One of the most common hesitations I see with businesses wishing to deploy more social techniques of engagement is their hang-up about making a video. This example from Google strikes me as the perfect example of a "social business" video i.e. the "casual" video for social engagement with an invisible professional touch.
I see this reticence whether the discussion is about making videos for internal use (for enterprise social networks) or for external consumption somewhere on the social web. The argument is usually polarised and runs like this:
"We need to professionally present our business and have it professionally made and that will cost us $3,000 per video, I know that because I have just spoken to the video people we usually use".
"No, everybody is used to Youtube and they even use those types of amateur videos on the daily news and even business programs - these days we are all able to get the content without fussing about the quality".
I actually favour the second view, just make it with your iPhone and do the best you can to hold things steady and get some good lighting and sound. People just want to hear what your customers or other employees are saying and if that is in their noisy office or factory that is ok.
OK I'll admit that my leaning towards the more casual approach does not usually solve the problem. Mostly I just think that in time those in the "professional" camp will become more relaxed, and until then they just miss out on the opportunity.
But there is a middle ground, and the Google Deep Learning video shows it. Here's what struck me about this video (aside from the astounding content):
The setting is extremely casual;
The framing, angles, and lighting are professional.
It's extremely "business social".
I think that this is a perfect model for those companies concerned about conveying a professional image in a "social" video. I doubt very much that this cost $3,000 to make, but on the other hand it was carefully planned.
IBM is often ranked in the top 50 of US companies in terms of social media savviness, but like most companies which sell indirect that savviness does not necessarily translate down through the channel.
This means that channel partners are actually missing the opportunity to leverage the investment that IBM is making in social media to help grow their business. In fact IBM found in their 2010 IBM Business Partner Social Media Survey that 75% of their partners were unsure of how to apply social media as an effective sales tool.
"They sense it could be an effective sales tool, but they don't know how to get started," said Sandy Carter, vice president, IBM software business partners and social media evangelist, in an interview (follow her @sandy_carter).
The online survey of 1,000 channel partners, the results of which IBM also unveiled last Thursday, found that 45% are experimenting with social media to drive new revenue streams. But 74% said they need more education and direction, Carter said. They were overwhelmed by the number of social media outlets and asked for training on specific tools like RSS, wikis, Facebook and Twitter. They also weren't sure how to measure the effectiveness of such efforts.
So IBM has just launched a "skills initiative" to bridge this knowledge gap. Some of the offerings, including online training sessions and a social media guide, are available immediately through IBM PartnerWorld Communities. Others will follow shortly, including a live session called "Leveraging Social Media for your Business" at the IBM Information On Demand Conference in Las Vegas in late October.
The initiative will also include online training sessions, podcasts, and Web events. Sandy Carter gives some immediate tips here on her YouTube update.
IBM is also offering partners a free one-year Lotus Live license to help set up communities with their customers. It is hoping partners will emulate its own PartnerWorld Communities, launched in June 2009, which has grown to a collection of social networking community spaces specifically designed to help its partners more easily connect and collaborate online.
The community, with members in 30 countries, extends beyond PartnerWorld with 10,000 partners tapping into 250 LinkedIn groups, 400 Facebook groups, and over 500 blogs on industry-specific topics ranging from SOA implementations and green IT to virtualization and cloud computing (and including the IBM Business Partner blog).
The 250 LinkedIn groups, 400 Facebook groups, and over 500 blogs are impressive statistics, an impressive social web footprint backing up IBM's ranking as a social media savvy corporation. In fact the Partner survey also showed that 97% of respondents described IBM's social computing capabilities as moderately to much better than other competing large IT vendors. Partners cited the expertise of IBM employees, support and responsiveness, and "ease of use" as reasons IBM is ahead of other technology and services companies.
This is all a good news story, for partners in particular. I'm still left wondering if the roadblock is the "how" and in the most simple way. Partners typically focus short-term and on sales, and they don't want to dig through a lot of material, as they indicated in their survey responses. The general education is all fine, but how do you get into it quickly, indepth, and in relation to sales. I know how we do it, because we use the XeeSM tool, but it is this aspect which might make or break the early success of this IBM effort with their partners.
What do you think of the IBM initiative?
Are you an IBM partner and agree with the survey findings?
What's the thing you most need from IBM social media as a partner?
In their report The path to successful new products McKinsey found that the businesses with the best product-development track records do three things better than their less-successful peers:
They create a clear sense of project goals early on;
They nurture a strong project culture in their workplace; and,
They maintain close contact with customers throughout a project's duration.
Doing these things created real advantage - "The teams in our study that embraced these tactics were 17 times as likely as the laggards to have projects come in on time, five times as likely to be on budget, and twice as likely to meet their company's return-on-investment targets".
With respect to project goals, the main finding was that clarity of scope was the main differentiator between high and low performing companies. That hardly qualifies as an insight, but it obviously requires ongoing attention in every project.
With regard to scope, requirements, and communication Wendy Soucie has a really good presentation Project Management, Social Media, and Productivity and there is also The Social Media Project Manager. Social media can play a strong role here in making sure that everyone is on the same page, and that changes and variations are totally understood across the team, and thus help manage risk and cost.
Customer development
McKinsey reports that the successful innovators "kept in close contact with customers throughout the development process. More than 80 percent of the top performers said they periodically tested and validated customer preferences during the development process, compared with just 43 percent of bottom performers. They were also twice as likely as the laggards to research what, exactly, customers wanted".
Social media not only plays a key role in this traditional sense of keeping in contact with customers, but also in two new dimensions. Firstly it speeds the customer development path compared to more traditional contact-feedback methods e.g. focus groups and "market research". There are many examples such as IBM sMash and Starbucks and my own presentation From Innovation to Wealth Creation - Getting Closer to Customers Faster.
Secondly it more naturally enables the opportunity, oft promoted by Axel Scultze, to bring customers right into the product development process. Right in starting from the strategy, the clarity of goals, then the development cycle, the trials, and the promotion and launch.
Doing this requires some courage, but it's success becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as those customers become advocates. They are clearly in the process because they are potential users of the product/service, and they will therefore have their own influence and networks among similar clients. That's where WOM comes in and builds upon the success of the lifecycle engagement of such customers in the product development.
And money can't buy that, no matter how many focus groups and how much "market research" you do!!
How do you use social media to improve product development, and what's the impact?
In the recent McKinsey article The basics of business-to-business sales success the B2B customers surveyed said "they care most about product and price, but what they really want is a great sales experience".
And in particular they want sales reps with "adequate product knowledge" and "fewer, more meaningful interactions" (only 3 percent said they weren't contacted enough).
McKinsey goes on to say:
"Striking the right balance between contacting customers too much and too little requires understanding their stated and actual needs. There should be a clear strategy for reaching out to customers based on needs and profit potential, with schedules dictating frequency. The best contact calendars center around events that create value for customers, such as semiannual business reviews..."
When it comes to specifics, McKinsey found customers were "more than happy to use self-serve or online tools and selectively tap specialist support for the most complex situations".
What's this mean for social media in B2B?
We already know that the buying cycle and the selling cycle have moved completely out of sync, and in particular that buyers not only inform themselves but that they now determine their own schedule for when they want to contact a selling organisation. They also trust recommendations from independent online sources, in particular forums, more highly than from any company source.
Therefore, the customer-contact recommendation above strikes me as quaintly old-fashioned, and even out of touch with McKinsey's own assessment of the strategic role of social media for business. The recommendation is an internally-focused process with a schedule! This seems a country mile from the way customers want to be treated today, given their presence in the social media.
As an alternative I would recommend "reaching out to customers" has to be a very regular operational activity in the social media, following the usual rules of contribution and participation. The rate of contact will depend then only on the relationship building and value, and not a calendar.
Reaching out in this regular will provide many opportunities to direct customers and potential customers to online forums, and self-serve tools in a value-added way which is relevant to the moment, as indicated through the social media conversations.
McKinsey concludes their article by recommending that companies should examine exactly how they are performing by asking the following questions:
What are the most influential drivers of the sales experience?
What things are your sellers doing that could damage relationships?
How does the perception your customers have of your sales force compare to how they view your competitors?
I'd probably put it a little differently, bearing in mind the social media context and the misalignment of the buyer-seller process.
Firstly, I would ask how can continue to better use social media and digital engagement/assets to really understand the buyer's buying process?
Secondly, what are the most effective things we are doing to facilitate the buyer's buying process (and hence our relationship)?
Thirdly, what can we learn in the social media about how our customers and potential customers view their buying needs and interaction with us versus our competitors.
The exciting thing is that all this information, for many companies, is available today in the social media.
How would you advise a company to improve its B2B sales engagement using the social media?
...doesn’t it stand to reason that solution providers will be more effective selling the technology, building custom applications around it and helping customers with the supporting business process if they themselves understand the power of collaboration and social networking?
It sure does, we're with you Beth!
Beth goes on the say that in their 2009 study focused on Partner Collaboration and the Role of Social Media, nearly 50% of solution providers indicated they are only "opportunistically" collaborative with peers, and "In fact, nearly 30% said they don't use social media in their normal course of business at all." And most of the others use social media "mostly to find new customers and do outbound marketing of their services and solutions - not to collaborate with their vendors or their [current] customers".
Partners are missing a real opportunity, because many of their vendors are extremely social media savvy, I wrote previously about EMC, and Microsoft.
This means the vendors have a large investment in social media assets and connectivity which can be re-purposed by Partners to grow their business. And after all "same shopper sales" are the easiest to get, as compared to new customers.
End-users are already using social media to get information about products. Depending on which study you read, 60-90 % of customers begin their purchase process online by gathering information and looking for current customer comments. Increasingly aware of this pre-sales activity, channel managers want to make sure their products are well-represented.
Communication between vendors, resellers and customers is noticeably improved using social media. Messages, attachments, and links are sent and received more quickly (usually getting through all those pesky corporate firewalls) from smart phones, netbooks, and other devices. And using social media drives down the cost of communications, sometimes by as much as 80%. It’s just cheaper to post a video on YouTube and send out a link than to maintain/expand a usable partner portal or distribute (and redistribute) a bunch of PDFs.
Social Media is extremely effective at building and maintaining more intimate relationships. A reseller can maintain weekly contact with 50 customers in just a few hours by connecting with them at their online spaces. This replaces the 50 phone calls and scores of emails flying off into the ether. Most important, social media is personal in a way that good salespeople and their customers appreciate.
That's why channel managers are keen, and it mirrors why partners/resellers themselves should be keen. And that is why we're a partner of the Social Media Academy and a big fan of the High Tech Partners Social Media training course because the potential for partners is so high.
If you think about distribution channels in software and IT in 2010 then we're on the cusp of major disruption. Think about the "cloud", and SaaS, and vendor cloud infrastructure undercutting independent vendors and partners - it's big.
In fact, a long time ago Peter Drucker famously said every enterprise should regularly ask itself "If we were to go into this now, knowing what we now know, would we go into it the way we are doing it now?" AND, perhaps far less famously - that:
this applies with particular force to an area that many enterprises tend to neglect...distributors and distribution channels. In a time of rapid change distributors and distribution channels tend to change faster than anything else. It is also on distributors and distribution channels that the "information revolution" is likely to have th greatest impact.
Drucker was again so right, and from here on for the next 18 months or so the channels of the IT industry are about to be ripped apart and re-formed.
That's potentially a big reason behind Microsoft just a week ago switching out one of their most respected world-wide partner executives for a tough new guy to shake it out.
The channels in for change, and it will happen whether "the channel" agrees or not, so best to try to help the leaders get ahead of the curve, and social media enablement has to be part of that plan. Not for it's own sake, but for the sake of more meaningful customer engagement.
Over a really pleasant discussion with Jamie Pappas today I learnt a lot about social media and EMC Corp - one of the corporate leaders and believers in the business benefits of social media.
We covered a lot, and one little snippet that jumped out at me was EMC's very positive attitude towards Facebook. I mean even today if you search on Linkedin I'm sure that you'll find a whole bunch of discussions around not only "why would B2B use social media" but also "Tell me why Facebook would work for business and in particular B2B". If you google those themes you'll be overwhelmed by the results, and I would suggest underwhelmed by the same old last decade hackneyed opinions of the naysayers.
EMC, like Cisco and Intel and Microsoft, are a light-year ahead of the Facebook-for-business-naysayers. In fact Huffington Post's Fortune 100 Companies' Social Media Savvy (STATS) says that 82 of the Fortune 100 tweet on a weekly basis, posting an average of 27 tweets a week. So big business is well out there in social media (including Facebook).
EMC keep a list of all "their" Facebook pages (about 35), meaning their corporate pages, and those set up by staff, and by others. It's not 100% complete, because they have to discover any "non-EMC" pages, and it's not always clear who the administrators of those pages are. It's also not 100% complete because of their open attitude towards their staff starting a page, with a voluntary code of practice.
The 3 Asks
Jamie said that EMC really only have 3 Asks of their staff if they wish to set up a Facebook page:
Check that something doesn't already exist which would suit your purpose;
Share the URL, and the admin details (i.e. let Corp Social Media know);
Keep it active, or close it down.
I was impressed with all these, as it isn't about hard and fast rules, and what you can't do, but about what you can do to exercise your personal responsibility, and what EMC simply asks of you in return.
But I was really most impressed with the last Ask because in that very simple request EMC is getting to the heart of social media and the reason to be there. You need to be alive, communicating, conversing, and maintaining the presence - it's not a one-off exercise. That latter point is also why EMC don't recommend that staff set up a Facebook page for a product spec nor a single event. For that type of "campaign" purpose they can use one of the many socialised Event options within EMC's existing presences e.g. Events in a corporate FB page.
There's also a bit of brand protection, since a dead page can be a turn off to customers, and that's to be avoided.
Keep it Active
So what's it mean - "keep it active"? Again no rules but the EMC suggestion is:
3 to 5 relevant posts a week, excluding raw links to articles, press releases etc
active monitoring
responding
administering - remove anything that shouldn't be there, don't let anything escalate without warning.
If you're not able to tend to these tasks, then it's recommended that you consider shutting it down.
Is that really it?
OK, I hear you ask, is that really it for a company of EMC's size (43,000 employees), reputation, brand value, and shareholder obligations? Anyone can just launch on Facebook?
Well no, of course there is a milieu - an environment or setting. Key is leadership, from all levels about the wealth-generating power of social business, there is desire to have employees engaged and participating in all things "company" and social media is one fabric for this, and there is a desire to be open with customers, despite in some ways still being a conservative company within.
And there is social media training, and a Social Media Club, and a Social Media Advisory Council. And of course there is a social media Policy, which I place last as a necessary but totally insufficient part of embracing social media yet which often dominates management's attention elsewhere.
Are there any downsides to such a liberal open-minded approach. Sure, there is some cleaning up to do from time to time, some duplication, some fails, and some lessons. The lessons are what the Social Media Advisory Council think about, and make any continuous improvements.
While some firms regard the possibility of negative comments as "risks", EMC sees them as opportunities to engage and to learn. As Jamie says, customers will often not tell you something face to face but will put it out in the social media andexpect that it will be discovered. It's an opportunity to be proactive.
Business benefits outweigh the risks
Overall, in EMC's judgement, the business benefits of tapping into to enthusiasm of employees wishing to communicate outweighs the risks of the lightweight "approvals" process for staff wanting to set up on Facebook.
What do you think of EMC's approach?
Would it work in your firm?
Would it work in firms you advise, and why or why not?
Earnest Agency has been publishing some valuable summaries of social media B2B marketing stats, particularly Vital Statistics for B2B Marketers. They've just released a video of the stats, it's a great resource.
They don't make any claim that all the stats are consistent, or precise, just that these are stats which have been reported by reasonably reputable groups. In fact they highlight the contradictions in order to challenge us to think more.
I loved the music Dave Brubeck's Unsquare Dance, took me back many years, but I love more the opportunity the video provides for conversation with B2B clients.
My favorite snippets:
85% of B2B buyers want companies to have a social presence to engage with them;
9/10 buyers say that they'll find you, when they're ready!
And these are not necessarily B2B but Huffington Post's Fortune 100 Companies' Social Media Savvy (STATS) says that 82 of the Fortune 100 tweet on a weekly basis, posting an average of 27 tweets a week. So big business is out there, the laggards seem to be worse as the company size gets smaller - that's counterintuitive isn't it?
Do you think B2B is a social media laggard?
Is social media as big an opportunity for B2B as B2C, or bigger?
It's a question which is still asked everyday - isn't Facebook for friends and consumer brands why would I use it for B2B?
We all know about the big B2C guys, the Starbucks, Pringles Adidas etc, but how about smaller businesses and B2B? The big B2B guys are all over Facebook e.g. Intel, Cisco, IBM, we'll stick to small SMB examples.
Here are 5 SMB B2B Facebook pages:
How about Mid West Laboratories, for "analysis you can trust"? Tied to their blog, a basic but functional one, they take full advantage of a Facebook presence. They are obviously tracking news and keywords, as this is often the topic of a blog post, which in turn is fed through to their Facebook page (that tracking is easy to do using Google Alerts).
Who'd have thought, staid McKinsey's have a Facebook page, and they are dealing exclusively B2B and with the very top C-level! They have a good selection of videos, and the link on their main Facebook profile goes to their Twitter account, not their homepage! I guess McKinsey's isn't really a "small business" however it's more the point about their C-level audience and Facebook which is the surprise.
Finally how about Chinese Lawyer ,Shanghai, "International Lawyer for your business in China!" who has more than 2,500 "fans"!!
Hints: if you are looking for inspiration check out Custom Facebook Pages, they have a great gallery, and the tools, and more at Facebook Designs. And here are 5 Tips for B2B Facebook Pages from Hubspot, and Mari Smith is the ultimate guide for small business on Facebook. Don't forget that integrating your website and Facebook will get the best results, see "Social strategy: Web integration to leverage brand advocacy", and if you are looking for a tool to better manage your time spend in the social media generating leads or following thought leaders check out Xeesm.
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