“Active members using our community to interact and engage with us controlled hundreds of millions of dollars in sales revenue over a 6 month period.

Active partners of NetApp engaging in the community delivered over half a billion dollars in partner owned sales revenue over the same time period.”

- Navneet Grewal, Director Digital Marketing

Introduction: NetApp launched its first online community in early 2008 to help executives engage and gain a stronger understanding of the products and solutions offered by NetApp as well as to build awareness for the growing storage industry among IT professionals. The initial community, built on Jive Software, was growing in size but engagement behavior and value derived from the community was low. Beginning in August of 2008, NetApp hired Impact Interactions to rebuild their strategy, help the company better meet the needs of its community, and align reporting to real world business goals that demonstrate the value of their community.

Addressing the Issues: After a review of the community, a competitive analysis, and review of appropriate metrics, the Impact Interactions’ team identified several areas which were limiting NetApp’s business results. The main areas of focus for our work included:

1. Restructuring the community’s offerings and forums to meet member needs and provide a clear path to engagement and value (Products and Services categories were redefined to meet member expectations and to provide a stronger focus, changed the community’s architecture to allow member measurement using the Jive Software analytics, and reduced the categories of available forums in order to concentrate conversations in appropriate areas to reduce the cost and time of moderation)
2. Redefining processes of managing the community using our best practices (Engagement and escalation processes, internal subject matter expert recruitment)
3. External member recognition process
4. Alignment of content strategy to NetApp’s business goals (Increased percentage of thought leadership content to attract influencers & decision makers, added partner focused forum & content to recruit NetApp partners into the community as subject matter experts, refocused outreach to concentrate less on technical information and more on business results  like TCO, ROI, Customer Success Stories)
5. Internal team education (Training on B2B focused approach using Impact Interactions’ best practices and experience, reduced B2C tactics that focused on awareness and pushing information rather than building engagement and relationships with members)
6. Understanding key metrics to report to build a health index for the community while also setting achievable KPIs (key performance indicators)
7. Developed measurement framework utilizing Jive Software, Omniture, and Business Objects to deliver focused reports (Traffic – baseline metrics, Behavior – engagement metrics, Value – business metrics with an economic value $ assigned)

The team at NetApp realigned their community using Impact Interactions’ recommendations. One of the main changes was moving forum categories into distinct sub-communities on the Jive platform in order to increase visibility into how members were using each area of the community. Initially, all areas had been under a single community architecture which due to Jive Software analytic limitations reduced visibility significantly into how individual areas of the community were performing.

Social Media Supports Community to Engage Members: As part of Impact Interactions’ ongoing engagement with NetApp, we performed a full social media audit to understand how audiences outside of the community had their information needs met. Having the social media run by their Public Relations firm for the previous two years had achieved minimal results. This was due to poor alignment, execution, and messaging using social tactics such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. Twitter, LinkedIn Groups, and Facebook were simply used as RSS fed message repeaters without a clear goal or objective for each entity. This caused the same exact message to be placed in multiple places despite different audiences. The result was that there was no integration of effort to utilize the strong results of the community with the marketing efforts of the PR firm’s actions. This wasted effort resulted in many lost opportunities for valuable engagement.

To correct this, as part of our strategy work, Impact Interactions recommended the following tactical changes to NetApp’s current strategy. First, the team needed to refocus social away from press release based activities to deliver integrated marketing, digitally relevant content, video, and thought leadership which was missing in action. In conjunction with this refocusing, there also needed to be a realignment of social effort to integrate community, NetApp.com, and digital marketing assets to better meet the information needs of multiple audiences using social tools. While the audiences are similar, there are differences in how segments like to gather information and interact with companies. This requires a stronger focus on each platform’s unique audience to meet their needs properly.  We also recommended that NetApp develop a social listening program to expand the influencers’ network and cultivate stronger relationships outside of existing channels.

For internal teams, we recommended that NetApp align internal efforts through social media guidelines and processes including the use of a social media and community playbook to educate multiple stakeholder teams throughout the organization. To allow for self-service reporting and measurement, it was recommended that NetApp develop a social media dashboard to report results across the enterprise, including CRM data as the value point to prove the importance of the social and community projects in meeting specific business objectives (and KPIs).

Business Results Achieved: Over the last three years, NetApp continued to focus on meeting members’ needs in order to build engagement. This focus increased engagement significantly over time allowing Impact Interactions to implement its value framework methodology to demonstrate the economic value of the community to senior management. This framework was built using data from multiple sources including Jive Software, Omniture, and NetApp’s CRM system and was completed in 2011.

The measured results were impressive. As detailed in a presentation at iStrategy’s San Francisco meeting by Navneet Grewal, active members (defined as those who contribute more than 10 items in a six month period) using NetApp’s marketing community to interact and engage controlled hundreds of millions of dollars in sales revenue over a 6 month period. During the same time period, active partners of NetApp engaging in the marketing community delivered over half a billion dollars in partner owned sales revenue to NetApp.

Summary and Takeaways: By realigning its community to focus strongly on influencers and business decision makers, NetApp has realized significant economic value from its community.

1. Lesson One: Don’t allow the limitations of your software platform mislead you into believing that value cannot be measured
2. Lesson Two: Use an architectural scheme that provides the most insight into member activities while providing a clear path for engagement to members
3. Lesson Three: Identify your audience clearly and provide content that meets their needs in order to build engagement both in controlled sites (community) and non-controlled (social)
4. Lesson Four: Be wary of using press releases as a major component of your social content strategy
5. Lesson Five: Each social site has a slightly different audience that is linked to your organization for a slightly different reason. Utilize a content focus that aligns to those needs rather than shot-gunning the same content everywhere
6. Lesson Six: Getting to the value is hard work. It requires relationships, strong data analysis, and the ability to combine your CRM data with your community and/or social data.

When organizations meet the needs of their audiences, the value realized can be substantial as the results of NetApp clearly show. To learn how your organization can benefit from our expertise, please contact us.

SOCIAL MEDIA SUPPORTS EVENT MARKETING CAMPAIGN

“Harnessing Social Media channels such as Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Facebook, with thought-leadership content in the form of videos and blogs, has helped endorse our position as leaders in the field of BI.” – Adrianne Gillies, DSCallards Marketing Manager

Key Learnings

Although familiar with the many available avenues of social media communication, SAP Partner DSCallards was using social media primarily for brand awareness and didn’t consider it a key marketing tool prior to the pilot project supported by Impact Interactions. This project taught DSCallards how it could use its existing social media accounts to promote itself as a thought leader to generate valuable sales contacts and to nurture leads. As a result of its social media campaign work, DSCallards saw a 161% increase in referrals from its social media accounts to its two websites. In fact, the number of social media referrals to DSCallards’ websites during the pilot was equivalent to the total number of referrals the company had seen during the previous ten months. All of these results were realized during a six week pilot to implement a comprehensive plan of social media curation, creation, and promotion.

Pilot Program

DSCallards is a full service business intelligence solution provider offering both consulting services and customized development.  Based out of Ashburton, UK, DSCallards has established itself as one of the best business intelligence solution providers in the UK and has a robust business surrounding its partnership with SAP. According to Adriane Gillies, DSCallards Marketing Manager:

“When combined with our fully accredited professional services and methodologies, DSCallards provides solutions that offer the most complete, open and integrated BI systems on the market today.  Our goal is to ensure that every business, regardless of size, can understand and use information without technical expertise or knowledge of underlying data sources or structure, empowering them to get answers to imperative business questions and to make more effective, better informed, decisions.”

Despite their win as the UK Champion of the SAP Social Media Program 2010 and again as UK Champion of the SAP Best Performance Challenge 2011, DSCallards continued to utilize its social media accounts as a secondary tactic for awareness. DSCallards maintained accounts with LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, etc. but wasn’t entirely focused on using these venues for lead generation. For the most part, DSCallards used their corporate accounts to retweet posts from the Twitter account of Lee Grogan, DSCallards Sales Manager, and to promote videos entered for the SAP Best Performance Challenge. DSCallards was utilizing social media as a way to increase brand awareness instead of relying on it as a means of building contacts and leads:

“Although happy with output from our efforts, we were not convinced that social media was an effective channel for driving forward demand generation and was more of an awareness and brand building exercise.”  – Adriane Gillies

While brand awareness is important, Philip Roylance, UK Enablement manager for SAP, saw an opportunity for its partner to look at social media as much more than an internet billboard.  Through its two SAP wins, DSCallards demonstrated it was savvy enough to take on the task of creating a social media campaign. In selecting DSCallards for this pilot, Philip stated:

“DSCallards has worked closely with SAP on projects in the past and were an excellent candidate for us to run a social media campaign with. Social media has become a very important part of SAPs marketing strategy and we need to work with partners who are able to demonstrate the agility and tenacity needed to make campaigns successful. DSCallards has shown this in abundance.”

To get DSCallards off on the right foot, Philip turned to U.S. based social media consulting firm Impact Interactions for help in assisting DSCallards with the implementation of a robust social media marketing campaign that would address the business objectives of thought leadership, contact generation, contact nurturing, brand awareness, and the promotion of SAP solutions. With over ten years of experience with SAP, Impact Interactions has a proven record of assisting companies increase their online presence. With two of DSCallards’ popular breakfast marketing meetings approaching, the time was right to launch a comprehensive campaign.

Tactical Planning for a Social Media Campaign

At the beginning of a social media campaign, both Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and initial metric benchmarks must be determined.  For DSCallards, there were several measurable KPIs:

• Increased registration for morning meetings
• Increased reach
• Increased blog visits
• Increased website visibility

The following DSCallards’ social media accounts were analyzed before the pilot kick-off to create the projects initial benchmarks:

• YouTube:
• Channel Views
• Individual video views
• Number of referrals from YouTube to website
• Twitter
• Followers
• Number of referrals from Twitter to website
• LinkedIn
• Connections
• Number of referrals from LinkedIn to website
• Blog
• Visits
• Number of referrals  from blog to website

Additionally, benchmarks were taken for the number of registrations DSCallards had acquired for their two upcoming meetings utilizing email lists, web site contact us submissions, and in-house contact lists.

Once the KPIs and benchmarks were determined, DSCallards orchestrated an effort to integrate all marketing accounts in order to meet their KPIs.  Previously, DSCallards had viewed their social media accounts as separate, stand-alone entities. Rather than each account being an item in its social media marketing menu, each was looked at as a stand-alone item in and of itself.  This approach had the unfortunate effect of fragmenting its social and online audiences.  DSCallards’ blog readers weren’t readily aware of its Twitter account.  The Twitter followers didn’t know DSCallards had valuable content on its YouTube site, etc.  In addition to these tactics, DSCallards relied heavily on email lists to send out SAP content based newsletters and to announce its popular breakfast meeting series. However, it did little to utilize social media to advertise those meetings or tie the content of the email newsletters into other interactive outlets which again left much of its online audience unaware of the benefits of attending these important meetings.

Impact Interactions introduced DSCallards to the concept of “Beacon Strategy Marketing.” Using this method, every form of social media is used to link back to the main form of communication for DSCallards, its website. YouTube videos linked back to relevant meeting registration information through descriptions and annotations. Twitter activity transitioned from being primarily retweets of Lee Grogan’s tweets to advertisements of new additions to their blog, LinkedIn groups, and upcoming meetings. LinkedIn activity increased with the initiation of more discussions and, again, consistently linked readers back to DSCallards’ website. Blog posts were skillfully mentioned across several platforms. Over the six weeks of the pilot, DSCallards learned how to tailor each message to the platform they were using.  Instead of repeating the same cookie cutter information across the different platforms, the message was finessed and adjusted for each audience. Recipients were getting the same information without seeing a copy and paste of text from one social media interaction to the next.

Challenges During The Campaign

The pilot did not come without its challenges, however.  Several events occurred that impacted the overall results of the campaign.  First, the December meeting was scheduled to take place at a location further from London and less accessible to participants than made sense for a two hour breakfast meeting. Consequently, registrations remained low for the December meeting. That said, despite the fact that its December breakfast meeting was the original focus of the pilot project, DSCallards decided to cancel the meeting and reschedule it for a time when it could be hosted at a better location.

From that point on, DSCallards decided to instead focus on a November meeting which was taking place a better location and featured a more popular subject.  Second, DSCallards had invested in an email list for sending out information regarding their monthly meetings.  Unfortunately, the list hadn’t been properly scrubbed for accuracy. DSCallards found itself relying on a list that largely consisted of invalid email addresses. The team at DSCallards had to scramble mid-pilot to try to purchase another list and send out the meeting information again.  By that point, though, DSCallards had largely missed its window for giving people enough lead time to plan for the trip to the more distant SAP location in December.

A secondary issue which impacted expected results was the implementation of a new website and blog platform. While a positive from an information standpoint as well as from an improved user experience standpoint, the new site provided new challenges in the campaign. First, new links needed to be featured for the social media promotions while the older links took visitors to the older site information. While the visitor could then click to the event registration, the dual site issue may have caused some initial confusion among visitors reducing results.

Results

For DSCallards, the company achieved great success achieving the long-­term goals of increasing in their reach, generating important business contacts, and establishing itself as a thought leader. DSCallards proved that social media could be used for far more than simply creating awareness of the date and time of its training meetings. Looking at specific Social Media Channels to develop and connect with contacts, prospects, and leads, DSCallards did very well in adapting its approach to include social media into its marketing mix. Specific channel results are given below:

Twitter: 370% increase in Twitter Followers

During the pilot, groups of potential followers were identified and followed. By reaching out first, DSCallards was effectively holding out a laurel to their audience.  Following them first would hopefully peak their interest enough that the person on the other end would return the favor. The tactic worked.  Over the six week pilot, DSCallards saw its Twitter following quadruple with significant retweeting of their information through their followers’ networks. Not only did this give DSCallards the opportunity to present itself as a thought leader but it also presented the company as another option for a business intelligence solution provider. They established both brand awareness and their reputation as an experienced and knowledgeable organization.

LinkedIn: 120% increase in site visits from LinkedIn Group posts

By utilizing LinkedIn Groups focused on Business Intelligence, Manufacturers, and Analytics, the team at DSCallards was able to guide additional traffic to its own blogs and web site. Once on the site, visitors were presented with the opportunity to learn more as well as to gain an invitation to one of the DSCallards’ breakfast meetings.

YouTube: 10% increase in video views, 6% increase in Channel Visits over 6 week campaign

During the pilot project, DSCallards took time to nurture its YouTube account.  After the Best Performance Challenge, the YouTube account was not frequently updated as an avenue to push viewers back to its website.  Additionally, several of the videos DSCallards posted were simply reposts of SAP content.  As an SAP partner this content was acceptable and may have created some needed awareness for DSCallards’ audience, but it didn’t present DSCallards as a thought leader. Once DSCallards began using the “beacon strategy” the company took greater care to ensure the content on its site was both valuable and original.  DSCallards took SAP-­supplied videos and dubbed them over with its own script which had the effect of making the videos more “personal.” It literally gave a voice to DSCallards. It also gave viewers the sense that DSCallards, every bit as much as SAP, understood the subject matter and had valuable expertise to offer.  Now, when visitors to the DSCallards’ YouTube account look at videos, they are presented with content DSCallards has customized and tailored to its audience  rather than a small number of  DSCallards videos dwarfed by a large number of SAP provided videos that have no tie to DSCallards as a company.

Blog: 20 fold increase in reads of blog content

DSCallards’ use of other social media outlets to drive readers to its blog worked phenomenally well and resulted in 20 times more visits to the blog in November as compared to October.  DSCallards made great efforts to post blog content updates more frequently than in the past and tailored each post to the subject matter of its upcoming breakfast meetings. Both of these efforts created the opportunity to passively advertise DSCallards’ meetings to its readers on their social media accounts while also promoting thought leadership in the BI area. Through these blog posts DSCallards presented themselves as thought leaders offering valuable content worth reading and training sessions worth attending.

Overall Traffic

Thanks to the many improvements to their social media communications DSCallards saw a very important improvement to quite possibly its most important customer­-facing outlet: the company website. The impact of a well coordinated social media campaign to support marketing efforts can be seen by the dramatic increase in referrals to the DSCallards’ websites from their social media accounts.

The metrics clearly demonstrated that DSCallards was now driving interested parties back to its website, where they could find a wealth of information about the company’s offerings.  Referrals increased across the board, proving that DSCallards’ tactics in all areas were working together to improve the effectiveness of DSCallards’ marketing efforts.

“Having worked with Mike and his team at Impact Interactions, we now believe that cleverly combining traditional marketing techniques with the power of Social Media and becoming thought leaders in the field of BI is a winning strategy for DSCallards as we make inroads into our chosen markets in the coming years. 

Harnessing Social Media channels such as Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Facebook, with thought-leadership content in the form of videos and blogs, has helped endorse our position as leaders in the field of BI. 

We are looking forward to transferring the skills learned throughout this pilot and putting the Social Media methodology that Mike and his team developed for us into practice during 2012.  By applying this methodology to our SAP Crystal solutions campaigns, where we believe we are already looked upon as thought-leaders, we are confident of our continued success.”

– Adrianne Gillies, DSCallards Marketing Manager

Communities.cisco.com, on the other hand, gets it. A platform that contains more than 50 communities for Cisco’s partners, customers and employees, communities.cisco.com, also known as Cisco Communities, has almost doubled its membership and has seen a 50% increase in overall traffic in the last year. Additionally, Cisco continues to see measurable savings and efficiencies as a result of the program. Allison Johnson, Social Media and Community Manager at Cisco, who has worked with Cisco for 5 years and communities.cisco.com for the past year and a half, discusses the ingredients that make up Cisco’s recipe for success and the challenges of managing a successful global community platform.

Q: What is your role at communities.cisco.com?

A:  At Cisco I manage the communities.cisco.com platform in addition to driving social media and digital marketing across the company.

When working on the communities platform I oversee the entire program at a macro level. My team and I work on everything from identifying technical problems and scheduling the bug fixes as well as onboarding new teams and setting up the overall program structure. We work closely with the community managers to help them reach their individual goals as well as goals we have for the program.

Sometimes we joke around that in my role I’m essentially a community manager of community managers. Every day is different and I never know what hat or situation I’ll find myself in. A main focus for us is our long-term strategy. People forget that communities are a long-term commitment and it’s essential to align your long-term plan with corporate strategies and initiatives. At the end of the day, the most important thing I can do is give the community managers the tools they need to be successful.

Q: What’s your vision for communities.cisco.com and its business purpose?

A: We set both short-term and long-terms goals for the program. Our 5-year vision is to sustain and create a global community program that deepens relationships with partners, customers and employees. Getting there involves building out some of our core areas to make them more engaging and relevant. We’re in the process of a study to learn more about behaviors. Currently we added a social share functionality to the platform to encourage conversations that are happening in the social web to interact and share with our communities.

Q: Tell us about some of the success you’ve seen as you’ve worked toward that vision.

A: This past year we saw tremendous growth in registrations (more than 50% to more than 110,000). Overall that is one of our largest success metrics. Monthly, we capture metrics and do analysis on our platform. This past year we’ve seen a lot of growth. Ways we hope to continue this growth are building out case studies and best practice sharing modules from these growth spikes.

A more specific example can be seen in our Partner Community. This private space was built for our Cisco partners and we have seen it contribute to reducing travel and increasing the productivity of Cisco experts. These experts travel most of the time and have little time for face-to face interactions with our partners. Now these experts broadcast training sessions for partners on communities, which achieves the goal of deepening relationships with our partners.

The common theme here is that the Web 2.0 technology that communities use can positively impact the business by encouraging innovation, reducing travel costs, opening communication and open up resources. Another way we’re positively impacting the business is that we are capturing and sharing frequently asked questions and conversations within the community. We have a wider reach and we’re able to answer more than one person’s question online. If someone else has the same question it’s all right there with a paper trail.  Communities.cisco.com have proven to be a very transparent, authentic way to communicate so more than one person is able to benefit.

Q: Those are impressive results. What are some recent milestones you’ve reached in terms of overall traffic and membership?

A: Our membership a year ago was at about 74K. We are now at about 113K. In 2011, we saw more than a  50% increase in overall membership and traffic. And, we’re also happy about the response time we’re seeing. Support questions usually get at least one or multiple responses within 24 hours.

Q: What are a few best practices you can outline that have helped achieve these results?

A: Open and frequent communications are a must when you are working with a group this large. We have an open bi-weekly Community Manager meeting to serve as a communication platform as well as a best practice share and overall time to update one another on the various projects we have in the works. We set the agenda in advance and we have an area in our own Community Managers Community, completely dedicated to presentations delivered and communications relayed in these meetings. We encourage CMs to bring up topics they want to cover as well as set the agenda for future facing meetings. Not limiting ourselves, we also bring in our external networks.  I think it’s really valuable that we’re always willing to learn from internal and experts about how to best manage the platform.

Additionally, every community has an established and committed community manager. You must always have one point of contact for each space. This way that person can drive communications about the community and content within their space. It is also imperative that they manage the editorial calendar. This is another best practice.

Overall the CM will coordinate with campaigns in different parts of the organization to drive awareness. Some may also work with hired moderators to make sure questions are escalated to appropriate subject matter experts. They should be focused on the communities health.

Q: What is the biggest challenge ahead of you?

A: I’d say it is taking the platform to next level. As I mentioned before we recently added social share into the platform, but what else is out there? It will be a challenge making communities an easy go-to Web 2.0 tool. There are so many different ways we communicate day-to-day whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, e-mail or text messaging. It’s hard to make sure there’s one central place to go to. From a platform perspective, technology and communities will continue to evolve and it’s my job to monitor this space and help drive what will make communities a better platform and program, without losing sight of our goals.

 - Lauren Bittner, the author of this blog, is Senior Director of Client Services at Impact Interactions and has 10 years of experience with helping companies align their online community management efforts with their business goals.

I was recently interviewed by Jon Vanzile for an article he wrote for B2B Magazine (6/6/11) titled “Is Blogging Over?” along with our client, Jeanette Gibson of Cisco. The article is in response to a New York Times article in February claiming that blogs are losing their marketing power, especially with younger audiences due to the growth in Twitter and Facebook. When we spoke about this, I told Jon that this isn’t the case from our experience in the B2B world. In fact, blogs are a cornerstone for B2B marketers (or should be) who are looking to develop stronger relationships with their customers, prospects, and stakeholders. Here is my quote from the article about why blogs work for B2B marketers:

“When you look at the B2B market, what’s necessary is thought leadership, and you cannot get thought leadership in 140 characters or a Facebook post.”

Think about this for a moment.

We counsel our clients that the main difference between B2B social media and B2C social media is the needs of the audience and the buying cycle timing. For B2C, social media is about building awareness and then trial. B2B is much more complex, it is about building awareness then relationships with the audience. Why? Because in general, the sales cycle for B2B is longer than B2C so more effort and information is necessary to help your prospect move to become a customer.

Blogs can play a big role in this relationship building process by highlighting your company’s thought leadership in the industry. Companies want to buy from companies that will be leading the industry and can demonstrate staying power. By providing executive views of the world to your audience, you help them to understand that your company is a leader and will be there in the long term to help your customers.

Can Twitter or Facebook do the same? No, they cannot. Here is a better way to use these tools in your B2B marketing.

We work with our clients to use B2B social media tools like Twitter, Facebook (yes, it does work in B2B), LinkedIn Groups, and YouTube in their online marketing mix. But we recommend a stronger process of using these tools as a complimentary set of tactical processes that support business objectives. We do that through our “Beacon Strategy.”

Just as a lighthouse helps ships to find safe harbors, the correct use of social media tools can help your audience find the best information you can provide quickly and efficiently on their time. Social media in a B2B setting works best when it works together with blogs and compelling content to educate and help audiences to learn more about your products, services, view of the industry, and support issues. By pointing your social media content on third party sites such as Twitter or LinkedIn Groups back to your controlled website, you have the advantage of measurement while your audience has the advantage of learning more. B2B social media requires measurement. Friends, followers, group members, etc. don’t mean anything until they are engaged in a conversation or contact process with your firm. Why? Because you cannot measure anything of real economic value until the person completes an action. Those actions should take place in your harbor, not somewhere in the vast ocean that is the internet.

Getting back to the article, B2B blogs when clearly written with compelling content are one of the best destinations in your safe harbor for people to learn about your company. In a project we did with SAP back in 2004 and 2005, we saw that one of the best indicators of whether a company was moving towards purchase was their reading of the SAP Executive Blog Series. This was a series of blogs by SAP Board Members and top executives at the time (people like Hasso Plattner, Shai Aggasi, Leo Apotheker, etc.). Why? Simple. Before a company spends thousands of dollars on your products, their executive team wants to know if you are aligned with their interests and if your company is truly customer focused. Blogs help to show this to your audience.

So, are blogs dead? For B2B marketers looking to use relationship marketing, the answer is a resounding NO!

The Elevator Pitch – Your Introduction to the Market

Traditionally, many people view the Elevator Pitch in terms from the late 1990s when management consultants told their clients to be ready to explain their company and its strengths in less than two minutes. While this was adopted at the time primarily by new stage companies looking for investments from venture capital companies, the use of elevator pitches has evolved tremendously over the past several years.

As more and more potential customer staff members search the internet for information (one of the top reasons B2B staff use the internet), your firm must not only be found but able to tell its story quickly. That’s what the elevator pitch does so well.  The key concept behind the elevator pitch for established companies using video for contact generation is that the videos reach people who you don’t know who may be looking for your solution or researching it for a decision maker in their company.

So let’s look at an example of a good elevator pitches from a member of the Best Performance Circle, SPIN Consulting of Italy.

You’ll notice immediately that this video elevator pitches is much less formal than you might expect. This video works well because it acts as an introduction, not a sales pitch. The style is conversational and inviting. But what of the results? Well so far, SPIN’s video has received close to 800 views. The majority of SPIN’s views have come from  viewers who visited the SPIN website, which is why you need to embed these videos into your site. Each of these views are an opportunity to introduce your firm to a potential customer.

Customer Success Stories

In business, recommendations and references are often used to help close a deal. What if you could change the timing to demonstrate your expertise and move ahead of your competition, would you make that change in your process? That’s exactly what good, strongly focused customer success story videos do for companies. It’s a tactic that has worked remarkably well for big global companies and for small businesses focused on a single market. Companies like SAP, Cisco, HP, IBM, Cap Gemini, Accenture, Atos Origin, and others have been using customer success whitepapers and videos to help build a faster relationship with their contacts and prospects for years.

In the Best Performance Challenge 2011, we’ve seen several examples of customer success videos. One of the better examples is from DSCallards Ltd, a partner selling Business Objects solutions in the UK. The video on SAP Crystal Reports Server is short, clear, and provides the opportunity for the customer to tell the story. That is the essence of the customer support video.

To date, this video has over 2,300 views since it was created in November of 2010. More importantly, the video has influenced visitors’ views of how the software can positively impact the business. This can be seen by reading the comments on the video on YouTube:

• Great video, good to see user experiences

Dawnlco 3 months ago

• Good video – shows how accurate reporting can impact different areas of the business. Nice to hear positive user experience from the users themselves.

DilbertDaveCarson 3 months ago

• Good to see real, like sized, customer stories, definitely helping us make our mind up

R00ddle 3 months ago

• I’ve been working on a large corporate Business Objects project and had lost sight of how MI reporting can be critical to the day-to-day running of a real life SME. It was great to see dashboard reports actually being used in an operational environment rather than being presented to management as a snapshot tool at a board meeting. Well done to the team for an excellent presentation of how the real world can see the benefits of information that they already had but didn’t know how to use.

wm419142a 3 months ago

• Very illustrative and informative video. Clear to see the business benefits to be derived from such a solution.

lizm2508 3 months ago

• Excellent video!. Really helpfull. We’re considering a similar solution in our organisation, and would like to discuss how we might use Crystal instead.

Please contact me!

businessmanup 3 months ago

• Really useful video. This will help us to move forward with our own reporting project. thanks!

zenagee 3 months ago

• Great to see real customers benefiting from meaningful dashboard reporting & positively impacting their strategy

greenrhino77 3 months ago

Look at the comments closely. See the comment asking for someone to contact the viewer? This is why allowing visitors to view video on their time is so important. As business people continue to start their search for products and solutions online using search tools like Google, Yandex, Baidu, and others, they will find your videos and web site. By combining the power of video into your web site, you present an opportunity to engage and learn more by starting the relationship early and demonstrating the power of your solution long before your competition.

One Last Point About Online Video for Business

In the Best Performance Challenge 2011, some of the feedback and questions from our competitor teams revolved around video styles and languages. Let’s look at one last research chart to answer the question of style:

In the viewers’ minds, it doesn’t really make a difference if the video is a studio produced gem or a company created offering. What does matter is that you offer video.

On languages, there is no set rule other than to meet the needs of your audience. If you are working in several markets which have different languages, you might want to consider providing videos in each distinct language. If you are focused on a single market, it is probably a better idea to utilize the local language. Remember, audience focus is the key, meet their needs and you’ll be successful.

Recent research has shown that executives across many industries are expanding their use of social media. At the same time, the research shows that the majority of business to business executives in charge of social media believe they are not achieving the optimal business results from their efforts. At iStrategy San Francisco, Impact Interactions’ president Mike Rowland, Cisco’s Jeanette Gibson, SAP’s Sara Larsen, and NetApp’s Navneet Grewal will present case studies of integrated, coordinated social media programs based upon proven strategies that provide a positive impact on the organization’s top and bottom line.

With over ten years of experience in the online interactive world, Mr. Rowland brings a wealth of best practices from clients such as NetApp, Cisco, SAP, AARP, Intel, and many other major brands. The methodology developed by Mr. Rowland and Impact Interactions utilizes measurement as part of the initial planning process for social media in order to provide clients with instant clarity into how the success of the project and effort will be demonstrated. To provide additional insight at the
conference, Mike will be joined by top B2B social media professionals from his clients Cisco, SAP, and NetApp. Successful case studies of B2B social media projects, organizations, and strategies will be presented and discussed with iStrategy attendees.

“Too often companies begin with the tools or third party sites like Twitter or Facebook then wonder why they aren’t getting the results they anticipated,” stated Mike Rowland, president of Impact Interactions. “Our methodology begins with defining success from a measurement point of view. We then build out key performance indicators (KPIs) to track our success based upon three categories of measurement: Traffic, Behavior, and Value. Too often marketers substitute traffic metrics or behavior
activities for value. This is why so many senior executives have difficulty believing that social media is effective. In order to demonstrate true value to the organization, you have to move beyond traffic and behavior and find the economic value of social media activities. Our expert panel presentation for iStrategy San Francisco attendees will help their organizations to move forward and realize the economic value of their efforts using social media in a B2B setting.”

By demonstrating a stronger method of using social media to compliment rather than compete with existing marketing activities, Mr. Rowland’s presentation will provide real world case studies from clients such as Cisco, NetApp, and SAP that translate efforts into stronger conversion, engagement, and ultimately business results. Whether the focus is lead generation, brand awareness, trial, promotion, or support, this presentation will demonstrate why integration of effort is critical to success.

Attendees will be able to understand why traffic and behavior metrics do not equal value in social media. Through social media case studies, marketers attending the iStrategy event will also understand why counts and followers don’t necessarily lead to value, while activities with strong calls to action and follow through do bring value to the organization.

“I look forward to presenting our best practices which help our clients succeed,” states Mr. Rowland. “If social media is to move past the hype and become a successful long term strategic asset for companies, we have to demonstrate not only what works but how success is measured.”

That was a fast seven years…

 Way back in 2003, the Internet world of Pets.com, Webvan.com, and others was dying a fast and some would say well deserved death. But what was emerging was the idea that the web provided companies with a direct link to an increasingly vocal audience for their products and services.  After cutting my teeth at Participate.com, I became a ‘true believer’ in the future of the internet as a powerful marketing and support tool. Even though Participate was slowly dying, I was convinced that companies would need help measuring their online activities and working with their online audiences.

So after leaving, I launched Metricreports.com one of the first companies to focus on analytics and metrics as an outsourced service for organizations. The business world was awakening to the idea that online activity meant more than just hosting an online brochure. The idea behind Metric Reports was that marketers could make better decisions if they understood more about what their visitors were doing on their web sites and communities. With more and more of the public starting to use broadband instead of dial-up services, the ability to interact online kept pace. That spurred an idea about our future:

Now:

Over the next several months, as companies wanted additional help with interactive media we expanded our offerings to include strategy consulting with companies regarding online communities as well as measurement. Our clients started asking for us to help with their implementation and use of the new social tools. So in late 2003, we renamed and re-branded ourselves Impact Interactions.  (See how fast the internet really moves?)

To differentiate ourselves from the growing list of consultants and freelancers in the market, we decided that we would not only provide the pre-requisite consulting document and powerpoint, we would also help our clients execute and measure the results of our recommendations. We don’t drop a document and leave, we stand by our ideas and will help to prove their value to your organization.

Sometimes, it’s a good idea to look back while moving ahead. Say hello to Social Media… what’s old is new again.

In 2004, we attended the first blog conference organized for business. What amazed us was the idea that somehow all of this was shiny and new. What floored us was that the speakers continued to push the idea that never in the history of mankind, had the ability to publish ideas using a one to many model been realized. These tools, Blogs and Wikis were going to change the world like nothing ever seen before… each person on the Earth would have his/her own blog and share their lives with everyone in a transparent and authentic way. (Does this sound familiar yet?)

When we brought up online communities such as Cisco’s NetPro (now called CSC) or SAP’s Global Business Community, both of which we helped to launch at Participate, out came the deer in the headlights looks from the speakers. Clearly, no one was trying to draw lessons (or best practices to use the correct jargon) from the experiences of others before them. The focus was on the new shiny tool. Measurement was left for another day. This would be a recurring theme as our industry evolved…into the Social Media industry today. Too much hype, not enough results. Attend most conferences today on Social Media and you’ll see firsthand how far we still have to go… From our inception, Impact Interactions focused on getting results rather than on the tools. It’s a major differentiator between our competitors and ourselves that we believe is the reason why our clients achieve stronger results more consistently over time.

We’ve witnessed the growth in the social media tools that allow interactions between companies and audiences. We’ve noted that for every Facebook there is a GeoCities or Friendster. The tools keep evolving and can truly help companies succeed online, but most never achieve the results that they could… because of the focus on tools and tactics rather than true strategy.

That is more true today as companies believe the hype surrounding social media but cannot figure out how to accurately measure the value it can produce. Achieving results for clients is all we are about… not pushing cool toys to use. In a world of hype, we’re a bit of a stickler for avoiding the hype and focusing on using the best tools to meet client objectives. And if you can’t measure it in terms that your Vice Presidents can understand, then you are probably not properly aligned to your company’s business goals in your social media program. But …

 We couldn’t have done it without our clients…. THANK YOU from Impact Interactions!

Our first client in 2003 was SAP, quickly followed by AARP. And we’ve been proud to be associated with them for multiple projects over the past seven years. Our focus on helping companies attain measurable results in their efforts lead to significant growth in both clients and in projects. We owe a lot of our success to the people that we’ve been fortunate to work with in these organizations. People like Raimund, Sara, Crispin, Nancy, Roland, Zach, and Lee of SAP or Sandy and Teri of AARP. Not only did we help them, but we learned from them as well. 

Today, we’ve grown considerably from our first few months using the Metric Reports name. Our client roster has grown to include many of the largest and biggest brands on the internet, but what we are most proud of is the fact that the majority of our clients continue to re-hire us each year for new projects. Along the way, we’ve helped them to use global and local tactics to achieve strategic results. Our work, like the internet itself is global. We’ve completed projects in the U.S., Germany, France, Italy, Japan, Poland, Russia, China, Brazil, Argentina, Spain and many other countries.

As with all our clients, we’ve worked with some great people along the way. From Elaine, Mike, Tim, LaSandra, Laura P., Laura D., Deb, Peter and many, many others at Cisco to Mark and Christine of the American Chemical Society to Navneet, Carrie, John, and Terri of NetApp, we’ve enjoyed working with some of the most passionate, smart people around.

On our anniversary, the team at Impact Interactions would like to thank all of you for helping us grow, learn, and be successful. We look forward to continuing to provide value to you, your teams, and your organizations.

So what’s next?

We’re never standing still. It’s a big wide open world out there…the social media consulting industry is very fractured with a lot of inexperienced people providing poor advice. More digital agencies are entering the space and claiming expertise (then turning to companies like Impact Interactions and others for help). The confusion levels amongst social media professionals in large organizations is still very high due to so much focus on one-off tactics versus integrated strategies that benefit the organization. For example, we often see B2C tactics being pushed for B2B programs which then have to be revised six months later due to lack of results.

With projects in Europe and Asia as well as North America, we understand that there are unique differences between the adoption of social media and online communities in the U.S. and elsewhere. (That’s why we partnered with PDAgroup of Austria in 2010, to help companies in Europe expand their use of social media to engage with their audiences and customers.)

Despite one of the toughest global recesssions, we’re very optimistic for the future.

There is a lot of opportunity for us to help. We expect to open a second office in Chicago in 2011 and are actively seeking partnersto expand our network in Asia Pacific and Latin America. To do that, we’ll need additional talented people to join our incredible team. That leads me to one final group that deserves a lot of credit for helping Impact Interactions grow to where it is today:

A Special Thank You to our Employees!

From our first employee through our latest one, our team is well versed in social media, online communities, and project management skills. They work tirelessly for our clients. They’ve given up weekends and nights to make sure our clients’ needs are met. Along the way, they’ve learned a lot and shared a lot.

I hope that all of you are enjoying our ride and are ready for our next stage of growth! Thank you for all of your hard work!

Happy Birthday Impact Interactions!

Mike Rowland, President

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.

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.

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.