With springtime comes blooming flowers and the start of a new baseball season. After the first rendition of “Take Me out to the Ballgame,” picture yourself sitting in a large stadium looking down on the bright green diamond and undisturbed brown dirt.

The home team hits the field. There’s the pitcher ready to throw the ball and set the play in motion. At the other end waiting for the pitch is the catcher who prepares to stop whatever the batter doesn’t hit. The visiting team’s batter marches toward the batter’s box looking confident and determined to whack whatever the pitcher throws to take his team’s first offensive move toward its overall strategy to win the game.

For businesses with a social media strategy, Twitter is the pitcher, Facebook is the catcher and LinkedIn is the batter. You may substitute the catcher with a different social network tactic. Twitter and the other social networks are not a strategy. They’re tools and tactics to support a company’s social media or marketing strategy.

Whatever you include in your social media lineup, you want to coach your Twitter player to succeed in using the tools to help the team win with its strategy, especially in the areas of self-promotion and monitoring.

Twitter is much more than monitoring and self-promotion. The reason for the focus on these two is that not every business feels it needs to be active in Twitter. Every business must at least listen in on Twitter. As for promotion, every business wants to promote its products and services, and that alone can affect the outcome of the game.

Monitor people’s experiences

People talk about your company and your competitors all the time. If they run into a problem with a product or service, they’ll tweet about it. If they have a bad experience with customer service, they’ll tweet that, too. Don’t fret — not all tweets are negative. People tweet about amazing experiences and why they love JKL company.

If someone struggles to find answers to a problem, he or she’ll ask for help in Twitter. Imagine what would happen if you solve that person’s problem without mentioning your product or service. You may find a new evangelist for your company. Tweets like “I’m looking into ABC and XYZ. Which do you like better? Why?” appear all the time. You don’t want to miss them when someone mentions you or your competitor.

Also keep in mind that your company can recover from negative tweets. In one case, a customer tweeted her disappointment in a company’s lack of response to her email requesting help after she had already looked for answers on her own. Within a few minutes, the company responded with a link so she could submit a trouble ticket. It took only 15 minutes from her first tweet to get the problem solved. After that, she wrote two positive tweets about the company. Two positive tweets to one negative; that’s a good deal.

As soon as you find a complaint or negative tweet mentioning your company, acknowledge the tweet even if you don’t have a solution right away. Then, use follow up tweets as needed to resolve the problem. Every situation is different. You want to be listening and ready to respond.

Limit self-promotion

Every major league baseball stadium has posted ads. But they don’t dominate the baseball experience. If they do, it’ll turn off fans who want to watch the game without too many distractions. Businesses on Twitter, of course, want to promote their products, services and content. You can do that as long as it doesn’t take over the Twitter game.

Several experienced social media users share their help and self-promotion ratio, but no one rule stands out. One expert says he tweets one self-promotion for every 10 tweets. Another uses the 80/20 principle with 20 percent of the tweets being self-promos and 80 percent devoted to helping others, sharing expertise (without selling) and posting useful resources.

People always break rules in social media. You will find Twitter accounts that do nothing but tweet the latest articles and blog entries from their own websites. Often, the people behind the website or company have separate Twitter accounts for engaging and helping others.

You can make your self-promotion tweets more helpful. For example, if you want to share your company’s latest blog post, don’t just tweet the post title and link. Give people a reason to check it out by telling them what’s in it for them. (Yes, the old standby of “what’s in it for me” (WIIFM) applies to Twitter!)

Be human like Babe Ruth

Twitter gives companies the chance to show the people behind social media who like to help and want to share valuable information with others. It’s harder to say no to a person who answers your question than to a company that talks to no one and only talks about itself.

Use Twitter to listen, engage and help while limiting the self-promotion. Go the distance, ease their pains and people will come to you and your company.

Meryl K. Evans is senior editor at InternetVIZ and the content maven behind the IT Solutions Journal, Connected Digest and Professional Services Journal. Follow her on Twitter @merylkevans.

Grasshopper Group is the company behind the 5,000 campaign, a rebranding campaign that included sending five green chocolate-covered grasshoppers to 5,000 influencers. The company used FedEx to create a sense of urgency and authenticity. A glossy white bag with an attached hangtag appeared inside each envelope. The hangtag had a URL leading to a video about the power of entrepreneurship.

Chocolate-covered grasshoppers may not be an American delicacy, yet the campaign compelled influencers like Guy Kawasaki to tweet about the campaign. The result:  The switch from the GotVmail brand to the new brand of Grasshopper worked. Who thinks of GotVmail after receiving grasshoppers in the mail?

Social media strategy

Grasshopper Group helps start and grow businesses. The startup company began growing its own product and moved on to help other entrepreneurs — then added a few more products.

Grasshopper aims to create a fun environment for employees. Since many of them already interacted with social media sites for personal reasons, it was natural for the company to take an official step toward social media and encourage employees to meld personal and work life online.

“We thought that employees could take their already strong online influence and act as proud company ambassadors,” says Stephanie Bullis, ambassador of buzz at Grasshopper Group. “Since our original plunge into social media, things have become slightly more organized; however, we have zero and never will have any sort of social policy,” she says.

The company saw that customers, the entrepreneurs using its products, were already engaged in social media. This compelled the company to join the online conversation to ensure that people could find the company and interact with employees.

Since Grasshopper focuses on entrepreneurs, a group that tends to be technically savvy, the company knew it’d be a wise move to adopt social media and tools with the following strategies in mind.

• Use social media as a way to communicate a cohesive message across multiple platforms.
• Make connections with customers, media, influencers, etc., that may not otherwise be possible. Start by building relationships online that later translate into more powerful offline relationships.
• Connect as real people. Bridging from business to business (B2B) to peer to peer (P2P) provides a more personal identity for the corporate brand.
• Share relevant information such as articles, tips, infographics, resources, events, etc.
• Empower 1 million entrepreneurs to succeed, by providing them with invaluable tools for their businesses.
• Support entrepreneurs beyond a product suite.
• Educate entrepreneurs that Grasshopper Group-like products exist. People start businesses every day that need affordable solutions to get up and running.

Building the business case

Sometimes, social media doesn’t make sense for businesses. Grasshopper knew it could find its main audiences on social media, where they collect information and connect with others. Social media makes it possible to engage with customers on a more personal basis.

Grasshopper Group employees find that it’s easier to track social media than traditional marketing efforts like radio and TV ads. Allison Canty, social media coordinator with Grasshopper Group, says, “You see the conversations happening about your brand, and you can influence them.”

People will talk about your brand and ask questions whether or not your company appears on social media. Better to be there as a resource, or others may negatively influence opinions of your brand.

Measuring success

Grasshopper looks at its connections, which is the number of people following the company’s Twitter account, subscribing to its blogs or “liking” the Facebook page. However, these numbers mean little if no one interacts. The company studies interactions through retweets, mentions, shared-information Facebook status tags (when people “tag” the company on their walls), and comments on blogs and wall posts.

Another important factor is influence based on the company’s reach through its posts — who talks about them and where. Of course, conversion is the fourth element of measuring social media success. Conversion is based on sales, revenue, referrals, and traffic driven to company and product sites.

In monitoring Twitter for specific keywords, Bullis saw a tweet from someone asking about a virtual PBX solution. Rather than just responding to check out Grasshopper, she also provided two Twitter IDs of customers using the service. One tweet led to a phone call and the person became a customer. Not only that, but also the customer had an online radio show and invited Bullis to be a guest. He also acts as a Twitter referral whenever someone asks about Grasshopper and its products.

When Twitter’s “fail whale” (for the uninitiated: a picture of a whale appears when Twitter is down) keeps showing up as people attempt to connect to Twitter, they grow frustrated and spread that onto other networks. Oh, the irony. Grasshopper has turned technical difficulties — something that can happen to any company — into a positive experience thanks to social media.

For example, during a brief outage with the company’s phone system, the staff hopped on the social networks to provide regular updates on the outage. Customers knew exactly when the service was back up. A company that doesn’t join conversations could easily experience a publicity nightmare. Because the company provided consistent information and updates, customers never had a chance to become frustrated and instead saw a company that provided fast, thorough customer service.

Advice to businesses

Many companies enjoying social media success have said this, and it deserves repeating: no company should dive into social media just because everyone is doing it. Social media takes time and planning to be successful in engaging prospects.

The two biggest hurdles Grasshopper Group faced in entering social media were finding the time to do it and figuring how much time to invest. The staff doesn’t have a rule for this, and like most people, some days they spend more time in social media than others. “Things happen very fast, and if you’re not constantly monitoring to some degree, you can miss out on important conversations,” Canty says. The more customer conversations that occur in social media, the more time staff spend engaging and listening.

Social media can open the door and cultivate relationships. Where the real value comes in is taking the conversations outside of social media using the phone or meeting in person to make a personal connection. “People trust you more and realize that you’re a real person and not just a corporate brand hiding behind a computer screen looking to make sales,” Bullis says.

Almost every company experiencing success in social media says it began by looking at its target market, where customers and prospects interact and set expectations before engaging. Canty says, “Determine what your communication with them will be (platform, tone, frequency) and what your communication will be from them.” The Grasshopper team continues to learn from companies that excel in social media and mimic their efforts while retaining the company’s own voice.

Social media elements

Goal: The company aims to spread three messages: “We are empowering entrepreneurs to succeed with a suite of products they love to use,” “We’re a brand for entrepreneurs” and “We’re a trusted resource.” 

Social media tools: Grasshopper’s staff takes social media seriously and has fun doing it through these social tools:

1. Twitter. The Grasshopper Group has various Twitter IDs to share information specific to the product or business, including @ghgroup and @grasshopper. Employees use Twitter to engage with their target markets for each Twitter ID because that’s where they can find and interact with their audience to share information and extend their reach. Founders and CEOs tweet with customers and prospects using personal Twitter handles and don’t hide behind a corporate logo.
2. Facebook. The company has pages for Grasshopper Group, Grasshopper.com and Chargify. It uses Facebook for personal interaction with customers and fans and provides updates including new features, events attending, news, blog posts and anything else involving the company.
3. LinkedIn. Grasshopper posts blogs on the company’s LinkedIn page as well as uses LinkedIn as a platform to connect with professionals, network, recruit, answer questions, join related groups and participate in discussions.
4. YouTube. GetGrasshopper’s channel is loaded with how-to videos and caught wildfire with the company’s conceived New Dork video. It hired the Pantless Knights to create this video that helped generate brand awareness and fun for entrepreneurs.
5. Blogs. Staff use blogs to tell customer stories, discuss related topics such as startups and entrepreneurs, host guest bloggers, and share information regarding products.
6. Flickr. Photo albums show pictures of the office, events and outings.

All these activities help the company influence brand loyalists and encourage happy customers to want to talk about products. Staff gain input on how to do their jobs better.

Results: While Grasshopper sees comments on blog posts and content retweeted in Twitter, the company knows social media is working when customers report they chose Grasshopper over competitors because of its social media presence.

The company created National Entrepreneurs Day to recognize entrepreneurs and encourage others to sign a petition to compel President Barack Obama to recognize the day. This is a 100 percent Twitter campaign. Soon, the campaign grew on blogs and Facebook so much that Kaufman Foundation took notice and recognized the company in its Global Entrepreneurship Week.

Almost daily, Grasshopper staff sees tweets asking for recommendations for services or similar services. Thanks to Grasshopper’s brand loyalist customers on Twitter and its social media monitoring due diligence, it can influence these conversations and help people with buying decisions. People sign up for services based on the staff’s immediate responses and help on Twitter.

Because of creative campaigns and social media, the company has more than 35,000 customers and has empowered more than 100,000 entrepreneurs. It has accomplished what most would consider impossible for a company with zero sales representatives. “We get to know our customers, their stories and their passions. With this information, we can help promote their story to our entire audience of online followers and influential media contacts,” Bullis says.

About the interviewees

Stephanie Bullis is the ambassador of buzz at Grasshopper Group. She is passionate about fostering relationships with entrepreneurs and connecting with the startup community. You can find Bullis on Twitter @srbullis or via email at sbullis@grasshoppergroup.com.

Allison Canty is the social media coordinator at Grasshopper Group. She is responsible for managing Grasshopper Group’s online social presence and is passionate about Internet and social media marketing. You can connect with Canty via Twitter at @AliCanty.

Meryl K. Evans is senior editor at InternetVIZ and the content maven behind the Connected Digest, B2B Social Media Digest and Professional Services Journal. Follow her on Twitter @merylkevans, LinkedIn or Facebook.

Personal use of social media is widespread and is exploding in popularity. Business use is growing and evolving. Are nonprofits like hospitals involved? Yes, and more will participate as time and budgets allow.

From this recent article in Bio-Tech Digest featuring an interview with Frank Barry, Internet strategy manager at Blackbaud, you’ll gain some valuable insights on social media and nonprofit and hospital participation. Through his sage advice, you’ll:

• Learn how social media is evolving.
• See some actual examples of effective social media use.
• Discover a fantastic website where you can see and analyze what hospitals do.
• Learn five basic decisions you need to make before you start a social media program
• Get a helpful white paper on social media use by healthcare organizations.
• Be able to attend a prerecorded webinar on social media.

[ Read more ]

Think back 25 years. Can you believe we didn’t have cell phones and a computer in every home and on every desk? The precursor to personal digital assistants, the Palm Pilot didn’t debut until 1996!

The networking company, Cisco Systems, is celebrating 25 years. (Can you believe the company didn’t exist before 1984?)

What do you see in 25 years? The innovative company has a CiscoIn25 video contest, which appears on its Facebook page with over 100,000 fans. The big question behind the contest is “How do you think technology will evolve in the next 25 years?”

The human network strategy

As you look at Cisco’s Facebook page, you can tell the company is having fun with social media and bolstering its “Together we are the human network” campaign. Employees managing the page know they represent a business and balance fun with business (see the evidence on the Facebook Page Guidelines).

Yet developing a human network requires more than fun — widespread resolve. Cisco integrates its social media strategy into every aspect of the company from product development and sales to human resources and communications. The company relies on social media to interact with employees, customers, potential employees, press, investors and analysts.

From an organizational chart perspective, two teams manage these efforts. Although the two teams have separate objectives and audiences, they work together on social media governance and training.

The social media communications team falls under corporate communications, and John Earnhardt, director of social media communications, leads the team. This team manages the overall content and strategy across Cisco corporate social channels including Corporate Newsroom, @CiscoSystems Twitter feed, Cisco Facebook page, Flickr and YouTube.

“The social media communications team focuses on those ‘influencers’ who, if you will, get a vote against our uber-company goal of being the most important technology company in the world,” says Earnhardt.

Jeanette Gibson (@jeanetteg) leads the other team, the social media marketing team housed in the central marketing organization. This team oversees integrated social media campaigns, lead generation, online brand strategy and overall monitoring and listening programs for the company. Its focus is on customers and lead generation.

Earnhardt says, “We both use the same tools, although they tend to focus on smaller communities that may lead customers or prospects into the sales funnel. In communications, we certainly point to our products and communities if people want to go there, but we don’t measure how much revenue we impact or leads we create.”

Building the business case

Using social media is a no brainer for a technology company like Cisco. The fun began with the company’s first external blog in 2005. “It was an experiment to ‘extend’ the experience and voice of our public policy team members within our government affairs group,” Cisco Senior Social Media Strategist Autumn Truong says.

“We’ve learned that we can have richer and more engaging conversations through social media. We are a customer-centric company that doesn’t fall in love with any specific technology. We ask customers and deliver what they want. Social media helps us listen and respond.”

The company added its YouTube channel in 2007, its Twitter account two years later and the Facebook page in 2009. The business case needed no help when the proof was in the conversation.

Measuring success

For Cisco, social media is about interactions. Truong says, “Regardless of your respective social media programs, engagement is at the heart of what we want to measure and achieve. Whether it’s as simple as someone retweeting your content or as involved as commenting or blogging — these connections provide great insight into the level of interest people have on a particular topic. If we can help our community engage and participate in the conversations, based on the content and information we share across our social media channels, that’s a win for us.”

To facilitate an upcoming redesign, Cisco plans to fine-tune and redefine how it measures content engagement on its site and across all its social networks. In fact, the company will use the redesign opportunity to ask readers if it should have a new name for News@Cisco in its blog and to receive suggestions from Facebook fans. A poll in Facebook will provide valuable information.

Currently, the company is experimenting with coupons on its Facebook page. It rewards new fans with a discount on two of the company’s products. This effort is helping the company gauge its Facebook community engagement.

Advice to businesses

Employees know that social media is still new from a business perspective. Cisco’s social media teams continue to learn while sharing insight and best practices, especially on its blogs. The company also shares its Social Media Guidelines handbook.

Social media’s low barrier to entry makes it easy for B2B companies to dive into it. Cisco believes that — after identifying your audience, goals and proof of success — you “Just do it.” You learn by doing and making mistakes.

A word of warning: Cisco used to rely on anonymous bloggers, and employees have talked about stuff they should not have revealed in public. These types of things can be damaging, but may ultimately hurt the employee more than the company.

Earnhardt says, “Fundamentally, employee training should be along the simple and clear lines of ‘offline and online rules are the same.’ For example, if policy says don’t talk to the media on the phone without your PR team, then certainly don’t talk to them on Twitter or Facebook.”

The teams rely on valuable online resources like Mashable for social media advice, but nothing replaces figuring these things out for yourself.

Social media elements

Goal: The company’s vision is “changing the way we work, live, play and learn.” You may see this as a big, hairy, audacious goal or as Cisco affectionately calls it, BHAG. Earnhardt says, “We believe it’s something that networking technology inherently does. We connect. We make the world a smaller place through video and collaborative technology. We bring people together.”

Social media tools: Cisco uses every social network with fervor. It doesn’t simply set up at Facebook page and forget about it. Staff updates content regularly and engages with its audiences in five different touchpoints:

1. Corporate newsroom: The corporate newsroom takes the form of a blog with the latest news. It also seamlessly integrates Cisco’s other blogs giving visitors a quick overview of each.
2. Twitter: The @ciscosystems Twitter feed — managed by John Earnhardt — tweets news and information about Cisco and its executives. The account’s bio includes a link to Cisco’s support page.
3. Facebook: Cisco Facebook page doesn’t just provide information and news. The company has Facebook Page Guidelines, posts a fun contest, provides an offer and links to its other social network pages.
4. Flickr: Cisco’s flickr photostream has over 50 pages of images and photos related to company events, executives and other interesting photos like the Doobie Brothers showing up at Cisco. There’s that fun thing again.
5. YouTube: CSCOPR YouTube channel contains over 800 videos including a series by Greg Justice, who calls himself the company’s “World’s Most Interesting Intern” where he raps about his experience at Cisco — meeting the president of Russia, sitting in an ergonomic chair and sounding like C-3P0 spouting out corporate acronyms.

“There are so many conversations going on in the technology space, and we want our voice to be relevant and important in those conversations,” says Earnhardt. More important, the team considers listening to be a critical part of the social media formula. Its Facebook page not only polls fans about Cisco’s News@Cisco name and favorite Cisco Internet video, but also asks about Facebook privacy changes and favorite holiday movie. (We like It’s a Wonderful Life.)

Results: Cisco’s social media success is easy to see. Just look at its impressive numbers across the social media board. However, numbers only tell you part of the story. After all, people can easily follow a company, but it doesn’t mean they’re listening. So look to the multi-way conversations happening on the various networks. “While we still have a lot to learn and to uncover about the power of social media,” Truong says, “we’ve seen early success in terms of volume and the type of people we reach and impact in a real-time environment.”

A transparent engagement tool

To Cisco, social media isn’t a business driver, but a transparent tool to communicate with its audiences. Truong says, “At Cisco, social media is viewed similarly to corporate social responsibility … It doesn’t necessarily have a direct business impact, but it is good for business.”

The company is implementing many social media behind the firewall that the company calls the “quad,” an enterprise collaboration tool that borrows from Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. The quad helps employees better collaborate, build teams and share information. When these products start to be monetized, that’s the ultimate measure of their efficacy.

All of this makes you wonder: Which company is forming today that will be known by 2035? What technology are we living without right now?

Think about it. Today, 25 years is what 100 years was in the 1800s. Things that didn’t exist 10 years ago: Wikipedia (2001), iPod (2001), BlackBerry smartphone (2002) and Nintendo GameCube (2001).

What a difference a decade makes.

About the interviewees

John Earnhardt is director of social media communications at Cisco where he manages the social media team responsible for the award-winning News@Cisco news site, the corporate blog and Facebook pages, and the Twitter @CiscoSystems, Ustream and Flickr sites. Follow him at @urnhart.

Autumn Truong is a senior social media strategist at Cisco leading amplification, community management and influencer engagement programs within the corporate communications department. She works closely with various organizations within Cisco to drive alignment on social media measurement, strategy, policy and governance. Follow her at @autumntt.

About the author

Meryl K. Evans is senior editor at InternetVIZ and the content maven behind the Connected Digest, B2B Social Media Digest and Professional Services Journal. Follow her on Twitter @merylkevans, LinkedIn or on Facebook.

Although it’s harder to get started because of size, approvals, layers of decision makers and other complications, more big corporations than ever use social media today.

That’s no secret. But how to do it right depends on commitment and strategy.

Frost & Sullivan, a giant company with 40 offices and 1,800 employees uses social media effectively. Its strategies are to start small, be consistent, be relevant and don’t be afraid.

Frost & Sullivan social media strategy

Frost & Sullivan raises awareness of the company and its brand by building a presence on several social media sites and through the company blogs. These activities provide stepping stones toward its target audience that result in new and repeat business.

Sarah Saatzer, corporate communications associate for Frost & Sullivan, lists three audiences the company wants to reach with social media:

• Clients. The company updates clients on the analysts’ work and activities.
• Prospects. In connecting with potential clients, the company shares industry coverage and builds relationships to generate interest and business.
• Media. Frost & Sullivan works to be a resource for reporters by sharing analysts’ coverage areas so the analysts can be a resource for future stories.

The team knows that sometimes prospects won’t contact them. “Even if they see a post and don’t reach out to us, we are still raising awareness of our company and coverage areas that they may reference later or pass along to someone else,” says Saatzer. Social networks provide a starting point for conversations. “We want to let them know what we do and how we can help their company and get them in contact with the appropriate research team to make that happen.”

Building a business case for social media

The drumbeat of social media began growing louder when Jake Wengroff, global director of corporate communications, joined the company in June 2008. At this time, several department heads and executives were asking questions about how to best handle and leverage social media.

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The corporate communications team took the lead, creating identities on Twitter and SlideShare by August 2008, and learned as it went along. The team didn’t need to worry about making a business case since this didn’t involve a purchase order or request for funds.

The team worked to incorporate messages, postings and tweets into its daily work and knew that social media would take time.

Outside of the corporate communications team, the company also launched analyst blogs in January 2010 for clients as “a walled garden,” meaning only clients had access. These blogs went public in August 2010.

The preferred social media tools

Like most successful social media users, Frost & Sullivan combines its social network efforts. For example, when staff posts a presentation on SlideShare, they follow it up with a tweet on the Frost & Sullivan Twitter account and post it on the Facebook fan page wall. The company relies on the following five social resources:

1. Blogs. Originally, the company managed blogs within a wall, but it recently opened its blogs to the public. Each business unit has its own blog for analysts to share market insights, trends or react to news relevant to the industry.
2. LinkedIn. While the company doesn’t have a LinkedIn page, many employees promote Frost & Sullivan on their own LinkedIn pages.
3. Facebook. The company uses a Facebook Fan page for linking to presentations and upcoming analyst briefings and to reference media mentions.
4. Twitter. The company has a Twitter ID to share the same information offered on Facebook.
5. Slideshare. The company also has a Slideshare account for posting presentations that analysts create to brief webinars or presentations from tradeshows or events.

Measuring success

The corporate communication team tracks social media statistics weekly:

• Facebook Page — Weekly updates on number of fans, page visits, comments and wall posts.
• Twitter — Number of followers, tweets and retweets.
• Slideshare — Number of uploaded presentations, comments and people who liked each.

These stats continue to support that more people are becoming familiar the brand, and the company’s social media presence is growing.

Advice to businesses

At first, corporate communications faced obstacles that many businesses do when trying to convince executives about the return on investment of social networking. “Resistance came from senior executives concerned that we would release sensitive client information, or premium data, through social networks. However, we assuaged these fears, and they soon realized that clients were increasingly expecting us to maintain a social footprint, especially those in our technology practice — our largest business unit,” says Wengroff.

He and Saatzer offer the following advice to businesses considering social networking:

• Start small, be consistent. Don’t jump in and create a handful of IDs for multiple social networks. Instead, start with one account and post new content on a regular basis while responding to comments. With each new identity, ensure that branding remains consistent for easier recognition.
• Be relevant. Yes, you need to let others know what your company does, but also tie it to current news and media reports. Blog posts, tweets and other content related to a hot topic often attract the most interest.
• Don’t be afraid. Naturally, a company fears that opening itself to the public could lead to negative comments. Saatzer says, “Many times these comments encourage healthy dialogue between our analysts and a company, which sometimes even leads to a sale. It can give the company a chance to let our analysts know what they are up to and give both parties a new perspective on a topic.”

Wengroff adds, “Another obstacle we had to overcome was that managers were concerned we would create and distribute all of this content, without a way to track its performance and ‘convert’ it to sales leads. As the social web is composed mostly of passive browsers, we have had to demonstrate that we do receive some sales leads from our efforts and that individuals are sharing and favoring our content, which are good indicators that we provide valuable, useful information.”

Frost & Sullivan social media upshot

Goal: Frost & Sullivan’s primary goal is to raise awareness of its brand that people associate with market research or consulting services. “Social media gives us a unified presence and gets our name, logo and coverage areas out there,” Saatzer says. “All of our social media identities are branded with the same logo, images and text.”

Results: The team knows social media has paid off because journalists have contacted them in response to tweets or presentations on SlideShare. Frost & Sullivan also knows it reaches potential clients when hearing from people who ask for more information because of a Facebook comment or a SlideShare presentation. Social networks have helped these potential clients learn about the areas that Frost & Sullivan covers. These contacts regularly lead to a sale or a vendor briefing. Wengroff says, “Success in social media often requires the ability to explain the rules of new media to those who are confused or impatient. Stay the course, keep focused and communicate your results, no matter how small.”

The size of the company shouldn’t deter large firms from using social media. Size has its advantages, and social media is no exception. A bigger base of clients and prospects to start with, a recognized name and brand, a large scope of content and events — all allow big companies to start the social media engine faster.

Meryl K. Evans is senior editor at InternetVIZ and the content maven behind the Connected Digest, B2B Social Media Digest and Professional Services Journal. Follow her on Twitter @merylkevans, LinkedIn or on Facebook.

Virtual Events

The concept of the virtual event, long a notion prompting predictions and fears of live events’ demise, has achieved an ironic feat. Far from threatening the vitality and existence of traditional events, virtual events bolstered by social media have strengthened the appeal of in-person professional gatherings across all industries, and will soon be crucial to most brick-and-mortar trade shows. 

Integrating the new with the best of the old 

The transformation of the live event through virtual elements has come about from the perfection of communications technologies such as streaming video and the emergence of communications channels such as social media. In concert, these factors have given rise to hybrid events. By combining offline and online elements with the multifaceted physical and virtual experience, hybrid events teem with interactivity on many levels. 

This evolution is already underway on the most forward-thinking trade show floors, where smart trade show producers blend the best of the new with the best of the old. Virtual technologies, along with complementary social media, will increasingly infiltrate the trade show floor, coexisting peacefully with good, old-fashioned hand-shaking and eye-to-eye contact. 

New research backs this prediction. Whether as an attendee, exhibitor, producer or supplier/vendor, over 75 percent of trade show and event insiders plan to attend a virtual trade show in the next 12 months, according to a recent Trade Show News Network (TSNN) and Onstream Media Corporation survey of 800 professionals. 

More telling, 75 percent of these same professionals consider a virtual trade show as an add-on or extension to an existing show or physical event. It’s not difficult to infer that the industry is embracing hybrid events as a viable way to enhance, rather than detract from, live events. 

The template: TS² 2010 

Take TS², an annual trade show about trade show marketing — and a good place, logically to gauge where the trade show industry is headed. In July, TS² 2010: Total Solutions Marketing for the Exhibit and Event Professional occurred at the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center, where over 1,500 attendees enjoyed in-person, tactile opportunities to physically interact with exhibitors and learn about trade show marketing face-to-face. 

The show’s traditional aspects were a hit. Yet central to the success of this year’s TS² was the IN Zone Lounge and Networking Center, an interactive pavilion that debuted live on the show floor to a positive reception. The center embodied hybrid events’ ability to energize and augment traditional trade shows. A creation of The Expo Group (Twitter: @TheExpoGroup), the IN Zone supported, facilitated and encouraged an array of new media–related activities. For instance, impromptu tweet-ups drew together offline attendees and online observers of TS² to the IN Zone’s comfortable lounge to share their latest thinking on all things trade show–marketing related; conversations revolved around the ability of social media and virtual events to augment the live event experience for all. 

Adjacent to these gatherings, professional trade show presenter and virtual event host Emilie Barta (@EmilieBarta) conducted a series of candid, talk show–style interviews with several industry thought leaders. Passersby on the trade show floor could view and hear these interviews by line-of-site or on a large plasma video screen, and a virtual audience watched streaming video online. 

Further promoting interaction between and among in-person, virtual attendees and TS² itself were representatives from 3D Media Group who roamed the trade show floor to shoot short video spots on attendees’ thoughts regarding TS². Later, they posted the videos online for all to see. Additionally, virtual attendees were encouraged to go viral by submitting a video for a TS²-associated contest. 

The social media ‘glue’ 

The success of hybrid events relies on crucial social media tools, along with a strategy to employ them. Even a live event bereft of any hybrid qualities becomes better when the show’s producers embrace social media. Why? Social media adds another dimension to interactivity among in-person attendees and online participants. 

A parallel scene unfolds alongside the event as social media channels enhance everyone’s experience. People bristle with chatter relevant to the event and of interest to anyone attending physically or virtually. This chatter instantly provides the event’s producers with real-time feedback and a long tail of organic visibility online. 

TS²‘s use of Twitter offers an example of the possibilities. In using Twitter effectively, TS² established and cultivated a presence there (@ts2show) long before the live event. Additionally, showing how hashtags can enhance the brand and increase visibility on Twitter, TS² created one branded for the show (#ts2show), and included other industry-relevant hashtags in as many tweets as possible. Examples of these hashtags are#eventprofs, the shared hashtag for a group of trade show industry thought leaders who maintain a highly active conversation on Twitter, and #tradeshow, which acts as a trade show indicator for anyone on Twitter searching for trade show information. 

These tactics combined social media search optimization with brand-building efforts and set the stage for optimizing TS²‘s social media at the event. In the weeks preceding the show and during the live event, TS² encouraged attendees and participants to add #ts2show in every tweet pertaining to TS². The IN Zone held its own outreach by asking attendees to include #InZone in every tweet. As an additional incentive for everyone to do so, the IN Zone posted all tweets incorporating these hashtags on its large plasma video screen, for all to see. This setup allowed Twitter observers to easily follow the hashtags and conversation. 

Rounding out its social media presence, TS² carved a presence on other common social media outposts during the many months leading to the event. For instance, TS² used Facebook and LinkedIn to announce contests related to the event and to foster an online conversation on issues affecting the trade show industry. These two channels, along with Twitter and others, promise to fuel TS²‘s drive to encourage a continual sense of community and render an annual gathering where stakeholders can meet and share, face-to-face, the ideas they contribute year-round. 

It takes a virtual village to revive in-person events 

Hybrid events and the technologies that facilitate, complement and augment them have rescued live events from self-inflicted inertia and stagnation. These new amalgams of in-person and virtual interaction have expanded live events’ shelf life to provide a meaningful experience to attendees, exhibitors and other stakeholders “24-7-365.” Furthermore, they transform the live event itself into a pilgrimage, where everything observed through the multifaceted, year-round experience culminates annually. Smart producers of live events are embracing virtual and hybrid events, along with the technologies that support and enhance them. 

Editor’s note: relationSearch partners, Skinner’s company, helped TS² develop its social media plan. 

Brent Skinner is CEO of relationSearch partners, a company that focuses on helping clients find and be found by target audiences with whom they may forge relationships. Whether the need is to form strategic partnerships, tap social media, improve organic search engine optimization or combine all these and more, relationSearch partners develop programs that feed the lead pipeline and drive sales. Visit http://www.relationsearchpartners.com/, follow Brent on Twitter @RSpartners or email bskinner@relationSearchpartners.com. 

A white paper that distills the many findings of the recent survey by TSNN and Onstream Media Corporation, Virtual Trade Show Report: Insights & Trends from Industry Insiders, is scheduled to be available this fall. Visit www.TSNN.com for more information.

Despite the Internet’s vast resources, people don’t always find what they need, especially when searching for obscure information or something that doesn’t yet exist. Consider an old song from your teen years that keeps playing in your mind. Maybe you only remember a few words, not phrases or lines. If you spend some time, you may find it buried in the information highway haystack. 

Yet if you use Facebook and Twitter, you will most likely find that tidbit much faster. In social media, people want to help and respond to queries. They respond to these queries with valuable information, and post blog entries about the subject. Now, search engines have two new places to go when someone does a query. 

One company has turned “It’s never been done before” types of problems into solved ones by sharing expertise in social media. Emerson Process Management supports organizations with complicated technology and engineering problems that need solving. Social media gives Emerson an accessible and fast way to reach those who need answers. 

Imagine the knowledge that Emerson has with 250 manufacturing locations around the world, 730 patents in 2009 alone and servicing over 150 countries. Social media acts as a bridge that connects the large company’s expertise with the people needing the knowledge. Once content appears on a social network, search engines become aware of it. As search engines discover the knowledge, it brings the company another step closer to customers and prospects. 

Emerson Process Management social media strategy 

Emerson wants to bring its expertise to the surface where customers and prospects can find it. While the traditional approach of connecting and interacting with others works, it takes more time than using social media. Furthermore, people who have problems that need solving don’t have time to wait until they meet the right person. 

The company entered social media by determining its business objectives and communications objectives for key audiences and then coming up with the message and desired outcome. As a result, Emerson has established processes for all of its communications. “Social media-related initiatives are similar in starting with the message phase. We want the participant to use his or her own voice instead of highly processed and tested messaging,” says Jim Cahill, head of social media and chief blogger at Emerson Process Management. 

Cahill lists four reasons for motivating your talent to get to the surface quickly by participating in social media: 

• Gain more visibility. Encouraging your experts to come to the surface through social media will speed up others finding them.
• Listen in real time. Social media is two-way media that allows people to reach out to others and respond. And it all happens in real time.
• Expose expertise. Many refer to this as “thought leadership.” When your talent goes out there and joins the social media fray, they let their knowledge speak for them and the company. This leads to building trust, which leads to business opportunities.
• Find answers fast. Whether the experts or prospects need answers, social media speeds the problem-solving process. Tweet a question, and you can get answers within seconds. Add the answers to Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs and other social media resources, and Google and other search engines will pull them up. 

The company is in the business of services, which isn’t tangible. “The intent is to increase our presence at the surface to improve our ability to listen, talk and engage with customers and prospective customers,” says Cahill. 

Building a business case for social media 

The journey began six years ago when Cahill and co-worker, Deb Franke, noticed blog posts appeared high up on search engine results, especially for engineers’ typical “how-to” queries. The timing worked out because the company brought together two business automation systems and a solutions business. Because of this, Cahill and Franke recognized that blogs offered a natural way to add visibility to the company’s experts. 

The foray into social media started with one blog in 2006. Cahill worked with legal, human resources and senior management before launching Emerson Process Experts blog. “After it proved itself as a way to provide visibility of Emerson’s expertise to those using search engines to find it, we embarked on more social media-related activities over time,” Cahill says. Today, the company has seven blogs, many LinkedIn and Facebook groups and employees using Twitter. 

“Social media helps us reach these goals by putting the people behind the technologies and engineering where they can more closely listen, connect and respond to customers and prospective customers,” says Cahill. 

Measuring success 

The most important metric is the number of contacts that come through the blog. Emerson Process Experts blog contains a sidebar with contact information. Cahill wants people to contact him for answers to issues they face. He connects them with the right people in the organization. Metrics include tracking the following: 

• Contacts.
• Monthly visits to the blog.
• RSS subscriptions.
• Visits to content sites with view counts (YouTube, Flickr, SlideShare, etc.).

Every post comes with a CAPTCHA-protected email link to the featured expert. Tracking contacts helps him connect sales opportunities with the blog rather than focusing on conversion because B2Bs have long and complicated sales cycles. 

While this may not have the hard numbers many executives want to see, Emerson Process Management has moved Cahill into the new role of social media head.

 Advice to businesses 

For B2B companies looking to get into social media, Cahill recommends starting with business objectives. “If they are sound, you’ll overcome objectives from legal, human resources and senior management. Patience and persistence are critical. It took us two years from the idea to realization,” he says. 

Emerson had to work around the status quo to get over its biggest social media hurdle. This meant pointing to other companies like IBM and Sun that used social media with success and sharing their social media policies. Again, remembering and repeating the business objective to raise the visibility of the company’s experts remained key. “The final piece, courtesy of some wisdom provided by business blogger Steve Rubel, was to prove it internally,” says Cahill. 

The team demonstrated post visibility by building inside-the-firewall blogs and using a custom Google search appliance to show results. Worrying about privacy and legal risks is not an excuse. This concerned many people when email became more mainstream. Yet, email turned into a business activity that few could do without. 

Emerson Process Management Social Media Elements 

Goal: The primary goal for Emerson is to solve problems as part of its “Consider it solved” promise. Social media gives the company a place to connect with those looking for answers. 

Social media tools: Emerson uses social media to make it easier for people to find experts. Communities also open channels for peer-to-peer knowledge exchange. The company shares content using the following eight resources: 

1. Blogs:  Blogs give Emerson a forum for highlighting the expertise across the company. Staff uses multiple blogs to focus on different areas of the company’s wide knowledge and industries. The life sciences industry blog and data centers blog attract different markets with different problems. 
2. YouTube and Screencast: Staff posts videos that share expertise. These videos also appear on the blog. 
3. Podcasts: Uploading blog podcasts to iTunes and MP3 sites provides greater reach. 
4. LinkedIn: The Emerson brand has a LinkedIn group so users and experts can collaborate, ask and answer questions, share ideas and network. 
5. Flickr: Staff posts images and photos to share knowledge and expertise. 
6. Facebook: Several Emerson brands also have their own Facebook groups that lists basic information.
7. Twitter: Company employees and brands use Twitter to mention new posts and connect with customers, prospects and trade press community members. 
8. Private community: The company runs a forum on its website. 

These resources improve the company’s standings with search engines. The content they create in social media lets experts demonstrate competence, trust, commitment and creativity, all required factors when you’re in the services business. As a result, they can grow the business. 

Results: In three years, the blog has grown from 5,000 monthly visits to over 50,000. Flickr and YouTube alone receive almost 10,000 monthly views. In one year, the company’s Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts went up almost 3,000. These numbers jumped almost another 1,000 in six months. 

Cahill receives 10 to 15 contacts per week. Some are support related, some are sales opportunities or requests for quotes and the occasional, “I didn’t know Emerson did this. Can you send someone to discuss our application right away?” One of these occasionals was for a “greenfield” plant that could lead to hundreds of millions of dollars in automation equipment and project services. 

Remember, the B2B sales cycle is long and complex. With millions of dollars in the balance, landing these occasional contacts says that Emerson is doing something right with its social media program. 

The message is clear. Using multiple social networks helps the company reach more people while boosting the company’s findability in search engines. 

About the author

Meryl K. Evans is senior editor at InternetVIZ and the content maven behind the Connected Digest, B2B Social Media Digest and Professional Services Journal. Follow her on Twitter @merylkevans, LinkedIn or on Facebook.

Reach a Difficult Audience through Content

The healthcare industry faces a unique challenge, finding ways to cut costs without affecting the quality of patient care. Sacrificing care means the difference between life and death. Furthermore, hospital decision-makers are so busy that they have built shells around them to protect their time and sanity.

So how does a consulting firm targeting this market break through hospital senior leaders’ protective shells, earn their trust, gain credibility and build a relationship? The way to go is to reach the prospects where they are and use content focused on their needs not the company’s own. That’s what works for Compass Clinical Consulting.

Before charging ahead with social media, Compass needed to update its brand. It changed the company’s name from Compass Group to Compass Clinical Consulting so its clients and prospects know exactly what the company does. This, combined with the customer-centric approach, has helped Compass accelerate brand awareness in a short time.

Compass Clinical Consulting social media strategy

Compass strives to develop useful content for hospital leaders to improve how they run their hospitals. This marketing strategy includes content that reinforces Compass’ brand, establishes credibility and trust, and encourages future clients to engage with employees to see if the Compass approach fits their needs. This ties in with social media because all content appears in direct mail, blogs, Web sites, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, news releases, articles and the company’s online news room. 

All of these messages support the company’s brand promise: “We help hospital leaders reduce the cost of delivering safe, quality healthcare.” Its social media strategy is to keep it simple by focusing on social media that hospital marketing departments use. Dale Wolf, director of education and information services, reports that about 10 percent of the company’s market segment uses social media, making Compass an early entrant into social media. “Being in on the ground floor is giving us the experience to master these media as more hospitals come on board,” he says.

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Besides that, the company appears on page one of search engine results for its keyword phrases. Social media is positively affecting its search engine findability. 

Because the consulting business is a relationship business, social media fit the company’s business model. Wolf explains, “We must communicate with people busier than in any other market segment I have ever worked. This is a tough wall to crack. Building awareness for hospital successes will help. Until then, we send our content out via every reasonable medium on the premise that a good percentage will get through the barriers.” The executives make up one segment; the company also works to connect with news reporters who cover healthcare. 

In the beginning, Compass limited its scope for social media by starting with blogging, Twitter and LinkedIn. After becoming comfortable with these, they are planning to expand their social media scope. The PR director also manages other uses of social media on his own. 

Building a business case for social media 

Compass has always included social media in its marketing plan. Part of that could be because of Wolf’s success in using social media in his previous job. He has also added social media to sections in the marketing plan that covers public relations because social media ties into public relations. 

As far as its business case goes, Compass management doesn’t believe that senior leaders use social media, and the older managers haven’t made it a habit to use social media. However, they know that future leaders will enter the business with social media skills. “So some of the decision-making on this was faith on the part of our senior managers. They do clearly see how it impacts Google search, and ‘findability’ is one of our key marketing themes so that helped in the rollout,” Wolf says. 

The company needs to reach people including board members, CEOs, COOs, other executives and quality directors who work long hours. They’re very tough people to reach. “This makes it very difficult to deliver a message with sufficient frequency so the message will stick. Every touchpoint becomes more critical,” he says. 

Measuring success 

The company started its social media program 18 months ago with limited resources, so it has not arrived at a point to build a comprehensive metrics program. But Compass still does the following activities to measure its success: 

• Track news release distribution through MarketWire.
• Track Web and blog traffic using WordPress stat tools.
• Track email open and clickthroughs.
• Experiment with Google Analytics. 

“The single most important metric is how many discussions we generate with senior hospital leaders. We always ask callers or other contacts how they learned about Compass, and we identify sales leads that result from particular campaigns or from Google search. The resulting sales validate that we are moving in the right direction,” says Wolf. (He recommends a Compass article that explains how social media helps the bottom line.)

 Advice to businesses 

Social media is not a magic bullet that drives sales for the firm. It is a bullet. “Carry a six-shooter or an automatic weapon that lets you shoot more than one bullet. The Lone Ranger’s silver bullet worked in the Wild West but not in the hectic marketplace we all now reside in.” says Wolf. He advises businesses to consider these four activities when looking into a social media strategy: 

1.    Work with a consultant who knows social media. The consultant should know how social media integrates with publicity, online search and Web traffic generation. 

2.   Jump in slow. Don’t try to do everything at once because swallowing the sun is a tough act. 

3.   Start with your customer-centric content strategy. Make the commitment to generate content on a constant basis. Marketing is no longer about advertising (not to say advertising is not important); it is about doing a lot of things right and realizing that customer-centric marketing is about helping customers learn how to do their work better. When you help customers, they will remember you. 

4.  Pull is better than push. Since pull is less predictable, it requires courage of conviction, consistency and constancy. 

“When marketers look at social media as an end to themselves, they are making a mistake. Social media are simply a cloud-based content distribution system that is remarkably fast, cost efficient and hopefully viral,” Wolf says. “We have as Robert Frost wrote, ‘miles to go before we sleep,’ but we are making rapid progress.” 

Compass Clinical Consulting Social Media Elements 

Goal: The primary goal for Compass is to complete consulting engagements so clients have a successful experience with positive, measurable and sustainable results. 

Social media tools: Compass uses social media to distribute its content in a variety of ways and to connect with its hard-to-reach target market: 

1. Content distribution. Marketing coordinates with each practice leader to produce content, including white papers, blog posts and Web content. They distribute white paper content by (1) sending the printed white papers directly to decision-makers by postal mail or PDF versions by email, or (2) sending a promotional letter that encourages decision-makers to visit the Web site and download the content. Compass posts all content in its Knowledge Center where spiders can detect it and make it available for online searches to improve search presence. 

2.   Blog: Staff repurposes white papers for the blog and manages three blogs. 

3. Twitter: The company automatically tweets content on corporate (@compasscc) and personal Twitter accounts. Tweets consist of headlines aimed mainly at news media. 

4.  LinkedIn: Staff posts content in discussion groups on LinkedIn.

5.   YouTube: The company posts all videos on its corporate YouTube account. 

6.   Flickr: Compass posts all images and photos on its Flickr account. 

7.    Social bookmark sites: The company also links to content on social bookmarking sites like FirendFeed, Stumbleupon and Delicious. 

8.    News releases: Staff creates news releases as content for posting on news release and online news sites, national media and local media, resulting in highly targeted, mass distribution of content. 

The prime strategy for Compass is to create useful content. The use of media — traditional or social — is simply a means of distributing content as broadly as possible. 

“We want to be seen for the thought-leaders that we are, creating and distributing relevant and useful content that helps leaders run better, more efficient hospitals. Social media is an extension that gives us more channels in which to talk with hospital leaders, at a relatively low cost,” Wolf says. 

Results: When Compass Clinical Consulting started the transition to social media, the Web site received an average of 500 visits a month. The company now averages almost 10,000 visitors plus 4,000 RSS feed subscribers. Page views surpass 40,000 a month. Building traffic to registration pages is the central focus of all Compass campaigns. 

Before implementing the program, a “Compass Group” Google search yielded one result in the first four pages. Now Compass “owns” all the results on the first four Google pages. The only exception is an occasional mention of other companies with Compass in their name. The company’s focus and persistent search engine optimization strategy — using key word phrases to improve search engine page results — has led to several client engagements. 

One tweet in Twitter compelled Fox Business News to call Compass for a TV story on healthcare reform. A single story builds credibility and provides publicity. 

Meryl K. Evans is senior editor at InternetVIZ and the content maven behind the Connected Digest, B2B Social Media Digest and Professional Services Journal. Follow her on Twitter @merylkevans, LinkedIn or on Facebook. 

About Dale Wolf

As president of Wolf Blumberg Krody Marketing, he and his two partners formalized their customer-centric approach into a data-driven methodology of direct marketing – coined as “contextual marketing.” This methodology led to growth for many national brands, hospitals and healthcare insurance companies.

 After selling his ownership in WBK, Dale joined Cincom Systems, Inc. to lead product development of Web-based software to replicate his contextual marketing methodology and spearheaded customer-centric marketing strategy for many of Cincom’s brands. Dale was also an early adopter of blogging and other social media.

Speak E.A.S.Y.

Bring together the devil in Reaper, a smarmy guy from The Usual Suspects and a large enterprise resource planning (ERP) company, and you have a business-to-business company that knows how to have fun while teaching. It’s part of the learn, laugh, share and connect philosophy that the supply chain management company Kinaxis applies to social media. 

Just For Kix Productions, the alias for Kinaxis, produces the show with the tagline of “the comedy series BigERP doesn’t want you to watch,” Suitemates, starring actors Ray Wise of Reaper and Twin Peaks and Kevin Pollack of The Usual Suspects and Shark. The show offers a creative and comedic way to raise awareness of customer frustrations with ERP vendors. 

Just for Kix Productions also produces Late Late Supply Chain Show, Uncle Jay Explains and Married to the Job. All of these touch on topics related to the industry. The videos make up one part of the company’s successful social media and online marketing modus operandi. 

Not only does Kinaxis go all in with its professionally produced videos, but it also brings in outside experts for guidance to ensure the company ventures beyond its blog and into the realm of social media with a full deck. 

The Kinaxis social media strategy 

The overall business objective for Kinaxis is to grow by increasing its market share and business momentum. Raising awareness in target markets, strengthening customer relationships and generating business leads are the social media gears, or goals, in the company’s social machine to reach its objective. 

The goals, in turn, led to the development of the social media strategy, which contains three parts: 

• Engage the broader supply chain community. This builds presence and credibility as employees provide valuable insights and join conversations. “It’s not about selling our product; thought leadership is first and foremost. Our blog is an example of that — you rarely see us mentioning, let alone plugging, our product,” says Kirsten Watson, director of Kinaxis corporate marketing. “We feel that talking about the industry challenges and solutions will, by default, prove out the Kinaxis value proposition.”
• Establish a corporate culture of engagement. Social media is not solely a marketing department endeavor. It’s a corporate-wide engagement that leverages many company experts. “Quite a few have embraced this as part of their daily routine, and that’s the goal. It’s an evolution that takes time. The company has established incentive programs to encourage contributions to the blog, discussion forums and other mediums,” Watson says. 
• Develop the company’s personality. Kinaxis has discovered that customers and prospects appreciate the company’s sense of humor. “It’s often the hook that gets people to visit our community/blog, etc. and learn more about us,” says Watson. The company produces videos using comedy while telling a story around a business problem such as the failure of ERP vendors in solving supply chain management problems.

“We believe that our social media engagement is the entire company’s responsibility,” Watson says. “With such a heavy emphasis on thought-leadership, we need to make sure our social media strategy is inclusive of our internal subject-matter experts. Most everyone can and should contribute. Of course, it’s a never-ending journey of adjustment and improvement.” 

The social media strategy focuses on building an online destination for supply chain management professionals, starting conversations around problems and solutions, boosting awareness with influencers and creating pull by having prospects who hear good things about the company come to Kinaxis. Together, these activities support the company’s effort to influence prospects. 

Building a business case for social media 

Kinaxis had to learn how social media can work for B2B since it’s not as intuitive as for business-to-consumer (B2C) companies. Rather than spending a lot of time trying to navigate the Web 2.0 waters with a blindfold, especially in a niche market, the company hired Forrester Research. 

Forrester studied Kinaxis’ target market to see where and what it did online. The audience consisted of supply chain practitioners and influencers, covering prospects, customers, academia, industry analysts, media and thought leaders. The result showed the target audience used social media for decision-making, support and references. “Knowing that supply chain management professionals are consuming — and participating in — social media for work purposes gave us justification to incorporate social media into our business,” Watson says. 

Working with Forrester, the company developed its social media strategy using Forrester’s POST model: people, objective, strategy and technology. Everything Kinaxis does today in social media comes from the plan including joining existing supply chain communities and creating its own community. 

Measuring success 

The company says that determining success has both hard and soft results. For the tangibles, Kinaxis looks at the following metrics: 

• Page views and unique page views.
• Referrals.
• Impressions.
• Online clicks.
• Email open, click-through and unsubscribe rates.
• Conversion rates.
• Community membership.
• Interaction and word-of-mouth mentions (blog comments, response to LinkedIn postings, tweets, retweets, etc.).
• Tracking the source of all new leads to a specific program or activity. 

Although these have value, they don’t tell the whole story. “The softer side of this is asking ourselves: Do we feel that people know us better?” Watson says. Employees look at whether prospects, industry colleagues, competitors and the press know or talk about the company.  

Advice to businesses 

“I don’t believe there is a choice of whether or not a company should consider social media — the choice is how it should participate. If your audience is online researching, talking, making choices, then that’s where you need to be, too. Some companies are scared to venture in uncharted (and largely uncontrolled) waters,” says Watson. She recommends following Forrester Research POST methodology, which contains the three steps: 

1. Identify where your audience is online. If you jump into Twitter and your audience isn’t there, that’s wasted time. Find them, and see what they’re doing.  
2. Define objectives. After knowing where your audience is and what it does, move forward with developing a strategy. 
3. Select the best tools. With a defined audience and strategy, you are in a better position to pick the tools that will benefit your company the most. 

“Social media is not a collection of new tools for you to blast out your marketing messages. They are tools for knowledge sharing and relationship building,” Watson says. “If you misuse them, people will call you out because the power is with the people, and they have a loud voice and a large audience.” 

Social media offers endless opportunities that can eat up resources. To be successful in social media means producing lots of content on a regular basis. Watson says, “Social media success relies on consistent and thoughtful engagement, and that takes time and effort. You need to figure out the ‘must-do’ vs. the ‘nice-to-do.’ We have implemented our social media efforts in stages. It’s better to tackle a few key things and get them right, than jump in and try to do it all from the start.” 

The company repurposes its content in a variety of ways. It may create a presentation that it blogs and tweets about, then create an interview from the content and start a conversation in the forums. Taking a phase approach also provides time to learn lessons and tweak them for future phases. B2Bs should consider taking a company-wide approach to share the workload while ensuring no one burns out and fails to deliver value. Watson says, “The bottom line is you get what you give. Have honest intentions and be true to them.” Then go after your goals. 

In fact, everything Kinaxis does revolves around SEO, one of the most important components in the company’s success. 

Although social media efforts take place throughout the company, marketing is a big player in the social media strategy. “Marketing takes the role of regularly feeding ideas and opportunities to the subject-matter experts. Long-term planning happens in the way of an internal editorial calendar that schedules out themes and deliverables by our group of experts,” Watson says. 

Results: In 2008, Kinaxis already had six figures of pageviews. One year later, the company more than doubled the pageviews. Kinaxis launched its community in the second half of 2009 and had an estimated 106,000 pageviews — and that’s after launching and using social media. Yet, it still managed to up the numbers by 20,000 in the first half of 2010. Finally, in 2008, it had over 13,000 leads. By 2009, that climbed to over 42,000 leads. Conclusion: Social media clearly works for Kinaxis. 

Meryl K. Evans is senior editor at InternetVIZ and the content maven behind Connected Digest, B2B Social Media Digest and Professional Services Journal. Follow her on Twitter @merylkevans, LinkedIn or on Facebook.

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.”

Long Winding Road

Article after article says social media works even for business-to-business(B2B) companies. But example after example claims to represent B2B, and is actually for business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing. 

Because Dell is a technology company, it walks the talk by always using technology and the Web to support its business. Dell has generated almost $7 million in sales from Twitter alone. Convinced? 

Dell’s social media strategy 

Dell believes that social media can be a very effective, indeed critical component for using the Web to business advantage and for connecting with customers. To drive this point home, think about eating at a restaurant. Granted, this is a B2C example, but stick with this. A person with an allergy requests an entree without an ingredient. Another diner asks to substitute fruit for the potatoes. Yet another diner requests a drink that was not on the menu, and as a result, the waiter runs to another store just to get a drink the customer requested. 

The smart restaurant learns from feedback. It adds the missing drink to its menu. It lists substitutions to provide choices so the customer will be more comfortable requesting a change. The restaurant would’ve never thought to change its strategy without customer input. If it had controlled its strategy, it may not have adapted to customer requests. This adaptation shows the company cares about providing customer service. Social media is the electronic form for the feedback process. 

The company uses social media for more than just marketing. Dell integrates social media with many areas of the business to connect with customers and to nourish relationships.

When Dell entered social media four years ago, its employees realized the impact it could have at the time. “Back then, it was all about connecting and responding to customers and just making social media work,” says Chief Blogger Lionel Menchaca. 

Richard Binhammer of Dell’s social media team reports that Dell’s key business customers say that social media is the most trustworthy online source for information. He quotes an IT Toolbox Study from May 2007, “When making purchasing decisions, IT professionals and executive decision-makers spend nearly 3.5 hours per week consuming or participating in social media — the highest usage profile of any IT audience.” 

Metrics measure success 

Dell learns from its customers and reviews the business objectives and measures based on those objectives. A major factor in the way the company defines success is in terms of helping customers resolve issues, identifying new product drivers, connecting with fans, sharing information about technology and implementing product suggestions from Ideastorm. 

On Twitter for example, Dellservergeek and Delltechcenter measure very different things than the folks involved with Ideastorm or Dell Home offer. However both are fundamentally rooted in Dell’s value of connecting with customers in a direct way. 

Advice to businesses 

“What customers have to say is vitally important to your business,” says Binhammer. If it’s overwhelming, start by listening before deciding where and how to engage, then take the plunge. 

• Listen to customers. Remember to listen to the blogosphere, not just the Twitters and LinkedIns of the world. Be ready to respond even if you don’t have the answers right away.
  Make it easy for customers to contact you. The more accessible a business is for its customers, the stronger the relationship.
• Thank customers for business. You don’t always have to find something to talk about. Just acknowledging them can make a difference.
• Ask customers for suggestions. Dell uses Ideastorm to encourage customers to share ideas and suggestions for its products and services. Don’t assume customers will come to you. Ask.
• Go where customers meet. Go wherever you can find your customers. Even if they haven’t found their way to a channel yet — such as Facebook — it doesn’t hurt to start something in case they do come later. Participate in these conversations.

“The key is to be yourself and avoid spamming,” says Binhammer. “Making genuine, direct connections with your customers in meaningful ways can only help you deliver what customers want at the end of the day.” 

Dell at a glance 

Goal: Dell has different business units that focus on reaching their target market and interacting online with customers and prospects. 

“We are reaching out to listen, learn and engage with customers because ultimately we want our customers to feel like they are walking the halls of Dell every day, and we want to continually improve and do better as a business for them,” says Binhammer. 

Social media tools: Dell relies on many different tools, depending on the business unit. It uses a multi-pronged strategy for joining and participating in conversations. You’ll find Dell using the following tools: 

1. Twitter: Dell has many different Twitter accounts to ensure it targets various customers and business types. The company has an entire page devoted to its Twitter activities at http://www.dell.com/twitter and explains the purpose of each account. @delloutlet has generated $3 million worth of sales from Twitter. 

2. Community forums: IdeaStorm gives customers an interactive forum for sharing their ideas for Dell products and services and seeing the ideas in action. The forum has over 10,000 ideas with almost 400 implemented. It encourages people to join conversations at www.dell.com/conversations. 

3. Blogs: Dell Blog Network covers Direct2Dell, Dell Channel, Dell Shares, Inside Enterprise IT, Education and Tech Center. It even has blogs available in different languages. 

4. Others: Dell has a presence in almost every major social media network ranging from Facebook and YouTube to Flickr and Slideshare. 

Results 

Dell has over 3.5 million people in its social media community including Twitter, Direct2Dell, IdeaStorm and others. It attributes almost $7 million of sales to Twitter alone. Direct2Dell is available in five languages and has 200,000 page views per month. 

“If you want to be successful in your use of social media, ask for suggestions, listen to customers in the blogosphere and wherever they congregate, and participate in conversations,” Chief Blogger Lionel Menchaca recommends. 

Binhammer says, “At any given moment, we can reach out to our customers to ask questions and get instant feedback. Being a part of those conversations has value, and it has been recognized since the days of chat rooms and community forums.” After all, these conversations will happen with or without you.

No matter your feelings about social media (SM), it’s big and proving it’s not a fad. Many B2B companies want to learn how to engage their clients and prospects. However, many businesses — including large organizations — can’t find their way, feeling wary about proceeding or taking shots in the dark.

Today, Texas Instruments (TI) continues its innovative ways by using SM in an organized manner with a bite-sized, zeroed-in strategy.

TI’s marketing approach

“Marketing, from our point of view, has always been about connecting to individuals and influencing them, even before the rise of social media,” says TI’s Director of Internet Marketing Devashish Saxena. “So we were lucky to have a wealth of understanding about design engineers and the decision process they use when they design products.”

The company knew what kind of information engineers were looking for, and had a good understanding of how they get that information and make decisions using the online channel in general.

As TI started going down the SM path, it first went back to that deep understanding to figure out how the engineers’ behavior would evolve or shift. More importantly, to identify how TI could take advantage of these new technologies, and help the engineers do what they are trying to do, in a way that helps TI from a business perspective. “We decided to zero in on the support area,” Saxena says.

Market research found that design engineers primarily use the Web to connect with manufacturers like TI to gather product information and technical specifications. However, after completing testing and prototyping phases, they rely on their colleagues as the number one source of support, often using informal personal connections.

Building a community

“We saw that as an opportunity and created the E2E Community as a place where engineers can connect with other engineers to engage in support dialogue,” says Saxena. Even more critical is that it’s a place where they can connect with TI engineers. TI’s customers value nothing more than access to its engineers.

“We’re not the first to develop an engineering-oriented forum, of course. But ours is the only one with direct access to TI design engineers, which is something that sets us apart,” says Saxena.

In addition to forum postings and conversation threads, the E2E Community also incorporates a lot of video content. Originally, the company printed how-to application notes, ranging from one or two pages to 50. Then it started looking closer at creating videos rather than documents. Now it puts an engineer in a lab or in front of a whiteboard and posts it on E2E.

Metrics measure success

TI defined and tracked traditional online metrics, such as traffic to the site and click-throughs, but the main metrics it used were the same ones it looks at across the online channel, and that is engagement.

“We track not only engagement of people in the community, but more importantly, whether engagement in the community drives the conversion from suspect to prospect to customer,” Saxena says. All marketing efforts had traditionally looked at certain behaviors as drivers: If they come to the site, download a product sheet, look at a video, request a sample, etc., they are progressing down the funnel in terms of engagement.

Similarly, TI tracks engagement levels in the E2E Community. Are they logging on frequently, participating in discussions or consuming content?

Go for a quick win

Saxena advises building something small, capturing the data and using an early success as a springboard. “You have to have a ‘success story’ or two before you can get the buy-in you need to go further,” he says.

When TI first traveled down the E2E Community path, instead of launching across all products, Saxena identified one or two specific areas, specifically the digital signal processing team and the low-power radio frequency team. “In both cases, we had ‘champions’ who felt good enough about the idea to want to jump in and participate in pilot programs,” says Saxena.

Advice to other marketers

“Social media is huge,” says Saxena. “If you don’t clearly define what you want to accomplish and whom you want to reach and what behavior you are trying to drive, it’s easy to get lost. And you can do a lot of shooting in the dark.” He sums it up:

• Define your goals. Know what you want to do, whom you are trying to connect with and what behavior you want to influence.
• Pick one thing. TI zoned in on support as a problem it wanted to solve for its engineer prospects. Don’t get distracted, or think that you need to use Facebook because everyone else is using it.
• Be ready for passionate internal debate. Prepare for that and be smart about finding one or two areas where you can build some small pilots and show success before broadening out. It’s difficult to get unanimous agreement in these spaces, unless you’re a very small organization.
• Develop comparative metrics so you can demonstrate success. Of course that will vary by industry and target market. “In our case, it was engineer engagement, which we had already been tracking for five or six years,” he says.

Even a large company has to enter the social media realm in bite-sizes. Big or small, TI shows that a company would have a better chance of buy-in and success if it begins with a single focus and tracking the before and after. TI shows no sign of aging as it continues unveiling new products.

Texas Instruments at a glance

Goal: TI’s target market in its B2B semiconductor business primarily consists of design engineers at companies like Cisco or Apple, who are developing products and making decisions about technical specifications and functionality that could include TI products. The goal with SM is to get more of them “engaged” with TI.

Engaged, as TI defines it, means progressing down the marketing funnel by visiting a site, logging in, downloading a product sheet, ordering a sample, buying a developer kit, etc. “We have models that show that if we can get engineers to request samples or buy our developer kits, we know what that means in terms of revenue down the road,” says Saxena.

Social media tools

TI relies on three main tools:

1. Online Forum: TI’s E2E Community connects engineers to engineers (both customer and TI engineers) for delivering design support. TI has identified forums, video and blogs as the three legs of the chair that makes up the community. All three develop high-value tips and design help content. This community leads TI’s SM effort.
2. Twitter: The TI Twitter feed, @TXInstruments, shares company activities and industry-related information with its followers, which include customers, electrical engineers, hardware and software developers, students, professors, employees, field sales, distributors, reporters and analysts. @TXInstruments also highlights relevant product developments, tradeshow activities, pertinent media coverage, industry news and trends.
3. Conversation Agents: These agents contribute to online discussions and have a part in the company’s comprehensive approach to SM. TI finds appropriate SM conversations on the Web and deploys select employees to act as Conversation Agents and contribute to those discussions.

Results: After a year, TI compared metrics from its engagement of the traditional online customer to those who took part in its new E2E Community. “We found that twice as many E2E members were engaged with TI, and their engagement was broader, deeper and more recent,” says Saxena. “We found two to six times more engagement across each of the metrics we measure, compared to the average person who interacts with us in the online channel.”

Saxena adds, “We are doing further research, but we think that those who became E2E members were predisposed to do business with us.”