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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B2B Social Media Catalyst Series – Customer Success Videos

Welcome to our second session of the B2B Social Media Catalyst Series on Customer Success Videos. As the internet becomes a more proficient source of information for purchasers, the role of online recommendations is growing. This is a commonplace activity in the consumer market where Amazon recommendations drive book sales, comments on TripAdvisor and Expedia drive vacation purchases, and even on Twitter where there is a constant stream of tweets from users recommending their favorite store. Smart business marketers long ago discovered the power of positive comments in online communities. 

Asking for referrals has become much more a part of regular business as members of LinkedIn already understand. For Business-To-Business marketers, that same routine can help build demand generation results by helping to build stronger relationships with the visitors to their web sites.

Too often, references are used in the ending phases of the sales process. Social media allows you to bring these very important assets into play much earlier with your prospective customer, even if you don’t know him or her yet. So with that as an introduction, please view our next video session on building your Customer Success Videos.

 

 

To download this presentation and/or the transcript for the video, please visit our Social Media Resources document library.

If you have questions or comments, please add them below in our comments section. The team at Impact Interactions is ready to help you improve your B2B social media strategy and tactics.

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B2B Social Media Catalyst Series – The Elevator Pitch

Welcome to our B2B Social Media Catalyst Series session on using an online elevator pitch to introduce yourself to your audience.  Before you can launch your B2B social media efforts, you must build compelling content that will entice your audience to engage further with your company online. In our experience, the elevator pitch is an underutilized tool which when successfully created acts as your introduction and online handshake. Using a video hosted by Youtube or elsewhere, but embedded into your site can add a little visual impact to your online efforts and demonstrate the power of video for your B2B social media efforts.

So with that as our introduction, here is our series video on The Elevator Pitch.

 

To download this presentation and/or the transcript for the video, please visit our Social Media Resources document library.

If you have questions or comments, please add them below in our comments section. The team at Impact Interactions is ready to help you improve your B2B social media strategy and tactics.

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Welcome to Impact Interactions’ B2B Social Media Catalyst Series

In our new B2B Social Media Catalyst Series, we are going to provide our best practices for developing or enhancing your B2B social media efforts. Too often, we see content on the web that promotes the idea that B2B and B2C social media tactics should be used in the same manner. Based upon our experience with major B2B brands like Cisco, SAP, NetApp, and midsize B2B companies like Micropole, we respectfully disagree with that idea.

The main reason is focused upon the results that marketers are trying to achieve when using social media. Consumer focused efforts usually are attempting to build awareness which leads to trial of the product or service. That’s why couponing and discounts work so well in the space. Think of Dell’s results on Twitter. They gained results by constantly announcing a discount on their products which lead to a sale. Yes, some small businesses bought using this channel, but the majority of customers were individuals seeking out a discount.

Business to Business focused firms have a much different path to success using social media. Their efforts are based upon building awareness to build a relationship that is mutually valuable and sustainable. In most cases, B2B social media efforts are not built for quick transactional results, but rather for a longer term relationship. In our experience, this is why we believe that B2B social media is a complimentary tactic to your relationship selling strategy.

So let’s get started with a quick introduction to the series by learning a bit more about the differences we’ve noticed during our work with our business to business clients and colleagues.

We’d like our B2B Social Media Catalyst Series to be an online roundtable for discussion of these issues. Please feel free to add your comments to this blog entry and the team at Impact Interactions will be happy to discuss our experience and ideas with you. You can download the presentation and transcript in our Social Media Resources library.

Future series sessions will include the building blocks for a successful B2B social media strategy, beginning with content then moving to the 3rd Party application (think Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook) beacon strategy we recommend to our clients, social media monitoring tactics, building stronger conversion and engagement rates, measuring your B2B social media efforts, and a framework for using social media for your lead generation and customer nurturing efforts.

We hope that you’ll join us for the series over the next several weeks and let us know if there are specific topics that you’d like to see us cover in our B2B Social Media Catalyst Series.

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Has Viacom Gone Too Far?

Very interesting take on the recent court decision regarding Viacom’s request for user records from Google/YouTube by the District Court for Southern New York Judge Louis Stanton. In his article “Viacom Has Gone Too Far” author Lance Ulanoff gets a bit upset by what he sees are the implications for users of YouTube. Among his chief complaints? Viacom will now probably go after millions of members to try and get them to pay for the copyrighted videos they viewed on YouTube because they are greedy. Well, he says Billionaire Sumner Redstone is greedy…

Read some of these blurbs from the story:

“Once Google delivers the terabytes worth of data, you and your minions can pour over it looking for copyrighted content and those who watched it. Oh, I know you say you just want to understand if people watch more illegal content than legal—like it’s all some academic exercise—but I say there’s more to it than that. You want to go after the viewers. You want to find people who consume too much Colbert Report and MTV on YouTube and find a way to levy a fine on them. “

“With those logs in hand, though, Mr. Redstone, Viacom has the will and means to do all sorts of nasty things. It will learn what copyrighted videos still exist, whether or not people still watch them, and who the watchers are. A witch hunt could ensue.”

What a bunch of nonsense. What did Viacom get the judgement to obtain? User records which can identify which users uploaded the copyrighted videos. Google can and probably will appeal the ruling. Why? Certainly not because they are interesting in protecting their members. Rather they will appeal because once they provide that information, it will no longer be cool to upload videos on YouTube and they will lose advertising revenues. Viewers are only attracted if the content is good….lose the content and you lose the viewers, the ad clicks, and their associated revenue streams.

But the bigger question remains in the author’s mind… “When will they go after the viewers?” Answer: Probably never.

Why? It’s not going to be cost effective nor is there any legal reason to do so. The DMCA is all about those who upload or transfer copyrighted materials, not those who only watch. User data including the transactional metrics for users is very valuable information to have when pursuing a copyright infringement case using the DMCA.

But not because of the information on the viewers separated from the videos uploaded…

The reason to get this information is to isolate the members who uploaded the most copyrighted materials, then build the trail of users who viewed them in order to have metrics backing up the amount that Google/YouTube owes you for the copyrighted content. Secondary reason is that if you lose this suit and Google/YouTube is found to be protected under the Safe Harbor Provision of the DMCA, then you have the data through discovery to go after the individuals who are now responsible for the lost revenues. (Not that they will collect the money, but it will send a strong message.)

We continue to hear so many people say that there is no harm in letting the members of a social network or community upload what they want and control the norms of the site. It’s the Internet for goodness sake! But unfortunately, these folks have had a bit too much of the internet communist Kool-Aid. This case is proving that these people (and many of them are consultants in the online community/social networking world) are on the wrong side and mis-informed. We hope that this case continues to move towards a judgement rather than a settlement in order to provide clarity for any organization that offers its members the opportunity to upload content to their site.

Looking for a better way to deal with all of these issues? Contact us. We’re not lawyers, although we have slept at Holiday Inns from time to time….

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The Business of Community – Ebay and Apple (with help from Microsoft)

Rachel Makool of EBay and Mark Freeman Williams of Apple Support presented interesting ideas regarding strategic planning and operations of a large online community.

Strategic Planning for Communities:

Rachel separates the strategic planning into two large areas: Business Strategy and Community Strategy. Business Strategy is very fluid and ever changing to ensure the online community is doing its part to help the business side of EBay. Community Strategy is the detail work of engaging with members (EBay holds lots of offline meetings with their members — 200 to 250 at a single meeting multiple times through out the year and sponsors their EBay users convention), looking at new features for value to members, and maintaining the road map for their technology.

Mark mentioned that for Apple’s Support Community, they prepare an annual plan for a projection of the upcoming year’s resource needs and basic projections. Then once it is prepared, they fight to get the resources needed while fire-fighting issues that may come up during the same time period. (For example, Apple fired all its moderators only to replace them later causing some havoc and hand wringing in the community.) However, once the actual year began, the strategic plan was made irrelevant in two weeks.

Operational Details:

This was an interesting insight into two large online communities. I’ll summarize EBay first, then Apple, then add some great insight into Microsoft’s communities added by Ken Rosen.

EBay:
EBay is concerned about the consistency of their member experience. The community started as a support community but evolved over time to a seller relationship tool. The community team latches on to company employees where they can (some get it, some don’t). Employees post as employees, no personas used. All employee member names are highlighted in PINK. The downside of this strategy is when a valued employee resource leaves the community there is a disruption. EBay uses both employee moderators and outside moderators employed by their software company. To support future strategy, EBay places some community members under an NDA and uses the group as a focus group for new features and site offerings. (A best practice for top communities that we recommend to our clients.) When negative issues like a proposed boycott or other rant regarding pricing comes up in the community, EBay watches but does not respond. While this type of thing can attract media (and has), EBay does not want to come off as defensive.

Apple:
As a support community, Apple is concerned about getting their members a correct answer to their questions as soon as possible. To do this, Apple uses 8 members of their support center. This strategy has resulted in most member questions being answered within an hour of posting. Apple does not use personas to answer questions, in the support world this makes sense. When a disgruntled member starts ranting or posts a negative poll or puts up anything else not related to the mission of the support site, Apple removes it. They use a zero tolerance policy on their user generated content.

Microsoft:
Ken Rosen of Microsoft gave several add on comments about his team and this topic. First, at Microsoft staff are expected to state their opinions (positive and negative) publicly, not through personas. To help identify their top users/members, Microsoft used coupon codes as pass alongs to measure which members had the highest influence in the community. They did this by tracking how many members used a coupon passed along by someone else. Microsoft also surveys customer satisfaction to test how their community is doing. They are thrilled if they get a 5% response rate for Microsoft surveys. Microsoft community member surveys get a 15 to 20% response rate!

Overall, this was a great session with many good points made by the speakers and audience. The ideas of not using personas is a good fit for mature communities but not for newer communities. Our experience has shown that personas are a best practice for new communities to drive engagement and conversion rates. But over time, the personas should diminish their role and let real users take over in the community. The idea of always using a corporate employee member to answer questions has always been an impediment to growth of a community. That’s because the model behavior objective of members answering each other gets stunted by employees answering everything turning the community into a Q&A with the company rather than a many to many conversation.

Thank you EBay, Apple, and Microsoft for sharing your views of large online communities. It was very informative! To learn more about online community management and strategy, please visit our website.

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Live From the Online Community Business Forum

I’m in Santa Fe attending the OCBF today and tomorrow and will blog on interesting issues that we discuss.

We’ve just finished the introductions this morning. In listening to the attendees, not only do we have a nice mix of very experienced community people, but also several folks new to the community world. What I found interesting was that even the existing, experienced communities are facing similar issues across the board. Issues raised by attendees in the introduction time were:

• How do I measure ROI?
• How can I build more loyalty among my members?
• Our growth has flattened, how do we get it going again?
• How can we get our executives to move away from looking at page views and into the engagement and conversion ratios that I prepare?
• How do we extend the community beyond the U.S.?

So, it’s going to be interesting to see if we will get to some of these issues. I’m always surprised that these questions remain as there is a wealth of knowledge available on various web sites that can help. But it’s good to get these out in the open and hopefully we can help.

Do these questions exist for your community or organization? We can help. Please contact us to find out how…

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The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same…Research on Online Community ROI Techniques

As part of our industry leadership role, we belong to the Online Community Research Network. We’ve been mildly intrigued with the research surveys the network has performed over the past several months, but the most recent survey based report “Online Community ROI: Models and Reports” surprised us. Call it a case of “The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same” syndrome.

Here are some of the report’s findings:

1. Only 31% of respondents have a comprehensive online community strategy in place (53% are developing their strategy as they go!)
2. 59% of respondents say their goals are closely aligned with their organization’s corporate goals.

We find this response interesting as if only 31% of respondents have a strategy in place, how can 59% have closely aligned goals?

Additional findings:

1. Metrics are still confusing people in terms of how to use them for ROI. The top ranking metrics be noted as critical for ROI are listed as traffic patterns and statistics (visitors, visits, page views, etc.).
2. Cost savings for Customer Service/Tech Support, Trial Downloads of products, both scored the lowest as critical metrics for ROI. Yet, these two metrics are the easiest to use to demonstrate a base level of support for an ROI case.

Community Managers who responded to the initial survey ranked Membership Growth as the number one success or performance indicator they report on regularly. The most important data that they report upward include (in ranked order): number of members, basic metrics (whatever that means), online content, number of visitors, number of posts, and other meaningless metrics.

More shocking than this is the response to the level of satisfaction/believability of the data with your executives and how satisfied the executives are with the reports they are receiving. A whopping 23% responded very satisfied with 19% responding satisfied. The executive teams we deal with want clear, concise and relevant reporting. That doesn’t sound like what the respondents are delivering to us.

Think there might be a correlation between the lack of a cohesive online community strategy that closely aligns with corporate goals and the lack of sophisticated measurement and reporting? We do.

Many of the respondents (and members of the OCRN) are still confused when it comes to demonstrating the value of their communities to management. With the lack of refinement comes the claim that online community is a soft application that doesn’t deliver results. During budgeting, how can your online community efforts get the funding you need if your team cannot prove its value to management?

Based upon the responses, we wonder how many of the vendors in the Online Community space don’t understand measurement and reporting issues. With budgets tightening, it is clear to us that this has to be a key issue for the industry. Yet in our opinion, the methodology and understanding regressed to pre-2000 levels. That’s a shame, because our ROI analysis does deliver an easy to understand measurement of how the community is delivering on organizational goals.

We help our clients understand exactly how their communities can help with organizational goals and how to measure their success. We start with targeted audience attraction through PPC efforts and sponsored content efforts, then follow these members through the online community value chain to demonstrate the ROI and value that online communities bring to an organization.

Want to learn more about this topic? Leave us a comment or contact us.

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MySpace: New Safety Measures…A Good Start…Maybe

Today’s big news in the community/social networking world is the agreement that MySpace entered into with 49 states and the District of Columbia. MySpace agreed to a rather comprehensive set of standards to help protect children who use their site. Sounds good, and many of the issues are dead on. There are a couple of elements that we think are so elementary (pardon the pun) that we wondered why the MySpace team wasn’t already performing them. Specifically:

1. MySpace agreed to review every image posted to its site. Best way to stop the online nonsense of users adding porn and offensive images is to be proactive. This probably was not done earlier for two reasons. The first is that the amount of images to review is probably quite large and would be very expensive to hire staff to do the reviews. The second is that the actual amount of images which are offensive and posted to the site is relatively small. But this is a good step for securing their site and making it more attractive for parents who are concerned about their children’s activities online.
2. Cross checking sex offender databases against the MySpace registration database. This is something that probably wasn’t thought about when MySpace was created. But in this age of immediate contact, communication, and internet gratification, it is warranted now. Just watch NBC’s “To Catch A Predator” series and you’ll see how the bad guys use the internet to go after children. Another good step by MySpace that other social networks should consider adopting. Afterall, many sex offenders are barred from using the internet to contact underage minors in their probation agreements. This would serve as an additional layer of law enforcement protection if the sites would contact local law authorities when sex offenders are found to have registered on their sites. (The only downside that we see from this element is that it may drive offenders deeper undercover, making them harder to find online.)
3. MySpace profiles for those users who are 15 and 16 will automatically be set to a default private setting. Another logical step. Hopefully, this doesn’t impact the use by this group but in some cases safety does need to come first.

It will be interesting to see the technology that MySpace will create and use to enforce the age based controls on the site. (Just like the video controls and copyright safeguards technology we’re still waiting to see from Google…).

Just as Facebook agreed with the NY State Attorney’s office to remove any objectionable content reported by users within 24 hours, these steps are a movement in the right direction and actually are implementing the best practices for running a community web site.

The way that many of the social networks sites run is to let users control everything and only act when contacted by an authority such as a state’s Attorney General. Not the best idea for these web sites. With the money that they are making, they need to invest in keeping their sites from becoming pits of objectionable content home to predators and perverts. In the long run, a solid moderation system such as we’ve implemented for several clients will save much more than it costs.

Want to learn more about effective moderation techniques or online safety for children? Contact us, we’d be happy to help.

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2007- What We Learned about Online Communities

2008 is here! As we embark on another year’s work for our clients, we want to share some of the best practices that we’ve built over the past five years or so… especially those which helped our clients succeed. So, in no particular order here they are:

1. Measurement of your community is not enough! Too many community teams measure very strict areas under their control without integrating their results into the larger organization’s picture. Our client, SAP understands this and measures from the online ad to the deal in a single report we prepare for them.
2. It’s the people, not the technology! Put another way, if you build it, they won’t necessarily come. What was true in 2000 is true today. Yet we talked to about 20 community and marketing teams in 2007 who could not understand why their social networks and community efforts were failing. It takes more than a pretty UI and good technology to succeed.
3. Personas are stronger than moderators. Again and again, we read blogs and hear in conferences that the community host/moderator should engage the visitors by being an active member of the community who starts threads and adds content to demonstrate the commitment of the organization to the community. This is not only a myth continually perpetuated by others, but a real negative to “real community members” who expect the moderator to be the referee, not a participant. Moderators who engage the community as moderator rather than host have a tendency to become personally involved in the personality and behavior conflicts rather than being able to stand back and objectively moderate. Personas are much more effective.
4. Just because a member is a long term member doesn’t mean that you allow them to remain a member for life. Some community teams are afraid to remove a long time member from their community for repeated violations. We had a situation in the end of 2006 where we removed a long term, previously publicly recognized super user. Unfortunately, this member went to the dark side and became hostile to other members and the moderation team. A decision was made, the controversy eventually subsided and the community was better for that member’s removal. Ugly? Yes. Effective? Yes.
5. Members will report violations of the terms of service and community norms because they “care” about their community. Another myth continually mentioned in books, articles, blogs, and conferences. We’ve tracked actual violations against member reported violations for five different communities this year (our clients and our roundtable members). What did we find? On average, members only report 20-30% of all violations. The type of violation they miss the most? Copyright violations, the ones that can really hurt your organization if left on your site. Just ask Google/YouTube or the now defunct Bolt.com. Members do not think it is their job to police or moderate the network or community. They think it’s your job and they are correct.
6. Social Networks are not really communities. This one will shock some folks. But as we’ve helped clients engage their site visitors using both Social Networking tools and traditional online community tools, we’ve been able to use metrics to identify key differences which affect the impact and the results realized from them. The number one difference? Social Networks are all about ME. Communities are all about WE. Social Network members spend time on THEIR OWN pages and return there more often than they go elsewhere. The networks that are built are small and usually exclusive versus the traditional community’s inclusive nature. They lack the power that larger traditional communities have in helping people resolve their issues.

The work we did in 2007 did reinforce something that we already knew… that people not tools make communities succeed or fail. If you’ll concentrate as much time on the people that come to your site and how to help them succeed, you’ll succeed.

Good luck in 2008.

If you’d like to learn more about the best practices that can help you succeed, please contact us.

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