Social Media Listening for B2B Marketing
Paul Dunay is an award-winning B2B marketing expert with more than 20 years’ success in generating demand and creating awareness for leading technology, consumer products, financial services and professional services organizations.
Paul is the global vice president of marketing for Maxymiser a leading web optimization firm, and author of four “Dummies” books: Facebook Marketing for Dummies (Wiley 2009), Social Media and the Contact Center for Dummies (Wiley Custom Publishing 2010), Facebook Advertising for Dummies (Wiley 2010) and Facebook Marketing for Dummies 2nd Edition (Wiley 2011).
His unique approach to marketing has led to recognition of Paul as a BtoB Magazine Top 25 B2B Marketer of the Year for 2010 and 2009 and winner of the DemandGen Award for Utilizing Marketing Automation to Fuel Corporate Growth in 2008. He is also a finalist for the last six years in a row in the Marketing Excellence Awards competition of the Information Technology Services Marketing Association (ITSMA), and is a 2010 and 2005 gold award winner in Driving Demand.
Buzz Marketing for Technology, Paul’s blog, has been recognized as a Top 20 Marketing Blog for 2009 and 2008, a Top Blog to Watch for 2009 and 2008, and an Advertising Age Power 150 blog in the “Daily Ranking of Marketing Blogs.”
Paul has shared his marketing thought leadership as a featured speaker for the American Marketing Association, BtoB Magazine, CMO Club, MarketingProfs, Marketing Sherpa, Marketing Executives Networking Group (MENG), and ITSMA. He has appeared on Fox News, and his articles have been featured in BusinessWeek, The New York Times, BtoB Magazine, MarketingProfs and MarketingSherpa.
Paul holds an Executive Certificate in Strategy and Innovation from MIT’s Sloan School of Management and a bachelor’s degree in Marketing and Computer Science from Ithaca College.
Thanks Paul. These insights into what tools / approaches you are working with are quite helpful. It can be a full time job staying on top of the listening tools landscape- and I think yours is one of the few blogs that looks at them in an objective manner.
Speaking of objectivity, I think one place where ALL listening tools currently fail the user is in providing the context of who the voices are (as such a high volume of social traffic in tech is being driven not by buyers but by marketing and PR folks- pointing back to whitepapers, webinars, other advertorial). A raw count of mentions across social channels (Twitter, Facebook, Blogs) is a pretty misleading picture most of the time, when so many of the mentions are from those with axes to grind. What percentage of those mentions were employees of the company, vs. competitors, versus actual customers?- that’s a question that no listening tool that I have seen provides.
Seems to me like listening is at a similar stage as early days of commercial internet (pre- Google) where the indexing was so poor that a search for any term would just barf back a poorly sorted mess. Clearly the most interesting social media buzz (for tech vendors) is that produced by their actual customers / prospects. It’s one thing to see just a volume bar of how much discussion is happening – quite another to actually break into actionable sales data.
Not to say these tools aren’t valuable- just that there is quite a bit of massaging of their results that tends to have to take place before an in-house marketing person can actually share them with sales. If you know of any social listening tools that provide a better filter about the audiences (or are even heading in that direction) I would love to hear about them. Thanks for the insights!
@Travis – boy you hit the nail on the head Travis – yes there is a lot of human processing right now to know or at least get a picture to know if the person is an Influencer. But it still takes some digging to get there and you are right Tweet count or Twitter follower count isn’t always a good gauge. I am experimenting with another system hoping to see if that works better – will certainly let you know via this blog if it does.
Thank you for sharing. This is timely article as I’m putting together a seminar on Social Media tools.
@John – sound good – let me know if I can be of assitance
I found your post looking on bing for just this information. I’m going to add you to favorites, I got alot from some of your other posts as well. Thanks!
@Lawrence – cool thanks for commenting! Go BING!
You might look at Tweettronics, http://tweettronics.com , as a Twitter listening tool… Far cheaper than Radian6 too… Includes assessment of mentions, sentiment, keyphrases and keywords, reach, and urls, along with identifying influential tweeters.
@Jeff – thanks for the suggestion – I hadnt heard about Tweettronics yet – will check them out!
Hats off to Travis for finding the soft underbelly of listening. The tool is of no more use than a “tell us what you think” web form that no one reads or responds to. Marketers are usually shocked by the obligation to actually read this stuff. I’m reminded of the guy back in my Cisco days who, when taken by the hand and dragged through blog post after blog post to look for relevant authors said after five minutes “I don’t have time for this!”. The reason we started the exercise is he approached our team for guidance, convinced he wanted to start a blogging program.
Brian Ellefritz, SAP Social Media
@Brian – thanks for the comment!
microblogging is really useful when you want to broadcast short updates. i am still leaning towards traditional blogging.`;”
@Connor – but also its great for starting a conversation or asking a question – something more suited for 140 char!
marketing really takes some skill and talent if you want to succced in it “~~