1. “One Size Does NOT Fit All”-  To noone’s surprise, B2B utilization of social media and networking applications in our customer and prospect outreach and engagement was a HUGE topic of conversation and debate.  This group is savvy enough to know that a business cannot just throw up a Facebook Fan page and call their social media strategy good, so the exchanges around the SMN question were lively and varied.   Every organization presenting or present, from Oracle to Microsoft is grappling with how exactly to write and implement the digital dialogue playbook.   As we at Cubed have been preaching, a cookie cutter approach is not the way to go.   You have to consider your audience, demographic, mission, sales and marketing objectives, etc. etc. and develop and integrated approach to social media; NOT pick the applications and retrofit them to your environment.

2. Customer Engagement Happens Everywhere- As I hinted in my opening, the idea that customer relationships are “owned” by any one discipline in your organization must be eradicated.   Julie Tung, VP Global Customer Programs at Oracle, reminded us that sales, customer support, account managers, etc. do NOT own the customer; our companies do!  If we have not done so already, we must begin to have a hub and spoke approach to customer engagement so that we are mining all contact with current and prospective clients and voices and remaining attentive to all information about our solutions and services and brand.    If we continue to operate out of silos, we are missing out on some key opportunities to deepen and broaden our relationships.

3. Metrics, Metrics, Metrics- As I predicted, how we measure the impact of digital dialogue on revenue continues to be a moving target.    Every presentation and conversation included a component around this challenge whether it was a discussion about corporate YouTube videos or how to calculate the impact of the use of collateral in reference programs.   We seem to be getting better at some of the mechanics…..Rhett Livengood of Intel reminds us to “Tag, Tag, Tag”, but we are still struggling with how we measure the overall effectivness of digital engagement.   What should be comforting to us all, is that the major players, Intel, RedHat, Oracle, etc. are effectively using free tools and applications to demonstrate the impact of their customer reference and social media strategies.   Sean White of RedHat shared their very innovative approach to presenting case studies in the form of our self-service blog and spoke to his use of Google Analytics and some other basic tools.   Laura Brooks of SatMetrix shared some new research into the notion of Networked Promoters, i.e., the quality not the quantity of our key relationships.

4. Digital Conversations must Emulate our Best F2F Practices- Nothing substitutes for the depth and breadth of information sharing afforded by a F2F conference, but we must learn to harness the energies and idea exchange of formal presentation like mechanisms AND hallway/lobby “drivebys” in our digital outreach.  As organizations, we must learn to be present and listening in all venues where our prospective and current clients may be.  Many of us continue to assume that the primary conversations are taking place within the conference rooms rather than at the virtual coffee break areas.  Many of the attendees have established thriving communities but we are all still seeking ways to join other conversations outside of our direct influence.   To really stretch the metaphor, it is no longer sufficient to sit at a roundtable behind our clearly marked name tents.  We must “walk” the hallways, “join” the outside events, and walk up to people; introduce ourselves; and LISTEN to what they have to say.

Thank you Bill Lee for gathering us together again!

Warmest regards,

Lisa

http://www.customerreferenceforum.com/event2010/program_presenters.php

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In a much shorter span of time, due largely to the rapidity with which we can today adopt and reject different technologies and communications metaphors, I believe that 2010 will bring us some readjustment to the adoption and application of many of the social media and networking solutions available.   Businesses, their customers and various audiences, and the technology vendors that support our ability to relate have behaved like the proverbial children in a candy store as they deploy ways of internetworking in their customer relationship, sales and marketing channels.   We have been preaching that adopting and deploying social media and networking applications should be informed by an integrated marketing/sales/customer relations strategy; we should also have been coaching ourselves and our consumer-friends to do the same.   Today, faced with multiple devices and applications on each, all similarly poised to serve my communications needs and curiosity, I see 2010 as the year that some consolidation, re-prioritization, and merger/acquisition will take place due to the constraints of bandwidth, the natural fall-out of the success and failure of businesses who have quickly cobbled together competitive applications, and the maturity of our adoption of the same both in our professional and personal capacities.   With no further ado, but some nervous wincing, I offer the following general and some specific predictions for 2010:

General Trends:

1. Organizations who have been dabbling their toes in social media channels for customer outreach will either be the best practice model or retract their offerings completely.  The speed with which our effectiveness in communicating using these channels is judged by our audience dictates that their is very little-time to privately fine-tune our approach.   Missteps are instantly reported and best practices lauded.   We have been cautioning our clients to strategize first; “Tweet” last and those that have adopted this approach are much more successful, even as they adjust it, than those who jumped on the Twitter, Facebook Page, blog, etc. bandwagon only to find they had little to say or had not developed the infrastructure to support their efforts.   I have been personally “testing” and rating the efforts of some companies in the telecommunications, high-tech, and consumer products verticals and will continue to do so.   Even in the past year, the gap between success and failure has been very black and white.   Those that dabbled without a transparent, honest and open approach to soliciting participation and feedback have dramatically reduced their presence or are gone; those that set strategy and have flexibly incorporated the feedback of their participants are still going strong.   Most importantly as is mentioned in this article, “real time is not fast enough”: 4 Social Media Trends for Business in 2010 (pamorama.net)

2.  A leader in social media measurements and metrics WILL emerge (this may be definitely in the wishful thinking category).   We have played with a number of applications in an attempt to measure our own effectiveness in our social media outreach and our clients and colleagues have certainly expressed this as their biggest challenge and need for 2010.   A plethora of applications and practices have evolved over the past year, but no one seems to have demonstrated the ability to provide service to both the SMB and large business marketplace.   VisibleTechnologies, Radian6, and ViralHeat all offer a  suite of solutions that seem to provide the breadth of measurement for which many have clamored, but we think that a vendor that has the benchstrength of SEO and traditional collateral metrics blended with the ability to monitor the pulse of sentiments expressed in our emerging channels will be a front-runner.   Another key success factor will be their ability to offer a tiered-pricing structure that is accessible to the smaller business.

3. Bandwidth issues will force resolution.   It is clear that the FCC is facing some enormous challenges in the spectrum arena, pushed by our adoption of mobile applications and our increasingly untethered approach to communication and conversation.   The “but of course” piece of this prediction is that the FCC will make a decision about alternative and additional sources of spectrum (for those of you inclined to take a look at the history, see this study: http://www.reg-markets.org/admin/authorpdfs/redirect-safely.php?fname=../pdffiles/working_01_021075290780.pdf The more intuitive piece is that our limited bandwidth and the growing frustration of consumers and business mobile application users must drive our own strategic thinking and prioritation regarding use of solutions that blend the best of our CRM, SFA, and social networking tools on our mobile devices.   Those applications that offer the best-of-breed that shares a piece of all of these will certainly emerge as icons on my Blackberry.

4. Congress will consider additional privacy legislation.   Knowledge service provision is the polite term for the complex data-mining that both corporations and individuals practice as conduct predictive analyses of our consumers’ and networks behaviors and attributes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_market).  Consumers concern for the privacy of their on-line personas (which seems paradoxical) will drive politicians at the local, state, and federal levels to contemplate additional protective measures,   http://www.cedmagazine.com/News-Congress-online-privacy-legislation-061909.aspx.   Most importantly, this concern of our constituents and attention of politicians should drive us as businesses to be ever more vigilant in our transparency and honest expression of our internetworking intentions, lest we suffer backlash from our audience and failure of our attempts long before legislation steps in.

To return to my opening anecdotal story, the plethora of choices that face us as businesses and consumers and the speed with which our internetworking communications are judged and evaluated will drive a much faster shift in applications provision, vendor consolidation and acquisition, and availability of broad content creation, publishing and measurements suites than we experienced post-divestiture.    If a single-bill and customer contact 800 number drove a return to a single telecommunications provider over a ten year period, shrink that consumer reaction and vendor response time metphor by 1/10th and you will understand the core of our predictions for 2010.   Perhaps a more concrete synthesis of this post is provided by my “Going Out On A Limb” prediction for 2010:

Twitter will be acquired by ?. The names of the players may change, but my thinking is that in Twitter we have found a truly facile, effective and immediate channel for communicating with a very diverse and huge potential audience.  The service and its users are self-regulating and successful users are quickly noted and its open approach to associated applications has resulted in a myriad of options for uploading content, measuring folowers, RT’s, etc.   We think that an acquistion by a company who has the content creation, editing, and publishing benchstrength, combined with an understanding of social media and networking measurement challenges will purchase Twitter and embed the channel with some native content and measurement utilities.   The odds-makers are predicting that this will be Microsoft, but we are thinking that the acquirer may be someone that is not in the search engine/networking/social media space but a more traditional collateral application company.   The debate at Cubed Consulting continues as to who this might be but we’d love for your to weigh in with your names!

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For most of us, this is one of our top (if not the top) goal of our Social Media efforts – create a community where members feel comfortable interacting with each other and with your organization.  Why?  Relationships deepen.  Synergies are created.  Information is exchanged.  Customers are engaged.  In short, magic happens.  How do we do this?  This can be a real challenge.

Two things that can make it a lot easier:  Technology and Metrics.  There are lots of options when selecting a community platform vendor.  Conveniently, I have been asked to judge the 2010 Social Networking category for the SIAA Codie Awards and I will be evaluating a few of them.  Without going into too much detail, the first organization that I met with, INgage Networks, has a very compelling offering in this space.  They won this category for the last two years and they actually offer a whole lot more than just a community platform and I suggest you check them out.  (In the spirit of objectivity, as I evaluate others, I will share more information about them as well.)

When it comes to selecting and sharing metrics, you should approach it in the same way that you build your Integrated Marketing Strategy.  You should go in prepared with a firm grasp of your goals.  An old but really good blog post on developing metrics is Tara Hunt’s Metrics for Healthy Communities.  Basically, set goals and objectives and then create metrics that stringently test those objectives.  Keep the audience in mind when selecting specific metrics.  And be sure to consider both qualitative and quantitative metrics.  She lists a lot of great suggestions for specific metrics.  Read her post for the details.

Picking the right platform and creating the right metrics not only sets up for success but implements a method to test and correct your approach, as needed.  I hope this is a thought starter.  I would like to hear your ideas about community building too.  To all of us building or growing online communities, good luck!

(Check out the link below for apply this thinking internally within organizations.  This is exciting and will be another blog post)

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I was approached by a colleague the other day who expressed his frustration that he seemed to be the only one in his organization that was actively interested and involved in social media and networking, although his company had established guidelines for participation and goals for their use of various channels.   He is charged with developing strategies for his division of marketing and I challenged his assumption that he was the lone participant.   He wanted to know how he could get more people engaged in the various activites that we suggest are stages and components of the social media portion of an integrated marketing strategy.  Given the demographics of the employees of this high-tech consulting firm, after five minutes of discussion, I was able to point out a number of places and opportunities for him to find new, engaged, and influential participants for his challenge.  During our chat, it struck me that as “out-of-the-box” as we may think we are being when we begin to embrace social media for our B2B marketing and sales processes, we may still be turning to our traditional content providers, customer consultants and engagement specialist, and other points of contact for content, feedback, input, and exchange.   We are forgetting that the words “media” and “networking” are prefaced by the word “social” in this new arena and that many of us have been involved in digital networking opportunities with colleagues, customers, and varied others long before YouTube and Facebook.   With that in mind, here are some suggestions about mining your existing, but perhaps hidden social content engineers:

1. Survey ALL employees about their use of Facebook, Linkedin, YouTube, Yammer, Ning, chat rooms, blogs, etc.   This is NOT a Big Brother exercise and you should probably make that clear if you are intended to embrace a more open approach to sharing information.

2. Make suggestions about interesting and relevant Linkedin groups, blogs, communities, etc. that you think may include communities with whom you want to have dialogue and encourage employee participation.

3. Ask for feedback from employees about the “buzz” to which they have tuned their digital ears.   Provide ideas for responses or direct them to your internal communities for information, data sheets, suggestions for help.

4. Include your internal communities and constituents as part of your metrics and measurements for your social media and networking strategy and success. If an employee as an individual makes an innovative suggestion about the use of your own solutions to a community to which she belongs, using her corporate email alias or association or not, it can be as impactful and responses can be as useful as if it were from an outsider.

5. Consider non-traditional internal constituencies.   I had the opportunity to interview the VP of Marketing for an electrical components distributor who mentioned that one of his warehouse employees told him about a contractor network that has had a lot of comments about his company recently.   I suggested that he include his warehouse staff as part of his marketing strategy as the community members are his companies clients and prospects and from the discussion threads they were seeing, having them participate in the dialogue could be an extremely fruitful and rewarding technique without significant added expense or too heavy-handed of a sales approach.

6. Include Twitter addresses, Linkedin url’s and other digital community contact information for ALL employees in email signatures, on business cards and other collateral.

7. As you establish your social media and networking guidelines for employees, ask for appropriate representation about the company but don’t be too restrictive.  Keep the SOCIAL in the approach and allow the digital conversation that any employee might be having broaden and deepen the relationships they are establishing with the entire company.

A quote that is attributed to Jay Baer really caught my attention as being relevant for this topic:  “Remember that in social media, everyone’s a teacher and everyone’s a student.”

We never know where the next great idea might be coming from and the digital conversations of our employees OUTSIDE of sales and marketing may be the richest and most honest source of how our solutions and products are received and perceived.

Warm regards,

Lisa

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1.  Send your Top 100 Clients a Flip Mino and ask them to record and upload a clip about your services and solutions.

2. Create a YouTube Channel and record holiday greetings from key customer service contact people.  Film people you may not traditionally consider but have important customer contact roles.

3. Offer to exchange audio testimonials with vendors who are also clients.

4. Write a post for your corporate blog that singles out top clients and charitable activities in which they have participated or interesting accomplishments of theirs this past year.  Don’t tie yourself to information that is solely related to their relationship with you:  just acknowledge them.

5. Add rotating refreshed holiday greetings to your email signatures that single out indiviudals, companies, etc. with which/whom you do business.   Create a template that your sales, marketing, customer organization can change out every day throughout the holidays (and then create one for the rest of the year)!

6. Announce your plans to launch a customer community blog with “insider” access to development roadmaps, key technical personnel, your CEO, etc.  Offer a “room” or discussion thread that is not monitored by you.

7. Run a contest asking for videos of the funniest, non-traditional (but appropriate) use of your services and solutions and offer the winner a free pass to your next user conference.

8. Run a contest (with similar rules) offering the winner fifteen minutes of telephone access to your CEO.

9. Offer to include your clients’ corporate charity of choice and information about donation and participation in all of your January 2010 promotional collateral.

10.  Assign a top client to an employee with whom they traditionally do not interact.  Ask your employee to make a phone call or send an email thanking them for their business this year.   This might demonstrate that your entire organization, not just their account and sales representatives, are committed to the relationship.

11. Add thank-you messages to all of your social media channels and make them personal.   We expect that you may have sent our some holiday greetings, but use the global reach of SMN and the ability to personalize to extend this effort.

12.  Take a breath.  Give yourself and your clients a break by promising that you won’t ask them to take any more reference calls or be interviewed for a case study, press release, or anything else until next year! 

 Our sincerest wishes for a safe, relaxing, and joyous holiday season to all of you!

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Vice

Virtue

Lust

Chastity

Gluttony

Temperance

Greed

Charity

Sloth

Diligence

Wrath

Patience

Envy

Kindness

Pride

Humility

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_deadly_sins

This post began as a list of the seven deadly SINS of social media, but as I scanned my TweetDeck, various sites, and the general chatter that I monitor about and in social media sites, I decided that our role as consultants should be as focused on the positive and results-oriented possibilities of our internetworking more than critique.   We have discussed and helped clients implement tactics oriented around our key success factors, and I hope this informs and enlightens that approach as much as it highlights techniques for compelling and sustainable social media and network interactions.   With no further ado and much literary license re Pope Gregory’s original virtues as alternatives to the vices:

Chastity: Recruit followers and Fans and invite membership to communities you establish with  the objective of creating a meaningful and valuable dialogue between you and your constituencies.   The quality of the engagement is far more important than the quantity of members and followers.

Temperance: Maintain a regular schedule of blog posts, status updates, and Tweets, and avoid posting just for the sake of posting.   Key messages on a consistent basis become expected and are less likely to be overlooked.

Charity: Concern and active help offered to others.   Provide valuable insight to problems, offer customers communities where they can exchange best practices, ask questions and be open to constructive input.

Diligence: Develop infrastructure and guidelines around your social media strategy so that it maps to your marketing, sales and company guidelines.   Make your social media effort a formal activity rather than an item on the “get-to” list.

Patience: We share with our clients many ways that you can attract and retain followers and Fans, but we also advise avoiding most automated tools that guarantee X number of followers overnight.   If you do the footwork of identifying the audience you want to attract and the communities to which they belong and tag words that you include in your posts that will trigger alerts for them, you will begin to build a following.

Kindness: Stress the positive aspects of your solutions and offerings rather than delineating the failings of your competitors.   The opportunity to share where you are differentiated will come in different format than 140 characters.

Humility: A strange virtue for marketing consultants to advocate, perhaps, but the social media world is very self-regulating and expects honest and real information.   We earn our followers and fans, and to earn them we must offer to engage in networking dialogue rather than demand it.  As you develop networks of satisfied customers, weaving their Tweets and comments into your own posts become a very effective means for getting objective testimonials about your solutions.

The most effective social media strategies are those that are clearly mindful and planned to acheive the overall goals of an organization by using new and different channels.   If the strategy is clearly laid out, and these virtues are top of mind, there is no reason why the execution cannot happen at various and compelling levels of the organizaiton that may not be traditionally externally facing.

Best regards until next time, Lisa.

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We can debate John Mackey’s personal opinion about health care reform until carpal tunnel sets in, but I would rather remind all of us of some basic tenets of social conversation and prudence and remember our key success factors:

1) Be genuine.    Individual voice and opinion are the hallmarks of our social internetworking and in many corporations define the uniqueness, variety, and personalization that is the core of their products and services.   Officers and key executives must be mindful, however, that their personal politics and opinions are perceived as representative of their corporate positions, so should be mindful of this intermingling.

2) Interact.  Has your organization established policies about executive social media and networking participation and if not, perhaps you should before taking on the role yourself.   We advise all of our clients to develop a  social media approach that is aligned with overall corporate, marketing, sales, and customer relations strategies as a first step.  The cultural etiquette and expectations of social media are that we are engaging in conversation, dialogue, and responses with our audiences, not merely unilaterally publishing facts.   Although certain channels may be appropriate for CEO or officer messaging, most are more dynamic and require more attention.

3) Provide value.    As truly well-thought and argued your personal opinion may be, the relevance of your topic and the content that you offer to your customers, prospects, and employees should always be the first consideration.   I’ve recently been reading a number of posts on www.theconsumercollective.com that provide some very compelling statistics regarding consumers willingess to defect from brands and services not due to a reverse in perceived value, but because they feel our published opinions, thoughts, diatribes, digital “nuggets of wisdom” are quite frankly, boring.

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Objective:  Create more corporate/brand awareness in new communities.

Tactics:

1) Traditional marketing outreach and collateral to new communities:

2) Leveraging existing or new social media outlets to establish relationships and create conversation.

a) Join New Groups in Facebook, Linkedin, etc. applications that map to new demographic profile.

b) Use Twitter Lists, hash tags, etc. to gauge and generate interest in solutions, company etc.

c) Produce audio/video/other collateral relevant to message and launch.

d) Etc.

My point is not to delineate the steps of our engagement process, but to demonstrate that the selection of tools, applications, and approach FOLLOW not DEFINE our social media decision-making.   If the objective were to gauge interest in a new solution or product, we may not advise establishing a Facebook or Linkedin presence until the research around communities of interest had determined that those were the appropriate venues.

I’m looking forward to “meeting” many of you and exchanging thoughts!

Regards,

Lisa

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In an insightful article by social entrepreneur Zenna Atkins in the Guardian online at http://bit.ly/2Eryg5, the author advises against the “big bang” approach to change, in favor of the incremental approach. Atkins argues that it is better to have multiple listening points, both internally and externally that enable an organization to be constantly aware of what is going on. This provides the necessary intelligence that allows the organization to evolve gradually to keep pace with ever changing customer needs. Listening posts might include customer and employee surveys, social media (blogs, customer forums, Twitter etc.), focus groups and direct conversations.

The bottom line – establish listening posts internally and externally. Introduce change in continuous small increments to allow your organization to become accustomed to each new state. Use the same listening posts to evaluate the success or failure of the change. Your customers and employees will be glad that you listened and acted.

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