The Social Media Strategist Report – How Self Important Are We?

Echo Chamber Cartoon Sourced from GapingVoid.com

I just finished reading the latest report from Altimeter Group’s Jeremiah Owyang titled “Career Path of the Corporate Social Media Strategist” and frankly was a bit disappointed.  Mind you not with the survey, it’s rigor, and its results, but rather with the predictive assumptions about the importance of the Social Media Strategist in the organization and with the continued pushing of change management topics within in the context of using social media.

First off, in an early stage of the Social Media Strategist’s career it’s highly unlikely that he or she “answers the call of duty” then “challenges the status quo” only to “lose altitude” but quickly recoup to “overcome cultural challenges” only to find “the increase in program requests from internal stakeholders – unmanageable.”  Really? Taking this viewpoint into consideration with the other points made about lacking any ROI, having problems with measurement, etc., can you really believe that these folks were able to overcome the cultural challenges of their organizations? Or were some of the members interviewed simply part of organizations that are innovative,  customer focused, and willing to try something longer than a single business cycle?

Our team has met several of the people interviewed. In fact, we work with several of them at Cisco and SAP. They don’t use this type of hyperbole in describing where they came from, how they started or expanded social media for their companies. These folks by and large are solid business people, who (as the report correctly states) saw an opportunity and made the most of it.

The second issue that I have with this report’s projections about the two career paths of the Social Media Strategist. Essentially, they are given as Help Desk Operator or Rock Star. We’d say the reality is somewhere in between with the Rock Star status being limited to very, very few people.

Let’s look at the Help Desk Operator according to the report. This person will be swamped by requests, if they cannot do everything the other departments want to then the other departments will run over them to launch their own facebook pages. In reality, most organizations are building out more structured approaches to using social media. While the helter-skelter methodology may have taken off as tools were adopted, most companies are more structured than given credit for in the report and are actively providing guidelines for the use of social media by various groups. An excellent example of this is SAP, where Brian Ellefritz and team are helping multiple organizations within SAP learn the best practices and how to stay on point with SAP’s messaging/branding. Another example is Cisco’s use of governance groups/councils to help guide departments in successfully using social media. This is not the future, it is now. Groups of stakeholders within companies work through a social media team to ensure a more strategic and valuable use of social media. It won’t be a help desk, it will be a best practice sharing knowledge group coupled with IT for the tools and analytics teams for the measurement.

The report also falls into the trap of using the number of followers on Twitter as some sort of metric for the importance of the Social Media Specialist. But is it really? We’d say it isn’t. Read our Gaming the Twitter System: Why Follower Counts Don’t Represent Influence to learn why.

So, if you’ve read this far you probably believe that I’m negative on this report. I’m not. It is the first real attempt to use research methods to draw conclusions about the Social Media Strategist position. We just wish that the hype about this industry would diminish somewhat… we’ve seen this same hype in the early days of online communities, then blogs, then social networks, and now with social media. It extended to the people who would run the community, blog, social network, and now social media. The reality is that social media is a set of great tools which some folks use adeptly and successfully while others don’t. And the rock stars? Well, they’re mostly the well hyped conference speakers you see everywhere. Let’s just see where they are in five years shall we?

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Impact Interactions to Exhibit at SocialTech 2010 (October 26)

Are you attending the upcoming Marketing Profs SocialTech 2010 event in San Jose on October 26th? If so, we hope that you’ll come say hello and bring us your social media questions. Our team will be exhibiting at the event and will be available to answer questions that you may have regarding social media for technology companies.

The Impact Interactions team has a long history of helping B2B Technology companies. In 2000, our president Mike Rowland helped Cisco Systems launch and manage its first online community, The Networking Professionals Community (NetPro). Mr. Rowland also helped SAP launch its first online community, the SAP Business Community as well as an additional 18 local language communities around the globe. Both NetPro and the SAP Business Community won multiple awards for their excellence in meeting member needs. Since then, Impact Interactions’ team members have helped multiple B2B technology companies ranging from Cisco to SAP to NetApp to IBM to Intel understand how to use social media and online communities to generate leads, lower support costs, educate staff, and extend offline events.

“Too often companies focus on the tools or third party sites like Twitter or Facebook, then wonder why they aren’t getting the results they anticipated,” states Mike Rowland, president of Impact Interactions. “In the technology industry, the users are very sophisticated and have clearly defined needs that must be met to succeed. 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, even in technology companies. 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.”

Recently, Impact Interactions was selected by Cisco to help with its launch of the Cisco Support Community Hall of Fame and Expert program, as well as the NetPro Poland and CSC Japan communities. Our continuing work for Cisco also includes social media reporting, community moderation, and social media consulting projects for the marketing and support channels.

Work for SAP includes partner channel social media enablement activities, Best Performance program training for partners in EMEA, as well as dashboard creation and management for SME online activities.

NetApp activities are focused primarily upon the NetApp Community, a leading information source for storage professionals. We also are working with NetApp to create a measurement methodology which proves the value of the community and corresponding social media efforts to senior executives. Additionally, we created measurement dashboards for NetApp’s management team.

Visitors to the Impact Interactions exhibition space at SocialTech 2010 will be provided with the opportunity to sign up for a free 45 minute consultation after the event to answer their specific social media questions. The event is being held at the DoubleTree San Jose on October 26, 2010. More details can be found by visiting the MarketingProfs’ event site.

“We look forward to meeting with attendees to share the best practices we developed over the past ten years helping our technology 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.”

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Impact Interactions Celebrates Our 7th Year In Business

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

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Moving Beyond Counts & Traffic – Social Media Measurement That Works

Lots of interesting research coming out on Social Media recently. We take note because the results and conclusions continue to demonstrate that measurement remains a high priority for executives, but what is delivered is not meeting their needs. Let’s take a look at some recent examples of companies surveyed about their social media efforts from a measurement point of view.

First a study from White Horse of 104 companies using social media shows us that when companies try to measure the success of their social media efforts, that very few (less than 15%) are able to get to an ROI for their work. They continue to use traffic and participation (we put that in our behavior metrics) to demonstrate success.

Here is another study which demonstrates a similar point, that companies are using social media traffic and behavior metrics as a measurement of success. This study completed by King Fish Media in June 2010 has great information; unfortunately, it reveals that while many companies say that they have a social media strategy in place they don’t understand how to measure its results.

Perhaps it is the way the research is presented versus the actual question asked, but when you read the measurements used for value they are not representing economic value in most cases. Rather, marketers and others measuring social media continue to focus on representing traffic as some sort of proxy for value. Worse, many still believe that the number of followers on Twitter or fans on Facebook is a valuable metric to use to demonstrate value. They couldn’t be more wrong…

Even the famed Guy Kawasaki is promoting an idea that the more followers the better during a TweetChat on MarketingProfs…but his perspective is the larger the audience from a sheer numbers perspective the better your results will be. In our experience, that is just not true. We see that the more QUALIFIED followers you have, the better your results MIGHT be.Why? Because the value of a follower is zero until they do something that brings value to the organization. If all they are doing is following and never taking action, can you assign a value to them? We think not. Have you analyzed your followers? How many are customers? How many are prospects? How many are competitors? (How many have followed your account to simply build their own counts through an auto-follow?)

So where does all this lead? Well, if you are attending theiStrategy meeting in Chicago on September 15-16, we’ll be there to address this issue. I’ll be presenting this topic on the morning of the 16th to the attendees.

I’ll demonstrate a stronger methodology for using a more integrated approach to your social media efforts which allows you to focus only on the metrics that really matter… those that lead to economic value for your organization.

For those of you who cannot attend, the presentation will be added to our social media resource center after the meeting ends. For those of you who are attending, please bring your questions!

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Social Media: Whose Brand Is It? A Contrarian View

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.”

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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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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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.

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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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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.

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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Tracking Down Online Community ROI (Part 2: Business-Side Metrics)

by Matthew Lees

Part 1 looked at community-side metrics. This is the data you get from your community’s Web server log files, your community platform database, and any third-party analytics systems (such as Google Analytics or Omniture) that you’re using.

It’s also the data that you – as a business sponsor, community manager, or other stakeholder – likely have direct access to. And while it’s important information, it’s used primarily to help ensure the health of the community, not quantify and provide insight into business value. For that, you need to tap into business-side metrics.

Business-Side Metrics
These are the metrics that do show business value. Unfortunately, for most online community use cases, such data lives in places that you probably don’t have direct access to or control over. This is where the legwork and the relationship building that Mike Rowland referred to in the previous post come into play.

Where to look in your organization and who to build relationships with depends on what you’re after. Here are four common business cases for B2B communities, with an overview of their potential business value as well as mention of the relevant business-side metrics, location of these metrics, and people who can help you access and understand these metrics and what they mean for the bottom line.

1. Service and Support. Reducing contact center costs is one of the primary business goals of a community in which customers help answer each others’ questions and solve each others’ problems (via what’s often called “peer-to-peer support”).
Business-side metrics: number of incidents (by source, e.g., phone, email, chat, etc.), first-contact resolution, agent hours
Where the metrics live: contact center analytics system
Who to make friends with: not only the VP of Support, but also the manager who is the most fluent with the call center’s reporting and analytics

2. Product Development Feature Set and Road Map. Here you’re probably looking for (a) ideas for new products and services, (b) ideas for new features and functionality, (c) ideas around improving customer-facing processes (i.e., making it easier for customers to do business with you), and (d) the prioritization of these ideas. These ideas and their prioritization by customers can improve processes, reduce time to market, and give you higher confidence that your product road map is what your customers want.
Business-side metrics: number of customer ideas that are implemented; number of existing ideas that were validated by customers; time to market; dollar value of reduced time to market (can be a squishy number)
Where the metrics live: product tracking system; business process systems (ideally these all track the sources of ideas)
Who to make friends with: product development / R&D teams, particularly the keepers of the road map and features/capabilities lists

3. Customer Acquisition and Lead Generation. Communities are a great way for people to go beyond what they read on your Web site and in your marketing collateral, to get a sense of how people are using your products in the real world. So prospects are part of the community ecosystem as well as existing customers. A vibrant community full of helpful, engaged customers can be effective in moving prospects into your sales pipeline.
Business-side metrics: number of new accounts that came in through the community, new revenue from these accounts
Where the metrics live: CRM system or other sales tracking application
Who to make friends with: the sales team, particularly the sales operations manager who tracks sourcing

4. Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty. Numerous studies have shown that online communities can have a positive affect on customer satisfaction and loyalty. The tricky thing in demonstrating this for your own community is to separate out cause and effect. Communities can be self-selecting; your most satisfied and loyal customers are probably over-represented in your community. For them, the community didn’t cause their high level of satisfaction, for example. Any surveys you do to measure satisfaction and loyalty should take this into consideration.
Business-side metrics: survey results; customer satisfaction / loyalty methodology or system, such as Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Where the metrics live: survey results database; satisfaction, loyalty system
Who to make friends with: the marketing specialist who measures customer satisfaction and loyalty for your organization

Legwork and Relationship Building
You may have noticed that the business-side metrics are really just the ones that your organization and your colleagues are already using to identify and analyze business value. You’re just looking to apply and tune them towards quantifying their impact from the community.

Of course, while the methods may be familiar, it isn’t necessarily easy to compile metrics and estimate dollars saved and/or generated. A lot of it comes down to doing the legwork and building relationships with the right people. Ideally determining community ROI is at the top of their priority list as well as yours. It will take time and attention to come up with ROI hypotheses, test them using data you’ve tracked down from wherever it lives, analyze the results, revise your hypotheses accordingly, and iterate. Hopefully your colleagues become partners in these efforts.

So how do you build these relationships, make those allies, and get the information you need? We’ll leave that for another day. But experience shows that chocolate helps…

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