadership in your industry.
In this post, I’ll explain how social media benefits the B2B revenue cycle. On Thursday, I’ll discuss how social media is integral to facilitating B2B social validation, inbound marketing and advertising.
Social media attracts and nurtures leads throughout the entire revenue cycle
Starting before prospects are even recognized as leads and continuing on long after they become customers, social media plays an integral role in attracting and maintaining patrons of your brand. The modern practice of lead nurturing, which involves building relationships with qualified prospects regardless of their timing to buy, has added a highly personal and interactive layer to the earlier practice of reaching out to every prospect regardless of their level of interest or qualification, via mass marketing, advertising and branding. Today, B2B buyers are using social media to inform themselves about products and services much earlier in the buying process and to negotiate sales on their own terms and timelines. It is therefore vital that sellers incorporate social media engagement into their entire revenue cycle.
Seed nurturing
Before you even have the contact information of qualified prospects, they are educating themselves on your products and services by coming to your website and social media sites to read third-party reviews and word-of-mouth recommendations. Use this opportunity to build your relationship with these prospects. Offer them free and valuable content through corporate blogs and social media sites to draw them to your products and services.
It doesn’t matter that you’re enabling these prospects to remain anonymous by offering this content without requiring contact information in exchange. Providing valuable content will build up your readership and attract quality prospects that will initiate business deals when they become interested. Engage them by actively commenting and responding to comments related to your marketplace across multiple social media sites. For example, LinkedIn offers immense opportunities to engage in specific marketplaces through their Groups and Answers categories. The goal is to establish thought leadership and credibility and begin to develop relationships among prospects in the online community. If properly nurtured, these prospects can become inbound leads. Agencies such as inmedia can help you create the content required to establish thought leadership among online communities and attract qualified prospects to your brand.
Prospect nurturing
Social media can also be used for building and maintaining relationships with known prospects. It is important for maintaining your brand’s relevancy that you constantly monitor social media conversations and engage with prospects across multiple social media platforms. If you come across comments or conversations that express a negative sentiment towards your brand, you can use this as an opportunity to interject and offer solutions as a means of damage control. You can also gain a better understanding of the buying potential of prospects by comparing their attitude towards your brand as expressed through social media to other engagement activities such as email, downloads, web page visits and click-throughs. Agencies such as inmedia can help you with the social media activities required to nurture prospects.
Customer nurturing
The relationships of existing customers should also be nurtured through social media as they offer huge potential for consistent as well as new revenue. You should use social media to reaffirm customer purchases during the critical time between the purchasing decision and the official closing of a deal. Creating fresh, quality content and maintaining relationships with customers through actively commenting and replying through social media can also help you cross and up-sell additional products and strengthen customer loyalty. Throughout this process, you should be listening to your customers’ online conversations for new needs, endorsements and even disappointment with your products or services, as it is likely that many of your existing customers aren’t going to tell you these things directly.
How is your business using social media to attract prospects? Do you have any case studies that you would like to share? Do you agree with these points, or do you have your own suggestions?
By Alexandra Reid
The challenge of incorporating exciting new-media and social-media channels into traditional PR practices has been the subject of a great deal of debate in the PR industry and the source of a lot of consternation among clients. It has left a lot of people lost, confused and scrambling. For many, it’s as if this new technology crept up and pounced on them in the middle of the night. If you’re feeling perplexed as you try to figure out just how new media should be strategically deployed for business, rest assured that you’ve now got support
inmedia recently hired me as its community manager specifically to help clients incorporate new media activities into their broader PR and marketing strategies.
Many businesses wonder why, despite all their efforts in new media, they still haven’t managed to turn followers and connections into customers. Many have also experienced those horrifying moments where harmful conversations develop about their brand while they don’t have any strategy in place to douse the flames.
That’s why it’s imperative that businesses have a well-thought-out plan before starting any new media endeavour.
As a PR agency with the capabilities of a new media agency, that’s where we can help.
inmedia has been modelling best practices in new media for more than a decade and we have the expertise to prepare and execute new media strategies. Not only can we develop strategies for our clients, we can also implement these strategies on behalf of clients.
We found the transition to new media to be rather easy because we didn’t have to alter our existing practices. Let me explain this point because it is exactly this transition that bedevils many PR agencies.
PR has always been about managing relations with various publics. Going a step further, true PR has always been about building bi-directional channels that require PR practitioners to listen, understand and respond to public concerns and viewpoints in order to forge meaningful relationships between businesses and consumers. It has always been part of our job to bring the public perspective to an organization to enable it to be responsive to public concerns.
inmedia has always taken a highly personal approach to PR and these skills naturally transferred over to new media. This was no stretch, but a seamless extension of what we were already doing. We adapted our existing skills as we saw new outlets become available.
For example, even before Peter Merholz coined the term “blog” in 1999, we were already using the highly personalized approach necessary to be successful in new media. Unlike a lot of PR agencies, we have always taken a highly targeted approach to media relations that places a premium on knowing the target journalist and why she or he would be interested in our client’s story. This approach seamlessly and effectively transferred to pitching bloggers.
Even before the term “social media release” was coined by new-media thought leaders Tom Foremski, Todd Defren, Chris Heuer and Shel Holtz, we were incorporating its elements into our media outreach. In 2007, for example, when we were managing the global launch of the world’s most advanced prosthetic hand, the i-LIMB Hand, for British client Touch Bionics, we uploaded a video onto YouTube that yielded 100,000 views within a month. We also uploaded a slew of photographs on Flickr, which developed into an active social site for the amputee patient community. Other elements, now seen as part of a complete social media release, were made available on the company’s website.
As larger numbers of useful new channels become available, we are incorporating them into our outreach efforts by sifting through social media and other sites to find the appropriate channels to which we can offer meaningful content and start a conversation.
Now we’re going one step further. After years of looking at the evolution of our PR agency’s use of new media, we are persuaded that there is a new role for us to play – to help clients build the capacity to effectively use social media.
For some time now, we have been researching and developing new media strategies to guide our clients in the building and management of their own social media sites and online communities. Increasingly, with clients that don’t have their own internal resources or know how to use social media sites, we now are also doing at least the heavy lifting of monitoring and identifying opportunities to engage, if not the whole job of also developing and posting content and responding to feedback.
As long as we are authentic and honest, we don’t feel that there’s much of a difference between writing an article for a trade publication under our client’s byline — something that PR agencies have been doing for decades — and representing our clients’ voices in new media or Tweeting on their behalf.
As I continue my work with inmedia in building out our social media practice, I’d love to hear your thoughts regarding PR agencies adopting new practices.
By Linda Forrest
I’m torn about Disney’s new “Let the Memories Begin” marketing initiative that utilizes real families’ photos and videos as a means to market their theme parks. Regular folk can upload their “memories” to be used royalty-free in any manner of marketing that Disney sees fit.
Full disclosure, I’m a Disney nut. By total coincidence, I may or may not be listening to the Walt Disney World soundtrack as I type this. My husband and I got married at Walt Disney World (no, Mickey didn’t perform the ceremony), and we travel to the Happiest Place on Earth as often as we can.
Like almost every other family that visits a Disney park, we come home with hundreds of vacation photos and videos of ourselves having a wonderful time, of our young son meeting his favourite characters, of the scenery and of events like the fireworks, parades and so on.
I definitely see the appeal from a consumer standpoint of having our pictures projected onto the castle, or to see our perfect wedding recognized as the ideal, to have our son’s beautiful smile as he met Mickey posted near and far for everyone to see. But from a professional standpoint, I fear the trend of “reality advertising” will not stand the marketing industry in good stead over the long term.
As a self-proclaimed casualty of the music industry, where copyright interests (read: revenue streams) in sound recordings fell by the wayside as illegal downloading became more pervasive, and as a watcher of all things media, where my television is filled with either unpaid or modestly rewarded people I could also likely see at the grocery store, I perceive this shift to a more “socialized” advertising approach setting a dangerous trend.
The fact that a large company with multi-billion dollar revenue has effectively found a way to circumvent spending money on creative content will, in my opinion, not bode well for the marketing companies that provide similar services to clients that most likely don’t have the same budgets as Disney.
This predicament reminds me of a fairly recent construct in the music business, that of the 360-degree contract that incorporates many of the revenue-generating activities of artists – artist management, recording, touring and merchandising – under one contract managed by one company. When the Madonnas and Robbie Williams’ of the world signed the first of these contracts, it scared the bejeezus out of me and I was convinced that the trickle down of this would negatively impact artists.
While I give full marks to the enterprising companies that came up with this approach, predominantly record companies that saw their revenues shrinking while artists continued to make money from live performances and t-shirt sales and discovered a way to get their hands into those pots, it’s the artists who suffer the financial repercussions. Who cares if Madonna’s giving up a percentage of her t-shirt sales when she’s got money to burn; it’s when the contract becomes the industry norm covering independent artists who rely on that t-shirt money to fill their gas tanks or their hungry bellies that the truly insidious nature of the agreement is realized. Williams himself later went on the record saying that his signing of this sort of agreement had been a bad idea that stifled him creatively. In fact, he compared his contractual obligations, ones that ran counter to his artistic integrity, to “slavery.” Harsh words indeed.
In the marketing and advertising realm, the internal teams at Disney or their multi-million dollar agency will not feel a pinch. But when mom-and-pop shops start to decide they can take these matters into their own hands rather than deal with professionals, our industry will suffer and we’ll have yet another obstruction to eliminate on our road to selling our services.
