This is the first in a short series of blogs based on research conducted by IDG Connect - and made available exclusively through Base One - into a fascinating area: the discrepancy between how marketers and prospective buyers view email communications. The findings, published this January, examine different perceptions of the drivers for engagement, intensity and open rates. Part one addresses the difficulties of B2B communication...

Recently I heard that BBC journalists have been told to use Social Media or "go and do something else" and hearing the criticism Peter Horrocks has received as a result, I began to ask how this approach might work if adopted at a B2B sales level.

We know that social media can be a vital tool in search marketing with forums, message boards and social networks providing a great platform for brand evangelists, link builders and advertisers to encourage customers to buy their service or product.

The BBC seems to be approaching online social interaction from two sides. One being to collate information about breaking news, the other is in the actual syndication process, leveraging journalists' personal followings as well as BBC followers to maximise the audience.

Taking this approach into a B2B environment could be a proposition fraught with resistance from employees not familiar with the various social mediums, along with those that will not buy-in to the benefits. I believe Peter Horrocks - BBC World Service director was of the same opinion, hence the "shape-up or ship-out"-esque statement.

As a member of the search marketing team at Base One Group, I am a part of what I consider a utopian marketing environment where everybody is pro-active in promoting the brand.

Imagine if you will, the experts within your company spending time building up a presence on the net, monitoring industry news and trends, then providing commentary and opinion utilising the various social networks on offer. Imagine producing a company whitepaper or blog post that can be shared, tweeted and syndicated to a captive audience through not only your company channels but also your staff's channels. Imagine each customer facing department regularly producing posts for a company blog, engaging in forums and message boards all carrying links back to your company website.

The end result, your company becomes known in the industry, you're the company that other companies and competitors want to be, but above all else, when your audience require your product or service who are they going to call? Your competitors? Why would they bother, your company and your staff are now people they know and trust.

The stumbling block is where employee resistance is met. Is it possible or ethical to push them out of their comfort zones and into the spotlight in order to further company achievement?

Have you encouraged your staff to "Chip in" with your marketing efforts? If so what was their response like? 

Opinion seems to be divided on blogging. Some marketers see it as a fading influence, yesterday's technology that is being fast eclipsed in importance by newer social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter etc. After all, blogging has been around for years - there must be something better by now?

But others recognise that a blog is still a great marketing tool if used correctly. It gives a brand a voice that connects personally with customers. It is versatile and cheap to implement. It has great SEO impact and can be used to create brand preference as well as driving traffic by giving people another reason to come to your site.

But, as always, if you don't have the right content you are doomed. Blogging may be the right strategy, but you do you have the content? Do you have the people to produce it? Do you have time to produce it?

These were question facing CWJobs, the leading IT recruitment specialist, when we started talking to them about heir social media strategy 18 months ago. Together we found a solution that has more than met their objectives - read all about it here:

B2B_social_media_case_study_CWJobs.pdf.

It seems like we've been writing about it for ages, but real documented accounts of successful social media marketing campaigns are still fairly thin on the ground.

Is this because it is not working? Not at all. There is plenty of research that confirms that social media marketing is a viable, powerful and increasingly important part of the marketer's toolkit. It's also well known that companies are planning to invest far more in social media techniques in 2010 than in previous years. But it is taking a while for the case studies to filter through.

So we thought we would document some of our experiences to date, and have produced three case studies based on our work with three different clients, and will publish them here in a series of blogs over the next week or so. The case studies are quite different in scope and cover the following topics:

#1: Building a social media presence
#2: Creating and populating a community
#3: Blogging for people who don't blog

We don't want to suggest we have prepared a 10,000-word thesis on each one, or that they feature the world's biggest brands. But what we have written is an honest, practical account of what we - and some very forward-thinking marketers of course - tried to do and how we got on.

We hope our experiences may be of interest to others out there who are considering the same thing, so we thought we'd share it. That is the principle of social media after all, isn't it?

Download the pdf file by clicking here: B2B Social Media case study: Building a Presence.

This piece complements a post I wrote about a month ago, where I explained the reasons why forums are a frequently neglected but highly effective part of the social media toolkit for marketers.

Online communities as we have already established are a great way of building conversation and attaining engagement, however, it's important to adopt key tactics especially when joining a forum as a B2B Marketer. I was fortunate enough to be taught from a person who has been on the social media scene since it's pretty much started and is now heading up the social media division at Brands2Life.

Let's start shall we? Here are a few factors I take into consideration when approaching a forum:

• It is important to have a set of brand guidelines that will tell us who the target audience are. That way you'll be able to sign up to forums that are relevant to the brand's category. This should also apply to other social media platforms such as Twitter.

• I have found the most important factor to consider in all of this is the TONE. The tone that is adopted within the forum will not only be representing your brand but it  will also allow other community members to relate to what is being talked about within a thread. The tone is easily identifiable via monitoring conversations within the forum before signing up; it is important to watch & learn.
  *Note that if you are representing a brand it is important to sign up as the brand's name so that other community members can trust who they are speaking to.

• Once comfortable with the tone that will be used, the first post made should always be an introductory post. It is important to create a presence and become recognised. Ensure to state that you have 'joined the forum as a means of.... and are representing the brand.'   
  

• Become conversational by talking to other community members who have topics that are relevant to your brand. Continue to build the community's trust for 2-4 weeks before you decide to start up your own thread and get conversing about the brand. 

• Forums are great means of driving traffic and one can do this by adding a signature that will link to the brand's website (again, only once you have become established) so that one doesn't  necessarily need to keep talking about the brand as that could be deemed as spam.   
  

• Lastly, have fun. Going into a forum is a little bit like going to a party. You join a crowd of people by firstly engaging with on-going conversation. What you will not do is join a crowd of people and completely change the topic because that would be plain rude.

I hope that this blog post has helped answer why forums are just as effective and how they can be better used to our advantage. I would strongly recommend forums as a suitable social media platform and another way of maximising a brand's exposure/awareness.  

I was at a conference recently on Social Media Monitoring. During a panel session, someone asked a question about measuring the ROI for Social Media activities. The panel did their best to respond, but admitted that it was still difficult to establish a direct link between Social Media marketing and revenue generated. One by one (and there were five of them), they came out with different versions of the same story: 'we know that our activities generated revenue, but it wasn't really possible to track it. It was hugely successful, though.'

By the fifth response, I was getting really frustrated. Not because of this failure to measure revenue, but because they were immediately associating the ROI for Social Media marketing WITH Revenue.
 
Different marketing activities generate different types of result. Some results are easier to equate to revenue than others. Can we measure the exact revenue generated by an above the line, branding campaign for instance? Social Media Marketing is all about generating conversations. These conversations can be about different subjects, and can take place on different platforms, even cross between platforms. They can also influence people to find out more by using other tools such as search, or plant a brand name in their mind meaning that at some future point they click on a banner. There's no way therefore that we can (or should try to) measure the revenue generated by a Social Media campaign.
 
Instead of thinking of 'R' for Revenue (yes, I know it's 'R' for Return, but I want to make the point), we should be thinking of 'R' for Results, and with Social Media these come in many forms:

-    The number of conversations started
-    The number of people involved in those conversations
-    The mood of the conversations and reactions to them
-    The number of Retweets
-    The number of new followers recruited
-    The number of new links generated

and..... the number of clicks generated, where and if we can measure them.

All of the above represent Results, and all of the above are a measure of success - just a different measure from those that we have become used to with 'traditional' on-line marketing. With Social Media, we are very much concerned with influencing potential buyers higher up the funnel, a no less important activity, but one step removed from revenue generation. Let's therefore judge performance in a realistic way, so that success can be clearly proved and celebrated, rather than attempting to present it using irrelevant and inconsistent metrics.

It's tough being a small business, especially in B2B. There is never enough time in the day to manage the day-to-day business, let alone think about promotion, so making a foray into social media marketing is the last thing on many small business owners' minds.
 
But when I read Diana Huff's discussion on LinkedIn that small businesses may not be able to compete with large companies because of the difficulty of creating content, I thought the opposite was true: social media is in fact a great leveller.
 
The reason is, as has been discussed on these pages before, that the impact of content does not depend on the money behind it. True, if you have a big budget and people to organise it, you can produce highly polished videos, and beautifully designed ebooks, compared to the hastily-compiled Wordpress blogs that the time-pressed entrepreneur may have to make do with.
 
But if the content itself is valuable - if it is useful, original, thought-provoking, expert - it will work as well as the big-budget productions of the blue chips.
 
The beauty of content marketing is that it does not carry a crippling media buying cost. Small businesses cannot compete in advertising terms with the big boys, because they cannot afford it. So, in the past, when brand presence depended on advertising in the business titles, the small players found it hard to compete. But in the brave new world of content marketing, media is not paid for, it is earned - by usefulness, by creativity, by expertise.

If the small business has an interesting, valuable, expert, useful angle, it will be spread by others and posted in lots of other places.

If they have the creativity, they don't need the spend.

 

Image courtesy of the great iPhone app, iHandylevel - available for download at all good AppStores.

Business Week interview with Dan Hill, author of Emotionomics

'Loyalty is an emotion. Trust is an emotion. If you really want to make headway, you can't just do the rational part. That's really like fighting with one arm behind your back. You need the rational and the emotional, but of the two you really need the emotional more.'

So says Dan Hill, author of Emotionomics, to emphasise the value of using emotion strategically in the marketplace. And how do you achieve emotional impact in marketing and advertising? Not from lists of features and benefits - that's your left brain talking. To hit them where the wallets are, you've got to get creative. 'Less explaining, more entertaining', we might say.

Or as Dan Hill sums up:  'We make our decisions emotionally, we justify them rationally.' Features and benefits can appeal to a buyer's rational side, producing satisfaction of a kind, but that's after-the-fact impact.

In 2010, I'm hoping we can help more clients recognise the influence an emotional response (and therefore creative execution) has on buyer behaviour. Emotionomics gives us some food for thought to offer, such as the fact that an emotional response typically triggers five times more brain activity than a rational one. By the way, we also offer monitoring, analytics, and other tools like eye tracking to satisfy your rational side.

What would you like to believe for your business in 2010 and beyond? Let us know at www.iwouldliketobelieve.co.uk.

What will 2009 be remembered for in the world of B2B marketing?

From our point of view, it was the year that B2B went beyond business as usual. What do we mean? Maybe this is best illustrated by a brief track back through the Base One Beyond blog and flagging up the most read posts. After all, we can think what we like but the acid test is what attracts the most readers. If the people don't get it, it's not working.

One of 2009's most used words was 'social media' and it dawned on many B2B marketers in 2009 that this was something to take notice of. This then spawned the term 'Buyersphere', which we have been quoting ever since we first blogged about it in March.

The following month saw a great example of how social media makes people tell the truth. Or rather how it exposes people when they don't, with the story of Damian McBride and his smear emails.

But the realisation of how B2B marketers needed to change what they were doing - and change how they were thinking - came to the fore during the summer. Our take on these developments was summarised by an interesting chance encounter with a traditional magazine editor (one of a dying breed in 2009), and by the fascinating debate over who exactly should be talking for your brand out there in the Brave New World of social media.

Whose job is it anyway? Your PR dept? Your marketing guys? Your CEO? How about - just possibly - it might be everyone's job. One of the realisations of 200 was that, as marketers, our job is perhaps not so much to do it as to enable it.

But there was also a wonderful feeling of goodwill around in 2009 - which is odd considering the economic climate. The awareness that peer-to-peer information sharing was increasing - the fact that buyers were talking to buyers - convinced many a gnarly old marketer that we could no longer talk at our customers. It was all about sharing and, well, being nice. Etiquette was big news in 2009 as it became clear that brands needed to give something of value if they were to receive the valuable attention of their target audience. A popular metaphor was that we were all invited to the world's biggest cocktail party - and we had to behave accordingly.  

But where was the proof that all of this was working? As proponents of the 'new way of working' we were keen to flag up a good success story when we saw it, and May showed us why it was more important than ever to listen to customers!

The following months, the discussions continued, with pieces on the problems with data capture, the true meaning of viral marketing and how to spot spammers. (I've also learned not to include the word 'spammer' in a blog post - search engines don't like it...)

As if to prove that going beyond business as usual was not limited to the business of social media, we then introduced a little culture into proceedings with B2Beat poetry - an anthology of inspiring verse from our very own poet laureate, Noel Ponthieux.  This obviously struck a chord with marketers around the world as the modest print run that we produced quickly sold out.

We chose scandal for our next topic, with the outrageous story of how Pepsi endorsed casual sexism in its social media marketing. This was followed by Jamie-Lee Wallace's excellent lesson in selectivity, before we then segued effortlessly into a comparison of Star Trek and B2B marketing. Trust me, the link is highly logical.

So in summary, it has been a year to remember for B2B marketing, and one for which we were proud to provide a commentary here on the Base One Beyond blog.

As an aside, it was also the year when someone pointed out that the words 'gold' and 'blog' are mirror images of each other. This makes 'blog gold' at the same time a palindrome, an excuse for a logo (see below) and a great name for the award we give to our best blogs.



And for 2009, I can think of no one who has boldly gone further than Ms Ponthieux with her Star Trek piece.

Thank you all for reading - see you next year.

If, in the early years of the 20th century, the Wright Brothers had set out to build a machine that would carry hundreds of passengers across the Atlantic, with toilets fore and aft, they would have failed.

Instead, they focused on the short-term goal, which in their case was to prove that it was possible for a self-powered, heaver-than-air machine to fly. The distance was unimportant, they wanted to see if it worked.

So when the Wright Flyer bumped back onto the Kittyhawk sands after its maiden flight - a distance of a mere 120 feet - they had achieved what they set out to do.

Whilst reluctant to drag the reader away from aviation pioneers and back into the 21st century world of social media marketing, the parallel is an important one: you cannot expect to go into social media marketing and achieve everything at once. You have to learn to walk before you can run. Or, to extend the earlier analogy, if you want your brand to really fly, you've got to do the basics first.

Here's why - and what you can do about it.