The Gray Areas of Social Media

How to target your efforts to get results
PSJ interviews Adam Kleinberg, CEO of Traction

Recently, Adam Kleinberg, CEO of Traction, attended the iMedia Agency Summit where he tweeted a running commentary. He made sure he used the conference hashtag because he gets a lot of interaction from other conference attendees and followers. He received a message from someone who said, “I love your tweets. We’ve got to connect when I get there.”

It turned out that person was not only a great guy and a keynote speaker at the event, but also the head of digital for a giant global energy drink brand. The two met up at the conference, and two months later, Kleinberg’s agency began working on a project for him.

Although B2B companies accept social media as a valuable tool to provide customer service and find new customers, they continue to struggle to develop a strategy and see results — and the connections — that Kleinberg experienced. In the following interview, Adam Kleinberg clarifies many of the gray areas while showing what does work for B2B in social media.

Professional Services Journal: While B2Bs accept social media and make it part of their strategy, they’re struggling to define and execute the strategy. What advice do you have for B2Bs?

Adam Kleinberg: B2Bs typically make two mistakes when approaching social media strategy.

1. They start with tactics instead of strategy, as in “I need to do something on Facebook.” My advice is to start by asking why before you jump to how. What are you trying to accomplish? If you show up with a preconceived notion of how you’ll succeed before you even define your problem, you’re likely to spend a lot of time in the dark.
2. They define social media as one silo. It’s not, just like digital media is not. Social is now embedded in every part of how people connect and communicate online. It touches every part of your business. The infographic below shows how Strategy, Marketing, Customer Care, Outreach and Empowering the team are all part of the social media pie. They are very distinct activities that companies should address individually.

PSJ: Many companies struggle to see results from their social media efforts. Furthermore, not all companies have a big enough name to find people talking about them or their competitors. What does it take for B2Bs to get results from social media?

AK: Even if you’re too small to use social monitoring effectively as a tool, you can still create contextually relevant content that provides value to audiences. The “right” channels might not be what you think they are. Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are big oceans to swim in.

An article you publish in an online trade journal that is sharable in those other networks might be a more effective way of getting your thought leadership in front of the right eyeballs than a build-it-and-they-will-come page on Twitter or Facebook.

PSJ: The B2B SM examples you present involve big companies with big resources. How can a small to medium B2B successfully use social media?

AK: There are plenty of ways small companies can outthink the competition rather than outspend them:

• Build out a LinkedIn Companies page and invite your customers to post recommendations for your services.
• Use Twitter to follow potential customers or reporters and engage with them to build relationships. Those relationships you build are real.
• Answer questions related to your line of business on LinkedIn Answers, Focus.com or Quora.com (a hot new social property). You can even set up a feed to have relevant questions on LinkedIn Answers sent straight to your RSS reader.

PSJ: Should B2B companies bother with LinkedIn Groups (not company pages) and Facebook pages? Why or why not?

AK: LinkedIn Groups can be valuable if focused enough. Most are a waste of time (OK, so you’re in the social media gurus group. Now what?).

However, I find some value in relevant networks I’m in like Cornell Alumni in Marketing & Advertising in the Bay Area.

LinkedIn Companies, however, has been overhauled and is very valuable. Every B2B should take advantage of it. I wrote an article on how to optimize your company’s LinkedIn profile and provided a free LinkedIn Companies Toolkit.

Facebook pages may worth having. Maybe not. Ask yourself why first. What do you want to achieve? Then figure out the resources (money and manpower) you can dedicate and ask if it makes sense. Last, ask if it’s the BEST way to achieve your goals. If the answer is yes, a Facebook page is a great idea.

PSJ: What three common denominators work for a majority of B2Bs when it comes to social media?

AK:

1. Authenticity works. Social media offers you a chance to set aside marketing speak and put a human face to your brand. People don’t come to trust brochures, but they do come to trust other people.
2. View social as an opportunity to extend or syndicate the reach of content you create so people can consume it on their terms. You can use a tool like Tumblr, so every time you write a blog post, it’s distributed to Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, RSS and a dozen others.
3. Insight is out there. Just look for it. People are talking. Listen in.

Want to connect to more prospects? If you really embrace social media, it works.

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About Adam Kleinberg
In sixth grade, Kleinberg programmed video games on a Commodore PET computer. In 1997, he started his first blog. In 1998, he was the resident Flash guy at a hot integrated agency. Then, he hopped around several agencies — both digital and traditional — for a few years.

In 2001, he and some friends started Traction. Traction calls itself an interactive agency, but it believes everything is interactive. It’s part advertising agency, part innovation consultancy. Traction aligns psychology and technology to create ideas that solve business problems. That’s the reason it’s been named the top interactive agency in the country. BtoB Magazine named Traction the interactive agency of the year in 2009 and has twice included Kleinberg in its “Who’s Who in B2B.” Kleinberg has written many articles for industry publications including Mashable and iMediaConnection.