Case Study – DS Callards Gets Results With Social Media Alignment

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

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Executive Use of Social Media – A Collection of Research (Part 1)

 

There’s been a shift in social media. Have you seen it? Business to business companies in industries beyond the traditional early adopters are utilizing social media more effectively today to build awareness, generate business, and nurture customers than as little as six months ago. Research that has been published over the past year shows that B2B social media is not only becoming more prevalent, but is also expected by customers, prospects, investors, and recruits.

In the video below, we’re going to interprete the relevant research from multiple sources in order to present a pretty compelling analysis for using social media in the business to business setting. In Part 2 of this topic, we’ll show you how several companies such as Cisco, Intuit, ShipServe, and Impact Interactions have used social media in the B2B setting to achieve real business results. We’ll also provide you with a measurement methodology which will help your team to quickly identify areas where action is necessary as well as where you are successful.

So in the words of the immortal Warner Wolf, let’s go to the video tape!

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How SAP Partners Are Using Video to Accelerate Their Demand Generation

As part of SAP’s Best Performance Challenge 2011, competing partner teams in EMEA are tasked with developing videos to help them begin to use social media in their marketing efforts for demand generation and lead nurturing. In the our Business Catalyst Series blog posts, I wrote about how video is quickly establishing itself as a must have for business to business marketers globally. In this post, I’m going to drill down a bit into how the teams currently ranked at the top of the Challenge are using their videos.

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.

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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 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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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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What’s Happening

B2B Social Media Breakfast Meeting Series kicks off on February 21st!

Come learn the best practices for utilizing B2B Social Media for your marketing efforts in 2012. Through our work with clients Cisco, SAP, NetApp, The American Chemical Society, Intel, and others, the team at Impact Interactions will help you to learn:

• Best practices on using social media to build awareness, increase your prospects, nurture your leads, and enhance your reputation through thought leadership social strategies
• Understand what tool to use when in your efforts (LinkedIn, Twitter, Blogs, YouTube, Facebook, etc.)
• Innovative ideas for channel management education and marketing activities
• Methodology for measuring your results and presenting them to key stakeholders and executives

Since 2003, our team has been helping clients to realize measurable business value by using social media and online communities. Whether you are a global organization or a local company looking to improve your social media marketing results, this breakfast meeting is for you.

There will be plenty of time for questions and discussions of issues that are of interest to you and your company. We’ll have plenty of hot coffee to keep the energy level high…. and decaf for those who are already running at a high level!

Register at: http://b2bsocialmediachicago.eventbrite.com (Space is limited to 20 guests to keep this a discussion oriented meeting!)

Impact Interactions to present “Social media demystified: How to build it, grow it and measure its success”

Impact Interactions’ president Mike Rowland will deliver a hands on workshop with Sam Hosencamp of Ragan Communications and Dave Thomas of Radian6 at the Fifth Annual Social Media for PR and Corporate Communications Conference  in Las Vegas on Febuary 14th. This workshop will provide attendees with current best practices on audience building, engagement, and measurement for social media. To learn more, please visit: http://bit.ly/u3vS1A

Impact Interactions President to host “Ask the experts: Advanced social media strategies” at the Fifth Annual Social Media for PR and Corporate Communications conference in Las Vegas on February 15th

Join Mike Rowland as he moderates a Q&A panel on the best practices of social media today with Mark Carpenter of The American Chemical Society, Jill Okawa Fletcher of Virgin American, Conz Preti of Univision, Sarah Lumbard of NPR, and Em Hall. The panel will quickly cover their top social media successes, then take questions from the audience in a true interactive knowledge sharing session. To learn more, please visit: http://bit.ly/oYjsXC

Start your 2012 Social Media and/or Online Community year off right with Impact Interactions’ free one hour consultation to clarify your tactics and measurement.

Impact Interactions’ Crains Chicago Business advertisement is offering you a one hour consultation to help get your 2012 off to a fast start. As part of the consultation, we’ll review your current efforts and discuss your objectives for using social media and communities. Then we’ll provide you with insight into our best practices to help you succeed. Whether you want advice on tactics, content, or measurement, our team will give you practical, proven advice to start your year off with a bang! Contact us to learn more. Act fast, this offer expires January 31, 2012.

Impact Interactions’ president Mike Rowland to present “Encouraging excellence in the workplace through internal social media and communities” at The Role of Communications in Creating Best Places to Work hosted by SAS December 7, 2011

Social media and online communities are powerful tools for building excellence and continuous improvement. These tools support internal communications while they build a stronger corporate culture of knowledge and expertise sharing. By empowering employees, organizations gain value as they promote corporate values and make the transfer of knowledge much easier and faster.

Drawing upon global companies in the past ten years, this workshop will explore the tactics, best practices, and measurement of internal social media and online communities. Attendees will better understand the value of internal social media and communities.

You will learn:

• Why now is the time to use social media
• How corporate culture affects engagement
• What to consider before beginning an internal social media project
• The methodology for launching and managing an internal project
• How internal and external uses of social media differ (and why)
• Measuring internal social media and online communities
• Best practices to keep your internal project moving forward

Learn more at http://bit.ly/oXVbYm

Impact Interactions’ president Mike Rowland to present “Ten Years in the B2B Trenches: A Practioner’s Guide to Maximizing the Return on Your Community” at Social Media Best Practices for B2B Communicators Conference, May 4, 2011 in San Jose, CA.

How many online communities really succeed at meeting their objectives? Does yours? Online communities expand the conversation with your customers, prospects and fans. Whether you want to reduce your support costs, generate leads, nurture customer relationships or build awareness for your products, online communities require a clear purpose and processes to deliver results. Managed properly, online communities can deliver a stunning ROI that will impress even the most jaded executive.

Drawing upon ten years of experience and examples from Cisco, NetApp, SAP, Ace Hardware, Intel and others, we’ll discuss many of the best practices and issues that impact online community success (including how to use social media with your community). A panel of top B2B community management executives will answer your questions for the last hour of the session. Attend this session to learn how to:

• Avoid common mistakes made in B2B communities
• Better meet member needs
• Use membership recognition programs to build your effectiveness
• Determine when to add local language communities to your offering
• Refine your reporting and measurement strategy to home in on what’s important
• Use integrated social media tactics to improve your results

Mike Rowland of Impact Interactions to present “B2B Social Media – Moving Beyond the Hype” at iStrategy San Francisco, April 5, 2011

Using case studies from its B2B clients, Mike Rowland of Impact Interactions will host a keynote roundtable session featuring Navneet Grewal, Director of Marketing at NetApp; Jeanette Gibson, Director of Social Media at Cisco; and Sara Larson, Senior Director of Digital Marketing for SAP North America. This session will focus upon the external opportunities and internal issues that surround the successful use of social media in the B2B channel.

Impact Interactions to sponsor and exhibit at Marketing Profs’ SocialTech 2010 Event on October 26th in San Jose, CA

With more than 30 years of combined Technology Industry Social Media & Online Community experience, the Impact Interactions team will be sponsoring the highly anticipated SocialTech 2010 event in San Jose, CA on October 26th. Visitors to the Impact Interactions exhibition space will be given the oppportunity to ask questions about how clients such as Cisco, SAP, NetApp, IBM, and Intel have achieved success using these interactive tools. Guests will also be offered a free 45 minute consultation for after the event to discuss their specific social media and online community questions.

Impact Interactions president Mike Rowland to present “Moving Beyond Counts and Traffic – Social Media Measurement That Works” at iStrategy meeting in Chicago, September 16

What is the value of a follower on Twitter or a fan on Facebook? What about a Community member? Too often marketers use traffic metrics or counts of followers as a proxy for value. In his presentation, Social Media expert Mike Rowland will focus on providing a clearer methodology for using and understanding social media to drive business objectives. The link to iStrategy’s Chicago Meeting can be found here.

Impact Interactions and Cisco launch Community Hall of Fame to recognize top members

Our team has been helping Cisco with the Cisco Support Community (CSC) since its initial creation as the Networking Professionals (NetPro) Community in 2000. Over the past ten years, the value provided to Cisco by its community members has been significant. To recognize the top members and employee contributors, Impact Interactions and the CSC Management team designed and launched the CSC Hall of Fame. Recognition and “MVP” style programs are an effective tactic to engage and retain members. To learn more about how a program like this can support your efforts, please contact us.

Impact Interactions presents B2B Social Media Workshops for Partner Channel Marketing in Europe

Following our successful presentation and exhibit at London’s Internet World, the Impact Interactions team is now engaged in delivering several social media workshops on using B2B Social Media to support channel partners and value added resellers (VARs) lead generation efforts. With workshops taking place in Paris, Munich, and Milan our team will work with over 40 organizations engaged in the technology consulting and implementation industry across Europe. Key concepts covered include the top of funnel build out using social media to extend the reach, nurturing leads using social media and communities, and the best practices in measuring and reporting on social media efforts in conjunction with traditional marketing programs.

Impact Interactions and PDAgroup of Austria Partner to Bring World Class Social Media Services to Companies in Europe.

We are pleased to announce a new partnership with PDAgroup to serve our joint European clients. PDAgroup of Innsbruck Austria and Impact Interactions will provide a complete range of services including consulting, moderation, reporting, and social media monitoring for large organizations across Europe. To read more about this exciting new venture, please read our press release.

Impact Interactions to exhibit and present “B2B Social Media Strategies That Work” at the Internet World 2010 London

Members of the Impact Interactions team will be hosting a conference exhibit at the Internet World 2010 show in London from April 27 to 29. We’ll have our latest whitepapers and social media briefs on using social media and online communities to drive business results. Additionally, our president Mike Rowland will deliver several presentations during the event showcasing Impact Interactions’ experience with global B2B social media projects. The client team from SAP’s partner channel in EMEA working on the Best Performance Challenge will join Mike to demonstrate how social media can enhance partner enablement, lead generation, and sales in a highly competitive industry.

We look forward to seeing you there. You can find us at exhibit area 7067, next to the Social Media Theater. Please stop by and meet our team.

Impact Interactions in the News

Our president, Mike Rowland was featured on Business.com’s Smart Business Results Blog.

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