Social media for B2B

Introduction

By Anthony Effik, Chief Strategy Officer, Publicis Modem

Social media and B2B marketing are in the midst of a stormy love affair, but their love child is yet to grow up. They share a common passion for conversations.

Conversations are what social media is all about; whether you are on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, or something sector specific such as IT ToolBox.com. This links into the B2B goal of generating leads through the salesforce, where the opportunity for a one-to-one conversation is the most valued prize outside of the sale.

B2B is more complex, and usually slower than B2C, and can involve more people in a structured process. Getting the right messages into this process and unlocking the power of advocates has historically been the critical function of the salesforce. The salesforce are the custodians of conversations with the market. These conversations with prospects and customers are the key measure of the organisation’s health. Social media can now play a role in this process by creating opportunities for profitable conversations.

How to use social media for generating leads

So how does a B2B organisation tap into these conversations to drive growth?

There are five things you can do:

1. Listen to - and analyse - the conversations out there
2. Re-think what the conversation could be – create a framework
3. Create a contagious platform that reframes the conversation
4. Provide tools for activating advocacy and spread contagious ideas that change the conversation
5. Collect data for the salesforce and integrate with their processes

Listen and analyse the conversations out there

There are hi-tech and low-tech ways to do this. You should first talk with the salesforce to find out what they are being told and asked. What are the main customer and prospect problems and issues? What do they say about the brand and the products? A quick look at general search results for keywords linked to the brand will give you an idea of the conversations and content out there. Compare this to competitor brands. Also see what is being said on the blogs by checking out Technorati and Google Blog Search. If you have access to a more advanced tool such as Onalytica, Radian6, or BuzzMetrics you might be able to map and score things like sentiment and influence.

Case Study:

Publicis Modem has been involved in a series of social media ventures for Hewlett Packard across several of their business units. By listening to what the target audiences were saying about HP they found that the big decisions had been made way before they engaged with the client online. It was a self-fulfilling prophesy; their content was about buying HP, so if you didn’t want to buy HP you simply didn’t visit. Users were only visiting HP when they had already defined their problem in great detail, and were close to a purchase with HP. On one level this sounds like good news, but on another level there was a need to consider the number of people who weren’t visiting HP. For most of the market there was a big difference between a business problem and a technical solution.

Create a framework

Most digital communications are about driving sales, and focus on providing information about the product rather than about helping solve a real problem. The product is rarely the whole answer to any business problem, but is instead just part of the solution. Before a product is selected there is much more thinking to be done. The goal is to be a part of upstream thinking when the target audience is framing the problem – way before consumers have even necessarily thought about potential vendors.

Case Study:

Publicis Modem created a framework that was built around three stages:

Framing the problem
Selecting the vendor
Maintaining the solution

After auditing the client’s digital assets and content it was found that most of them were - unsurprisingly - focused on selecting a vendor – the purchase stage. The recommendation was to use social media across the whole process, but in particular to use it to populate the first stage - framing the problem - and the last stage – maintaining the solution – with content and advocates.

Create a contagious platform

To reframe the conversation for HP, Publicis Modem built different platforms for different parts of their business. For senior IT decisionmakers involved in creating and managing complex server and storage networks they created the HP Blades Servers Community. This is described as a place for you if ‘you have questions about blades. The community has answers. Inside Blade Connect, the customer can find the information they need and connect to others with a click. Meet other blade users, share thoughts, and talk to the experts that built the blades . . .or just catch up on the latest buzz.’

Publicis Modem also created the HP Information Management Hub, a ‘community with a comprehensive library, independent comment, expert insight, best practice, interactive events, blogs, and exclusive videos and podcasts.’ IT professionals visited these sites for very different reasons. The hub allowed for information across the whole framework to be reached. Users were able to find information about HP and also generate their own content. This helps framing the problem stage.

The Information Management Hub focused on making the Hub contagious by creating HP-sourced content that is rich, and musthave for the audience (such as videos, webcasts, whitepapers and podcasts), but also encouraged user generated content.

Activate advocacy and spread contagious ideas

Wherever you are in the purchase cycle, B2B marketers relish the opportunity to create one-to-one sales conversations as conversations drive advocacy and advocacy drives growth. Fred Riechheld’s research into Net Promoter Scores shows that the likelihood to recommend a brand or product is the strongest indication of a business’s growth prospects. Riechheld’s work at Bain & Co showed that the most recommended company in its category grows 2.5 times the rate of the category average. Getting recommendations is key to growth.

In other research by Weber Shandwick we find that “50 per cent of people who say they would recommend haven’t yet recommended”. Thus a key part of social media in general and B2B social media in particular is about activating advocacy. In Information Technology, you’ll find that advocacy has always been key offline, and key case studies. But these superstar advocates are only part of the story, the cherries at the top of the proverbial cake that hide the many others. There’s wisdom in those crowds, so our goal should be to activate the 50 per cent of people that say they’d recommend that haven’t, and get them to share their experiences with others. With the HP example, Publicis Modem equipped the advocates with tools to share content that was provided by HP and user-generated sources. They allowed for send-to-a-friend functionality, RSS feeds, social bookmarking, and opportunities to rate and review content.

With these mechanisms in place for propagating the message, the agency could then look at paid for media such as banner advertising in standard formats to advertise the site to drive traffic. However with rich media formats the client can also add social features to advertising, and take site content and detach it from the site and distribute it to third party social media platforms where audiences are congregating, such as LinkedIn, IT Toolbox, CIO.com and many others. This means striking clever and bespoke media deals with vendors who can host unorthodox advertising formats that take feeds from sites, and can respond back.

Collect data for the salesforce

All of these efforts take us full circle to my original assertion that good social media B2B activity is focused around the salesforce. Our framework of three stages - framing the problem, selecting the vendor and maintaining the solution - meant that our target audiences were engaging with us right throughout the purchase experience. This took pressure off the salesforce as the audience self-served itself with content and answered most of its simpler questions. Any enquires to the salesforce were therefore very hot enquiries or tough questions that required vendor specific answers.

Access to most of the content areas usually required registration which gave us data that was fed into the lead management process, and integrated with other data sources to give a 360 degree picture of the prospect or customer. In some cases we get data into the process from people just before they are ready to buy, but not too early – a kind of Goldilocks Prospect Opportunity; not too hot, but not too cold. In addition to this one-to-one data we also obtain group data on which content areas are of most interest to the audiences - which helps HP listen. And if you remember, listening is the first key step in doing effective B2B social media. And so we start again around the virtuous cycle.

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