Category: Interviews

Social Media for B2B vs. B2C Brands

Posted on by Drew Neisser

DN: Do you have any thoughts on why large B2C companies are more “socially fit” than large B2b companies?
Social media began in the hands of consumers like music enthusiasts looking to promote their tunes on MySpace, students using Facebook to connect with classmates, retail customers looking to get deals on their favorite brand through Twitter etc. It hasn’t been until very recently that businesses who serve other businesses have started to realize the benefits of social, but it’s quickly moving into the enterprise. The stuff that has sprung up on the consumer side is just the tip of the iceberg. The real mass, the real power to transform, is on the business side.

DN: Do you think there is still skepticism among B2B marketers that social can help them achieve their business goals?
In conversations I’ve had with peers in the industry I think there’s broad agreement that social marketing can be effective in business to business. However, there’s still a major shift underway in terms of the resources aligned to social and to digital approaches in general (beyond banner advertising and search term marketing.)

DN: Are there any risks in terms of pushing messaging or ignoring customer service by having social run out of the marketing department?
Yes. More importantly, it is risky to look at “social” as somehow separate from business processes and create distinct “social” teams. I feel the same way about “digital.” The more sophisticated or mature approach is to see both social and digital as modes of interaction that can affect any business process. Our Social Business Management council has representation from sales, supply chain, product development, HR, security, legal etc in addition to marketing and communications.

I know I seem to interview folks from IBM a lot but that is only because I think they are doing so many things right especially in the area of social media.  (And oh by the way, I’m going to be interviewing another IBM’er May 3rd: Real-world B2B Social Media Marketing Success: CTAM Conversation with Ed Abrams of IBM so you can expect more to come on these pages).  This is my second interview with Ethan McCarty who holds the title of Digital and Social Strategy at IBM. As you will quickly see, Ethan gets it and as such requires little introduction.  Thanks Ethan.

DN: Most companies especially B2B struggle to develop engaging content. What’s your trick?
At IBM we are focused on quality standards for everything from videos to info-graphics to social network landing pages and tweets. We have a strong understanding of our brand that we can rely on and extend to our teams globally and even our agency partners.

DN: You mentioned  that IBM is in the process of auditing all of your social channels” — what do hope to learn from this audit?
As I mentioned, we are focused on quality standards — but also improving the signal to noise ratio on social networks. For example, reducing the number of IBM community pages on Facebook that were started with the best of intentions by IBMers around the world but then became stagnant. We’ve had really good success with this already — and it just means that someone looking to connect with IBM can find us easily and get a better experience at the end of the day.

Social Media Fitness: Financial Services

Posted on by Drew Neisser

Among the many contributors of insightful content for the Social Media Fitness Study was Kris Gates, AVP, Participant and Interactive Marketing, Mass Mutual Retirement Services Division.  If you haven’t tried to do social media in Financial Services then you have no idea the regulatory barriers these folks face everyday.   I think you will find what Kris has to say about these challenges and others quite interesting.  Thanks again Kris.

DN: Besides regulatory risks, do you think there is anything else holding Financial Services firms back from committing more time/money to social media?
Beyond regulatory concerns, I think the inability for marketers to provide the business with a social media ROI the way we do other mediums continues to play a role in firms commitments. This seems to be the item that most of the naysayers point to.

DN: Can you shed some light on why your organization developed a disaster plan? Did you by chance have a disaster first?
No disasters. Due to the nature of our work, our company takes disaster planning very seriously. Our communications and mediums to distribute those are all included in our planning.

DN: How have you dealt with customer service related SM issues and / or recruiting via social?
For now we continue to manage social out of our marketing area. When customer service related items come up, they are assigned and resolved through members of our customer service team (call center).

DN: What are the barriers to creating highly engaging content?
It’s not that the content is not engaging so much as the topic. We’ve noticed a consistently steady rate of view, clicks, etc but not less comments. So a lot of people are consuming our content without responding/commenting. While we continue to create more compelling content, I believe consumers personal financial issues/questions/thoughts are something they are not entirely comfortable sharing with their Facebook friends. Funny that people will share details about their personal life via social channels, but are hesitant to let others see they struggle with financial literacy…

DN: Can you speak to the expected benefits of coordinating the customer experience across all communication channels?
We look to provide the same value, support, education for our consumers no matter which channel they prefer to engage us in. From a content creation standpoint, I challenge my team to the three channel test. If a piece of content is not compelling enough to be utilized in some form in at least three consumer channels, then it’s probably not worth creating.

DN: What if anything is holding you back from being in more channels?
If this is referring to social media channels, the answer is resources. (for content management, response, and compliance/regulatory review). Although. I believe this as an area we will expand upon in the future.

Marketing Insights on the Social Media Fitness Study

Posted on by Drew Neisser

One of things I’ve always liked about my business is the diversity of marketing challenges that are out there. For example, it’s hard to imagine two more different situations than those faced by Stacy Braun, SVP of Marketing at AXA Equitable and Evan Greene, CMO of The Recording Academy (better known for The Grammys.)  Yet when you drill down a bit, especially in the social media arena, you’ll find that smart marketers share a common commitment to understanding their target, engaging at all the right touch points and establishing metrics for success. Both Braun and Greene were kind enough to answer some of my last minutes questions related to the Social Media Fitness Study. I think you’ll find what they have to say quite interesting.

DN: Can you speak to the benefits of having a cross-disciplined social media team?
Braun: At AXA Equitable, we see the benefits of having a cross-disciplined team in driving the social media strategy and execution for our organization. Because social touches so many areas of our business, it is important to have a coordinated effort that engages all key players in our decisions around this evolving platform. This ensures we are thinking through all of the nuances that can impact our brand image, our PR strategy and how our employees, advisors and customers are engaging with our brand. While a cross-disciplined team may require more check-points along the way, the result of having collaboration and insights from all key areas of the firm ensures that we “own” the experience together.

Greene: It depends on your goal. Rather than simply using social as a tactic, the most effective brands use social as an organic part of everything they do. Therefore, a cross-discipline team, that touches many areas of the company is an effective, collaborative approach.

DN: Can you talk about the benefits of doing a social media audit?
Braun: We conducted a social media audit about a year ago and it proved extremely helpful in understanding the opportunities available to us. By looking at competitors in our industry, as well as companies in other categories, we recognized the potential of social media, which helped us set our priorities for the year ahead. It also helped us refine our social media guidelines for employees, and identify new ways to use social to proactively enhance our brand image.”

DN: What compelled you all to set up a social media training program?
Greene: With social media still being relatively new, and touching everyone either in their personal lives, or at work (and often in both places), there are no standardized rules. In fact, the rules continue to evolve almost daily. Therefore, with so much at stake with brand image and reputation in today’s fracturing marketplace, companies are well served to establish clear parameters that can be consistently applied and followed across their organizations. Otherwise, simple, sometimes innocent mistakes can happen and be disastrous to a company’s brand and reputation. When this happens, it can be very difficult to recover.

DN: What are the advantages of having a real-time dashboard?
Greene: Metrics are crucial. Listening and monitoring are really becoming the new frontier. After all, the better you become at interpreting the data, the more effective conversations you will be able to build with your social ecosystem, and the deeper the engagement you can create.

Social Media Fitness From a B2B Perspective

Posted on by Drew Neisser

A lot of people talk about social media.  Jenny Weigle does social media.  And I might add she does it really well for the socially savvy brand, CareerBuilder.com.  I met Jenny at MediaPost’s Social Media Insider Summit back in January and was delighted to catch up with her afterwards to discuss some of the findings of the soon to be released Social Media Fitness Study.  (Thanks for the insights Jenny.)

DN: Can you shed some light on how your organization came to have a disaster plan? Did you have a disaster first?
It’s all about communication. We didn’t have a disaster take place, but if one does, we feel confident in our ability to work through it because of the strong communication across departments in our company. We have social media guidelines and a community management playbook that both outline the steps to take in a crisis. My supervisor and I collaborated with people across departments to create these documents.

DN: Can you speak to the benefits of having a cross-discipline team in place for social media?
In my opinion, it’s not just a benefit for social media to cross departments…it’s a necessity. A tweet or a post on your company’s Facebook wall could pertain to any topic: customer service, job openings, products, services, advice, etc. It’s essential that the person in charge of your social media efforts is in touch with every department so that he/she can provide an answer to the fan/follower as quickly as possible. That’s what makes a company stand out and stay connected to their fans through social media.

DN: How are you developing such effective content at CareerBuilder?
Our team listens to the feedback coming from our fans on social media and looks over a report on that feedback on a regular basis. Also, each person creating our social content is up-to-date and informed on our industry so that we can give our audience the most relevant information.

DN: How have you been able develop to a consistent customer experience across all of your social channels?
Again, it comes back to communication. I stay in touch with our customer service team on a regular basis (at least monthly). They’ve been fully trained on our engagement tool and I keep them updated on major changes to the social platforms. We are a team, and it’s important to know that and do whatever it takes so that all admins feel that they are a part of the team, working together to achieve our social media goals. We also regularly recognize our team members for outstanding performance.

DN: Can you offer any insight to as to why you decided to streamline your accounts and address the benefits of doing so?
If someone wants to connect with us through social media, it should be very easy for them to find us and begin engaging. By having too many accounts, a company can make this harder for a user to find and connect with them. We evaluated which accounts were most important to us, and in some cases we merged them, in others we closed them. We did this with our audience in mind and what would make it easiest for them.

DN: Do you have any thoughts on why large B2C companies scored higher [on the Social Media Fitness Test] than B2B firms and smaller B2C companies?
B2B has been slower to adopt social media overall. In my opinion, it’s easier for a consumer to pick up on social media because he/she can use it and learn it on their own time. For a business to use social media, it must first consider what needs and goals it will fulfill, who will run it, what content will be shared, what metrics will be measured, etc. This takes more time, research and consideration for the business.

Optimizing Your Digital Media

Posted on by Drew Neisser

One of the findings that surprised me in the Social Media Fitness Study was that large companies seem to be far more “socially fit” than small companies. I suspect the reason for my surprise is that I have worked with a handful of well-funded fast growing start-ups that totally get social and who squeeze every last drop of value out of it. One such company is TagMan, the global leader in tag management, whose Marketing Director, Nelleke Kloet offered up her input on the results of the study. Since TagMan is in the business of helping clients figure out how to optimize their digital media activities and they have data that shows the disproportionate power of social media to drive traffic and leads, it should come as no surprise that Nelleke is both a believer and a “fit” practitioner.

DN: Any thoughts on why large companies had higher “fitness” scores than small companies?
That surprises me as I think the “free” media has been explored in the past better by smaller companies. I guess with time, resources have increased and improved scores. Resources, in terms of money as well as people, resources which bigger companies have more of.

DN: Do you think social media can be even more powerful for small companies than big companies?
Yes, I think it can have better ROI for small companies and more accessible if you have limited budgets.

DN: What role does social media perform in TagMan’s overall business plan?
It’s one of the elements of the marketing mix. We ensure we know the exact role of each media and focus on that.  For example, Facebook has a specific role for employees and to get to know the people behind the company. Each Linkedin group and profile has a specific role. For example, the company LinkedIn page is about our company and the people (great for comparison to competitors business) whereas the TagMan group is about news and discussions for people working with tags.

DN: What are your goals with social media?
We use it for thought leadership mostly but we have seen, for some campaigns, it has actually worked for lead generation too. It depends on the call to action.

DN: You were among the minority in which social media has permeated all aspects of your business. What is behind your commitment to social media?
We see the benefits of social media when we run TagMan attribution reports for our clients so we know what role it can play in the marketing mix. We also use our own real-time attribution reporting for our website to help us what role it plays in our business.

DN: Can you speak to the benefits of having all your employees be active in social media?
All our employees are brand embassadors so they should be able to speak about your brand in the appropriate way. If you have to restrict it it actually means you have not done enough ‘marketing’ on your own employees – which is ofetn the case in larger companies. The benefits are that you can tap into their networks so more reach as well as its more genuin and not scripted which makes it more believable for the audience.

Using Social Media to Focus on Customers

Posted on by Drew Neisser

B2B companies for the most part have been playing catch up to their B2C counterparts in the social media arena. One company that is coming on strong in this area is Pega, a company that helps other companies be more focused on their customers via BPM and CRM software solutions. I was delighted to able to catch up with Grant Johnson, Pega’s CMO as part of the soon to be released Social Media Fitness Study. (BTW, CMO’s can catch up with Grant at The CMO Club Thought Leadership Summit starting April 26th in NYC.)

DN: Large B2C companies significantly outscored large B2B companies in this study. Why do you think this is the case?
While social has proven to have vast benefits for all companies that become adept at it, there’s little doubt that B2C organizations – especially those with millions of customers that come into daily contact with consumers – have more opportunities to show they’ve embraced this. At Pega our target-account approach differs from many other B2C organizations. That’s not to say we’re not embracing social media, because we are, but we’re leveraging it in a far more targeted way than most B2C organizations do based on the size of our audience.

DN: Can you speak to the role social media plays in Pega’s overall marketing mix?
Social has become an integral and formidable medium for us to leverage throughout marketing as we at Pega view it as part of our overall customer-centric market approach. We’re active on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn to ensure we’re engaging with our customers appropriately but also so we can continue building our brand awareness. We’ve added another dedicated full time resource to further our social media efforts and we’re confident that this role will continue to increase.

DN: You mentioned that social wasn’t gaining as much traction as you’d like. What are doing to address this?
I’m actually dedicating much more resource as traction is building faster this year.

DN: Is there a hope that if more employees are active in social that this could benefit the whole company?
We are encouraging more people to be involved in our overall social media efforts and we want to make sure the right people are engaged with customers and prospects across the whole client management lifecycle, whether it’s account executives, industry solutions, public relations, as well as ensure they know what’s appropriate and what’s not in this medium.

DN: Lots of companies especially B2B struggle to develop engaging content. Do you think this is category wide problem?
Yes. Many companies have reams of content, but it’s too centered on company promotion vs. customer and prospect engagement, when taking into consideration what stage of the buying cycle they are in (e.g. someone just surfing your Web site for the first time is not ready for a “how to pick a supplier” checklist). Also, we want to make sure we present content in the most digestible way possible. While they’ve no doubt proven useful at many things, 140 characters or 300-word blogs aren’t always the most appropriate way to do this.