Social Media Darwinism » Branding

Changes in B2B Marketing — Mad Marketing TV Ep 13

Paul Dunay — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 15:00:16 +0000

Join guest host Jeff Ogden and special guest Paul Dunay, CMO of Networked Insights and author of Facebook Marketing for Dummies, as they discuss:

Recent changes in B2B marketing
Influencer strategies and why they’re important
Facebook’s IPO and what it means for marketers
New social media tools for B2B marketers
Social data and what it means to B2B marketers

Join Jeff and Paul as they discuss how Paul has made the shift from working within a large company doing B2B marketing, to thriving in a start up environment where he’s focusing on social, amongst other things. Paul delves into the development of an influencer strategy and what that means. Jeff and Paul also address the Facebook IPO and the opportunities Facebook provides for marketers. Paul ends with an introduction of various new social media tools for B2B marketers, as well as the explosion of social data and what that all means.

To hear more from our special guest Paul Dunay, read his blog or follow him on Twitter.

Don’t forget to join us for our next episode when we discuss creating the life you really want with Randy Garn. Also, look out for special “After Party” footage from this interview with Paul Dunay coming next week.

MadMarketing TV is sponsored by Act-On Software: Marketing Automation for the Fortune 5 Million. Visit http://actonsoftware.com to learn more.

Why Your Marketing Needs Real-Time Data Another Advertising Week in New York is upon us and...
Marketing needs to be more Adaptive! Ok so this isn’t the newest concept you ever...
Use Facebook Data to Unlock Consumer Affinity When I started this blog back in 2006 Facebook was...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Why 2,000 Facebook Likes Won’t Save Your Job!

Paul Dunay — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 14:00:12 +0000

“I wish we didn’t have to spend 10 hours creating a report every month to show [advertisers] that what we’re doing is worthwhile.” Victoria Harres, PR Newswire

Does that sound like your job? I know it sounded like plenty of roles I had within major companies!

But as a Social media marketer, we believe in the power of a world where consumers are more connected to friends and brands, but when it comes to convincing the C-suite how and why, oftentimes they find themselves pointing to indeterminate measures of success such as Facebook Likes. In fact, 68 percent of companies don’t know or can’t measure social media ROI or worse 62 percent of CMO believe that social media will pay off … eventually!

Well that day is already here for the enlightened CMO which is exactly what I want to talk about at this years SXSW event. In my session I will elaborate on over a dozen proven social media strategies from brands like Dell, Jive, Avaya, SAP and the NCAA to establish targeted social media programs that delivered real results. My session will explain how to combine social monitoring with analytical firepower to go from reactive social media—such as customer support and crisis management—to proactive social strategies that lead to product innovation, lead generation and interactive buying.

But I need your help to vote for my session! So if this sounds good to you I would appreciate it if you would click here and vote for my session!

How much is that Facebook Fan worth anyway? Vitrue a social media marketing platform determined that the...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

How Social Media Gave True Blood a Transfusion

Paul Dunay — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 18:00:11 +0000

The first episode of a new TV season needs to grab the audience, and social media campaigns have become an integral part of doing just that. But counting the number of conversations won’t by itself tell a producer or network executive that a show is going to continue to attract viewers and remain popular. Instead, deeper analysis of social data is needed to gain insights into which promotional elements are working and which topics are creating buzz among viewers, including featured characters, plotlines and featured actors.

So in our latest Social Intelligence report, Networked Insights set out to analyze the social media conversation surrounding the Season 4 premiere of HBO’s hit series True Blood. Our research provided insights into who is watching the show (moms!), what they care about (the relationship between main characters Sookie and Eric), and the channels they use to follow the action and communicate their feelings (blogs, Twitter, Facebook, HBO.com and mom-focused websites).

Our methodology for analyzing the True Blood social media conversation comprised four key elements: audience definition developed from discussions on social media sites; impressions, which provide an estimate of how the media is consumed and account for the many users who do not actually create posts; sentiment, which captures conversation volume and whether posts are positive, negative or neutral; and topic discovery, which uses advanced clustering technology to extract key sub-themes and reveal engagement drivers.

Engaging fans across the social web serves as a catalyst enabling advocates to promote your brand or television show. Through social media, broadcasters and brand marketers can capture awareness, which builds an audience and then inspires them to take action – whether to watch a premiere or purchase a product. With the added dimension of a shared, digitally connected viewing experience, fans can now have social interactions with your show and its viewers, everywhere. Learn more about the growing importance of the social conversation in building and maintaining an audience in Networked Insights’ Social Intelligence Report: True Blood.

Don’t tell Jelli there is no ROI in Social Media! I had the pleasure of meeting the team from...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

How much is that Facebook Fan worth anyway?

Paul Dunay — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 18:00:15 +0000

Vitrue a social media marketing platform determined that the average value of a Facebook ‘fan’ is about $3.60 when it comes to a Media Equivalent Value (MEV) per year. This calculation is based on the brand posting to their Facebook Fan Page twice a day and that they have a million fans which equates to 60 million impressions per month at a $5 CPM (cost per thousand impressions), so 60 million impressions. This would result in $300,000 a month in Media Equivalent Value or what the brand might have to spend elsewhere to get the same eyeballs. So then the math goes $300,000 month, which is $3.6M a year, meaning with 1M fans, the average value is $3.60 per fan.

While I can understand the approach to equating it to media dollars that you would have to spend to get that same reach only .2% of Fans ever return to a Fan page and in some cases it’s more like .02% (hat tip to BrandGlue) So people on Facebook who “like” your Fan page basically never go back to it.

The true value of a Facebook fan is Zero until you can monetize them. And that’s the era I think we have all just entered. For the last 2 years we have been building our network of people that “like” the brand by creating content and engaging with them. I certainly hope you have been doing this – and its not an insignificant feat to create all this content. This is the #1 stumbling block I hear from marketers over and over again.

So the question I hear from many marketers now is “ok I have done that – now how do I monetize them?”

In reality there are only 2 ways to do this and I invite your comments on this approach – you either sell them something (hello f-commerce which is coming to a Facebook fan page near you soon) or you activate them in some other way like an “advocate” network meaning if they cant buy from you directly perhaps they could refer you a new customer which might even be better than buying something from you if you think of the Lifetime Value of a Customer (LTV).

Bottom line is I think we are exiting a phase of experimentation (what I like to call Social Science Experiments) and moving into a phase of monetization. How are you monetizing your fans?

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Marketing needs to be more Adaptive!

Paul Dunay — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 18:00:42 +0000

Ok so this isn’t the newest concept you ever heard of – but hear me out – its time we really changed a few things in the marketing organization.

So its easy to see that today’s marketing teams are not that well equipped to handle “real time marketing” as David Meerman Scott defined it. We need better systems to take in data and analytics in order to make smarter better business decisions.

I would argue that you have to have several sensing mechanisms in place – one that is a data set that is always looking backward (like a rear view mirror) so see what has been said and is always listening and watching the conversations, in addition to that you need a forward looking data set (like a windshield) to help drive decision making on what new products or services to launch, what will be the effectiveness of this campaign, what new hyper customer segments can we go after, and then of course you need a dashboard that pulls all this together in one place so you can see across multiple forms of media.

With today’s fragmented media landscape no single individual can pull together all these media channels to orchestrate and master them. And as a result you get silos of sub-optimized media.

In a real time marketing world speed will be key. So how can you even think of making a yearlong media plan? But that’s what some media planners are doing when it comes to TV and Print. As marketers we need to be optimized for speed and rapidly effective decision-making. Having said that I know we have a long way to go but anything is better than making gut level decisions or worse taking advice from your CEO on a media plan!

Small Budget – Big Impact So let me ask you a question – if...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

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

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

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!

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

B2B Marketing needs a stronger Why

Paul Dunay — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 16:09:52 +0000

Last year I wrote about how the balance of content has shifted. Bottom line is there is more content being produced by Users than by Publishers these days. Which means Publishers (or Marketers) are now the “white noise” in comparison to User Generated Content. Our messages are being drowned out by user generated content.

This struck me recently at a concert I attended in Madison Square Garden where everyone around me was either texting, taking pictures or video taping (using their smartphone) the concert and sending to their friends. Of course, I ended up doing the same! All 20,000 of us must have created and shared a teraflop of data that night in about 4 hours. Which reminds me of what Eric Schmidt recently said – that every 2 days we create as much information as we did from the beginning of time up to 2003.

So I have been thinking a lot this summer about the effectiveness of our demand generation efforts this year. The unvarnished truth is I believe it’s getting harder and harder to make your demand generation efforts stand out. And perhaps these two things have something in common.

Perhaps the “connectedness” of all this great content provides less and less time for people to take in our messages. They just aren’t making more hours in the day which causes all of us to prioritize the content we receive (whether we know it or not) based on family, friends, trusted others, peers, colleagues etc. Notice that marketers don’t make that list (duh) but also think about how much more content you have been getting from those sources now that social media has arrived. And I would argue this is exaggerated even more when it comes to B2B Marketing.

Ok so now that I depressed you – lets talk about what I have been thinking B2B Marketers need to do. Enter Simon Sinek.

I first heard of Simon Sinek from the boys over at Marketing over Coffee John Wall and Christopher S Penn. Simon’s approach to messaging is very unique in the sense that – All organizations function on 3 levels. What you do, How you do it and Why you do it. The problem is, most B2B companies don’t have a strong why. Apple makes a great example – we all know what they do and how they do it but we also sense why they do what they do which is to “redefine the computing experience”. Which is similar to Google in the sense that we know what and how Google does what it does but we also know their mission is to “index the worlds information”!

You can go on and on about other brands (Southwest Airlines comes to mind) that have a strong mission or a strong why. And further I would argue many B2B firms are missing the boat when it comes to having a compelling why. I find myself listening to people saying “we need to create a message around this new product or service” when in reality they should be focused on creating a stronger why for their company – which would eliminate the need for a grand scheme of messaging at the individual product or service level.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

B2B Marketers Fate Rests in the Hands of a Few

Paul Dunay — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 16:38:30 +0000

At the recent ITSMA Marketing Leadership forum I was stunned by a presentation given by Sean Geehan CEO of the Geehan Group author of the upcoming book the B2B Executive Playbook. The big eye opener for me was – B2B marketers are always tasked with getting net new customers when in reality their existing customer base is their most important source of revenue and referrals. Therefore our spending patterns are typically reversed. Hear me out …

If B2B marketers are constantly focused on gathering new customers our spending will be misaligned with the actual group that can delver us the highest return – our existing customers. And while that doesn’t sound that exciting – it can get really exciting when you align your budget to a group of customer that can help you deliver sustainable growth! (Which is what the CEO and the market wants from you anyway!)

New customers will cost a lot to acquire and in their first year or two deliver small revenue as the relationship between your company and the new customer is growing. It’s a tender sapling that needs to be nourished.

But in many cases, 20% of a B2B company’s’ customers are responsible for 80% of the revenue. If you apply the Pareto principle that means that out of 400 customers – 80 customers are the ones that deliver a bulk of your revenue. (In most cases that means 80 decision makers!) The question that really opened my eyes was – how much are you spending on those customers? What percent of your budget? 20%, 50%, 80%?

Unfortunately in most cases the proportion of spend on those customers is painfully small and the argument here is that needs to change. Especially in an economic climate like this! The Bottom Line – The Fate of B2B Companies Rests in the hands of Just a Few People! Its time to start embracing those few people in ways B2B marketers haven’t before.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

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.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.