Social Media: Whose Brand Is It? A Contrarian View

Fortune Magazine August 16 2010 Issue

This week’s Fortune Magazine has a very interesting article in its career section titled “Building Your Brand (and keeping your job)” by Jost Hyatt. Are you a senior level marketer in an company that is moving quickly into social media? If so, this article should be on your critical reading list. Here’s why (excerpted from the article):

“When Monty joined Ford, he brought with him 3,500 Twitter followers; he now counts 41,000, conceding that many of those came with the big blue oval logo that now accompanies his tweets.”

“And he’s kept his Twitter handle as @scottmonty rather than adding the Ford brand. ‘I was Scott Monty before I came to Ford, and I’ll be Scott Monty after I leave Ford,’ he says.”

Scott Monty's Twitter Profile

And he is absolutely correct… when he leaves Ford, he takes all the brand equity from his social media efforts with him. Well, maybe not all but certainly a lot.  This is not a criticism of Scott in any way, just a social media tactic that is going to back fire with a lot of companies as the economy gets better and people start changing companies again.

As we wrote in an earlier blog post, Walking Out the Door with the Twitter Password, organizations must have a plan for social media and turnover of employees. But we didn’t go in to the brand equity and ownership issue. So with the above article as an example, here are our thoughts.

Contrary to popular opinion that brands are owned by everyone in the world of social media and that organizations should give up control, we argue that this advice results in companies giving away valuable assets. The number one objective for using social media from a brand perspective should be to build the importance of the brand in the audience’s thoughts. That’s why marketers use advertising to build awareness, coupons to build trial use, and consistency in branding to build a relationship with consumers. In B2B terms, it’s still about awareness but the relationship factor becomes even more important. With all of the money spent by marketers to build their brands, enhance them, and promote them, why would they let the value slip away as someone walks out the door for a new position? But with the social media tactics promoted and utilized by so many, this is exactly what companies are doing.

“People forget that they are always representing their companies… If you send a tweet that says ‘My Boss sucks,’ you have to be aware of what could happen.” – Lucia Erwin, fomrerly H-P’s sr. director of strategic workforce planning

And here’s an example of how personal accounts acting as corporate accounts can back fire from the article:

“Amy D. was a social-networking expert at a marketing firm. She was just ‘letting out some frustration’ last year when she issued a tweet noting the irony that she was editing a presentation about social media for her boss who didn’t use it. She got fired shortly thereafter for violating a new communications policy.”

(Amy probably wasn’t a real social networking expert because that was such a rookie mistake. But that is another story about our industry all together…)

So what is a company to do? Well, for one rethink this tactic. Think about the number of cases where an employee has tweeted, added to their wall, or commented on a blog inappropriately or worse in a way critical of the brand. It’s easy to write these off as isolated instances, but it happens a lot. That’s why companies institute social media policies for their organizaiton’s employees to follow. It gives them recourse and a limited amount of protection should they fire someone (as also mentioned in the article above).

A better tactic is to use the brand as the leader, not an individual. The account(s) are owned by the company, not the individual. The passwords are the property of the company. If the individual leaves, the account remains in tact but with a new author. Does the author get some credit? Sure, in the profile section of the company brand’s account. For example, the account for your product could be titled “AcmeWidgets” with a profile that states “AcmeWidgets provides product information and company communications. Our account is written and managed by JoAnn Smith, an Acme employee with six years of experience in the Widget Industry.” (See our Twitter account profile as an example: @ImpactInteract.)

That way, the focus of your company’s social media efforts remains on the brand not on the personality of the employee. It also gives credit to your employee, but allows your company to switch out the author at any time without losing your audience. 

While some ‘gurus’ and social media ‘experts’ will argue about transparency or being authentic here, this tactic is transparent/authentic, it gives your company a social media voice, and it allows for a measure of protection of your most valuable asset…. your brand.

Sometimes, it pays to follow a contrarian idea and go against the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ especially if it involves maintaining your brand’s position and standing in an ever growing social world.


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This entry was posted on Monday, August 9th, 2010 at 5:00 am and is filed under Best Practices, Social Media Trends. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Global View – The World Cup & Social Media

                                                           

 

 

Image Courtesy of Adidas.com

Over the past several weeks, we’ve been focused on the World Cup as has most of the world. But as we’ve been drawn into the fever, the controversies (Goal – England!), and the off-beat (Miniskirt scandal), we’ve also been working on several large global projects for our clients around the world. And just as you watch for the details of how your team won or lost, our clients have been watching to see how they will win or lose. Because, in global social media and online communities your team can’t take a dive to stop the action or disrupt the play. Instead you must be focused on the details and the flow of your effort.

By details, we mean not just the players but their skills. In the social media world that means understanding that Twitter in Japan is big and growing, but it is pretty much ignored in Italy. So in Japan, you want Twitter on your team. In Italy, we’ll let’s just say that we’d put Twitter on the bench for at least the first half. Facebook in Germany is a big scoring striker for the B2C focused company, but in B2B it’s a ball boy. While over in Japan, Facebook wouldn’t make the team. So as you look to expand globally, research your offerings in terms of your audience. It will help a lot in terms of the results you’ll achieve (or miss)… each player has a role in the game and on the team. Don’t offer up each player as a starter when some should be on the bench.

For online communities, the make up of your team is just as vital. But so is your coach who is focusing on the details of the game’s strategy & tactics while also being the one keeping their eye on the details. For example, your coach should understand that even though many platforms are able to work in a double byte language like Japanese, the audience may want both Japanese and English titles when using your community. Each of those little buttons that perform a task on the site must also be in the local language, yet often they remain in English. The devil is in the details…

We’re excited by the recent interest in globalization of social media and online communities by our clients and prospects. But just as regionalism really isn’t dead in the U.S., differences in cultures are far greater than the differences in languages alone. Don’t expect that the offering you provide in English will translate across to your next targeted area. Instead, collaborate with your audience to define their needs and select the tools that will help them the most.

Afterall, fans follow teams where there are players they can relate to and admire, not teams that continually frustrate them…


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This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 30th, 2010 at 4:36 pm and is filed under Best Practices. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

B2B Social Media Best Practices: SAP Best Performance for Partners Program

Over the past several months, we’ve been helping SAP’s Partner Enablement team to understand how to use social media to further their goals of increasing partner sales and adding new partners to sell SAP software to the small and midsize enterprise (SME) market. Because there is a lot of confusion over using social media in a B2B setting, we’ve built a training methodology which takes the best practices from our ten years of experience in B2B social media and community work to simplify and help SAP’s partners.

The methodology is built around a very simple, yet powerful concept: Restaurant menus. Our training workshops provide teams with the questions that they must answer to successfully utilize social media. The goal is to clearly identify your strategy and objectives, then build a menu of tactics to support your effort.

So, are you a Pizzeria or a Fine Dining restaurant? Do you have a limited menu or an expansive menu with ever changing offerings (think of daily specials)? Does your audience have the time for a five course meal or do they want take out? Do you have multiple chefs or is there one person making your pizza?

By answering these and other questions, B2B teams begin to gain clarity in their objectives, audience, content strategy, and measurement requirements. Once we complete this session, we move into the tactical way to utilize social media in order to build out the menu of offerings.

Not all tactics are appropriate, nor does B2C social media strategy always deliver the intended results. By understanding how B2B social media tactics differ from B2C and work together to deliver results, our client SAP has generated significant results. In terms of helping partners succeed in a tough economy, it’s Best Performance for Partners social media program delivers training and information efficiently to help each partner organization succeed in meeting its revenue and lead generation objectives. For SAP, the partners who are participating are learning better ways of marketing and selling which benefits SAP directly in the form of revenue achievement.

For SAP, the Best Performance Challenge is an innovative way to build its partner channel competency each year. The Best Performance Circle, composed of the top partner organizations in EMEA and India, reinforces SAP’s commitment to its partners by using an online community to strengthen its relationship with a key part of its sales ecosystem.

The video below by Raimund Mollenhauer, Head of Enablement & Talent Net for SAP Partners, SME EMEA & Global describes how SAP is using Impact Interactions’ methodology today to deliver results:

The innovation continues at SAP with future roll-outs of additional Best Performance initiatives. Their use of social media not only speeds the adoption of these initiatives, but also delivers value to the partner channel in a cost effective manner.

To learn more about B2B social media best practices, our workshops, or social media for channel management, please contact us or ask a question here on this blog.


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This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 18th, 2010 at 10:38 am and is filed under Best Practices, Impact Interactions clients. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

B2B Social Media – Moving Beyond the Hype

Several of our team members were in London for the annual Internet World Exhibition held at Earls Court between April 27th and April 29th. As one of the few exhibitors and speakers in the B2B Social Media Industry at the show, we noticed a lot of confusion about using social media and what social media could do for a B2B focused organization.

For example, we noticed a large number of email vendors selling the idea that email is social media (it’s not). The idea of renting a list of unknown people to send your message to was presented as social media (it’s not). Lastly, there is so much confusion over using social media applications like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn for business that we spent much of our time helping people learn the basics of the applications and why they might want to consider using them.

But just as important to us, there were many people who were disappointed using social media as they didn’t get the results they wanted or thought that they would. Why? Because in most cases, their companies were using B2C techniques to engage with the B2B audience for their services. Many were following the common theme of retweeting others, constantly updating their Facebook pages with product information, building a network of as many followers as possible, and joining as many groups as they could on LinkedIn. And most of it was a gigantic waste of time.

The crowd comes into the theatre for my standing room only talk on B2B Social Media

At Internet World, I presented a short case for why B2B Social Media is very different from B2C. The presentation covered the idea that most people are focused on the tactics at the expense of their strategy by following the common wisdom of social media experts and gurus who only understand B2C marketing. B2C is concerned with building awareness, then trial. That’s why couponing is so effective for B2C. B2B is concerned with building relationships. It’s harder and takes much more time than B2C social media tactics. But in the end, it leads to tremendous value when executed properly.

You can download the presentation’s slides here: B2B Social Media – What Works 2010. The slides are helpful when viewing the actual presentation below: (Quick Note, the edited video below is courtesy of Seminar Streams, so you’ll have to register or log in to see the video. Or enter our username Impact and our password impact. The video will play right away and you won’t have to search for it.)

 

 

 

If you’d like to learn more about using B2B Social Media for lead generation, customer support, training, channel or partner management, or another specific purpose, please contact us.


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This entry was posted on Monday, May 10th, 2010 at 3:11 pm and is filed under Best Practices, Impact Interactions clients, Social Media Trends. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Determining Online Community ROI (Part 1: Community-Side Metrics)

by Matthew Lees

In recent months my research, writing, and client work has (happily) focused on one of the hottest topics in social media…calculating ROI. For a variety of reasons, determining quantifiable ROI of social media programs and online community initiatives presents a variety of challenges. There’s nothing new in this statement; people have been trying for years to make it easier to figure this out. But ROI keeps fighting back. It’s getting to the point, though, where business executives will be expecting a more quantified understanding of the impact customer communities, for example, are having on the bottom line. Knowing that it’s “the right thing to do” from a customer-centric perspective isn’t going to cut it much longer.

One of the challenges is the fact that some (or even most) of the information needed to measure ROI isn’t in a convenient location.

Last year in a post called “B2B Communities – What Works,” Mike Rowland discussed a handful of essential best practices for B2B communities. He wrote: “You can measure the ROI for B2B communities, but you cannot get there by using only community software metrics and/or web analytics packages like Omniture or Google Analytics. None of these provide true value metrics that have an economic value associated with them. To get to ROI, you must build relationships within your organization so you can obtain real data on customers, leads, ecommerce transactions, etc.”

Right on, Mike. To get at community ROI (whether for B2B, B2C, or any other type of community), you’ve got to track down data from several sources – particularly from sources that you probably don’t have direct control over or access to – which takes building relationships, making allies, and a bit of legwork.

Community-Side Metrics
The relatively straightforward part of the legwork compiling the data you do have direct access to. This is the information you can get from log files, your community platform database (often through an analytics dashboard), and, if you use one, a third-party analytics package (such as Google Analytics or Omniture). The types of things available from these community-side sources include:

•    Traffic and Usage. Pages served, page views, visits (and unique visits), time on site, etc.
•    Membership. Total members, new members, active members, reputation and ranks, etc.
•    Activity. Posts, comments, ideas, invitations, votes, ratings, subscriptions/notifications, downloads, views (e.g., of video clips), time between posts, etc.
•    Search. Both quantity of searches and specific search terms (such as top 20 search terms)
•    Other. Moderation (e.g., moderator touches), referrer pages, etc.

Ideally you’ll be able to break down this data based on important parameters, such as time and location within the community. For example, you’ll probably want to look at the all-time number of members, as well as the number of members over a given time period (typically week-over-week or month-over-month). And you may want to look not only at total pages served within the community, but also at pages served within particular areas (such as forums, blogs, idea sites, and so on).

Community-side metrics can be very useful, but, as Mike wrote, they don’t illustrate economic value. At least, not in and of themselves. They’re certainly useful in terms of knowing whether or not the community is healthy (three consecutive months of decreasing page views, for example, might tell you that something is wrong), but they only get you part of the way toward determining ROI.

Up next…building relationships and doing the legwork to identify the business-side metrics that get you the rest of the way there.


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This entry was posted on Monday, April 26th, 2010 at 6:13 pm and is filed under Best Practices, Measurement & Reporting. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Baseball and Social Media Success: It’s the Little Things


by Matthew Lees

Springtime seems finally to be reaching the northern hemisphere in actuality, not just in name. The April rains that crossed the US have caused their shares of headaches (or worse), but they should eventually bring May flowers; school children are sensing they’re on the home stretch toward summer vacation; and baseball season is underway.

As social media analyst and baseball fan – I met my wife at Doc Gooden’s no-hitter in 1996 – I’ve often observed several similarities between the two realms, the most relevant of which is the importance that baseball and social media place on doing the little things well.

Baseball
Baseball is ultimately about the small moments. A game may ultimately hinge on a grounder that just glances off the diving second baseman’s glove with two outs in the 6th inning, an alert runner on second tagging up and taking third on a foul ball the right fielder catches halfway in the stands, or a sacrifice bunt that moves a runner into scoring position.

Sure, a game-winning three-run homer in the bottom of the 10th is exciting. Effective, too. But these don’t happen every day. More often than not it’s the small play, the play that goes unnoticed at the time, that makes the difference. Add these up over the course of a 162-game season, and it’s the little things that separate the playoff contenders from the “We’ll get ‘em next year” crew.

(The importance of the little things is the reason why there aren’t many great baseball movies. Baseball is about holding the runner on third base when there’s a grounder to first, fouling off four pitches before drawing a walk, and bringing in a relief pitcher an inning earlier than planned to give the starter’s sore arm a little more rest. And most of the time during a baseball game is spent with ostensibly little going on, with the inactivity is broken by intense bursts when the ball is put into play. But producers of baseball movies tend to require high drama, the 3-2 pitch with two outs in the bottom of the ninth that the aging slugger hammers into the center field seats. The pace and unpredictability of real baseball doesn’t play well in the theaters.)

Social Media
As with baseball, it’s the little things that matter in social media. For every video that goes viral – the social media equivalent, perhaps, of a home run – there thousands of seemingly insignificant interactions with customers in branded communities and throughout the social Web: the reply to a question in an online forum, the blog post that gets retweeted, the Facebook post that announces an upcoming event. It’s the aggregate of these day-to-day interactions between you and your customers, readers, subscribers, users, and partners that have the biggest long-term impact.

How? None of these actions is big or brash or glamorous. But they’re part of the slow and steady relationship building that, though unheralded, gets long-term results. The question you answer in the community forum could solve a customer’s problem without the need for them to call your contact center (thereby saving your company money while saving your customer the time and effort); the blog post you write could generate a conversation that sparks a new product idea; and the Facebook post could draw someone who eventually becomes a new customer.

If your social media initiative hits word-of-mouth gold, that’s great. But focusing your strategy on home runs is like stacking your baseball line-up with power hitters. You’ll get some dramatic wins, but be in last place at the end of the year.

It’s spring time, when everything can begin anew. And it’s the little things that matter most. Play ball!


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This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 20th, 2010 at 6:41 pm and is filed under Best Practices, Social Media Industry. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

What Have You Done For Your Community Lately?

If I could sum up the advice I gather from books and seminars about networking and building business relationships, whether it takes place on a social media site like “LinkedIn” or a face-to-face meeting, it would be this: “Ask not what your network can do for you, ask what you can do for your network.”

Now take that sentence and substitute the word “online community” for “network”. It still works. The members of a community are connecting to help each other professionally in some way. And they are certainly helping the sponsor of the community drive a business objective. Part of managing a community, just as in managing a network, is focusing on furthering the interests of the people you’re interacting with, rather on focusing solely on how they can help you.

I was reminded of this philosophy when I read “Seven Steps to Creating a B2B Community on Twitter.”  The article relays best practices for creating a relationship with your followers that is more about giving than taking to help build a thriving community.

What examples do you have of ways  you have created a win-win situation for your community members?


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This entry was posted on Friday, April 16th, 2010 at 3:21 pm and is filed under Best Practices. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Blogging for Business II – What to Look for in a Blogger

by Matthew Lees

In his post earlier this week (“Blogging For Business – B2B Best Practices”), Mike Rowland expertly covered a lot of ground in laying out best practices and benchmarks in running a successful blogging program. The “Ingredients” chart alone is worth the price of admission; I’ll bet a lot of people who run blogging programs that are successful now, only after a lot of fits and starts, wish they had information like that when things were starting out.

Some time ago I wrote about this topic for the Patricia Seybold Group (see “Best Practices in Corporate Blogging”). In reviewing that report, I found that there was just one aspect of B2B blogging in which I could add some value…regarding the bloggers themselves.

Who Should Blog?
There is no well-defined or industry-accepted profile of a B2B blogger, but certain characteristics and skills indicate the likelihood of success. Based on dozens of conversations with bloggers and sponsors of blogging programs, the following elements bubbled to the top. For the most part, B2B bloggers should:

  1. Genuinely care about what they do and what they’ll be writing about. Lack of interest shows. The most important thing for bloggers to bring to the table is a positive attitude. If they like what they do and enjoy the topics they’ll be writing about, they’ll probably be in good shape.
  2. Have some degree of expertise and experience in their subject area and with your company’s products and services. No surprise here. Bloggers need to know what they’re talking about. Note that this says “have some degree of expertise,” and not “be a full-fledged expert.” It’s fine for bloggers to admit they don’t know everything about their subject area. Doing so makes them more personable and can help generate buy-in from readers.
  3. Bring a particular perspective to the topics they’re writing about. Regurgitating what’s already out there may work once or twice, but, as they say in the newspaper biz, you gotta have an angle. (Well, they used to say that.) Advice commonly given to bloggers is to “be yourself.” That’s much easier said than done, but it’s relevant when it comes to finding their voice and their perspective. Once they’ve got it, though, it makes everything a whole lot easier.
  4. Have an interest in engaging with and learning from readers. One of the goals of blogging, of course, is to generate conversations. So, ideally some readers will comment on posts. It’s almost always beneficial to the blog and to the sponsoring organization when the blogger chimes in and responds to comments. And it’s a much more positive experience if they look forward to, are energized by, and learn from such conversations.
  5. Not be overly sensitive about criticism. It’s not that they shouldn’t care. It’s just that criticism, which can sometimes be intentionally or unintentionally harsh, shouldn’t bring bloggers down to the point where they get resentful. They don’t need rhino-thick skin, but should be able to take things in stride.
  6. Have some writing ability. Blog writing is definitely different from other forms of writing that business professionals tend to engage in. It’s more informal and conversational than technical documents, marketing plans, business proposals, and press releases, and it’s more structured than most business emails. Although it takes getting used to, most people who bring at least modest writing skills can eventually find their own successful blogging style if they’re engaged, determined, and well supported.

Bloggers don’t grow on trees, but they can be found just about anywhere in your organization. Getting the right people to blog is half the battle in running a successful B2B blogging program. (The other half is following best practices, such as Mike previously laid out.) There are thousands of B2B bloggers out there…but there’s always room for more.


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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 15th, 2010 at 9:12 pm and is filed under Best Practices. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Thinking Past the Community’s Launch: A Warning from “The Candidate”

by Matthew Lees

I’ve been working with a few clients on upcoming online community deployments. As with the launch of most any technology endeavor, particularly Web-related ones, the energy and excitement become palpable as the launch date approaches.

The weeks and months preceding the launch are full of planning meetings, discussions of issues that inevitably arise, all kinds of decisions by a dozen different people wearing a dozen different hats, technological configuration and development, graphical work, customer outreach, testing, and much more. Most of these things are geared toward getting the community looking and functioning the way everyone envisions it will, so that it’s ready when the flip is switched and it goes live.

But the community’s launch is just the beginning. It comes after a great deal of work by a dedicated team, but it’s really just Day 1 in terms of what the community is fundamentally about. All the effort is put ahead of time in because, starting on Day 2, people will be asking questions, giving answers, solving problems, holding conversations, voting in polls, sharing ideas, getting to know each other, observing, learning, and providing some value to each other and to the sponsoring organization.

One of my roles in working with clients is to prompt them to be ready for what will happen after launch. But not every community team is prepared for Day 2.

The laser-sharp focus on the launch of a community, sometimes to the exclusion of what will happen afterwards, always reminds me of the ending of the 1972 movie “The Candidate.” The film stars Robert Redford as Bill McKay, the son of a former popular governor who has never had any political aspirations of his own. Prompted by veteran campaign strategist Marvin Lucas (played by Peter Boyle — I sure miss him) to run for the California senate seat, he takes on the task with conflicted intentions. The movie follows the race from announcement to primary to election, into the first few moments after the outcome is decided.

It’s a brilliantly perceptive and energetic film with a lot to say not only about politics of the 1970s, but also about politics in any era. And it has a lot to say on paying too much attention to short-term objectives, potentially to the detriment of long-term goals.

The final scene is a classic. There’s an excellent overview of the movie at the Film Night at the Park site. This excerpt is from the last paragraph:

“And then there’s the final scene, considered by many to be one of the most powerful political statements made in a Hollywood film. When the circus is over, and everyone packs up to leave, only one question remains. And it remains to this day, hanging in the air…”

I can’t spoil that line here, of course. Best is to watch the entire movie, to get the full impact. (If more instant gratification is required, you can view the final scene on YouTube or read about it on Wikipedia. Do watch the movie at some point, though.)

But that question remains, too, hanging in the air after an online community launches. If you’ve done your planning for Day 2 and beyond, you’ll know the answer.

[Fade to black]


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This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 13th, 2010 at 6:36 pm and is filed under Best Practices. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Blogging For Business – B2B Best Practices

Many of our clients and visitors to our site have questions about blogging in the B2B marketing world. We believe that blogging is a very good solution for starting your interactive journey of engagement with your audience. But we also understand that there needs to be a focus on creating compelling content that helps your audience become informed about your products and service, demonstrate thought leadership, or meet other needs of your readers.

Too often we see a blog that is full of press releases from marcom teams that provides minimal value to the reader. What we mean by compelling content is a blog entry that provides unique viewpoints from executives about industry trends, macro-economic issues which impact the industry, or industry developments. That does not mean static, boring paragraphs on dry topics. Rather it means providing your analysis on why this information is important for your audience. We know from our work with SAP that prospective buyers of B2B products and solutions are looking for executive viewpoints to understand where the company is going and to see if they agree with the direction. This is especially true for those companies preparing to buy a product which represents a significant change to their business operations.

But does that mean that your team must write a long 1,000 word blog entry each time? Some teams think so, and that provides a disincentive for internal members to contribute. As a team charged with blogging for your organization, the best way that you can build internal contributions is to train potential bloggers that entries should take multiple forms ranging from the short paragraph and link to an article to the summary of a key issue that may take several paragraphs to describe properly.

As long as your writers are providing a point of view on the content, the length doesn’t matter. A few sentences detailing why an article link provided is valuable often is more widely read than the long entry. Remember, B2B readers often have less time than B2C readers who are reading for enjoyment. Because of this dynamic, a short and to the point style is often preferable.

In our day long workshops to train organizations on the best practices of social media, we use a menu analogy to help everyone understand that social media works best when there are multiple courses and types used. We teach teams about using cocktails, appetizers, entres, and desserts to tantalize, teach, and engage with their audiences. As part of the workshops, we build recipe cards for our teams. Our blog recipe card is shown below:

This recipe card covers multiple ideas needed to consider when blogging. But overall, the idea is that a consistent well written blog can be very useful for both the organization and its target audience.  Content must be of interest, well written, and invite comments. Once comments are made, your organization must engage even if the comment disagrees with your idea or premise. Organizations that will not respond to user comments should not blog. Those that do engage will receive the benefits of social media engagement, leaving those who do not far behind.

Do you have questions about what to blog? Here is our rule of thumb for B2B blog content (it’s based upon our metrics analysis of client blogs):

  1. 50% thought leadership
  2. 20% analysis & insight
  3. 15% promotional (events)
  4. 15% announcements (product related)

Want to engage your audience? Try these best practices we and others have developed

  1. Write in a personal voice, have an opinion or point of view
  2. Blog content should have an element of uniqueness
  3. Offer insight and analysis to events and/or trends
  4. Add graphics, videos, charts, etc. Anything that can offer more connection and activity for the viewer
  5. Update your blog using a calendar schedule so that it doesn’t become stale
  6. Use your personal experiences to enrich your blog, people can easily tell if you are just posting press releases
  7. Be conservative with the amount of links to your site or products
  8. Talk about what’s on your mind, do not just copy and paste press releases
  9. Do not make the blog into a sales brochure, diversify your content
  10. Do not replicate content on the blog that you can find on your main site
  11. Do not ignore your readers, if you see that there are comments, answer them and create a two way dialogue

Remember that you will have many more readers than those who will engage and comment. Help your audience. Think of their needs, then write the stimulating content in a concise manner that will meet those needs. Ready to blog? We hope so and look forward to hearing your thoughts.


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This entry was posted on Monday, April 12th, 2010 at 6:30 am and is filed under Best Practices. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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