Social Media Darwinism » Blogging

Make Your CFO a Social Media Fan

Paul Dunay — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 18:00:01 +0000

Social media definitely pays off, but you’ve got to focus on the approach not the tools.

Social Media has hit the mainstream these days but the big concern on every product marketer’s mind has been how to justify the ROI? Never is that more true than at budget time. The purse string holders might harbor unspoken thoughts like: “We spend big bucks on those developers, customer support and sales engineering people. Why are you wasting the company’s money by giving them geek toys when they should be doing real work for us?

If you’re concerned about social media cost justification, you’re not along. A recent Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) survey found that only 20% of CMO’s felt social media produced measurable ROI and 62% hoped it may someday. If the CMO’s lacked ROI confidence, then just imagine what a CFO or CEO survey might have told us!

Social media definitely pays off, but you’ve got to focus on the approach not the tools. The classic product marketing approach to social media is treating it like just another broadcast media channel by posting press releases, sharing events, posting videos and expecting to see instant results like you get with other online media like banners, text links and search. All of that is a good start, but the results you need to justify your efforts will come by taking a holistic company approach.

Here are some real-life examples and I am sure you can find others when you start thinking this way.

Improved Customer Support

Social customer support can reduce customer churn and increase retention rates faster than any other program I have ever seen. Listening for and spotting a customer issue, responding to them and solving their problem in minutes using social media provides an “exceptional customer experience” which also unlocks the beauty of social media and the web in sharing stories of great customer service travel far and wide.

Collaborate with your customers

I don’t care whether you own a community or your rent one from a provider like LinkedIn Groups – but a community is a great place to create a social experience with your customer. B2B marketers often host bi-annual advisory boards or annual user group meetings and these are just screaming for a way to keep them connected via a tool like on online community. When you do that the results reported in a recent Jive report of over 2000 customers are outstanding. Lower costs, more revenue – a perfect combination!

Users
- Generated 32% more ideas
- Sent 27% less email
- Found answers to questions 32% faster
Employees
- Spent 42% more time communicating with customers, which led to better retention rate
Results:
- Support calls dropped by 28% (Lower costs!)
- Sales to new customers jumped by 27% (More revenue!)

Activating brand advocates

When you give great customer support or have a great product – why not activate the social channels to accelerate their word of mouth. See below for what happens when you do.

Find diehard fans on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn
- Enlist them for your brand
- Get them to make recommendations
- Build your brand with the power of their voice
Results: 5-9X ROI (based on revenue lift) by activating best brand advocates

Increase Engagement with Professionals

Used LinkedIn recommendation ads to invite endorsements and engage target users
- Earned 2000 product recommendations
Results: 500,000 viral updates on company products

Finding intent to purchase

You may be wondering with all this great social media conversations going on – is there anyway to mine social media to market smarter? The answer is yes there are tons of ways to mine the data to improve your content creation, SEO and SEM keyword selection, media planning (from online to tv media) and for lead generation.

Analyzing social media to find leads using a variety of search terms
- Both competitive and non-competitive search terms reveal buyers such as “replace product X” or “upgrade competitor Y” – any list of competitive terms paired with the words replace or upgrade can give you a list of potential prospects

Results: $250,000 sale found using social media and completed in 14 days

By now, you should be getting the idea of ways to expand your thinking on justifying social media. When you find others, let me know!

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Paul Dunay joins Networked Insights as the CMO

Paul Dunay — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 18:00:40 +0000

Almost 5 years ago I started this blog with the notion exploring the changing definition of Buzz Marketing in light of this new thing I saw on the horizon called “Social Media”.

I remember questioning where all this blogging was going to take us. I even asked others in my podcast series like Douglas Karr from the Marketing Technology Blog, who built strong following on his blog record time, where are we going with all this blogging and where will it take us? The answer was – neither of us knew!

Like Doug I was experimenting with this new technology in all of its forms from RSS, blogging, podcasts, videos, twitter, social networks, Facebook applications, mobile, location based applications and as you have seen me speak about before I think the role of marketing is changing to one that is becoming more like a Marketing Technologist. But it always felt like we were on 2 paths – our day job of running marketing and our night job of experimenting with these technologies to find something we could then add into the mix of our day job.

Well fast forward to today 5 years, 7000 tweets, 413 blog posts, 78 podcasts, 21 awards, 4 “for Dummies” books and numerous eBooks later and I am happy to announce that I have finally converged the 2 paths I was on into one meaningful path that really makes me happy.

After 2 years of developing a strategy to deal with various types of social media conversations within Avaya we finally got the monitoring and routing of those conversations to be institutionalized within the firm. No small feat by any means but I just couldn’t imagine that the sum total of social media in B2B was just about monitoring and reacting to tweets all day. I felt there had to be more we can do with the social data that we just cant get out of monitoring. So I started looking at the social media analytics space for social technology that can provide real insights. You can read about all of my findings in my post on Monitoring vs. Analytics [Infographic].

During the process of looking for the next big thing in social media, I ending up finding some really exciting technology at Networked Insights. Having owned both Radian6 and Networked Insights side by side I realized there was a big difference between “data and insights”. Data is reporting on what has already happened, Insights are ideas that come from the data that allow you to find new market opportunities, new ways to place media and new ways to find customers who exhibit purchase intent, which is why I hired Networked Insights in the first place!

I believe there is a vast sea of unstructured social data about everything you can imagine out there which can be used to help pre-inform your decision making in marketing, its up to the marketers to harness the insights of what the data is telling us to challenge the norm and transform marketing into the revenue generating center it should be!

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Any Publicity is Good Publicity in Social Media, right?

Paul Dunay — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 18:00:29 +0000

It used to be said that any publicity is good publicity. Now the same could be said about social media – any mention of your brand is good in social media but that’s not entirely correct!

Let me explain …

Five years ago, a tech savvy, digitally focused company could find satisfied and unsatisfied customers venting about their product or service on any number of electronic forums (you remember UUnet , AOL Chat rooms, Fucked Company etc …) These were online bulletin boards, chat rooms and blog sites but the difference was the conversation was more isolated and therefore harder to find.

It’s the interconnected nature of today’s social networks like Facebook or microblogs like Twitter and the way they broadcast their messages to the world but also in the process creating permanent search friendly records that make them so powerful and also potentially dangerous.

This is why PR needs to move from fixating on getting ink in Publications to getting digital ink in Conversations. Think about the life span of paper based earned media – not long after its printed does it sit on someone’s shelf. Rare is the day when you walk into a meeting and someone pulls out an old magazine and slams it on the desk fussing about an article written months ago. But a quick Google search and bingo digital ink is indelible.

The challenge for all of us is to explain to senior leadership and members of the board that getting into hundreds of conversations online is better than a mention in the Wall Street Journal!

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10 Best Posts of 2010

Paul Dunay — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 18:00:29 +0000

Far and away one of the best blog posts I wrote this year was on the new 4′c of B2B Marketing – it was read over 15,000 times and 3X more popular than the next most read blog post of the year. This inspired me to do a quick 10 Best Posts of 2010 as we slide into the New Year.

I hope you enjoy it …

4 C’s of B2B Marketing – We’ve all heard about the four P’s of marketing: Product, Price, Placement, Promotion. The four P’s were created mainly to describe the ideal “marketing mix.”
4 P’s to Social Media Marketing - Ok ok – based on the great response I got from my readers on my last blog post The 4 C’s of B2B Marketing I thought I would try to apply the same principle to Social Media Marketing.
Fire your Director of Social Media! – At a recent ANA conference I was interviewing Brian Wallace VP of Digital Marketing and Media for RIM when I heard him say “2 years from now- if I still have a Director of Social Media – I should be fired!”
Is The White Paper Dead for B2B Marketing? – In a recent conversation I was having with the Bloom Group they believe “the practice of publishing white papers must come to a close because of the utter proliferation of white papers, and the poor content contained within so many of them.”
Customer Service is the New Marketing – Zappos was founded in 1999 and sold to Amazon for $1.2 Billion Dollars just barely over ten years later. Zappos is powered by its customer service and was built on the premise of WOWing each and every customer.
Using Content to Build Trust in B2B Marketing – In the recent Edelman Trust Barometer report they detail out how trust is rebounding in a handful of Western countries especially in the United States where trust in business jumped 18 points to 54 percent.
LinkedIn Search Optimization (LSO) Critical for B2B Marketers – Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via natural search results.
Social Media Budget Ratio in B2B Marketing – In my new advisory role for the members of MENG I have been getting a bunch of questions from the members that are making great fodder for blog posts.
How to Choose a Social Media Listening Platform for B2B Marketing – In the last post we covered how to create a Social Media Lead Flow. And once you have identified the conversations where you think a sales opportunity …
B2B Marketing: Trust + Community = ROI – Trust is not a new thing when it comes to marketing and communications as evidenced by one of the most awaited studies in the communications world is always the annual Edelman Public Relations Trust Barometer.

4 C’s of B2B Marketing

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What a Trifecta of a Year!

Paul Dunay — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 18:00:11 +0000

Last year I wrote about how some weeks are hard to top and how lucky I was to have launched my first book – Facebook Marketing for Dummies (Wiley) with my co-author Rich Krueger, and I was nominated for BtoB Marketing Magazine’s (a Crain’s publication) list of the Top 25 BtoB Marketers of the Year 2009. And appeared on the Facebook Halloween episode of HubSpot TV (my favorite web TV show) all in one week! I was in awe of what you can accomplish, I was even more touched when I heard my 16 year old son say “I have no idea how Dad does it all” (thanks buddy)

But this year is going to make last year look like I was slacking off …

Each year I set goals (written ones – because you would be amazed at how the mind works when you write goals down!). So here they are … I wanted to create a social product for Avaya, I wanted to write another book, I wanted to win a Social Award, I wanted to win an industry award,, and I wanted to get nominated for BtoB Marketing Magazine’s list of the Top 25 BtoB Marketers of the Year again.

Not a shabby list. Unfortunately I not only “Achieved Expectations” on that list … I actually “Exceeded Expectations”!

In January I started on a product with the Avaya Labs (formerly Bell Labs) team to create what is now known as the Avaya Social Media Manager. It’s a gateway server and software that works with popular listening engines and applies our own Natural Language Processing (NLP) to the “stream of data” coming out of the listening engine to find Support related Tweets, Facebook Comments, Blog posts, Forum posts and pushes them into the Contact Center where they can be answered and tracked with all the other support related issues. In the process I found that this was the BEST place to get an ROI in Social Media. This was so well received by our clients that we have more demand than we can handle for this product (a High Class problem as I like to say!).

I even wrote another Dummies book (well booklet) about it that Wiley custom published for us called Social Media and the Contact Center for Dummies which you can get a FREE digital copy of at the link above or email me.

I also contracted with Wiley to do another book called Facebook Advertising for Dummies. This just came out on November 16, 2010 according to Amazon. But we were working on this book for the better part of the first half of the year.

But wait that’s not all!

Starting in November I had a 9 day streak of winning and accepting awards from 3 different organizations. November 3rd was the ITSMA Marketing Excellence awards where my Avaya team won an award for Sales Enablement, followed by November 10th where I made this years list of Top BtoB Marketers for 2010 and accepted an award at their gracious ceremony in New York with my wife, my mom and long time supporter and former colleague Diana Butler Buxton by my side and then on November 12th I accepted an award for the work we did in supporting customers using social media – this was the Social Advocacy award from AMI Partners.

With the year rapidly winding down I am almost afraid to set any goals for next year! But who knows what next year will bring but it is my sense that it will be great!

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Social Media for the Boardroom

Paul Dunay — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 15:00:24 +0000

At a recent BlogWell event I got a chance to hear Robert Raines from Chevron present his Social Media program and how he reports their activity into the Boardroom. It all starts with the Pulse Report that Chevron had produced by Edelman (their PR firm) using their Alterian’s SM2 social media monitoring tool. They identified around 60 Million conversations (per year) across blogs, microblogs such as Twitter, discussion forums and social networks like Facebook and other enabling technologies such as YouTube, Vimeo and Flickr relating to Energy.

From there the work began with Edelman to classify them into key conversational issues (of which they identified 50 issues) and then narrow that down to 8 major issues within 3 broad categories: Energy Resources, Energy Technology, and Energy & Environment. These were the three broadest terms that applied to the most relevant conversations about energy.

Obviously a topic like Energy has been written about for ages – at its highest level it has millions of conversations, press, articles, blog pages and best of all opinions! They used Boolean searches (which are available in most listening engines today) to narrow their searches to only the most relevant posts. Then they detailed a taxonomy of trigger words that signaled whether the post was positive or negative in sentiment. And from there analyzed and tracked the changes in volume and sentiment for each topic by quarter.

Using the report they were able to glean insights into the prominence of certain topics by consumers and the trending of the topics that were most important to Chevron. Moreover they could use the report to build content and engage in topics that were trending where Chevron was a thought leader or was looking to become more of a thought leader.

I think this report is a great example for all of us – it shows a very comprehensive approach to monitoring and gaining insights from data. Many listening engines provide you with “streams” of data which is great. But as I like to say “there is a big difference between Data and Insights” and this report shows you how Chevron navigated the streams of data to create real insights that can be shared and discussed at the highest levels of the organization. Its perfect example of where I think PR needs to focus these days – on conversations and not on publications.

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Social Media – is it really mainstream in B2B Marketing?

Paul Dunay — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 15:43:57 +0000

So I ran across some interesting stats last week when I picked up a tweet from Jeff Bullas on the 15 essential social media facts and figures for B2B Marketing.

Seems as if more B2B Marketers are engaged in Social Media then B2C marketers (actually data point from the article – 81 % of B2B companies have accounts on social media sites compared to 67% of B2C) which leads me to think Social Media has gone mainstream in B2B. That’s a good thing yes but I don’t feel like we are there yet.

Let me explain …

I don’t know how you feel but I certainly feel like everything I read about Social Media is the same old thing just a rehash of something else I read before. There doesn’t seem to be anything really new. Sure Facebook changes its platform every Tuesday but I mean something more like groundbreaking ideas using social. Maybe that’s because we are entering a stage where we are all including social in everything we do. It’s no longer a social science experiment by a bunch of early adopters – it’s just part of our everyday approach!

Also I am not seeing anyone really “killing it” with or in social media (sans Mark Zuckerberg of course). There seems to be tons of Social Media consultants and Directors of Social Media but will that party last? (see my post on Fire your Director of Social Media).

Furthermore everyone seems to have a book out on Social Media – heck I have 3 books on social media (2 out there and 1 on the way!) It’s amazing to see so much written on this topic which leads me to believe the party is over.

So where do we go from here?

I guess we head back to the core of what we do as B2B Marketers and take these lessons learned in Social Media back with us and see if we can innovate. I once heard that innovation happens when people get bored with a technology – perhaps we are at that point now in social.

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Do you need to be an Extrovert to be in Social Media Marketing?

Paul Dunay — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 16:07:23 +0000

Great question which I found myself asking last night after I reviewed my recent Myers Briggs score. I found it interesting that my score came in as ENTJ.

For those of you who aren’t aware of the Myers Briggs test it asks you a bunch of questions from multiple angles to rate you on 4 basic scales: your Favorite World (Introvert/Extrovert), Information (Sensing/Intuition), Decisions (Thinking/Feeling) and Structure (Judging or Perceiving). The result is a 4 letter score such as mine – ENTJ – which means a person who prefers being an Extrovert rather than an Introvert who prefers Institutional Information over Sensing, that prefers Thinking rather than Feeling when it comes to making Decisions and prefer to Judge Structure rather than perceiving it.

But focusing on the Extrovert angle for a second, I began to wonder if you need to be an extrovert to be in social media. Certainly internally in your organization you need to be an extrovert if you want to organize a Tribe or movement in your company to take on social media. And for sure you need to be an extrovert if you plan on becoming a proclaimed social media expert or guru. But I never thought of myself as an Extrovert, even though I know the test is very consistent (yes I have taken it before and gotten the same score – even before Social Media existed).

I wonder if this spectrum from Introvert to Extrovert will play it’s way out on Social Media. Meaning if the 1-9-90 rule (see link to my post) will actually change over time. The 1-9-90 theory that says out of every hundred people who join a community or network – 1% actively contribute – 9% contribute from time to time – and 90% are lurkers. Perhaps as more people get comfortable being extroverted and live completely transparently then we will see a shift in that law to a ratio that resembles more of the online population.

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Is The White Paper Dead for B2B Marketing?

Paul Dunay — Wed, 26 May 2010 16:19:45 +0000

In a recent conversation I was having with the Bloom Group they believe “the practice of publishing white papers must come to a close because of the utter proliferation of white papers, and the poor content contained within so many of them.” “Kill the white paper!” they are increasingly telling their clients. “We think white papers – even those in PDF form that are emailed or posted on a website – are a relic of the print days” said Bob Buday, President of the Bloom Group. And I tend to agree.

But then the question quickly becomes how do you build thought leaders?

In place of a white paper, B2B companies need to create a topic micro site – i.e., a site focused on a single topic and providing a wide range of educational content and interactivity that a white paper alone just can’t provide. Such content can include:

• A blog by the subject-matter expert(s)
• Discussion forums
• Surveys/polls that the audience can take
• A news aggregation feature
• And yes, white papers

Here is Bloom Group’s position on this http://bloomgroup.com/content/topic-microsites

Practically speaking a micro site in place of every “white paper” would be overkill and the sheer work involved in going from just a white paper to all those artifacts for the micro site is not insignificant.

Personally I am taking the angle within my organization of more eBooks rather than white papers. Aspiring to the World Wide Rave theory from David Meerman Scott which says to give away your content rather than lock it up behind a registration form. I also like to use the eBook to point to a landing page with some more Premium content (research, analyst paper) as well as many of the other artifacts that I can muster on a single topic. Trying not to let the eBook or white paper for that matter be the only artifact you create from your efforts. An eBook should spawn 3-5 other items that can be used to reach out to potential clients like a couple of blog posts, an email blast, a podcast perhaps and several factoid tweets that can point to your landing page.

But the purpose of a topic micro site is to help a firm show it has deep expertise in a given subject and to help potential customers think about that issue and the best way to solve it. A topic micro site – if positioned as a firm’s current and future expertise on an issue, and if continually refreshed with good, new, multimedia content (including content from viewers) – can be a tool to keep prospects and customers returning to a piece of your website.

What’s your view on this? We would love to hear from you.

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Wayne Gretzky was an Inbound Marketer

Paul Dunay — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 16:12:23 +0000

A few years ago in every presentation I made I had a slide at the front of each presentation that featured Wayne Gretzky. It was affectionately called the “Wayne Gretzky School of Marketing” slide and it was basically a photo and a single quote that said “Skate to where the puck is going not to where the puck has been”.

The inference of this slide years ago was to remind my teams, my peers and my clients that we need to create forward thinking content. Content that would attract the type of audience that we wanted and develop the SEO that we needed on the major topics we wanted to be known for.

Years later we have terms like Content Marketing (created by Junta 42) and Inbound Marketing (created by HubSpot) that advocate the same type of approach. The idea being rather than do outbound marketing to the masses of people who are trying to block you out, why not do inbound marketing where you help yourself “get found” by people already exploring and learning more about your industry.

But there is a subtle difference with my hockey analogy that isn’t covered in the definition above and that is … creating content on a topic that is forward thinking. Nobody wants to read the 1,000th post on a topic that everyone has heard about before. For example who cares about CRM these days so writing about the benefits of CRM wont help your cause but writing about whatever is the next big thing in CRM will help distinguish you from the masses and attract those potential customers who are looking to learn about the absolute latest in CRM.

In reality Wayne Gretzky wasn’t a marketer but he was a very intuitive and successful hockey player. And in business if you want to stand out from the crowd and the very best way these days to distinguish yourself is to create content that is differentiated and that people want to read by applying what I am now calling the Wayne Gretzky School of Inbound Marketing!

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