Recently, the celebrated American astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson teamed up with Reddit for a very special Ask Me Anything (AMA) session. For several hours Neil answered hundreds of questions about his thoughts on space, space science, and the future of scientific research and education in America. Neil is already known for his charismatic demeanor and it came through even in his text based responses.

So what does this have to do with social media? Neil’s AMA is an excellent example of using social media to not only engage but inspire a captive audience. While you have to be willing to deal with the unexpected, the opportunity for thought leadership is unprecedented. Putting yourself out there and advertising the idea that people are encouraged to come “pick your brain” for a few hours is a great way to make your mark on the social landscape as someone who not only is willing to offer your own thoughts and ideas but also entertain the thoughts and ideas of others. Take a few moments and read through the conversation at Reddit. Beware, though! Neil’s appearance garnered a whopping 11,000 comments!

About Neil deGrasse Tyson: Widely touted as the next Carl Sagan, Neil deGrasse Tyson is a tireless and fearless advocate of space science. Currently the head of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History and future host of the sequel to Carl Sagan’s epic Cosmos series, Neil has dedicated his life to once again making science an exciting and attainable field for the next generation. If you have time to get misty eyed, check out Neil’s account of meeting Carl Sagan for the first time.

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!

Impact Interactions’ president Mike Rowland to host panel discussion “Riding the Hype of Social Media for B2B Marketing” at iStrategy Conference, April 5, 2011 in San Jose, CA.

In the current economic environment it becomes absolutely vital for businesses to be able to reach and acquire new clients and grow while at the same time managing costs. Social networks are a great and easy way for B2C companies to communicate with their potential customers, but their use by B2B businesses presents a number of challenges. Nowadays buyers set the ground rules on when and where they will engage and increasingly turn to trusted third parties for education (including blogs, Twitter, and other social media), not sales people. This means B2B marketers must develop an integrated social media strategy which identifies where customer conversations are taking place and effectively uses various digital channels to acquire, convert and retain business customers while simultaneously nurturing existing clients. Sound challenging? It is.

This panel discussion will examine NetApp’s, Cisco’s, and SAP’s social media strategy and how new online channels and interactions provide the company with innovative ways to market to their business audience. It will also look at examples how these companies organize their teams and how they integrate social into the rest of their campaign mix, with results of specific campaigns, and show simple tools used to build an integrated Social campaign and measure success.

Join Navneet Grewal, Director of Online Marketing with NetApp; Jeanette Gibson, Director Corporate Communications with Cisco; and Sara Larsen, Senior Director of Digital Marketing with SAP, along with Mike Rowland in learning how to help your B2B efforts move to the next level of success.

To learn more about this great senior executive level event, please click here.

Image by Worldle.net

The Dachis Group’s Social Business Summit 2010 in Austin has come to an end. Like many conferences, it featured a variety of dynamic speakers providing their view on the topic at hand whether it was macro trends or the specifics of their experiences. But what comes from this conference is a little bit more interesting than most…

Taken as a whole, the Social Business Summit 2010 presented a compelling case of how doing business has changedand how successful organizations like Intuit, Citibank, Comcast, Yum Brands (KFC), and many others are dealing with the change in a way that creates value for their organizations. But where the summit differs is in the organizational aspect of that change. Having taught Organizational Design & Behavior during my MBA program, this is always an area of business that I believe is overlooked when a disruptive event or technology occurs. My eleven years and counting in the online community/social media/interactive industry have provided numerous examples of how organizations embrace the change or ignore it.

For example, in Charlene Li’s session on “Making the Case for Open Leadership” I could identify with my own experiences in the Property & Casualty Insurance industry where closed, top down leadership is practiced with vigor. At Safeco Insurance Company, we sat on huge volumes of customer data that were stored untouched in company databases. In 1998, working with several agencies, brokerages, and employees, I put together a business plan for using the data as a means to drive down the combined ratio (the main metric for insurance companies) and generate new revenues. The plan was shot down immediately with the statement “we’ve been doing it our way for over 100 years and it works, why change?” Management at Safeco was unable to be open to ideas that came from its sales team (agencies) and employees in the field. Instead of listening and treating them as partners, and adapting to the market’s direction, Safeco was stuck in its past where control dictated that you told your sales team and employees what to do and didn’t want feedback. This idea was so culturally enmeshed at Safeco that as business practices changed with the adoption of the Internet in the late 1990′s, it could not and would not adapt. By believing that only one way communication worked, Safeco missed opportunity after opportunity in its business to stay successful. Instead it slowly died with consistent management turnover and poor financial results until finally Liberty Mutual purchased them. It’s not that Safeco senior management missed one opportunity, it’s that their management style and lack of vision missed so many that their organization became less relevant over time.

But don’t think this type of thinking is relegated to heavily regulated industries. Citibank’s Jaime Punishill relayed to me at lunch that it takes time and a lot of pushing to move your organization, but it can be done if there are senior managers willing to listen. Citibank whether it wanted to or not is moving towards open leadership and working with its stakeholders to drive change (and hopefully value) to its shareholders.

Where does Open Leadership work? Our client Cisco was mentioned by Charlene. We helped Cisco launch its first online community in 2000, the Cisco Network Professionals Community. Over the years, we’ve helped launch and manage numerous communities for Cisco around the globe. There is one constant. While Cisco may have many of the same issues as any other large organization, it recognizes that command and control model of management doesn’t work. It lives and breathes the strategic and tactical oxygen of change, adaptation, and listening to the customer. While macroeconomic forces certainly helped Cisco in the 1990′s, it culture has helped it succeed where others like 3Com, Lucent, and Nortel have failed. Other successful organizations with this approach include our clients NetApp and SAP.

The second most important theme of the summit to me was the network. Not just a social network, but the network of customers, suppliers, employees, shareholders, and competitors. Too often conferences confuse strategy with tactics. Taken together, the summit’s sessions provided a strategic look at how business is moving quickly to a social business model and presented the tactical results to back that assertion up.

While I don’t agree with some of the comments about how corporations have ruined networks, trade, commercial transactions, etc. or how we’re moving back to a peer-to-peer economy,  I do agree that the network has always been in place. First it was local, then regional, then super-regional (think Europe), and more recently global. Large multinationals have made the economic process more efficient than it has ever been. Yet, it is still rife with inefficiencies. The understanding that building relationships with your network can make you more efficient is just catching on. For all the talk of rapid adoption of social media, we see far too many disjointed efforts where marketing, support, sales, and internal efforts are all operating independently (and inefficiently).

One great example of using the network properly is that of Intuit’s TurboTax team. Christine Morrison gave a wonderful talk on how it is about making money with the network while also meeting the network’s needs. The overall takeaway was that it is more profitable to pay attention to the network and become part of it than to try and dictate to it or worse, ignore it.

While there are differing opinions on how to utilize the network, several key features of successful networks are:

1. An executive who believes in the power of interacting with stakeholders and has the power to implement a plan, hire staff (in-house or outsourced), and measure the results objectively
2. An organizational culture that truly wants to listen to its stakeholders (lip service doesn’t work) and take action based upon what it learns
3. A focus on results that matter to the audience (customers, employees, suppliers, investors, etc.) which in turn translate into value for the organization in the long run

Corporate culture leads the way to long term success or failure (the Safeco example above shows what can happen when you believe that your organization can dictate to the network rather than work with it). And that’s what social business is all about to us. It’s not the technology, it’s about understanding how your targeted audience wants to interact with you and if your culture can withstand the change or not. In our consulting and management projects with Global organizations such as Cisco, SAP, NetApp, Intel, and others we’ve seen how this idea is so much a part of the firm’s success.

So what was missing? Well from our standpoint, there were a couple of items that were either untouched or glossed over which are incredibly important to the success of any social business project. First is the issue of trust. Until the last session of the day by Lee Bryant, trust wasn’t even mentioned. Social business runs on trust. If you are unable to trust your audience, peers, employees, and other stakeholders you will be unable to act upon their input.

Second, the idea of globalization and culture was not discussed despite its implications on social business. There is a very large difference in how people do business because of their cultures. Social businesses must account for this. The culture in Japan is different than Poland which is different than Germany which is different than the U.S. Online activities reflect that difference. We’ve seen it in action in our work with Cisco’s NetPro Poland as well as SAP’s local communities around the globe. The one comment about global efforts was from KFC’s Rick Maynard who said ”We don’t have a global strategy, we have a strategy that we localize for differences.” While the network is global, local tactics that meet your audience’s needs demonstrate that you understand the local culture and how it impacts your communications.

Overall, the Social Business Summit was a success.If you take a strategic view of the content presented, you hopefully came away with a better way of looking at social business. There are several other folks who attended who have shared their comments and the tweetstream from the event as well:

• Steve Ellis
• iMediaWorks
• @CarrieBugbee (Tweetstream of #SBS2010 tweets)
• @adamcohen (Tweetstream)

We’re looking forward to next year’s event, you should too….

Mike Rowland, President

I grew up watching television shows where each week there was a “Special Guest Star” on an episode each week. These guests provided a little extra to the show and usually were cool celebrities. Think of all the villains on Batman for example or the Brat Pack on “Vegas” or the vacationers on Fantasy Island…or for those of you a little younger, the guests on the Simpsons.

Following that idea, I’d like to introduce our Special Guest Blogger, independent analyst Matthew Lees.

Matthew is a well respected analyst in the Social Media and Online Community World (see his bio here). He is the author of reports through the Patricia Seybold Group such as:

1. Selecting An Online Community Platform
2. Best Practices In Crowdsourcing
3. Analyst Report: Lithium’s Social CRM Suite

After reading his research and reviews of his findings, I thought Matthew truly understood how to make social media technology work in an enterprise organization. So, like all good social media practitioners I followed him on Twitter (@mlees) and his blog. Matthew and I first met in person at one of Forum One’s Online Community Unconferences. We’d been reading each other’s blogs and reports and discovered that we come to the industry with the same high level focus… using these tools to improve business results. While Matthew focuses on the technology and its impact, we focus on the process and the users. Together, we cover the issues that all enterprises need to succeed in their social media projects.

We decided in late December over a crab cake lunch here in Maryland, that we should find a way to collaborate together. Our idea is to inform, educate, and drive the best practices we’ve developed to a broader audience with this blog and our twitter accounts. Matthew will be posting here over the next few months both independently and collaboratively with our team members.

If you have a suggested issue of topic for us to cover, please contact us by adding a comment on this entry or by using our contact form.

So, with that said welcome Matthew!

Mike Rowland, President

The world is adopting social media at higher and higher levels according to a recent Neilsen Report.  According to the research by Neilsen, global time spent on social media sites increased by 82% in December 2009 when compared with December 2008. Pretty large increase especially if you look into the footnotes and understand that this research is based upon only U.S., U.K., Australia, Brazil, Japan, Switzerland, Germany, France, Spain and Italy. No China, no India, no Russia, nor are there any Nordic countries listed.

But this growth coincides with what we’re seeing here at Impact Interactions. We’ve helped develop and launch multiple communities in countries such as China, Russia, Italy, France, Germany, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Poland, and elsewhere over the past several years. And while clients are still interested in their communities in the U.S. their focus is shifting. We are seeing more interest in companies asking us to help them launch communities and social media plans in countries ranging from Japan to Russia to Brazil to Mexico.

The growth in third party applications such as Twitter and Facebook have helped companies to understand the potential reach of the medium, but it is the local language social networks like StudiVZ (German) which have helped in-country marketing teams decide that they must be engaged with their customers using social tools. So even as Facebook moves past these local social media/networks, the smart marketer understands that it’s not the tool so much as it’s the growth that matters in deciding whether social media is a good tactic in a particular market.

In our experience leading a social media workshop in Innsbruck, Austria at the prestigious Management Center of Innsbruck it was clear that our non-US audience were more engaged on local language social media tools including blogs and social networks than on the U.S. offerings. (In fact, it was there that I learned more about StudiVZ and other offerings.)

That doesn’t mean that non-U.S. members are not on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. But it does mean that for the savvy global marketer the research and identification of which sites or applications to use is a bit more difficult. While the strategy remains the same, each Internet culture requires a clear focus on localized tactics. That means a cookie cutter approach using the same tools like Twitter, Facebook, or other application across multiple markets will not deliver the results you desire.

Watch the growth, it’s here to stay. But also look for the smaller sites that can deliever more value to your organization when using social media globally. As the old adage goes “All marketing is local.” The same applies to social media.

-Mike Rowland, President

“Following our lawyers’ interpretation of the DMCA, we don’t remove any content until the copyright holder contacts us. You say that is a weak defense against copyright lawsuits. Why?”

And our answers always come back the same:

“Do you make any money from ads or other offers on your site which are visible from the page showing the copyrighted materials uploaded by your members? If so, you may have a problem.”

And then we’d go round and round with each other, citing specific examples and whether they violate the act or not. The stance we’ve always taken is to be pro-active and remove it if you are making money from that page. We recommend that you remove it before someone asks because over time, you become a great target for a lawsuit.

Well, now many of the larger copyright holders are telling the world the same thing. On Thursday, October 18th a consortium including Disney, Microsoft, Fox, NBC Universal, CBS, and Viacom entered into a pact which sends a strong message to all of us who host sites that allow user generated content. In essence, this group is moving forward with clarifying the rules of engagement in the WWW war over copyrighted materials. Here is the statement from the Wall Street Journal’s article on the announcement that stands out:

” The copyright holders in the group have agreed not to pursue Internet companies for infringement claims if their sites adhere to certain principles. Those principles include eliminating copyright-infringing content uploaded by users to Web sites, and blocking any infringing material before it is publicly accessible.”

This group is promoting the idea that site owners have some responsibility to review what their users are uploading. The group is looking for firms to simply make their best efforts to remove the copyrighted material in a prompt manner. And from our view of the world, that make sense if you want to avoid getting tied up in court and spending a bucketload of money to defend your site…See our blog entry on the costs of getting served papers for this type of lawsuit.

But of course, we are biased. We help firms moderate their user generated content and firmly believe that the DMCA is so full of ambiguous wording that the best defense in this area is a good moderation strategy. Want to discuss this further? Post a comment or contact us.