We’ve talked in the past here on B2B Voices about using StockTwits to track and follow what people are saying about your publicly traded clients or company. And recently the company announced it is now offering verified investor relations accounts.The new investor relations accounts launched with three companies: Ford, HP and CME Group (Disclaimer: I work in corporate communications at CME Group and we also partner with StockTwits for our futures products).

So this sounds great. Sign onto Twitter/StockTwits and start tweeting, right? Well, like all things in communications, you need to nail your strategy first. Here are some thought starters on how/why to use StockTwits for investor relations:

• Objectives: Know what you want to get out of StockTwits first. This isn’t the place to spam users and and not talk back. The network of traders mean business and these are smart people. Before you get involved have an idea of how you plan to use the platform.
• Monitoring: It’s been said so often but you can’t ignore the fact that people (shareholders) are talking about your company. You need to follow the sentiment. Not that you can use Twitter to change the price of your stock, but if there are false rumors or statements you should correct them.
• Promotion: Material information (e.g, new products/services, earnings) should be communicated to your target audience of investors and StockTwits allows you to do that.
• Disclosure: Know and understand both the SEC requirements and your client/company’s policies. If you want to brush up on these issues the fourth annual Financial Markets World conference on social media disclosure is taking place this September.

In addition, if you haven’t been reading the IR Web Report you should. The site if full of useful information for investor relations and public relations professionals alike. For instance, the site recently published a report that 41% of publicly traded companies do not use PR news wire services. This number could decrease as the site points out that, “…rule changes by the New York Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ Stock Market now recognize SEC filings and website postings as fully meeting their disclosure requirements.” This ruling creates a great opportunity for services like StockTwits to fill a void of communicating financial news for companies.

As communicators we have a responsibility to consistently look for new and innovative ways to communicate to our stakeholders. Using tools like blogs, Facebook and Twitter have provided a wealth of options, but I’ve always believed that these tools must fit into your overall business and communication goals and objectives. These aren’t silver bullets to solve your challenges. Services like StockTwits provide us with another way to enhance our efforts and bring the corporate communications and investor relations functions closer together.

My recommended next steps for you would be the following:

1. If you have clients or work for a publicly traded company go to StockTwits and search for them using their stock symbol. I suggest you bookmark these sites or add them to your RSS feed in order to follow them regularly.
2. Subscribe to the IR Web Report in your RSS feed.
3. Review your current communications plan and how you are integrating social media as a communication tool.
4. Set up a meeting with your investor relations team and discuss how StockTwits can add value to your clients/company.

In addition, don’t just think StockTwits is for publicly traded companies. The company just launched a service to track privately held companies as well. You may want to see if your client/company is listed.

Finally, congratulations to the team at StockTwits for all their hard work, which paid off by being named by Time magazine as one of the 50 best websites of 2010. Another validation for the use of social media in the business world.

What are your thoughts and experiences on this topic? Let us know.

Should Investor Relations Teams Use Twitter? is a post from: B2B Voices

This was originally posted as a guest post on the EditMe blog.  I thought the content would be valuable for our B2B Voices audience!  “EditMe is a wiki where regular people build websites. Add, edit, and delete every web page, image, and attachment from within your web browser. Pick from our gallery of web designs, or customize your own.” Consider checking out their blog and their site.

We’ve all been there: we’ve got a blog, a Twitter account, a Facebook page, you name it…..you’ve got traffic….. but no one’s giving you any love.  No “comments” love.  No “click” love.  No “Facebook Like” love.  No “Twitter Retweet” love.

Is it you?

Well, it is, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that your content is bad itself.  It may mean you haven’t given people a good enough call-to-action, a reason for them to do more than just read what you put out there and move on.  It doesn’t mean that they walk away dissatisfied, or unfulfilled.  In fact, you may very well have left a good impression on them.  But you could be doing more to get them to interact.

So, you ask, what are some ways I can make people want to *do* stuff with my content?  How can I get them to react to it, or even to share it? I’ve listed a few ways below, and would love to hear from you some of your success stories.

Way Number One: Question Them

Assuming that your content is actually good and offers value to your readers, and that you’ve distributed your content enough that it has eyes reading it, getting your audience to take that one step further and process your content increases the likelihood that they’ll want to react to it in some way.  What I’ve found to be an effective tactic – as a practitioner and as a reader – is asking a question.

Whether it’s in the middle of a blog post or at the end, or as part of a conversation on a social networking platform, a question forces your reader to pause and think about what’s being discussed.  Quite literally, the act of reading a question provokes your brain to actually ask it of itself, and therefore mull over answers. This is a much more active process than simply reading, which can sometimes be very passive as we skim, consume, and move on through the piles of content we see each day.

Additionally, asking a question invites your readers to a discussion, and shows them that you want to have that discussion, while also empowering them as capable and knowledgeable contributors to the discussion topic.

Way Number Two: Connect and Share

One of the biggest ways you can get people to interact with and pass along your content is if you make it super easy for them.  Seems obvious, right?  But it requires taking a good look at each separate platform, recognizing how your content is being presented and the ways in which people can interact with your content from a technical standpoint.  Often times, it’s small details that make the difference.

Have you made it easy for people to leave you a comment, or is it a hassle to do so?  If there are a bunch of barriers up that make it difficult for me to leave a comment, I’m not going to do so.  A simple form and one click says to me “we welcome your input!”

Have you made connecting with you in various ways as easy as pie?  Think about how people can contact you further, follow your RSS feed, sign up for newsletters, follow you on other social networks, etc.  ”Interacting with your content” doesn’t necessarily have to mean that it’s one particular piece.  If you get people to continue to come back to future content easily, that’s great.

Are your sharing options clear, and do you have some control over how your content is presented once it’s shared?  For instance, if you have a button on your blog posts that people can click and share on Twitter, you not only want to make sure your readers do as little work as possible, but also that your content – your blog title, URL, etc – are as clear and attractive as possible when shared.

You get the picture here.  You want to make sure that people can connect to you easily, can engage in conversation with you easily, and can share your content easily, while also keeping your content in the rocking form it should be.

Way Number Three: Buck the Trend

Sometimes “taking sides” gets the juices flowing.  There’s no denying it, so, if you can, you might as well embrace it. Now, I’m not saying you should write every post from ontop of a soap-box.  But often times, companies and organizations back off from taking sides because it’s safe to be neutral.  However, if there’s a topic that fits into the theme(s) of your organizations “reason for being” that you feel you can comment on with some authority and take a diplomatic, professional stand, this is usually a good hook for people.

This tactic should follow an internal discussion of your content strategy as to where the line is between “taking sides” and “creating controversy” (which can be detrimental).  This again also needs to be aligned with your branding and your Voice.

Remember, a good way to present your side is to also make it a welcoming conversation for anyone from any side.  This can be done by combining your stance with questions, and asking people what they think.

Way Number Four: Involve Them

This will seem like a pretty easy one once I explain.  Creating a more “official” process by which people can directly interact with you makes them a lot more willing, especially if there’s something in it for them.  Asking them for their stories relating to a particular topic or running a contest on your blog are sure ways to get more participation.

The tricky part here is to make the call-to-action applicable enough to “what you’re all about” so people aren’t just coming, participating, and then leaving and never coming back.  I’ve seen too many iPod give aways that had no thought put into whether or not the participants would come back or not.  They only came for the iPod, and then they left.  The reason to act was not compelling enough to have them stick around.  Some of the more successful campaigns have been something like submitting a story on a particular subject area that fits your organization’s “thing” and offering a prize to the best (whatever you determine best to be) submission.  If you can engage them through company/organization-related issues, they’re more likely to come back after they’ve responded to your official call-to-action.

Way Number Five: Think About the Conversation

Have you ever read an informative, but professionally (read: rigidly) written blog post and really really wanted to interact with it?  If you’re anything like me, the answer is probably no.  I feel more likely to engage with content that sounds like I’m talking to a person.  Now, this doesn’t apply across the board, because your Voice ultimately needs to be aligned with your brand, but I’m of the general ilk that adding a little bit of informality to some of the content you have on social media platforms can have its benefits.  This can complement your more formal pieces of content quite well.

In general, thinking about your content as a piece of a conversation can be helpful in putting it together.  How would you talk about a particular topic?

If you choose to adopt any of these, remember also that it doesn’t mean you’re applying it as the heart of your content production strategy (unless you really want to).  These are meant to be tactical level ideas that support your strategy.  You can use one way one time (or never!) and be done with it.  You can think about doing two of them at once, or try one every few weeks.

There are plenty of other ways you can get people giving your content some love, and I’d love to hear from you what you’ve found most successful, so please leave a comment!

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5 Ways to Increase Engagement With Your Content [Cross Post] is a post from: B2B Voices

As the use of social media by journalists and non-journalists has continued to grow we’ve been making the shift at the exchange to integrate the risks of social media with our spokespeople. Here are the areas that we have now included in all of our spokesperson training:

• Understand that your interview with a reporter may also end up being referenced in blogs, Twitter or Facebook.
• Know that when you are giving a speech at an industry event the audience may now be using Twitter, Twitpic or will use the material in blog posts — in addition to the journalists in the audience who may use your comments in a story.
• Keep in mind that even in “customer only” meetings that information could be sent out via Twitter.

Adding these new communication risks has been a challenge since not everyone uses these new tools. We’ve been able to talk with our consultants who work with our executives to integrate this into their training. I’ve found there still is a challenge in balancing the “fear factor” of saying something damaging at a conference versus staying on message. There also is the need to provide an overview of the various social media tools, but over time our use of social media to promote the exchange has helped bridge that gap.

Is this a topic you’re addressing at your organization and with clients? Do you think that people are more aware of the risks/opportunities or is this an ongoing process? Let us know your thoughts and success stories.

Allan

Are your spokespeople social media trained? is a post from: B2B Voices

I don’t think I’ve ever had a client without a customer reference problem.  Let me know if you’re an exception – I’d love to know how you found the path to reference nirvana.

Let’s face it, it’s not going to be easy. At the same time, nurturing customer references might be the most important part of your marketing program. Every study I’ve ever read about what influences B2B business buyers puts the personal recommendations of peers and colleagues at No. 1, and it’s not even close. So let’s just roll up our sleeves and accept we’re going to have to work at this.

from jasonkeath on Flickr

My theory is that customer references are more sustainable and have more influence on your prospects if there’s something in it for the reference. But it’s not just the obvious. Yes, a thank you in the form of a dinner or a gift is a nice gesture.  But for your best references, it’s ultimately about access and networking:  access to your senior leadership and experts, and networking with peers.

Well this is exactly what you should want!  If you want to maximize the ability of your best customers to help create new ones, they need to know more than just the details of their own project. They need to know your strategy and where you’re headed. Their conception of that strategy may be two years out of date (valid when they originally bought your product or service). That means they may very well be spreading the word about a company strategy or product direction that’s no longer valid and that may as a result attract the wrong prospects and deflect the right ones. More than that, senior-level decision makers in particular know that the most valuable commodity they and your leaders have is time, and investing it tells both parties they are important to each other and breeds loyalty.

Your customers value access to peers to network and learn. It can be difficult to form those relationships, especially when those organizations are separated by thousands of miles and every day seems so busy it’s just about survival. You bring a lot of value when you creating opportunities to bring these individuals together in interactive settings. (And by the way, by interactive, I don’t mean to suggest that this can be a webex or conference call – there’s a place for some virtual engagement but it’s face-to-face that cements relationships.)

Of course, some customers, for whatever reason, won’t be particularly interested in participating in your program even if their experience with your product has been positive.  That’s okay. Keep them happy – because they may find they get their voice back as a badvocate – but move on to others to be the lead customer advocates for your company.

That’s the relationship side of the success equation.  There’s also the process side, which is equally important.  You’ll need someone to manage all this.  Check out Kyle Flaherty on his Dances With Strangers blog for more on that: “These programs are important.  They are the lifeblood of supporting numerous sales and marketing activities, plan accordingly and have someone dedicated to making sure that things are done right. “  Technology tools are helpful, like Boulder Logic’s customer reference program add-on for Salesforce.com.

Best wishes.  As long as this is going to be a significant undertaking, let’s try to get the best possible customer engaged in the program.

Customer References: What’s In It For Them? is a post from: B2B Voices

A group of us here in the office have been having some discussions lately about our digital and social media capabilities in the B2B social media space.  If you work in an agency, you know how it goes – the big, splashy, sexy B2C stuff tends to get all the attention. After all, they have Ashton Kutcher. We have engineers, analysts and ROI models. We had a diverse group of pros in the room – a former technology analyst, several people from our financial services practice group, one from our tech practice group (me) and the head of our digital and social media team here – and so it’s not surprising that we started talking about what we even meant by B2B social media.

I came upon a realization that I think was shared by others there, that the concept is so broad as to be all but

meaningless. Maybe that’s self-evident but there are some consequences borne out of that realization.

What might come to mind when I say, “B2B social media”? Customer service? Social CRM? (social BPM, Social BI, etc. yikes!) Online lead generation? Online crisis management? Customer community development? Thought leadership? Brand building?  Influencer relations?  Corporate social responsibility?

You see where I’m going. If all of these areas indeed fall under the rubrick of B2B social media, then it doesn’t mean a whole lot. It also means it’s going to be difficult to avoid Tower of Babel misunderstandings, turf wars, ineffectiveness, and of course expert consultants with expertise in entirely the wrong areas for many B2B social media “initiatives.” After all, any B2B social media expert is unlikely to have deep expertise in more than 40% of those areas given their diversity.

Eventually, we will stop talking about social media and just go back to talking about media channels and communication programs that use a varying mix of them according to the business objectives to be achieved. In the meantime, two recommendations come immediately to mind as you sort out your B2B social media strategies.

Prioritize: We recommend as a best practice the formation of a social media council formed with a balance of people from across the organization with a stake in your company’s social media success. The first question that group should be asking itself is, “What really brought us together?” And you need to go deeper than, “We have to get our social media house in order.”  Agree on what you mean by that – what threat-oriented and growth oriented issues brought you here. Don’t “boil the ocean.”

Don’t Hire B2B Social Media Experts: You may then decide you need outside help, in the form of hires or relationships with consultants or agencies. You are not looking for a B2B social media expert. You are looking for something more specific: someone with expertise in one or more critical areas such as online crisis management, community building, blogger relations, search engine optimization and lead generation, community relations, etc.

You can all tell me if I’m off base. I’m interested in what you all think here.

There’s No Such Thing as B2B Social Media is a post from: B2B Voices

Last week the exchange co-sponsored the Ragan Communications Social Media for Financial Communicators event with our business partner NASDAQ OMX. You can review the entire event on the Facebook page created by Ragan. I was encouraged by the content of this event since it was so narrowly defined for financial communications – and I think a vertical industry focus is certainly the next big phase in social media. And even though the financial services industry is heavily regulated, there were many great examples of companies using various platforms.

If you attended this event you came away thinking, “There really are few reasons to not be doing social media.” Kudos to Mark Ragan and his great staff for putting this event together. I wasn’t able to attend every session but here are my reactions from the panels I did watch.

Be the brand: I have always said that social media at the exchange was never a silver bullet. I think companies that take the approach that social media can “save” their brand are misguided. It must fit within your existing brand and support various initiatives.  Steve O’Halloran from ING Direct discussed this during his presentation. He used many real world examples of what ING Direct has done with social media to reemphasize all of the qualities that make the bank unique, fun and a leader in its category (NOTE: I am not currently an ING Direct customer). In particular, Steve showed how they are really helping customers online to learn more about saving money and promote financial advocacy. And even though ING Direct does not have bank branches they do have some of the best cafes to visit. What are you doing to reinforce your brand in social media?

Social media for investor relations is coming…are you ready?: I was pleased to hear from Phil Pearlman at StockTwits that they are soon launching an investor relations tool on their site. We’ve talked about StockTwits before on B2B Voices as an investor relations tool and this is positive news. While this isn’t live yet I’m sure given the focus of the team at StockTwits that this will be a great application and take their offering to another level. If you have yet to visit StockTwits you should check it out — especially if you work for a publicly traded company. What I like most about the potential of this tool is the ability for public relations and investor relations to collaborate more online using social media. Ironically, NIRI’s annual conference took place a few weeks ago and from people I know who attended the discussion around social media was a footnote. This could be a great opportunity for you to work with your finance team and play a key role in educating your C-suite about social media.

And now  word from the journalists. A panel of financial journalists — Felix Salmon, Reuters; Stacey-Marie Ismael, FT Alphaville; Connell McShane, FOX Business — answered questions about their use of social media. I was lucky enough to sit on the panel representing the interests of communicators. Felix blogged about the conference and his thoughts on why companies should be using Twitter. One of the key takeaways for me about the panel is that they are all connected to and use Twitter daily — not so much as a broadcast medium but for a way to monitor trends/issues and meet new people (potential sources). I commented, and I think the panel agreed, that Twitter really is not the platform to pitch reporters, but because of its simplicity and real-time information sharing it’s the place to build trust and relationships with reporters.

Enthusiasm. While I didn’t hear any breaking news from Demetrios Skalkotos of NASDAQ OMX about using social media what I did takeaway is that enthusiasm matters. That’s not to take any credibility away from him or NASDAQ OMX — he and the company know what they’re doing in social media. But it was the enthusiasm from Demetrios that really stood out to me and if you’ve ever seen him speak you know what I’m talking about. It’s this kind of passion for our work that makes a difference — whether it’s social media, advertising, writing, design or video production. His presentation was the perfect way to end the two-day event since he left all of us feeling as if we could go back to our job and make things happen. That’s just the type of leadership you need, especially when you are pursing something so new and rapidly changing as social media.

I was also fortunate to present about CME group with my colleague Michael Shore and a copy of our presentation can be found over on SlideShare. If you happened to attend the event what was your takeaway? Share your thoughts about the conference here or if you didn’t attend let us know your reaction to some of my thoughts above.

Social Media for Financial Communicators is a post from: B2B Voices

For those of you who don’t know already I am a long time supporter/player of soccer (football).  I actually attended the first week of the 2006 World Cup in Germany and watching it so far has me wishing I was in South Africa. This year I am paying attention via the Internet and TV. The World Cup is by far the world’s most watched sporting event (about seven times larger than the Super Bowl) so there’s a lot at stake (this is a great report on the Economics of the World Cup). With the World Cup now fully upon us there already are some great lessons to be learned for communicators. Here are my thoughts.

• Competition — In some cases rivalries in the World Cup can be extremely competitive based not only by the demands of the tournament but also for other reasons — think England v. Argentina; USA v. Mexico; Germany v. Netherlands; N. Korea v. S. Korea. How do you approach your competition? Do you study them with the passion of a world class manager? Do you understand and exploit their weaknesses? Sometimes the preparation for these matches is more important than the match itself.
• Media — Yes, the press can be relentless. Ask Robert Green of England. But guess what? I bet it doesn’t phase Green or the England team at all. Why? Because they are used to that type of scrutiny day in and day out playing in Europe. Are you ready for that type of scrutiny by the media? How would your team react to a negative story? Do you bounce back because you know you have a winning strategy and coach your management team to look beyond the headline? Does it rally your employees? Or does it rattle you so much your team can’t perform?
• Social media — Nike launched it’s World Cup commercial not via TV, but via social media. It now has more than 15 million views on YouTube alone. We’re also seeing Twitter struggle to keep up with all of the World Cup tweets (hopefully they will realize they need to build a world-class network). And there are numerous players now using Twitter to discuss what is happening in South Africa. How are you using social media to talk about your company? Are you just using tools to talk or are you looking at the right tools to listen and converse with your audiences?

Click here to view the embedded video.

• Fans — If you are following the action on Twitter or watching it on TV (or lucky enough to be in South Africa), you already know that people are passionate about not just their team, but their country. Look at the Netherland supporters in their orange. The Brazilian supporters dancing and cheering. Watch closely at the other countries and how their fans sing, cheer and support their team for 90 minutes each match. There is a tremendous amount of pride that comes with supporting your team/country. How are you instilling this into your fan base/followers? Are you making them truly your fans or just treating them like customers?
• Fatigue – Players in the major European leagues may not say it, but they have to be tired. Between league matches, cup matches and recent friendly/exhibition matches it will be interesting to see how players last. Fatigue will play a factor for communicators as well in our now 24/7 connected world. My suggestion — take a break from the marketing madness to recharge (my choice of relaxation is my kids). You’ll be a better person for it and a better communicator.
• Technology – Adidas invests lot of resources to build the perfect ball for the World Cup. And this year there is a lot of criticism over how it was designed and how it reacts. It could be factor in games (or at least an excuse). How are you taking advantage of the technology your company has at its disposal? In addition, don’t forget to include your InfoSec team as we discussed here earlier.

Hopefully this makes you look at the World Cup in a slightly different view as you watch the games for the first time or if you’re an experienced World Cup fan. How else do you see this global competition changing the way you look at your job? Let us know.

What B2B communicators can learn from the 2010 World Cup is a post from: B2B Voices

By Leyla Arsan, Lotus Marketing Services

As a small business owner who utilizes Social Media for her own marketing efforts, I often think of how I can better assist my B2B clients more effectively manage their social media efforts.  I start by clarifying what social media means to me; social media is not just Facebook & Twitter, those are just two components. Social Media is an all-encompassing effort that stretches into blogging, photo sharing, slide sharing, video, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn – anything that helps you connect with your customers in a less traditional, or more social, way.  This particular post will detail a few ways in which B2B marketers can utilize visual imagery and rich media to assist in social media marketing efforts.

Flickr
While building my business as an event marketer, I started to use Flickr to host photos of client events. I would share these photos with clients post-event and reference the photos when pitching new clients or discussing my capabilities.  Flickr is an affordable service, easy to use, and well known, so it made great sense to use it for business.

After a short time, I noticed that the photos I posted, when properly tagged and titled, were being searched and found by Google & Yahoo (and sometimes other search engines like Bing and Ask.com).  I stumbled upon this inadvertently as I perused my Flickr analytics.

I produce B2B events – post tradeshow events, customer events, customer appreciation, etc. Eventually, I started to take photos at every event where a number of photos were specifically taken for the benefit of potential new clients. I post these photos to my Flickr stream in properly marked folders or sets.  I then use the Google keyword tool – http://www.google.com/sktool to find relevant keywords to tag my pictures. I search the keywords as a customer would when searching the web to find an agency that provides the services that I provide.  I can even search keywords used by my competitors.

The photos potentially show up in search results and individuals click and navigate to my Flickr stream. I say “potentially” because I don’t want to mislead, it is not a magic bullet, you don’t tag a photo and POOF your photo shows up at the top of the Google search.  In addition to tagging, I make certain that each photo has my company URL in the “description” of the photo.  Some people watermark their photos, I don’t and if you read on you will see why.

When possible, I allow my photos to be used by others in a non-commercial manner (check Flickr’s Creative Commons). This further exposes my photos when they’re added to other blogs and websites. According to the Creative Commons rules, when an individual uses my photo, they must link back to my Flickr stream or my website, this helps drive more traffic to my stream.

YouTube
I could make this portion about “video” as opposed to YouTube because there are other services out there like Vimeo.  I use both services, but for search purposes, YouTube is currently the best bet.

I personally do not use video much as I would like, so I reached out to colleagues for their personal best practices regarding marketing with video.  A former client who is a corporate communications manager of a leading flexible packaging company gave me some great insight on how he employs video for social media marketing.

The company has produced a couple of short videos that were rolled out on YouTube. The videos were produced in-house on a shoestring budget and each video was no more than five minutes long. The content was product driven – showcasing new products and providing added information on existing products. The videos were then shared the on Twitter, YouTube and the company website. The goal was to inform their Twitter followers (mainly customers, potential customers and journalists) about current products and any new products in development.

Though there was an initial jump traffic to the company website, this spike was temporary. Unfortunately, their marketing department is not equipped with the manpower to take on the task of defining and executing a strong social media marketing campaign.  They believe if they were able to dedicate the appropriate resources, the response would be more favorable.

The greatest obstacle the packaging company faced in regards to video was determining what content best suited their business objectives. With so many different product lines, determining what would generate the best results proved to be difficult.

In the first video, they promoted a new product in a way that unintentionally ghosted the deficiencies of another product line.  They ended up pulling the video. But with all marketing, not excluding social media marketing, testing is imperative.  The great advantage of social media is the simplicity of pulling a promotion.

The company found that the greatest benefit of the video campaign was that marketing did not have to rely on the sales team to visit a customer or to introduce new items.  Social media can be used as an extension of the sales team, particularly when one may be dealing with an older sales team that is slower at introducing new concepts and products to customers.  If your customer is following you on Twitter, they know what you are doing all the time.  It can significantly increase your speed to market with a product or service and can cut costs of doing mass mailings.

When asked if he felt social media were right for the packaging industry, the answer was simple. “If the staff and support were in place to plan a good social media campaign, it would add great benefit.” Many trade publications, journalists, editors of industry publications and packaging designers are on Twitter.  The individuals who work in the communications field of the packaging industry help the manufacturers get the word.

Guest Post: How B2B Companies Can Use Video/Photos in Social Media is a post from: B2B Voices

I’m a little slow on the uptake with this one but I wanted to flag Forrester’s report, “Social Technographics: Business Technology Buyers,” which came out about a month ago (April 28) and looks at the social media habits of business technology decision-makers. Good quantitative research into B2B social media usage is fairly thin. If you have access to the full report, it’s worth a review.  Also a summary from B2B Online here.

It shows, not surprisingly, that penetration of social media continues to increase. For instance, 46 percent of business technology decision-makers have joined a social networking site for business purposes, compared with 29 percent in last year’s study. Of those, a third are “Creators,” which means they engage in activities such as publishing a blog, uploading videos or writing and posting articles. Forty-five percent are “Critics,” posting reviews of products or services, commenting on others’ blogs, or contributing to forums or wikis. (Obviously, individuals could select more than one category.)

On the other hand, the report suggests that the sexy public social media services like Twitter or blogs may not be helping B2B tech companies much, compared to information sources like forums and wikis. Moreover, traditional sources of information – your website (note, I am using the new AP standard, people), sales person, tradeshows, etc. – rank higher in importance.

This is a pretty good study, as the group surveyed numbers more than 1,000 across four countries, although the weighting has shifted from a bit more than half the respondents representing IT vs. line of business to more than 70 percent coming from IT. On the other hand, as with all studies like this, you don’t want to over-read the conclusions.

For one thing, people are notoriously bad at evaluating their own behavior.  Evidence: The Economist recently reported on a UK study of television and video viewing habits and found the public badly understated the amount of time they watched live television and badly overstated their use of online video.

The other concern is that the wording of the question (“Which of the following sources of information impact your purchase decision-making process?”) will understate the impact of the earlier stages of the purchase process.

Flickr from LawsonComm

I mentioned in my last post the concept of an “Awareness-to-Advocate Process Path” – the journey people take from being aware of a need to ultimately becoming a customer and advocate for your product or service and the different information sources they use along the way.  It generally starts with awareness of need, advances to understanding of product category that meets that need, then to a consideration set (i.e. a short list), ultimately to a selection, and if the customer has a positive experience, he or she ultimately becomes a brand advocate.

So where does Twitter have the most impact? Where do blogs have the most impact?  Given that they are good at making you aware of new issues, help you identify new experts, and perhaps make you aware of new brands, I’d say they are heavily weighted towards the front half of the Path. As a result, their influence may be less obvious.

It’s also worth noting that word of mouth was the most influential information source, which is consistently what every report I ever see shows. Let’s keep in mind that word of mouth is social media community-building gone inline – it can happen via email, Twitter or around a campfire. Prepare for them all. (hmm, camping trip as trade show…) Moreover, the best way for you to arm those word of mouth advocates will likely come from an inline blend of in-person events like conferences and digital connections like social media, even if they themselves influence future customers via traditional channels like phone calls, face-to-face meetings and email.

Finally, it goes without saying that IT people are different creates from line-of-business decision-makers and habits also vary by industry. It’s best to do your own research on your own target audience.

Research Firm Updates Business Technology Buyers Report: Social Media On the Rise is a post from: B2B Voices

A few days ago, I blogged about the B2B roundtable we had here at Weber Shandwick Minneapolis, “Social Media and ROI: Dare We Talk About It?” And we did!

In that post, I summarized the first half of our message to attendees, which was that it was not a big deal to ignore ROI in our trial social media efforts of the past year because a small Investment required only a small Return. Now that we want to get serious and scale this, you better believe we need to talk about measuring real business outcomes.

But how do we do this?  A survey of our attendees showed most simply didn’t know where to start. Interestingly, Jim Estell blogs here that you can’t measure ROI for marketing at all, much less for social media, because it’s too complex. I’ll be the first to admit the proof of impact isn’t always definitive but if you’ve done the research to know your audience well, then this is certainly a do-able task in B2B because there is typically a defined purchase process where our efforts can have a clearer impact.

We have a measurement model for communications in general and it works for social media too.  (In other words, if you can measure business outcomes impact for any sort of marketing communications effort, you can certainly do it for social media. ) It’s called ARROW (see our little graphic).

ARROW Model for Communications Measurement

A = Activities. These are the things we generate. In social media land, that includes blog posts, tweets, YouTube videos or simply the number of web properties we are maintaining.  They get at a measurement of effort. On their own, however, they are meaningless.

R1 = Reach. Essentially number of eyeballs of our target audience we are reaching. We may measure this by Twitter followers or Facebook “friends” or blog page views. Important, but are we changing how our target audiences thinks or behaves?

R2 = Relevance. We sometimes use the word Resonance too. We want to measure that a message got through to our audience and that it connected with them. Relevance measurements can include key messages in third-party blog posts or tweets, number of retweets, blog comments, increases in site traffic or click throughs on a corporate blog to resources on your web site. Still not a business outcome.

O = Outcomes. Ideally, this is when our audience enters the sales pipeline in some way by requesting information or registering on your web site (i.e. becomes a lead) or when you sell more stuff, or when the quality of your leads improve or when your sales cycle shortens.

W = Any of the measures above divided by cost.

Ultimately, the goal is to find a corrolation between reach/relevance measurements and business outcome measurements. We are looking at evidence that the reach and relevance measures are in fact creating a better environment in which to sell. Don’t stop at measuring ARR!

If, despite a significant investment in marketing communications or social media efforts, no corrolation can be found, then you are right to question whether your dollars are being put to good use. What we’re looking for in choosing our reach and relevance measurements is whether or not they are precursors to ROI. How do you know?  Well, you can take the trial and error route to see if there are any corrolations, or better, you can conduct some good audience research before launching a major social media campaign to define what I’m calling the Awareness-to-Advocate Process Path, the average compositive path a prospect takes from awareness of the product category or your brand to being an advocate for your brand. That research significantly helps mitigate your risk of making a big investment in a program that delivers no return.  You still must measure the result to determine the strength of the impact.  More on that in another post!

Measuring Outcomes in B2B Social Media – Part II: A Model is a post from: B2B Voices