Impact Interactions Welcomes Experienced Social Media Professionals Lauren Bittner & Adam Crawford!

With our continued growth here at Impact Interactions, we’ve recently added two experienced professionals to help our clients’ social media and online community projects succeed. Please join us in welcoming Lauren Bittner and Adam Crawford to our team!

Lauren Bittner (Social Media Consultant) brings over nine years of professional experience in the social media and loyalty programs to help our clients drive deeper, meaningful relationships with their members. With consulting and management experiences ranging from IBM and McGraw-Hill to Allstate Insurance and Ace Hardware, Lauren has a strong foundation in the B2B social media world. She will initially support the Hall of Fame and Expert member recognition program at Cisco’s CSC as well as support additional projects both for Cisco and our other B2B clients.  Prior to joining us at Impact Interactions, Lauren helped improve usability for client sites as well, bringing another dimension to our services for clients. Lauren got her start in social media at online community pioneer Participate.com.

Adam Crawford (Social Media Consultant, Business Development) is an experienced social media professional with over ten years experience in helping large organizations with their social media and online communities. In his experience, Adam has managed teams of moderators for such diverse companies as NBCi, ATT, AARP, and Ace Hardware. Further extending his social media experience, Adam was an Account Development Manager for Open Text, a leading Enterprise 2.0 content management and social media software company for the past five years. This gives Adam a wide understanding of not only the processes and procedures for social media programs, but also a solid understanding of the technology requirements needed for success. Prior to Open Text, Adam worked for Participate.com as well. In his new role, Adam will help Impact Interactions with Business Development and consulting work.

Please join me in welcoming Lauren and Adam to our team.

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.

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.

Impact Interactions Strengthens the NetApp Online Community

NetApp launched its first online community in March 2008 to build better relationships with customers, partners, prospects, and other stakeholders. Initially, the community was well received, but NetApp’s community team looked to Impact Interactions to accelerate their results. Working with prominent technology companies such as Cisco, SAP, Intel, and HP has given Impact Interactions the knowledge and understanding needed to guarantee that NetApp avoid many of the pitfalls that newer online community teams make.

“Our initial assessment of NetApp’s online community determined that their community team was using many of the correct tactics for building a successful community,” said Mike Rowland, President of Impact Interactions. “But with our strong experience in B2B community creation, management, and measurement we were able to provide an enhanced roadmap for NetApp based upon proven B2B best practices.”

Working together with experienced consultants like Impact Interactions can give an organization that is new to online community a significant advantage over competitors who either take on the task alone or avoid it altogether. These advantages include a shorter development stage; generating realistic, measurable objectives; and avoiding costly mistakes. Many communities don’t understand how to increase conversion and engagement rates or how to generate useful metrics reports for analysis, which Impact Interactions can help with significantly.

The advantages of using an outside consultant aren’t limited to those who have yet to launch a community. The fresh perspective and experience they provide can benefit a community at any point in the lifecycle. This is partly because public information is still scarce on the development and management strategies needed to make communities a successful endeavor. Furthermore, most of the research and information that is available about online communities is based around business-to-consumer (B2C) communities. The strategy and techniques used for B2C communities is often times very different than what should be used to make business-to-business (B2B) communities successful.

This is an important concept to grasp when developing a community. “A lot of times I hear people say that they want the community to be like Facebook or MySpace, but what they don’t realize is that social networks and B2C communities have a totally different purpose and a totally different audience than B2B communities. The strategy and management techniques used for these professional communities need to reflect these differences,” said Mike Rowland, President of Impact Interactions.

For additional information regarding online community consulting or moderation services, contact Mike Rowland or visit http://www.impactinteractions.com/.

American Chemical Society Selects Impact Interactions for Online Community Consulting Project

We’re proud to announce that the American Chemical Society (ACS.org) selected Impact Interactions for a comprehensive strategy engagement to help build out their online community activities. The American Chemical Society is the world’s largest scientific association.

Our work was broken down into three phases:

1. Creation of an online strategy road map to meet multiple stakeholder and member audience needs
2. Technology selection and recommendation to consolidate a multitude of offerings into a unified standard offering with strong measurement capabilities
3. Community Management processes document based upon our best practices

The full press release is available on our site in the Impact Interactions News & Recent Presentations area on our home page. It will also be released by PRWeb on October 30th.

Look for additional press releases regarding our newest clients in the coming weeks. We continue to guide the top enterprise level organizations entering the social media world. We’ve also helped many organizations who’ve launched communities and social networks but who’ve been disappointed with their results to realign their offerings to realize stronger returns on their investments. Please contact us if you’d like to learn more about how we can help you get the most out of your social media offerings and investments.