Social Media Darwinism » Content Marketing

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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Don’t tell Jelli there is no ROI in Social Media!

Paul Dunay — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 18:00:16 +0000

I had the pleasure of meeting the team from Jelli (http://www.jelli.com) a few weeks back. Jelli for those of you who don’t know it already is 100% user controlled radio so what Pandora is doing for music is what Jelli is doing for radio – totally crowdsourced.

The site I have to admit is so easy to use it’s addictive; within seconds of registering you are affecting the world of radio, as we know it – “rocketing” songs to the top and “bombing” songs to the bottom of the list.

Founder and CTO, Jateen Parekh explained to me how radio stations are basing their song selection on the listeners of Jelli and getting great results. In fact recently two radio stations have been completely taken over by Jelli progamming!

Radio stations both small and large are crediting Jelli with increasing their ratings. For example – 94.5 PST out of the Philadelphia area is reporting – increased ratings, increased impressions and best of all increased revenue for the WPST night show by 12X!

Jelli listeners have proved to be 100x more active then Pandora listeners and make 300 actions on average per month (actions are defined as Likes, Dislikes etc) which is easy to imagine since its so easy to use.

So I like to classify this ROI in Social Media as an approach that leverages the data of social media. Much like you are able to optimize your media spending based on social media data, or optimize your keywords selection based on what’s trending in social media here is an example of serving up what your audience really wants to hear (in real time) and having it affecting market share and revenue. Now that’s a real ROI in Social Media!

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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!

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Microsoft’s Future in Digital Marketing

Paul Dunay — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 01:15:33 +0000

Over the weekend I got to meet with Romi Mahajan the World Wide Director of the Digital Marketing Platform Group at Microsoft. His role is to create the vision for Digital Marketing as it relates to Microsoft SharePoint 2010 for Internet Sites, and Microsoft FAST Search Server technology to create great digital experiences for its customers and leverage its extensive partner network. I was really surprised and excited to learn that Microsoft is taking the Digital Marketing place very seriously since they are one of the largest players in the space!

Below is a transcript of some Q&A that I captured with Romi …

1) What is your vision for Microsoft and Digital Marketing?

I believe digital marketing is at the center of a set of tectonic changes happening in the marketplace, across enterprise and consumer-based scenarios (which are converging quickly). Companies have a core set of common questions (How do I create loyalty in my current and potential customer base, how do I create new forms of commerce, how do I expect my brand in meaningful ways, how do I connect to my value chain (partners etc) in a seamless, efficient, and exciting way…) and in each case, digital marketing can provide either the foundation for the solution or elements of the foundation. Meanwhile, at the same time media, advertising, technology, and brand are all moving towards a singularity and, as such, digital marketing becomes the easy moniker with which to refer to all these changes. Microsoft as a company not only understands the changes afoot, but is the only company that has direct involvement in all the different aspects of digital media like paid, earned, and owned media, back end and front end technologies (from the OS to the presentation layer), and a solution for all sorts of computing devices. I see Microsoft at the forefront of digital marketing in the next 5 years.

2) How much of the Digital Marketing spectrum does the Microsoft’s Digital Marketing cover?

The Microsoft Digital Marketing suite covers many but not all of the aspects of the digital marketing. That is why the partner ecosystem (Agencies, ISVs, Integrators, Consultants) are core to rounding out the offering. In areas, we excel, in others we have “ an answer” and in some areas we rely 100% on partners. That I believe is the winning model and the only one that scales.

3) How is Microsoft helping brands to connect with customers using the Microsoft Digital Marketing suite?

Microsoft has powered thousands of dynamic websites including sites like Dell.com, Ferrari.com, Energizer.com, Chesapeake Energy.com and more. Through interactive elements on websites to the provision of winning digital experiences via mobile, Microsoft is working very hard to help brand connect to customers. I don’t want however to overstate the case. There are many great firms out there who we partner with and who help us understand the customer in new and exciting ways. There are also other great companies who compete directly with us. The key is not “who wins” but how the customers’ customer is being taken care of and served in the process.

(4) What stand out examples can you give us of Brands using the Microsoft Digital Marketing suite?

So one of the best examples we have is Ferrari.com where they used SharePoint as the presentation layer and content management system. Few people know that SharePoint is one of the largest content management software’s out there, not just inside the enterprise but also outside the enterprise.

Ferrari wanted to make its Web site as state-of-the-art and captivating as the cars it manufactures! They migrated from a Java-based infrastructure to Microsoft Office SharePoint to streamline development, simplify content management, and improve the user experience. And with the new site, Ferrari has created a stronger audience connection while increasing traffic by 237 percent, with a 150 percent increase in unique visitors.

5) Where are Microsoft and Digital Marketing heading next?

The future is an exciting one for both Microsoft and for the Digital Marketing industry in general. While aspects of digital marketing have “jumped the shark,” the change is here to stay. Look for more adaptive, dynamic websites, set of services that when combined intelligently create new digital marketing platforms, a lot more ‘closed-loop’ marketing in the digital marketing space, the rise of what I call “The Gaming Metaphor” as the central “method of interaction” that dominates digital experiences, and a host of others that I’m not smart enough to predict!

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Facebook gave us the last piece of the Earned Media puzzle

Paul Dunay — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 18:00:55 +0000

A small relatively un-noticed posting on the Facebook blog gave marketers who use social media one of the greatest gifts I have seen in marketing in quite a while.

Take a look at the original posting below …

Improving Facebook Page Insights
by Facebook Pages on Tuesday, November 23, 2010 at 7:48pm

Facebook Pages are a great way for admins to learn about their audience and view Facebook Insights about people connected to your Page. We are launching a new feature for all Facebook Page owners and Facebook Platform developers that will provide additional metrics around your Page content. All Page admins will now be able to see per post impression counts for each story posted on your Page after June 25, 2010. Per post impressions will be collected in raw format and all impressions will be counted toward the impression total. Unique impressions are not available at this time.

The true meaning of this post is Facebook has given us the ability to track the impression count of an individual piece of content posted on your Facebook Page. This was previously only allowed for Pages with more than 10,000 fans/likes.

This is significant because now you can measure impressions across all your ”earned” social media such as your Facebook Page postings, YouTube Views, Twitter, Blog Impressions etc. And if you can officially measure impression data across all of these forms of media then you can attach a CPM to that number and define the Media Equivalent Value (MEV) you can get by participating in Social Media.

Some clever firms saw this and immediately launched Social Media dashboards that can derive a MEV for you such as SocialEye by Overdrive Interactive and SocialSenseFB by NetworkedInsights (both of which I am currently test driving). Which means you can now truly measure your progress daily, weekly, monthly in social media. And better than that you can report back to your executive team how much media value you were able to drive for your company by using social media, giving you a nice tidy way sum up all your media value backout the cost of your social media program and show an ROI.

Marketers have been typically looking for a tool to measure ROI in social media but because the metrics were so different (fan, followers, views of videos etc) it was impossible to “normalize” those metrics to create a single measurable metric which was why it was so hard to measure the ROI in social media. Ultimately all marketers will be heading to a place where we can monitor spending across all forms of media – Paid, Earned and Owned in order to know where to place our very next dollar of media spending. Furthermore I think you will see this type of media analysis emerge more this year. So little did we know in the quiet of an evening in November just 2 days before Thanksgiving, Facebook gave marketers something really to be thankful for on Thanksgiving!

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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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Is User Generated Content building a Wall between your Brand and your Customer?

Paul Dunay — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 18:00:03 +0000

So here is a little fact that really scares me – User Generated Content has surpassed that of publisher content which means we marketers (or publishers) are the “white noise” to the User Generated Content “signal” they produce.

So let’s dive into that for a moment …

At a recent concert I was attending at Madison Square Garden – the most popular thing to do at the concert was not dancing (good thing in case you have seen me dance) but it was video taping, text messaging, and generally sharing the experience with others who were not in attendance. 20,000 people for 4 hours producing tons of content – more content than I produced with all my teams around the world in a year – they exceeded in 4 hours!

Now take that same dynamic and put that in front of your brand. If you have (lets take Microsoft for example) customers who are avid users of the brand and tend to be socially active blogging, tweeting, posting on Facebook, or posting on forums about their good and bad experiences with the Microsoft brand – then how as a brand marketer am I supposed to get my message through all that mess?

The answer is – you can’t!

The dynamic I am pointing out exists for most brands today B2C and B2B brands. They quantity of conversations are growing every day about your brand (at Avaya our brand mentions have increased 5 fold in 18 months!!) Now I am not sure it can continue at that pace but I am not 100% sure.

150 million people use Facebook everyday and access it via mobile (more than the entire Twitter registered user base!) and they are said (by Facebook) to be 2 times more active than those that only access Facebook via the web.

One thing is for sure that dynamic is going to continue to get worse as smartphones surpass internet users in the next 2 years. That’s a stat we all need to keep an eye on!

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Mapping Content to the Sales Funnel AND Buyer types

Paul Dunay — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 23:29:39 +0000

You often hear about the concept of mapping content to the sales funnel (especially in B2B Marketing) but it’s not so common in practice. I will self confess that I have ignored this one for a while. The other version of this is the mapping of content to your buyer types and this too is one I have ignored for a while … until now!

Ok so I took a look at my sales funnel and started to take the content my team produces and map it against the funnel – for simplicity sake I like to use Awareness to Consideration to Purchase as my 3 major stages of the sales funnel.

For Awareness I like to use broadly appealing content that can be shareable (the new KISS as I like to call it – Keep it Shareable Stupid). This would include eBooks, Research, White papers, etc. Not all of these have hooks for gathering download information (that’s just not acceptable these days). We use 2 distinctions – Premium content and Non Premium content – the latter being free and the former being behind a registration page.

For Consideration I like to use more in depth tools like webinars and live/virtual events – derived from the lists of folks who downloaded and have been interacting with us on a particular topic. These are typically better than the broad brush webinars because we can have a real consideration discussion that includes such things as use cases, ROI modeling and even self funding ideas.

And then for Purchase I like to use case studies, customer references, press releases on new wins etc. This gets to the final decision makers desk and helps out the sales force immensely since they can never seem to have enough of these in their toolkit.

So then I flipped to another chart where we started to map the content we create to the buyer types and for simplicity sake I like to use End User, Influencer, and Buyer/Executive as my 3 major buyer types.

What we realized pretty quickly was the content we were using to attract Awareness – was the same content we would use to attract End Users (now I always hope to get an influencer or a buyer in there) but in reality when we look at the leads we are nurturing we are seeing more end users which is ok since we have a ton of end users in the 200,000 customers we have!

For the Influencers – we like to use the same content we have for the consideration stage – webinars, live events, virtual events and so on. Here is where we see more influencers show up to get the detailed info that they need to make a recommendation for a major technology purchase.

And finally for Buyers/Executives – we see we need the same type of content we need for the purchase end of the funnel – since they have the recommendation from the end user and influencer but they need evidence that this is going to work and that they are not the first person to buy which is why case studies, customer references and new win stories really help speed the sales process.

What’s been your experience with mapping content to the sales funnel or buyer types? I would love to know.

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Facebook’s Like Button adds Life to your Content

Paul Dunay — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 15:00:54 +0000

Like it or hate it – the Like button is here to stay. In the first week of its launch 50,000 like buttons were integrated on various websites and more than 1M “likes” were registered within 24 hours of its introduction. At last count well over 100,000 websites integrate some form of Facebook’s social plugins (including my site!).

Research is showing that we will use the Like button for many things because its is one of the easiest social actions (easier than share) and can signify you like certain content, show you like a certain product, approve of an advertisement, or share your feeling for a video. Whole activity streams are being created around the use of the Like button.

My favorite is Levis use of the Like button to create a social shopping experience. They’ve integrated the new Like feature with every product on the site so at a quick view, you can see the number of “Facebookers” who Like the item and maybe even cast your own vote. On individual product pages, it even pulls in pictures of your friends who’ve Liked the item. The best part is website extends the Facebook integration out to create a “friends store” which essentially customizes the entire experience to be Facebook friend centric and also allowing you to invite all your friends into that shopping experience! Hello affiliate marketing – I love it! If you haven’t seen it you can check out the store at store.levi.com.

In the future you should be able to Like books on Amazon that you read for only your friends to see, Like search results on Bing to give your friends a heads up on the best result, perhaps even use the Like button to vote on the outcome certain TV shows (my favorite idea is to use the Like button for Reality TV shows such as The Apprentice, Top Chef, Survivor, or Project Runway and actually create the outcome of these shows).

Still in its infancy the Like button holds a lot of promise for Facebook as their march continues to making all interactions both web and mobile more social. In fact if Google’s mission is to “index the worlds information” perhaps Facebook’s mission is to “Socialize the worlds information!” (but I digress …)

For marketers the like button holds some significant promise for extending the lifespan of your content. A recent statistic showed that with Liked content you can expect click thru rates to improve by 3-5 times compared to content that does not have a Like. In an age where there is more User Generated Content than Publisher (or marketer) Content – here is one way that B2B Marketers can ride that user generated wave to make your content stand out and live longer than it does today.

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