Buzz Marketing for Technology

11 B2B Marketing Predictions for 2011

Around this time last year I wrote about the 10 B2B Marketing Predictions for 2010 and while I would say 7 out of 10 have already materialized and the others are on their way. So that begs the question – what’s on the horizon specifically for B2B Marketers next year?

Here are 11 concrete ways I think the environment in which B2B Marketers operate will evolve in 2011.

Enjoy!

Facebook Advertising – will continue to improve and unfortunately get more expensive. After 9 years of Search Engine Marketing – I think it is safe to say any keyword you are going to buy is maxed out when it comes to the Google AdWords auction process. So people are looking for an alternative and that’s Facebook Advertising. I even wrote a book this year on just this topic called Facebook Advertising for Dummies (Wiley). And as more people find out about this gem of an advertising experience CPC and CPM prices will continue to march upward – I have already begun to see this in my own ad buys!
Mobile Marketing – I know I said last year was the year of mobile marketing but I just saw a stat from a Mary Meeker presentation that smart phones will eclipse PC sales in 2012 (that’s just a year away) which will lead us to more mobile usage than PC usage so you better start your Mobile Marketing program now. Keep in mind we all start in the same place and that’s at ZERO! Mobile it totally optin and you need to start building your mobile optin list now.
Facebook will move into Mobile Ads – having said what I just did about us marketers not having a good mobile optin list – its just so natural for Facebook to ask you (you will ask us first Mark right?) if he can extend his advertising into your mobile device which he already has (if you put it on your profile). I have been thinking about this play for Facebook for a while – glad I am getting it down on virtual paper for my grandkids to see!
Social Media Strategists will become Chief Customer Officers – ok so you know I am also @Avaya_Support on Twitter so perhaps this is a closet fantasy for me but it may just come true – perhaps not this coming year but in years to come. Think about it marketers have been given this gift of Social Media which is reinventing areas of your company on the fly. In my company alone we have seen it touch Product Development and R&D, to Billing and Finance, to HR and Recruiting, to Customer Service and the Contact Center. You need someone to own the customer experience now in all those external channels and your internal channels as well!
Ecommerce will hit Facebook – Next year the deal that Facebook has with oodle.com for the Facebook Marketplace will be over. My predication would be they cut the cord there and open up a marketplace of their own. Startups like Payvment, and Alvenda will help companies large and small to open up shop in Facebook. Delta, Levis and 1800 Flowers are already there – can Victoria Secret, Brooks Brothers, and Godiva be far behind?
NFO is the new SEO – that’s News Feed Optimization on Facebook. Basically .2% of fans return to a fan page and in some cases it’s more like .02% (hat tip BrandGlue) So people on Facebook who “like” your Fan page basically never go back to it. So stop thinking of it as a micro site and making it all fancy. What you need to focus on is the content and optimizing the content to get comments and likes which will help you drive amount of people that Facebook will show your page to. It’s all based on Facebook’s algorithm called EdgeRank.
Advocate Marketing comes into Focus – you know all those people we are delighting with great customer service using Twitter – well they have become a strong voice for our brand. Now we are looking at ways of collecting and harnessing them. Tools like Zuberance are helping to do just that and allowing firms to do special things with their advocate base like provide them special events, invites to live events etc. We are just scratching the surface on this one but I can tell you its going to be big!
Reputation Management emerges in organizations – Toyota, United Breaks Guitars, Dominos Pizza, Motrin Moms, Dell Hell – we have had some major disasters all brought on my lack of speed in this market. Many firms are listening now for their brand (I know I spoke to 50 of them this year about this issue) but I don’t think they are ready for a crisis. I did a Reputation study on this topic two years ago and it proved how many companies lack the infrastructure then – we have come a long way since but do you really have a process to react quickly?
Real Time Marketing makes headlines – ok so I am reading David Meerman Scott’s latest book called Real Time Marketing but you know what – he’s right! He’s got tons of examples of firms that capitalized or failed to capitalize on Real Time issues (United Breaks Guitars!) We all need a lesson on how to be more real time – it’s a great book, I can’t put it down – I have read every book David has published and I can tell you – you need to read this one!
Someone better win the SmartPhone Application race soon – I can’t keep building 4 versions of the same application in order to cover the SmartPhone market – Blackberry aps, iPhone aps, Android aps (what the growth rate on Android) and Windows aps. Ok yes HTML5 should help this but throw in iPad and various other tablet aps and marketers are starting to look like Technologist which brings me to my next prediction.
The Rise of the Marketing Technologist – Marketers for the last few years have been closet techno geeks and its time for them to rise up – companies need digitally fluent marketers who can apply technologies to help make marketing more measurable and scientific. Then we can really change the dynamic from marketing as a cost center to marketing as a profit center!

FOUND the ROI of Social Media for B2B Marketers!

I think it is fair to say that Social Media has hit the mainstream these days but the big concern on every B2B Marketers mind has been where is the ROI? As a result I hear of many Social “science experiments” going on across several organizations that may or may not yield the results the marketer is hoping for. But I believe there is one place that delivers a strong ROI in Social Media and if you follow my advice not only will you conquer social media but you will delight your customers in the process!

Most of the time when I am talking with other B2B marketers they seem to be taking classic approach to social media and treating it like just another media channel posting press releases, sharing events, posting videos and expecting to see instant results like they get with other online media like banners, text links and search. There is no wonder why they find it hard to find a strong ROI with that approach.

Others are looking for a tool to do the work for them and I would argue that they shouldn’t be focused on finding the right tool, they should be focused on finding the right approach!

Enter Social Customer Support …

Social customer support I would argue is the single best place to focus your social media efforts since it can reduce customer churn and increase retention rates faster than any other program I have ever seen before. Listening for and spotting a customer issue, responding to them and solving their problem in minutes using social media provides what can only be called an “exceptional customer experience”.

Don’t take my word for it, a recent Forrester study showed that customers actually prefer a better customer experience compared to everyday low prices and that they would actually be willing to pay an average of 10% more to a company that provided a superior customer experience. Moreover, great customer experiences drive positive word of mouth (WOM) which capitalizes on the viral nature of Social Media. And finally companies that provide great customer experiences have customers that defect less and are more profitable to them in the long term. So why wouldn’t you center you social media efforts on providing outstanding customer support?

Not everyone enjoys calling into a contact center and more and more as social media evolves it provides a choice to your customers on how to interact with you. Going forward they will expect to get support using the channel that they prefer and feel most comfortable using and in many cases that is going to be social!

The downside of poor customer service has been well documented on the web more and more people are taking to the web to warn other would be customers of their dissatisfaction so don’t let that be your company! I never read a Social Media case study that started with “we completely ignored this customers issue they were blogging or tweeting about and everything worked out great” in fact it is always the opposite.

Supporting and retaining your best customers is always a good strategy especially when in B2B where a few customers account for a large part of your revenue. Keeping them happy and engaged with you is easy to do with social media and it turns out that it is the best place to find an ROI as well.

Is User Generated Content building a Wall between your Brand and your Customer?

So here is a little fact that really scares me – User Generated Content has surpassed that of publisher content which means we marketers (or publishers) are the “white noise” to the User Generated Content “signal” they produce.

So let’s dive into that for a moment …

At a recent concert I was attending at Madison Square Garden – the most popular thing to do at the concert was not dancing (good thing in case you have seen me dance) but it was video taping, text messaging, and generally sharing the experience with others who were not in attendance. 20,000 people for 4 hours producing tons of content – more content than I produced with all my teams around the world in a year – they exceeded in 4 hours!

Now take that same dynamic and put that in front of your brand. If you have (lets take Microsoft for example) customers who are avid users of the brand and tend to be socially active blogging, tweeting, posting on Facebook, or posting on forums about their good and bad experiences with the Microsoft brand – then how as a brand marketer am I supposed to get my message through all that mess?

The answer is – you can’t!

The dynamic I am pointing out exists for most brands today B2C and B2B brands. They quantity of conversations are growing every day about your brand (at Avaya our brand mentions have increased 5 fold in 18 months!!) Now I am not sure it can continue at that pace but I am not 100% sure.

150 million people use Facebook everyday and access it via mobile (more than the entire Twitter registered user base!) and they are said (by Facebook) to be 2 times more active than those that only access Facebook via the web.

One thing is for sure that dynamic is going to continue to get worse as smartphones surpass internet users in the next 2 years. That’s a stat we all need to keep an eye on!

Brand Advocates vs Brand Adversaries – it’s a Very Thin Line!

Everyday I provide support on the social web to customers. For the last 18 months we have solved hundreds of issues both small and large for customers around the globe, some as quickly as 15min others as long as 24 hours. But what’s becoming clear to me is that real time communications is essential in this new multi channel world where you better be listening for your customers and delighting them with Social Customer Service.

Xbox Support found that people they help on Twitter are far more satisfied than people they help via the call center, not to mention the cost of providing that service is significantly cheaper as well.

It’s a great double sided ROI story for Social Customer Support. It saves customers who are having an issue call them Brand Adversaries and delights them into becoming a Brand Advocate while it also provides a cost reduction ROI when it comes to the call center.

I see this in my travels talking to Avaya customers about how social media can be integrated into their contact center.

But I also hear all the horror stories about the customer who they ignored and it got worse. I like to say I never read a Social Media case study that was titled “We Ignored this Tweet and everything was Great!” in fact it is always the opposite of that.

I think there are 2 factors at play here – the first is listening and being able to react quickly – if you don’t have a listening engine in place and a routing for that complaint to get fielded you are just tempting fake – its not IF there will be an issue its WHEN is there going to be an issue.

The line between a happy customer who is now having an issue (a Brand Adversary) is VERY thin. Which brings me to my next factor which is time – when a customer is having an issue they want action – when they tweet you they expect you to be there and unfortunately Twitter doesn’t have an Out of Office feature so you better be ready to help (I have seen Xbox Support post hours of operation – lets see how that goes for them).

You can use this to your advantage and make your Brand Adversaries your best Brand Advocates if you surprise and delight them with outstanding customer service in by using social. Then it unlocks all the great things about social when they tweet and tell others about the great experience they had with your brand.

Mapping Content to the Sales Funnel AND Buyer types

You often hear about the concept of mapping content to the sales funnel (especially in B2B Marketing) but it’s not so common in practice. I will self confess that I have ignored this one for a while. The other version of this is the mapping of content to your buyer types and this too is one I have ignored for a while … until now!

Ok so I took a look at my sales funnel and started to take the content my team produces and map it against the funnel – for simplicity sake I like to use Awareness to Consideration to Purchase as my 3 major stages of the sales funnel.

For Awareness I like to use broadly appealing content that can be shareable (the new KISS as I like to call it – Keep it Shareable Stupid). This would include eBooks, Research, White papers, etc. Not all of these have hooks for gathering download information (that’s just not acceptable these days). We use 2 distinctions – Premium content and Non Premium content – the latter being free and the former being behind a registration page.

For Consideration I like to use more in depth tools like webinars and live/virtual events – derived from the lists of folks who downloaded and have been interacting with us on a particular topic. These are typically better than the broad brush webinars because we can have a real consideration discussion that includes such things as use cases, ROI modeling and even self funding ideas.

And then for Purchase I like to use case studies, customer references, press releases on new wins etc. This gets to the final decision makers desk and helps out the sales force immensely since they can never seem to have enough of these in their toolkit.

So then I flipped to another chart where we started to map the content we create to the buyer types and for simplicity sake I like to use End User, Influencer, and Buyer/Executive as my 3 major buyer types.

What we realized pretty quickly was the content we were using to attract Awareness – was the same content we would use to attract End Users (now I always hope to get an influencer or a buyer in there) but in reality when we look at the leads we are nurturing we are seeing more end users which is ok since we have a ton of end users in the 200,000 customers we have!

For the Influencers – we like to use the same content we have for the consideration stage – webinars, live events, virtual events and so on. Here is where we see more influencers show up to get the detailed info that they need to make a recommendation for a major technology purchase.

And finally for Buyers/Executives – we see we need the same type of content we need for the purchase end of the funnel – since they have the recommendation from the end user and influencer but they need evidence that this is going to work and that they are not the first person to buy which is why case studies, customer references and new win stories really help speed the sales process.

What’s been your experience with mapping content to the sales funnel or buyer types? I would love to know.

Are kids Brains Different when it comes to Social Media?

I know it sounds like a crazy idea but hear me out. So you know how your grand parents used to tell you about the Great Depression and how you needed to save for a rainy day. My grand dad used to save everything including the wood and nails from old construction projects but I bet if he could have saved the paint he would have.

That generation of people who grew up with the Great Depression is slowly dying off now and for many of us it’s only a faint memory in our brains as “stuff our parents or grandparents used to say”.

I find this same dynamic happening now when I talk to kids today about the Social web. Grant it my kids are awesome in fact they impress me which how they are utilizing the social web but they are clearly growing up in a very liberal open and transparent time where sharing everything on the web is almost expected.

This came to life for me in Technicolor when I heard of the boy from Rutgers University who killed by jumping off the George Washington Bridge after his roommates streamed a live video of him having sex with another man.

Ok we all did dumb things in our lives (especially in college) but I began to wonder if kids today are growing up without a synapse in their brains that we have developed over the years to know what is right and wrong when it comes to sharing.

I am not saying adults are perfect – see my eBook on the 5 Ways to get Fired using Facebook. But I think we have a sensibility that perhaps is less developed in our kids. And what happens when we all die off like the Great Depression memories who will be there to teach them about what’s ok to share and what’s not. Will there be courses in grammar school and high school in the future?

One thing is for sure – I feel like I am lecturing like my grand parents did about the great Depression when it to talking to kids about sharing online – perhaps I am turning into my parents after all.

3 More ROIs in Social Media – Conversations Leads and Advocates

If you follow me you know I talk a lot about the ROI of Social Media since I happen to have stumbled on a great ROI using Social Media in providing support for our customers at Avaya.

Social customer support I would argue is the single best place to focus your social media efforts since it can reduce customer churn and increase your retention rates faster than any other program I have ever seen before thereby delivering a strong ROI. Listening for and spotting a customer issue, responding to them and solving their problem in minutes using social media not only lets you conquer social media but delight your customers in the process.

But I think there are 3 more ROIs out there where you can build a great business case with Social Media

Conversations – PR needs to move from publications to conversations and if you take that concept and really track and engage in conversations where you brand would fit – I could see that leading to an ROI over time – similar to the way the long tail works for books or movies – this is the long tail of conversations and it would be like having 100s of ads out there for your brand that were all relevant and in context. Which leads me to my next ROI …

Leads – Listening for mentions of your brand or product or even competitors brands is a great way to find leads – evidence I have when listening for the competitors of Avaya – if I hear someone say “replace Cisco” – don’t you think that’s a conversation Avaya should be engaged in? Grant it there haven’t been a ton of those conversations but if you add up all your competitors and your own brands product lines it becomes meaningful.

Advocates – Here is the last one where we have had some success as well. How are you building and taking care of all those really avid followers on Twitter or die hard fans on Facebook – perhaps if you were able to harness them like some companies are doing now with service like Zuberance – you can get them to make recommendations and build your brand with the power of their voice. We are seeing some success with this but some clients of Zuberance are really killing it with this one strategy.

Dell has been talking about how they made $3 million dollars off their Twitter site – how did they do it? With a Coupon Code! – We have plenty of tools both old and new at our disposal to measure and track so many things on the web – so much so – that I have lost all patience for the concept that “we cant measure social media” – if Dell can measure with a coupon code just think what can you be doing to track the flow of social media with special 800#, special email addresses, special landing pages.

That’s how we did it at the beginning of the web – I don’t see why this time is any different!

Facebook’s Like Button adds Life to your Content

Like it or hate it – the Like button is here to stay. In the first week of its launch 50,000 like buttons were integrated on various websites and more than 1M “likes” were registered within 24 hours of its introduction. At last count well over 100,000 websites integrate some form of Facebook’s social plugins (including my site!).

Research is showing that we will use the Like button for many things because its is one of the easiest social actions (easier than share) and can signify you like certain content, show you like a certain product, approve of an advertisement, or share your feeling for a video. Whole activity streams are being created around the use of the Like button.

My favorite is Levis use of the Like button to create a social shopping experience. They’ve integrated the new Like feature with every product on the site so at a quick view, you can see the number of “Facebookers” who Like the item and maybe even cast your own vote. On individual product pages, it even pulls in pictures of your friends who’ve Liked the item. The best part is website extends the Facebook integration out to create a “friends store” which essentially customizes the entire experience to be Facebook friend centric and also allowing you to invite all your friends into that shopping experience! Hello affiliate marketing – I love it! If you haven’t seen it you can check out the store at store.levi.com.

In the future you should be able to Like books on Amazon that you read for only your friends to see, Like search results on Bing to give your friends a heads up on the best result, perhaps even use the Like button to vote on the outcome certain TV shows (my favorite idea is to use the Like button for Reality TV shows such as The Apprentice, Top Chef, Survivor, or Project Runway and actually create the outcome of these shows).

Still in its infancy the Like button holds a lot of promise for Facebook as their march continues to making all interactions both web and mobile more social. In fact if Google’s mission is to “index the worlds information” perhaps Facebook’s mission is to “Socialize the worlds information!” (but I digress …)

For marketers the like button holds some significant promise for extending the lifespan of your content. A recent statistic showed that with Liked content you can expect click thru rates to improve by 3-5 times compared to content that does not have a Like. In an age where there is more User Generated Content than Publisher (or marketer) Content – here is one way that B2B Marketers can ride that user generated wave to make your content stand out and live longer than it does today.

Facebook can’t be stopped and here’s why!

I am just putting the finishing touches on the 2nd Edition of Facebook Marketing for Dummies (Wiley) with my co-author Rich Krueger (and BTW we have sold over 20,000 copies in less than a year!). We also just completed Facebook Advertising for Dummies (Wiley) which is due to ship in November. And a question I get asked in every meeting when I present social media is – “so who is going to become the next Facebook?” and I am here to tell you – No one and here why …

Facebook has currently grown to over 550 million members which is one out of every 3 internet users! Mark Zuckerberg is calling for 1 billion member mark and I believe they will hit that mark sometime before the end next year (you heard it here first people!). Facebook also overtook Google in page views just recently. In my Top 10 B2B Marketing Predictions for 2010 blog post last year I called that day to be February 14, 2010 (betting on the social activity that the holiday brings) but I was actually 2 months late – the first time Facebook surpassed Google was on Christmas day 2009. It took until this August for them to sustain the page view count and surpass Google for good.

Ok so that is a look at membership and traffic but the part that I think really closes the door on any up and comer is their Business Model. Facebook is currently running 3 business models – any one of which you or I would die for and they happen to have them all under one roof.

Ads – Facebook Ads is a business model similar to Google AdWords (which is one of the best ad models out there) but it takes that ad platform to the next level. You can target behaviors and explicit likes from a member’s profile. It can be 1:1 advertising or it can be one to many who share common likes for example – Male, Married, lives in CT, likes to Sail, likes to eat Sushi, and listen to Dave Matthews – and bingo your ad would appear on my page.
Applications – Facebook Applications is a business model similar to Apple App Store (which is a pretty darn good business model too!). Like Apple, Facebook takes a percent of the revenue for each application which if they are correct – there will be tremendous upside in this model as developers build applications specifically for their platform.
Commerce – Facebook has been flirting with a business model similar to eBay (yet another killer business model). They are currently locked into a 3 year agreement with oodle.com that runs their marketplace but once that is up next year – I believe – they will ditch them for a more “store front” model similar to Yahoo Shopping or eBay.

Much like Lycos or Altavista or even Yahoo there were search engines that came before Google but Google closed the door on them. I am here to tell you that Facebook is in the same position as they make everything more social by sticking the “like” button on everything and adding mobile features. There is no challenger on the market right now that can take on Facebook (yes, not even Google) for the front runner in the social networking space. I believe they have left the realm of social networking long ago and they are now working on a social operating system for the web. So if you haven’t opened your Facebook account personally or for your business yet – what are you waiting for – like it or not Facebook isn’t going away anytime soon!

(Written on the eve of the launch of the movie The Social Network)

Social Media for the Boardroom

At a recent BlogWell event I got a chance to hear Robert Raines from Chevron present his Social Media program and how he reports their activity into the Boardroom. It all starts with the Pulse Report that Chevron had produced by Edelman (their PR firm) using their Alterian’s SM2 social media monitoring tool. They identified around 60 Million conversations (per year) across blogs, microblogs such as Twitter, discussion forums and social networks like Facebook and other enabling technologies such as YouTube, Vimeo and Flickr relating to Energy.

From there the work began with Edelman to classify them into key conversational issues (of which they identified 50 issues) and then narrow that down to 8 major issues within 3 broad categories: Energy Resources, Energy Technology, and Energy & Environment. These were the three broadest terms that applied to the most relevant conversations about energy.

Obviously a topic like Energy has been written about for ages – at its highest level it has millions of conversations, press, articles, blog pages and best of all opinions! They used Boolean searches (which are available in most listening engines today) to narrow their searches to only the most relevant posts. Then they detailed a taxonomy of trigger words that signaled whether the post was positive or negative in sentiment. And from there analyzed and tracked the changes in volume and sentiment for each topic by quarter.

Using the report they were able to glean insights into the prominence of certain topics by consumers and the trending of the topics that were most important to Chevron. Moreover they could use the report to build content and engage in topics that were trending where Chevron was a thought leader or was looking to become more of a thought leader.

I think this report is a great example for all of us – it shows a very comprehensive approach to monitoring and gaining insights from data. Many listening engines provide you with “streams” of data which is great. But as I like to say “there is a big difference between Data and Insights” and this report shows you how Chevron navigated the streams of data to create real insights that can be shared and discussed at the highest levels of the organization. Its perfect example of where I think PR needs to focus these days – on conversations and not on publications.

Mapping Content to the Sales Funnel AND Buyer types

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