Social Media: Transforming Company Culture

The oldest B2B software company embraces the newest media

by Meryl K. Evans, Editor, B2B Social Media Digest 

Effective business-to-business (B2B) social media is not just the latest “pretty face” in public relations (PR). It’s also transformational technology with the potential to help company departments work better together — operating in a united yet decentralized environment. Social media provides each area of the company with the power to interact with the outside world. 

For Cincom Systems, Inc., one of the original B2B software companies, its social media revolution began in 2003 with the email newsletter, Expert Access. This newsletter is a result of the company’s plan to build a community of customers and prospects by giving them access to a variety of experts. Readers have the opportunity to ask experts questions. People sharing ideas give the company a strong way to extend its brand. 

The email newsletter has helped the company build a solid following. “When social media vehicles began to appear, it made sense for us to make our conversation with our customers and prospects easier, faster and more broadly available to both Cincomers and our audience,” says Jay McKeever, Cincom director of worldwide marketing. 

Cincom’s social media strategy 

Cincom chooses to use social media as a way to help a new audience become aware of the company, which aims to provide answers that help the audience members do their jobs better. These answers can be in how-to’s, best practices, new trends and techniques in management, and technology articles. “From a global perspective, social media extends our reach to people and places in which we do not have physical representation,” says McKeever. 

The company is working on a full-blown strategy for social media. “Different product teams are employing resources to promote events and news through social media outlets,” McKeever says. The company builds editorial calendars to guide its efforts. “But we need to assign more regular reporters to disseminate information and engage our audiences in two-way dialogue.” 

The company uses social media as an interactive PR tool to engage its audience and tell its story without the hype. Instead, Cincom focuses on solving problems. “We work to earn their attention with good, solid, authentic stories/news without a whole lot of corporate crapola (AKA vomitus eruptus),” says Steve Kayser, Cincom PR manager and communicator. The company began its social media activities with no plan and by experimenting. 

Recruiting activities

Steve Storer, Cincom senior recruiter, relies on social media to find the best talent as fast as possible for every open position. Storer explains that the most qualified applicants come from either direct employee referrals or friends and associates. “Social media applicants are a direct extrapolation of the traditional applicant referral process. Their knowledge and interests are searchable, and we can validate their fit for our job openings via analyzing their postings and testimonials from others,” says Storer.

Recruiters can discover potential candidates through their LinkedIn group activities or Twitter stream. On the flip side, candidates can check out Cincom to see if the company is a fit with their career objectives and goals. 

“Based on firsthand experience, direct referral candidates and social media applicants are much more closely aligned to the requirements of our job postings. That allows me to focus my recruiting efforts on screening-in a greater number of quality applicants for each open position,” Storer says. 

Social media removes the tedious part of the recruiter equation of relying on a traditional weeding-out process based on analyzing large volumes of unqualified applicants who may have a well-designed résumé filled with appropriate key words. Such candidates may turn out to have little applicable experience relative to job openings.

Building a business case for social media

Like many companies, Cincom faced skeptics and had to begin with education and adoption. Not everyone likes to write, and employees are busy in times when many businesses do more with less. Social media has become one more thing that people don’t have time to do. Cincom has overcome some obstacles but not all. The company wants to see every employee contribute in some way to its social media efforts. 

Cincom has shown the value and power of social media to employees. “It can be fun and addicting, but the company needs to get better at the fun part,” McKeever says. Cincom is assigning posting shifts and using an editorial calendar to help employees avoid the “I don’t know what to write about” syndrome. “We are trying to streamline this process by breaking up our efforts between thought leadership, survey questions, news flashes and other content,” McKeever says. 

Cincom built a case for social media through its early adopters, especially Louis Columbus, Steve Kayser and James Robertson, all whom are active in social media. They’ve been the influencers to employees in showing the value of social media. “They set the example, they demonstrated the effect it could have on awareness and community development, and people are slowly getting on board. It doesn’t hurt that this is a relatively low-cost platform — one we can track,” says McKeever.

The company saw its business case for social media come together quickly because the low-cost platform offers an easy way to listen to prospects and
customers. The company realized that not listening to customer complaints is an expensive mistake. 

Measuring success 

Cincom measures traffic from social medial to its Web sites, or watches data related to an offer. “After several months of looking initially at the Google Analytics reports and later, WordPress, we all became convinced that as a means to drive upper-funnel activity, it was a clear winner. Since then, we’ve seen our upper-funnel statistics at levels we’ve never attained previously through traditional strategies,” Columbus says. 

The company tracks page views, Web crawlers accessing the content and RSS feed subscriptions for every item shared in social media. It also looks at time visitors spend on the content including blogs and landing pages and opt-ins for downloads. “Against all these metrics, we measure our own progress over time. When we made the shift from Google Analytics to WordPress, the feedback became much more focused and helped us to do much more,” says Columbus.

The company reviews search terms and uses the more popular terms that drive the most traffic. After identifying key terms, the company creates fresh content using those terms.

Advice to businesses

“Strap on your Nikes and just do it! Really, it’s like anything else you do to communicate and market. Who is my audience? What is meaningful to them? How can I help them solve their problems? Why should they listen to me? Understand those things, develop a strategy, set a plan, execute, monitor feedback and make changes,” says McKeever. He recommends the following:

• Listen first. Follow or connect with people you respect in the different social networks to get a feel for how to best use each one.
• Deliver value regularly. The content you share doesn’t need to be about your company. “Strive to deliver insights and intelligence your followers and connections can use to be better at what they do. When you have news about your products or services, share it once or twice. But break up those messages and conversations with a ton of valuable content,” Columbus says.
• Be real and be honest. Respect everyone you interact with in social media.
• Apply the 1-10-1 rule. “You have 1 second to attract someone’s attention (title/subject line) so you can earn 10 seconds of his or her time to earn 1 minute to pay attention to your story — whatever that may be,” Kayser says.

“Far and away, the most critical factor in making social media part of our overall marketing approach is the innate value of these networks as a learning ecosystem,” says McKeever. “Having the ability to listen, learn and put together entirely new solutions based on what prospects and customers say is invaluable.” 

Cincom at a glance 

Goal: Using social media, Cincom targets the media, analysts, IT managers, business users and technology evaluators. It uses social media to generate favorable awareness about the company, build a deep relationship with people by solving their problems and share its expertise by assisting people in the Cincom products and services buying process. 

Social media tools: Some of Cincom’s social media activities occur as the result of its editorial calendar. The company uses a mix of tools to participate in conversations and share experiences. Here are some tools it uses:

1. Twitter: Cincom employees post tweets to respond tocomments, share subject matter expertise and announce news. 
2. LinkedIn: Sales teams around the world use LinkedIn as a branding and sales tool. Cincom finds potential candidates and looks at their postings to see if they’re a possible fit. The company is rolling out training to facilitate this effort. 
3. Blogs: The company leaves comments on blogs other than its own. It also has a few of its own blogs including one from the CEO to share thought leadership.

• Cincom CEO Thomas Nies
• Cincom Expert Access – Online Business Magazine
• Riffs & Tiffs Blog
• The Perfect Customer Experience Blog

     4.  Analytical tools: Cincom began with Google Analytics, but it needed more real-time information and details, so its development team created analytics for WordPress. It also uses whos.amung.us and Feedjit.

The company has expanded its tools to include YouTube, a Facebook page and social media news releases. 

Results: The company has increased traffic, increased interest and achieved better SEO placement for findability. Of course, nothing matters unless sales reflect increased activity. “Our Healthcare group attributes its last two major deals to prospects searching for a topic and finding a social media news release and an Expert Access article on a certain topic,” Kayser says. 

Blogs and Twitter posts have helped Cincom learn more about how outsiders perceive the company than ever before. Industry experts, prospects and existing customers provide the company with a lot of feedback simply because Cincom freely shares insights. Social media gives an instant snapshot that tells the company whether it’s on track using statistics from Web site and blog traffic and the impact of its brand-building activities. 

McKeever says, “When conversations start with these people either in person or on the phone, there is this immediacy to them — They feel they already know you. That immediacy and trust from sharing information and intelligence continues to keep us plugged into the latest developments in the market, and that is invaluable.”