Category: Interviews

Social Media: Insights Worth Copying

Posted on by Drew Neisser

I had the pleasure of catching up with Diego Pereda as part of the Social Media Fitness Study follow up interviews. Diego is the
Social Marketing Program Manager
, Corporate Marketing and Communications at Xerox Corporation and offers a number of insights, dare I say, worth copying. Thanks Diego.

DN: B2C companies seems to be ahead of B2B brands when it comes to social media. Do you think B2B marketers are skeptical about social media?
At this point in the B2C world, social media is mission critical. Consumers have demonstrated the power of social media and social media is one of the primary ways for consumer brands to interact and engage with their target audience. For B2B companies there is not always a clear connection to how their efforts in social media will translate in business results. Therefore, skepticism still exists but there are more cases from B2B companies that have embraced Social Media and are being successful with it so it is a lot easier to make the case to a Senior Executive from a B2B company that social media is here to stay, it will help their brand, or customer engagement or reduce support cost. There are many examples of B2B companies achieving just that via Social Media such as Cisco, Intel etc.

DN: How did social became a vital part of Xerox’s marketing activities?
Xerox has been developing its social marketing practice in earnest for several years, but we really stepped on the accelerator in late 2009 via a small group of what we call “social media natives” from across our business. As the practice has grown, we’ve kept track of our approaches to the work as well as some key indicators of customer engagement on the social channels. Our emerging social media gurus are engaging with prospects and customers where it makes sense for each business, and using the dominant channels – blogs, twitter, Facebook, YouTube, customer forums, etc.

DN: Can you speak to the benefits of having a cross-disciplined social media team? Was this hard to set up?
We have a cross disciplinary team that has representatives from across the company but is led by the corporate marketing organization. The team was not hard to set up as it was an evolution of the first team that started to develop social media at Xerox. A multidisciplinary team is critical as it allows you to have multiple perspectives from all the various parts of the business when developing the company SM plans and strategies. For example it is important we take into consideration when we craft our social media plans that we understand how a customer engages Xerox for support (offline and online) and understand what is the best social media platform or tool to use to help customers in seek of support.

Having a broad range of perspectives at the social media table is important so that we have access to people who are in each of the businesses and therefore our plan, strategy and tactics make sense not just from a corporate or marketing perspective, but also from a support, sales and regional perspective.

DN: Very few companies have set up a “center of excellence” for SM training. Xerox has. Can you speak to the advantages of this approach?
Our Center of Excellence is chartered with developing and executing the strategy for Social Media @ Xerox. Part of the strategy for last year was to grow the expertise of Social Media within the Xerox marketing and communications community so we developed a course for all communicators at Xerox and a series of social platform guides to teach them about using the social platforms like twitter. We also created a twice-a-month virtual get together called “Blog hour” so any of our bloggers or anyone interested in blogging can join and ask questions about anything related to blogging (technical, content, etc) or just listen to bloggers share best practices, concerns, etc And the Facebook Page administrators get together (via phone conferences) quarterly and maintain a lively discussion on our internal web collaboration platform.

The benefits we have derived from the Center of Excellence efforts and activities are that we have empowered more of our marketing and communications community to get involved in social media and to do it with the benefit of training and best practices at their disposal. We have witnessed a growth on all of our major platforms (Twitter, Facebook, Blogs) and we attribute a great deal of this growth and development of pods of social media practioners outside of the Center of Excellence to these efforts.

DN: Why do think this is so challenging for B2B marketers to create engaging content?
I think companies in the B2B space sometimes lose sight of the people making the decisions within the businesses that they are trying to reach via social media. At the end of the day whether B2C or B2B you should be producing content that will resonate with the people that that will be making some decision: purchase, recommendation, RFP decision, etc Our CMO often refers to it as B2P, Business-to-people.

DN: Only 1 in 3 B2B companies have started/completed an audit of their social media account.  What’s up with that?
I think that this is actually a good indication that B2B companies are seeing a need to audit. This is something that we are planning to do in 2012.

How to Grow Your Social Footprint

Posted on by Drew Neisser

One of the great parts of conducting the Social Media Fitness Study is that I got to interview a number of really savvy social media practitioners.  Among these is Greg Tirico, Senior Social Media Manager for Sage, a big software solution provider for small and medium sized businesses.  Greg offers insights into the role social plays in Sage’s marketing mix and of particular note, how they grew their social footprint by 50% in a month with the help of direct mail.  Thanks Greg!

DN: Can you speak to the role social media plays in Sage’s overall marketing mix?
The principal marketing focus at Sage is to build brand awareness, particularly around a key differentiator, which is a better customer experience. To that end, social media is one tool of many that supports the objective, including online, print and broadcast advertising, web strategy, PR, employee engagement and fine tuning of every other communication touch-point, all designed to deliver a superior customer experience. With each passing marketing campaign social media becomes more integrated in our overall marketing mix. Like many organizations, our social media activities started out as a silo within the marketing organization. This was important at first as it allowed the social media practitioners at Sage to experiment with their tactics. More recently, we have seen tremendous results when social media is properly integrated with print based marketing campaigns. For example, we increased our overall Like count by 50% in less than a month through a direct mail campaign in which respondents were encouraged to share their business ambitions with us on one of our Facebook product pages. People are still contributing today even though the contest is over!

DN: What are the benefits of having social media in the marketing department?
The clearest benefit to a centralized marketing approach is the ability to quickly adapt to changes coming at us from the social networks themselves. For example, the Facebook Timeline implementation for business pages is a forced change with a tight deadline. With an organized team of Social Media Leads at Sage we are able to easily adapt to this change and make sure the marketing teams have the information they need to be as effective as possible. There are benefits to a cross disciplined team as well. Many of the customer support organizations at Sage have started to participate in our internal conversations about social media and we are strongly encouraging this level of interaction through training programs and a greater level of information sharing.

DN: What triggered the development of a disaster plan at Sage?
There is not a particular instance that drove us to the creation of a disaster plan. We are in the lucky majority of social media participants that have had the opportunity to learn from other’s mistakes. It seems very natural to have a disaster plan much like a company would put a business continuity plan in place. The effort is minimal and you can test the process with minor negative comments on Twitter or Facebook.

DN: Do you have any thoughts on why developing engaging content is so challenging for B2B companies?
Generally speaking, B2B companies are used to talking about features and benefits based on bullet points from a sell sheet. Repurposing this content, verbatim, for a social network is not what most would consider compelling content. At first, we all struggled with this. Now, those social media marketers that have been paying attention to their audience by channel understand what truly resonates.

DN: Few companies have been able to deliver a consistent experience across all social channels. How have you been able to achieve this?
Consistency can be interpreted in terms of visual identity or tone of voice. From an overall brand identity perspective, we do have guidelines for tone of voice – essentially that our tone should be friendly and conversational in support of our role as trusted advisors to our customers. However, there’s leeway to ensure that our people can adapt to their audiences. From a visual identity perspective, we have been working to bring all of our channels together under a Sage master brand. Sage is moving to a master brand from a series of product specific brands and our social media channels will absolutely reflect this. In this case, the visual reinforcement of the Sage brand across all of our social media channels will be clear to the visitor.

DN: Do you think there is still skepticism among B2B marketers that social can help them achieve their business goals?
Initially, there was skepticism in the B2B space regarding social media marketing activities. Today, the medium as a marketing tool is being embraced and many B2B companies are playing catch-up with B2C firms. The mix of individual channels is not always the same across B2B and B2C. For example, LinkedIn is an excellent source of referral traffic for many B2B firms. Conversely, Facebook is the largest source of referral traffic for B2C companies.

This Ex-Renegade’s Thoughts on Social Media

Posted on by Drew Neisser

To help gain insight into the results of our soon to be published Social Media Fitness Study, I interviewed a number of marketing professionals including Trip Hunter, VP Brand Marketing of FUSION-IO, a recently public company that is doing really well on all fronts.  Trip, as many of you know, worked at Renegade for many years, so of course, I’m completely bias about his talents.  Nonetheless, I think you will find what he has to say quite informative and insightful.

DN: B2C companies outscored B2B companies in the Social Media Fitness study. Do you have any thoughts on why this might be the case?
B2C companies are much better at engaging with people as individuals. B2B companies market like the end consumer isn’t a human being. They are a collection of survey responses and data points. They’re not. They are real- live human beings too that get sad, and find things funny, and care about their overeating.

I also think there is a belief that the level of passion that consumers in B2C have for brands is a lot higher and more a part of ‘who they are’ than exists in B2B brands. People strongly identify with the brands in their life. They help define who they are. “I’m an apple person”, or “I drive a BMW.” You don’t hear so much someone say “I’m an HP 980 server guy”. So I think B2C brands are better positioned to capitalize on this. It is not always true, but it’s a perception among B2B that individuals don’t identify with B2B brands as much, so why bother?

DN: Do you think there is still skepticism among B2B marketers that social can help them achieve their business goals?
I do think there is skepticism here, especially among more established and mature industries, because it is difficult to find a point of view or create content that is newsworthy, or interesting, or engaging. If you can’t get people involved in your story, then you might walk away. Fusion is lucky in that it is a technology that is very innovative, and new, and because of that, techies really pay attention to our story. They are constantly talking about Fusion, and playing with our solutions, and benchmarking them against the existing status quo, and engaging with us. Their passion for Fusion is genuine, and we would be the fool not to engage and share and facilitate in the growth of that passion. A lot of people are asking a lot of questions, because what we do is so revolutionary. If we don’t answer, someone else less qualified will. By facilitating understanding, we ultimately help them find solutions for the current issues that plague traditional data storage architecture.

DN: What is social media doing for your business?
We consistently generate qualified leads through SM. When prospects ask the general community a question about Fusion, we put them directly in touch with someone at Fusion who can answer that question. More often than not, this leads to further conversations which lead to sales. As our director of social media said “I am the SM switchboard operator who connects people to the right person in the right department. I communicate with customers and potential customers directly and help them out. Our efforts are as much about customer service, if not more, than about lead generation.”

DN: Less than 1/3 of the companies surveyed had a disaster plan in place. What triggered the development of a disaster plan at FusionIO and did it work when you had to use it?

There are at least two kinds of disasters: Disasters that shake the house, and those that knock it down. Our disaster plan covers the former well. We’re working on the latter.

Disasters that shake the house happen almost everyday. Someone makes a negative or incorrect comment about us, or incorrectly compares us to a competitor. Our first negative comment through SM was back in 2009, and we have been creating our disaster plan ever since. As a result of that negative comment, we contacted the customer, helped him out, and turned him into an evangelist. He went on to make supportive and positive comments about us from then on. (see below) Recently we’ve been adding “what if” scenarios to the playbook. Being a public company, we have to be prepared.

In general, we’ve learned that the quicker we are able to respond, the more favorably things go. There’s no way to fully measure the impact of our direct communications with followers, whether they be customers, fans, or critics, but we believe it’s invaluable. Because we have been very approachable and communicative, people expect honest and quick answers from us. They know they can reach out to us via social networks and we will respond and help them.

One key component of our plan is to be measured in our response. Sometimes people just want attention-want to be recognized, and you have to know when to walk away. What we have learned is that there is a code of conduct in the community, and many times it is self regulating. Recently a guy made a video about us that wasn’t based in fact. We responded saying we would love to discuss his POV offline as is would be a rather in-depth discussion. He had no interest in doing this-he was looking for attention. But the community dealt with him, discounting his claims and eventually stopped listening. This was a huge homerun for us-So much more credible than if we are telling him he is wrong.

DN: Most companies especially B2B struggle to develop engaging content and get their customers to pitch in. How have you been able to accomplish this?
We are always trying to grow engagement with our customers, and we are not as far along as we would like to be. That said, we are so new that a broad understanding of our technology doesn’t exist yet. People want to know more, so getting them involved is not as hard as it might be for others.

We treat them like the intelligent, opinionated, passionate human beings they are. B to B companies’ customers are still consumers and human beings. We may not have the massive number of followers that consumer brands do, but our fans are just as loyal and passionate.

DN: You mentioned that you are in the process of auditing all of your social channels — what do hope to learn from this audit?
We are hoping to learn a lot of things, especially where we stand relative to our competitors. Since we sent you that answer, we have gathered some revealing numbers. Even though we’re much tinier than our largest competitor, we are gaining followers as a percentage of overall audience faster than they are, and in the area of measurement that really matters–shares–we are also ahead. People click on our links and share our content on Twitter more than they do with our largest competitor, so that is promising.

We also want to find out what we need to do better. B2C companies are known for creating very engaging content on channels such as FB and Twitter-we can learn a lot from them and how some types of B2C efforts can translate across to B2B.

The Importance of a Social Roadmap

Posted on by Drew Neisser

As part of the qualitative portion of our soon to be released Social Media Fitness Study, I had the pleasure of catching up with Pete Abel, SVP of Corporate Communications at Suddenlink.  What I especially like about Pete is his candor.  While he and his team are doing lots of smart things with social media including the development of a cross-disciplined team, a disaster plan and a road map, he fully acknowledges that they need better metrics, a belief most of his peers share.  Enjoy the interview and stay tuned for more insights from other smart marketers in the days ahead.

DN: Can you speak to the benefits of having a cross-disciplined team in place to manage social media?
Starting from the premise that social media is all about having – and maintaining – conversations with customers and other stakeholders, we believe the best, most legitimate conversations are achieved when a diverse group of people participate, each bringing to the dialogue their own unique perspectives and skill sets. To be clear, our approach is not the wild west. The members of our cross-functional team are not renegades. We consult; we coordinate; we check and verify with each other. But at the end of the day, the quality of the conversation is improved – and our customers seem to be happier – when they hear from more than just one voice, or one group with one perspective.

DN: Can you tell me how Suddenlink came to have a social media disaster plan in place?
About three years ago, I was at a thirtieth birthday party for one of my nephews. In the midst of the celebration, I was notified that a disgruntled customer had opened up a Twitter account with a handle that used our company name, preceded by an expletive. Within a few hours, this customer had accumulated dozens of followers and an even longer list of tweets from other disgruntled customers. Eventually, we got our decision-makers together, formulated a reasonable response strategy, implemented it, and the crisis diminished. But that experience underscored for us just how quickly issues can surface in social media and take on a life of their own. We knew that, but we hadn’t experienced it first hand until then. From that point forward, we were compelled to become better prepared. Granted, the “disaster plan” we have in place today is not all that complicated. It’s essentially a monitoring program and communication chain, one that helps us make sure we promptly identify issues and react accordingly, with all the key people involved. But even with just those basics in place, we tend to sleep much better at night – and, I’m confident, we’re in a much better position to respond than we were three years go.

DN: Can you talk about the challenges of establishing KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for social media?
We have some informal metrics in place. For instance: “How many customers are we helping each week, and of those, how many are we transforming – in the language of Fred Reichheld’s book, The Ultimate Question 2.0 – from detractors to promoters?” But we can and need to do more. Several questions remain: “What does that more look like; how do we get there; and what does it cost – not just in dollars but in human resources?” To use a semi-tired analogy, our team members often feel like they’re trying to sweep back ocean waves with brooms. How do you measure the success of an effort like that? Recently, we started reviewing tools that will help us collect, analyze, visualize, and report on the tone and trends of various conversation threads relevant to our company. From that base, we hope to establish more robust and better-informed objectives or key-performance indicators – and track our progress against them.

DN:  Could you speak to the advantages of having a social media road map in place?
After we had a reasonably sound social media program up and running, members of the team started coming up with new (and often very intriguing) ideas about what we might do next. Tina Simcox – from our customer experience team – was a particularly energetic idea generator, and she still is. Unfortunately, as with all organizations and all ideas (social media or not), we had to face the reality of limited resources and make some tough decisions. So we sat down and started mapping out the art of the possible: What are all the ideas; which of them are the most important/critical; which will deliver the nearest term bump; what do they cost; what can we do today; what might we be able to do tomorrow? The discipline of that process helped us get some of those great ideas up and running; otherwise, I fear none of them would have been implemented. Saying all that, I’ll confess, after we worked our way through the first version of the roadmap, we let it lapse. I’d guess we’re not the only organization guilty of doing so. But we need to get back to it. It’s critical to making sure we’re not resting on our laurels or running off in potentially unproductive or even counterproductive directions.