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How Social Is Being Used To Drive Business

June 22, 2012 By Leave a Comment

How are social networking and social software impacting businesses now and in the future?

A new research report co-authored by MIT’s Sloan Management Review and Deloitte entitled “Social Business: What Are Companies Really Doing?” may have the answers.

The report surveyed nearly 3,500 managers from companies 115 countries in 24 industries, and conducted in-depth interviews with thought leaders and top business execs from major brands, including McDonald’s, IBM, SAP, Salesforce.com, and Yammer. Here’s a quick rundown of its key findings.

1. Social Business Matters Today- Will Matter Even More Tomorrow

    • 52% of survey respondents believe social business is important to their business now; 86% acknowledge it will be important or somewhat important in three years
    • The most important use of social software is for customer service, 2nd most important use is to innovate for competitive differentiation
    • Managers still see it as an external-facing activity

Bottom Line: Though not everyone sees it as important to their business now, nearly all managers agree that social software will become increasingly critical to their organization over the next few years.

2. Many Leaders are Enthusiastic, but Lack Metrics to Prove Value

    • Leadership and clear vision recognized as key to social software adoption
    • Biggest barrier to adoption: lack of management support. The most common answer to the question “How do you measure social software use?” was “do not measure”
    • CEOs, presidents and managing directors are 2x as likely as CIOs and CFOs to say social business is important to their organization

Bottom Line: Metrics may not be as important when companies are experimenting with social software, but as it becomes more widely used, metrics must be in place to assess progress and encourage successes. Social business depends on leadership; leaders can benefit from social business.

3. Different Perspectives Based on Size of Organization

    • Respondents from small (fewer than 1,000 EEs) and large (over 100,000 EEs) companies were twice as likely as managers of midsize companies to acknowledge the importance of social business
    • When asked the importance of social business three years from today, all groups answered similarly

Bottom Line: social tools allow small companies to look bigger than they are; large companies appear more human and approachable. Midsize companies see the advantage of social tools, but don’t see themselves exploiting them for three more years.

4. Social Business Getting Most Traction in Media and IT Sectors

    • Almost 75% of managers from Media companies say that social software is at least somewhat important to their organization today; nearly 66% of managers in the Tech industry say the same
    • Managers from the Energy and Utilities (7.1), Financial Services (10.4%), and Manufacturing (9%), industries are least likely to say that social software is important to their organizations. However, managers from all three segments acknowledge that it will be much more important in three years

Bottom Line: Certain industries are seeing more value in social tools than other industries. But even managers from industries that place a low premium on social software today agree that social tools will be much more valuable in the near future.

Ultimately, small businesses are using social to amplify their reach. Larger organizations are doing so to humanize their brand. It’s great to see that mass adoption of social for marketing is finally nearly here!

Filed Under: Blogging, Content Marketing, Crisis Communications, Digital Media, Professional Networking, Public Relations, Social Media Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

B2B Companies STILL Ignore Social Media

May 19, 2012 By Leave a Comment

A new survey from Satmetrix, revealed today that the majority of B2B companies are still not tracking their social media activity and are ignoring customers who interact with brand pages online.

The global survey shows:

  • 51 percent of B2B companies have no social media tracking in place, in comparison to 22 percent of their B2C counterparts
  • 69 percent of B2B respondents ignored customers who provided feedback via social media because they had no process in place to respond

For those companies that did measure effectiveness of social media:

  • only four percent performed sentiment analysis
  • while 56 percent simply counted comments and followers

Chief executive officer at Satmetrix, Richard Owen said, “Whilst 77 percent of consumers post about products, 67 percent of businesses have no means of measuring what is being said and less than one in 20 have any insight into the sentiment of what is being said. This is both a huge threat and a massive lost opportunity.”

Converting Content to Conversation is the Key to Thought Leadership

It really does blow my mind that in 2012, we are having the same discussion we’ve been having for the past five years about the value of converting content to conversation online.

I’ve talked to many B2B companies throughout my career and every time we discuss social media, they insist their customers aren’t on Facebook. There are so many things wrong with that statement, it makes my head spin. First of all, Facebook is not social media; it is merely one channel within the social media space. LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Vimeo, G+, the blogosphere – anything peer-to-peer related is social media. (Come on, now, folks, it’s 2012 – surely y’all recognize this, right?!)

Secondly, your B2B customers may be “business buyers” and not “consumers,” but they are still human beings and human beings engage with their peers online to discuss their interests. I assure you, no matter how obscure your trade, no matter how small your niche B2B audience is, your customers are talking to each other and seeking out advice, guidance, case studies and recommendations.

It goes back to the old saying I first coined in 2008 that social media is like the high school cafeteria in that everyone gathers together around their shared interests. For every industry, there is a cafeteria – maybe it isn’t Facebook, maybe it’s Twitter or LinkedIn – but there is a cafeteria and a lunch table within it where your customers are talking. And, if you aren’t listening, you aren’t leading.

As I said in 2011, content creates thought leadership and every B2B company I know wants, nay, needs to be seen as the smartest kid in the class. And, content disseminated through Twitter, LinkedIn, G+ and other social channels equals SEO, something, again, we’ve been talking about here since 2009 and even in 2008 and SEO equals thought leadership.

So, I gotta say, seeing the results of studies like this just makes me crazy because it really is so simple and the opportunities have only grown over the years. Please, y’all, if you are a B2B company, step up to the plate and embrace the conversations happening around you every single day. And, if you don’t know how, connect with me on LinkedIn and I will show you because reports like this just drive me to the brink.

Filed Under: Blogging, Content Marketing, Digital Media, Public Relations, SEO, Social Media Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Wikipedia is Dying; Nobody Edits Anymore

August 5, 2011 By Leave a Comment

We all know on Wikipedia, anyone can edit. The problem is, nobody wants to.

Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales made an announcement at this year’s Wikipedia conference: Nobody wants to edit Wikipedia anymore.

Wales later told the AP that the number of Wikipedia editors is slowly dwindling. “We are not replenishing our ranks,” he said, “it is not a crisis, but I consider it to be important.”

According to Wales a lot of the core Wikipedians have simply aged out, got married and found that they have better things to do with their time.

I’d personally add one more reason: Wikipedia makes it entirely too hard for people to become contributors/editors and when you do, your content (even content that fits within the MoS parameters of editorial content) is seemingly arbitrarily changed by admins without any rhyme or reason.

I used to be a Wikipedia editor and in many ways it was very useful. I spent much time adding my clients’ case studies to relevant topics, helping with their SEO while improving the validity of wiki content. But, when trying to help other clients become editors themselves, I often heard, “this is just too hard” and “they make it too difficult.” Or, “all of my hard work was erased for no reason.”

Now, I do think editing should be somewhat restrictive and shouldn’t be so easy that anyone can make any changes they want. And, I’m sure there were instances of my clients adding sales-speak to the site, which will get flagged faster than … well something that gets flagged quickly.

But, when you make the game so difficult that people give up, you can’t be surprised that no one wants to play with you anymore.

Today, Gawker said: Wikipedia needs to get cool again, somehow. When Wikipedia launched in the early naughts it was attractively subversive—it pissed off your teachers, journalists and any square over 40, basically. Idealistic young nerds flocked to the site with that early web 2.0 communitarian fervor. But new editors aren’t showing up at the same rate. After years at the top result on practically every Google search, Wikipedia has lost its urgency. Kids who were in 8th grade in 2004 have gone through their entire high school and college careers consulting (i.e. plagiarizing) Wikipedia; to them, Wikipedia is a dull black box—editing it seems just a bit more possible than making revisions to Pride and Prejudice.

Meanwhile, Twitter and Facebook have become the preferred sites of younger Internet users and Wales has been trying to incorporate some of those features into the site to keep younger users participating:

“The typical profile of a contributor is ‘a 26-year-old geeky male’ who moves on to other ventures, gets married and leaves the website,” Wales said. “Other contributors leave because, 10 years after the website was launched, there are fewer new entries to add.”

By March, Wikipedia had about 90,000 active contributors. The goal is to tack on another 5,000 by June of next year, said Sue Gardner, executive director of the nonprofit that runs the website.

Among its steps, Gardner said the site is expanding a program that encourages university professors to assign the writing of Wikipedia entries to their students, particularly in India, Brazil, Canada, Germany and Britain.

The website has also introduced a new feature called WikiLove aimed at keeping users engaged. Visitors to the website select a graphic icon — choices include kittens, stars and the Mediterranean dessert baklava — and send it with a message of appreciation to a page contributor as encouragement. “It’s like a ‘like’ on Facebook,” Wales said.

Let me know what you think. Are you a Wikipedia editor? Do you want to become one? Or, should the site put its glory days behind it?

Filed Under: Consumer Habits, Content Marketing, Digital Media, Journalism, Marketing, Public Relations, Social Media Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Content Marketing Creates Thought Leadership

April 5, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Some of you emailed me after my last post asking for recommendations around the type of content to create for your clients. Obviously, this is a difficult question to answer in general terms. After all, the whole point of my last post was the value of the context of your content. So, it would be difficult for me to give you contextual advice without knowing more about your clients, their audience and competitive space. 

That said, I will offer up some general guidelines and further discussion around the value of content marketing.

First of all the type of content you create should be driven by the type of audience you are after. Consumers spend a great deal of time on YouTube and Facebook. B2B audiences tend to focus more on LinkedIn and SlideShare. And, Twitter, podcasts and Blogs fit both … as long as what you say is relevant and useful.

Consider this:

1. Content establishes thought leadership: 79 percent of content curators listed thought leadership as the primary objective. Creating valuable content around your category establishes you as an expert, period.

2. Consistency breeds familiarity. It takes anywhere from 5 to 12 exposures for a new idea to stick. The more consistent you are with your value proposition in your content, the more people will connect your brand to your message.

3. Content brings brands and customers together. This is especially true when there is an interactive element to the content, like comments in a blog, LinkedIn Q&A conversations or user-generated content campaigns.

4. Aggregation can set you apart. There is a flood of information online and Google can only give you a best guess at the most relevant, but there are millions and millions of pages returned for any search result. Aggregation sites like social bookmarks can help you connect your content with key audiences seeking it out.

5. Mashups can give you a unique edge. Merging existing content to create a new point of view can be a great way to leverage popular content. Taking multiple points of view on a particular issue and sharing it in a single location can be a terrific conversation-starter. More broadly, mashups can offer a way of creating something new while still using content curation as a basis for it because you are building on existing content.

6. Chronology is becoming more important as industries are evolving. We have seen incredible changes in so many industries in the past several years. Within marketing alone, we’ve seen the mashup of marketing disciplines like advertising and PR. One of the most interesting ways of looking at your content is to track the evolution of information is over time – and how our understanding of topics has changed over time.

Whether you are creating podcasts, blog posts, videos, SlideShares or participating in category-specific Q&A, the most important thing (behind context) is consistency. If you want your voice to have power, you have to power it with consistent content.

Filed Under: Blogging, Consumer Habits, Content Marketing, Digital Media, Marketing, Public Relations, SEO, Social Media Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Content May Be King, But Context is Queen

March 23, 2011 By Leave a Comment

I’ve always been a big fan of companies becoming content creators to drive organic SEO around their brands. But, I’ve seen a trend recently with business content that is a bit unsettling. Many companies are so determined to stock the search engines with their videos and SlideShares and Facebook pages, they are forgetting about context. 

Fact is, if content is king, context surely is queen.

I often tell my clients, the key to a social media marketing strategy is to start with that first impulse that sends someone on the path to your brand; that first Google search; that question on LinkedIn; that initial problem they are trying to solve and then build your content around it. This is a sure-fire way to get your brand in front of the people specifically seeking you out.

It’s important to remember you are participating in a competitive marketplace and there are other people who provide similar services and products who can take market share away from you. The more relevant you can make your content to your target audience, the better shot you have at connecting with them in a meaningful way.

Consider these statistics:

There are 49,500 Google searches every month for “children’s clothing.” 27,100 monthly searches for “supply chain solutions.” And, 40,500 monthly Google queries for “executive recruiters.”

That seems like an awful lot of prospects right? It’s certainly a lot of search activity. So, if you create content tied to these terms, you will just be inundated with customers, right? Wrong. If you try to connect your content to these very general searches, you are going to get lost in a sea of online activity that may not be relevant to your business at all.

Look again at the above numbers and now consider this:

There are only 1,300 monthly searches for “infant clothing.” 720 monthly searches for “supply chain inventory management solutions.” And, only 3,400 monthly searches for “IT executive recruiters.”

The more specific the topic, the smaller the barrel of fish becomes for your lead generation. This is true for your content as well. The truth is, there is no excuse for broad-based content creation today. There are countless tools, many of them free, that allow you to monitor what people are saying, what questions they are asking, what terms they are searching and what problems they need solving. The more you can tailor your content to this context, the greater chance you will have connecting with your key audiences.

Use Social Mention to find the web sites with the most relevant activity and the Top Talkers in your category. Blog Pulse and Board Reader are also very useful to dive even deeper into those channels. Advanced Twitter Search will help you identify those top trending topics and Twitterers.

Content-driven marketing is an important piece of any online marketing or PR strategy. But, it’s no place for laziness. Take the time to really identify what your target audience needs and then give it to them. I promise you will see the results and rewards.

Filed Under: Content Marketing, Digital Media, Marketing, Public Relations, SEO, Social Media Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,
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