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
In a previous post, I outlined the first three of the top five best practices of social media for business. In summary, it is important that you research and develop a social media strategy, dedicate enough time and resources and remember the three R’s: Respect, reflect and respond. In this post, I discuss the remaining two.
4) Measure your social media activities to determine business value
In measuring your social media efforts, it is imperative that you begin by establishing your goals or benchmarks. There are no universally applicable benchmarks to strive for, only your own aspirations for establishing or furthering your brand through social media. Without clear benchmarks, you have no way of determining what kind of data you need and have nothing to compare your data against.
Most businesses are interested in measuring how their social media presence has contributed to an increase in leads, sales, brand awareness and loyalty, and how it has aided their customer service. This is accomplished by analyzing the results provided by measurement tools. A simple Google search will turn up a plethora of measurement tools that can measure your social media account’s total page views, connections, engagement, referrals and conversions. I will discuss how to analyze this data to compare your businesses’ social media success against benchmarks in an upcoming post.
5) Follow through once you’ve started and stick with it
You’ve set up your social media accounts and tried your best to establish a presence but for whatever reason failed to succeed in hitting your benchmarks. Let me make one thing very clear: This does not mean it is quitting time. Abandoning your social media accounts without providing a reason will appear to your community that you are ignoring them and reverse whatever advancements you have made in developing a positive reputation for your brand on this channel. An outdated business blog or Twitter account conveys that your business is having difficulty managing its social media interests and staying on top of key issues in your space. Because your foray into social media was well planned and well thought out, your community active and well defined and your business processes aligned with keeping content current and relevant, your reasons for ceasing communication on this channel should be compelling to your community. If you were persuaded that social media was going to help build your profile, and provide you with a good communication channel with your audience, what changed to convince you otherwise? Perhaps your experience would make for a useful case study on social media.
What do you think? Do you agree or disagree with these points? Are there other practices that you think should have made the top five?
By Alexandra Reid
Earlier this year, it was predicted that 2010 would be the year that social media goes mainstream for business. Nine months or so later, this statement has proved to be partially true. Companies both large and small have flocked to social media platforms as ways to engage online audiences, listen to their patrons and drive sales. However, while major brands such as Dell, Ford, Comcast and Starbucks have devoted significant resources to develop far-reaching and long-term social media programs, it appears the majority of smaller businesses are still hesitating to get on board.
A University of Maryland study revealed that the adoption by small businesses of social media platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Foursquare, has doubled in the last year to 24 per cent from 12 per cent. This increase is quite drastic and signals the growing influence that social media is having on everyday business activities. However, the overall number of small businesses taking on social media activities is still relatively small, suggesting that many are struggling to implement social media tactics on their own.
Despite whatever fears or excuses these businesses may have, it is to their detriment to ignore the benefits that social media can provide for their businesses. In terms of marketing reach, an online study of 37, 600 Internet users in 54 countries revealed that 61.4 per cent of active Internet users managed a profile on at least one social account. Furthermore, over the last year, the proportion of net users connecting with a brand in social networks has increased to 30 per cent from 20 per cent, demonstrating an increase in demand from customers that their favourite brands be active users of social media sites.
As it is my job to teach businesses how to develop and implement successful social media plans, I thought I would offer some guidance to those businesses that I haven’t had the pleasure of working with yet. Here are the first three of my top five best practices for businesses interested in participating in social media. Next week, I’ll post the remaining two.
1) Research and develop a social media strategy
Before embarking on your social media activities, you need to observe and listen to your competition and target audiences. To develop a community around your brand, it is important that you gain a keen understanding of the types of topics being discussed, the language and style of dialogue being used and the individuals who are leading the conversations in your market. Search for these people and relevant conversations by entering keywords that represent your market into the search boxes on various social media sites such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Foursquare. It is also important to search the blogosphere, which you can do through search engines such as Technorati, BlogCatalog and Google.
In developing a strategy for your social media activities, it is important that you understand that social media accounts should be approached collaboratively. All accounts must express the same vision and must be maintained and updated equally to avoid mixed messages being delivered about your brand to your audience. Your online presence should be far-reaching yet connective to help channel audiences to your products and services.In developing your strategy, you must determine your audience, goal and action plan that should involve the adoption of management and measurement tools to compare results against benchmarks, which I will further explain later in this post. Agencies such as inmedia can help you develop a social media strategy for your business.
2) Dedicate enough time and resources
The purpose of developing a social media action plan is to generate a large and active online community around your brand. Make sure you are prepared to manage this community when it develops by determining how much time and resources you will need to commit to the project. You need to choose the social media platforms on which your business should be active, who will be in charge of managing the accounts, what type and how much content you will need to produce, how often you will post content and the tools you will use to manage your community.
Hiring a community manager to take on social media activities on behalf of your brand is a great way to ensure continuous participation. Agencies, such as inmedia, that have new media capabilities can help with this. In dedicating the time and resources, it is important to consider the “return on avoiding pain” as an additional measurement to ROI: one of social media’s greatest assets is the ability it provides brands to intervene in times of crisis for damage control and reputation management.
3) Remember the three R’s: Respect, reflect and respond
In any sort of dialogue, whether it’s face-to-face or digital, respect is of utmost importance in ensuring that all commentary is sincere, insightful and sound. You must listen to your audience and encourage a free-flow of opinions. Don’t be afraid of “bad” comments because if they’re not saying it to you, they’re likely saying it to someone else. By being informed about criticisms, you are better equipped to make things right.
Reflect on all comments to ensure you reply in a respectful and helpful manner. You should use this as an opportunity to show off the human side of your business, so make sure you are transparent in your objectives and identity. You must never, ever, be salesy when communicating through social media, even though your social media goal may be to increase sales for your business. Instead, offer helpful advice and information that indirectly adds value to your products and services. Engage with your community to encourage their loyalty.
Respond to comments with timely and interesting content to establish thought leadership and brand awareness. Provide your followers with the most direct form of customer service. Through social media, you have the opportunity to win the hearts and minds of millions. Get over your fears and take it on with confidence.
Let me hear your thoughts. What practices are you following as you develop your business’s social media activities?
By Alexandra Reid
There is no doubt that the digitization of business has put enormous pressure on professionals to do increasingly more work in far less time. Adding just one more task to your already busy workday is seemingly impossible so certainly undertaking something as demanding as new media is completely out of the question, right?
Although new media hits my sweet spot, I’m not about to sugarcoat it. New media takes a lot resourcing, especially the time required to create content.
However, being busy is also not an excuse to avoid new media anymore. Your community expects it and it is likely that your competitors are already in the game. Besides, the benefits of new media can be too compelling for you to dismiss considering it just because of time constraints. Brand promotion, SEO, on-the-spot customer service and feedback, networking and lead generation are just a handful of the advantages you will reap from being actively involved in new media. So why not give it a shot?
I am a firm believer that successful new media engagement is achievable by any business, no matter how busy, so long as there is a clear plan and a good support system in place. The beautiful thing here is that, as new media channels increase in popularity, support systems have been coming up roses specifically to help you fit new media into your busy work schedule. From advice offered in blogs and white papers to new tools, to teams of people who will literally do the work for you, businesses can now enjoy all the benefits of new media with far greater simplicity.
Here are five simple ways that any business can be successful in new media.
1) Employ a community manager
Community managers are employed specifically for their communication skills and their ability to provide a human voice for a company. With customers expecting more and more from companies regarding their willingness to listen and engage in conversation, it is becoming more valuable for companies to employ community managers to build and maintain long lasting relationships in this way. Community managers should understand the company’s vision and be well connected to company employees at all levels in order to direct messages of importance to the appropriate people and ensure these messages are answered. Once a community is established, community managers can be extremely valuable in brand building, customer service and damage control.
2) Hire an agency with new media abilities
Whether your community manager is internal or part of your external agency team, there are other services available from external agencies on an as-needed basis. Agencies can help you build and maintain an online community by crafting an overall strategy, crafting your new media accounts and content, monitoring your online conversations and engaging with your audience. Executing a successful social media program requires continuous engagement over the long haul, making it vital that a long-lasting agreement be established between any company and agency. Learn about inmedia‘s capabilities in this area in this post.
3) Allow your employees to have access to new media during work time
Blocking access does not keep employees off new media sites so why not steer their engagement to your advantage? Employees need to be trained and educated on the best practices of new media participation to both encourage them to endorse their businesses’ brand among their online communities and to avoid making damaging statements about their company. Staff using new media are also able monitor online conversations and deliver messages of importance to the right people. It is vital to know if negative comments are being said about your business or brand in order to develop a plan for damage control.
4) Optimize your new media engagement
If you are feeling overwhelmed by the immensity of new media and are running on a tight schedule, it is important that you optimize your engagement by determining your audience, your goal and your action plan. Agencies, such as inmedia, can help you through this process.
5) Use the tools available
There are a number of tools available to help you manage your new media engagement.
Google Reader: If you are going to use new media, it is important that you participate in the blogophere. Google Reader helps pull all your favourite blogs into one place, group them into categories and skim the headlines of the latest posts to ensure you don’t miss anything.
Hootsuite: Integrates several accounts such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter and allows you to update everything at once. It also allows you to view statistics from your tweets and send messages from the same area.
Tweetdeck: Is a desktop management application that allows you to update several sites at one time.
Tweepi: Is a web-based Twitter tool that sorts through your followers to see whose Twitter accounts have gone stale and allows you to easily un-follow these people.
Google Analytics: Allows you to analyze your web traffic. It reports how many people are coming to your site from various new media platforms and which search terms people are using to find your website.
Delicious: Lets you save all the website and articles online that you want to read later while it also allows you to see what other people are reading.
I am interested in hearing what you have to say. Why do you think businesses feel discouraged from using new media? Do you have any other suggestions for businesses on a tight schedule int
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.
