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Does your idea marketing have a point of view?

February 13, 2009 by

We at ITSMA a broad, inclusive definition for what constitutes thought leadership. All you want it to be able to do ultimately is spark interest among the people you want to reach with ideas that map with your ability to deliver.

To do this, you need to do research with customers and across your target markets. You also need to cultivate a group of internal subject matter experts to collaborate with customers and third parties to develop and refine a point of view. Finally, you need to implement this with customers so that they can provide corroboration that the idea is valid and practical.

These are the core elements of thought leadership marketing. Think of any of the best articles you’ve read in the Harvard Business Review, for example. Each has:

  1. A relevant business issue of interest to a lot of people
  2. A strong point of view
  3. Grounded in some kind of market research
  4. Validated by case examples

Now, I really don’t think this point of view has to be especially new or creative. It doesn’t have to be something that no one has thought of before. But it has to crystallize a point of view that is of interest to people and makes them stop and think.

Look, Al Gore had nothing new to say about global warming when he did An Inconvenient Truth. But he packaged all that stuff up in a very strong, clear point of view that said that we can’t continue waiting to make the sacrifices necessary to stop all this because if we don’t, we’re going to harm our children. It’s going to be hard to do what we have to do but we have to suck it up and do it now for their sakes.

What I see so often in thought leadership content is that there is no point of view linking it all together like that. At the top, you have broad research surveys and at the bottom, you have case studies of customers implementing a particular solution. But what’s missing is the point of view to take the customer from that broad research down to the case studies, the proof points. There needs to be a link.

I’m going to be giving a presentation next week on how to use thought leadership as a marketing tool during a recession. It’s being hosted by a web conferencing company called BrightTalk. It’s free and I hope you’ll attend. I’ll be talking about how to develop a thought leadership content engine inside your company and how to create a thought leadership dissemination supply chain to develop and refine the ideas and point of views that bubble up through the content engine. Here’s a link to sign up:

http://www.brighttalk.com/webcasts/2656/attend

Filed Under: Idea Marketing, Uncategorized Tagged With: ,

Get Ready to Slice Up Your Videos for Search Engines of the Future

January 16, 2009 by

In my last post, I talked about how formatting is important in helping clients get through your longer thought leadership pieces. We really need to slice things up and give people as many entry points as possible.

The same is going to be true with video.

You’ve probably heard of in-video searching, in which the major search engines are starting to try to parse the web’s video content so that you can find specific scenes within the videos. Of course, as with everything web, there are a few startups that are out ahead of the big boys, such as VideoSurf, which serves up thumbnail pictures of what it deems to be a representative sampling of the videos that it returns in a search. You can skim through them to get at least some sense of what you’re in for. (Here’s a recent NYT article that looks at VideoSurf and other video search technologies.)

I think video search has big implications for B2B marketers. My sense is that for B2B thought leadership, viewers will want to skim videos the same way they skim written content. It should cause video producers to slice their videos more finely than they do today, just as the web has sliced up journalism-favoring sliced up checklists like FAQs over long, unbroken narrative articles. Video producers are going to need to break even shorter videos into logical sections, with transitions between each-just like news programs. If the thumbnail technology takes off, it may make sense to put more text into the videos than we do today, so that someone viewing the thumbnails could select a subsection to watch more easily.

While we wait for video search to become more practical, it makes sense to surround your videos with text-based ways for people to find them. But apparently, we aren’t even doing that. According to this Forrester survey, only 20% of marketers bother to put keyword terms into the filenames of their videos or write search-engine friendly captions. It also makes sense to put a transcript of the video on the same page to make it easier to find.

Are you having luck getting B2B clients to watch your videos?

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: , ,

The Secret to Getting People to Read Long B2B Content: Formatting

January 9, 2009 by

Some time ago, I was helping a consulting firm write a whitepaper. I asked the consultants I was working with to send me an example of a previous whitepaper written by their firm that they liked, so that I could get a sense of the kind of writing style and presentation that they preferred.

The next meeting I had with the consultants didn’t go so well.

“I’d be surprised if anyone read that paper all the way through,” I told them.

Now a marketer wouldn’t be shocked to hear that, but these consultants were. And they had some reason to be. The whitepaper—it looked more like a coffee-table magazine, actually—was gorgeous. Four-color, thick paper stock, elegant design, and high-budget photography. And it was well written: stripped of marketing and consulting jargon, focused on educating and informing the reader rather than pitching any specific services. It was organized as well as any special issue of a business magazine, with an overall theme that had universal appeal and four articles packed with useful and unique information (including survey data) that each related to the theme and to each other.

But there was a fatal flaw.

First They Skim, Then (Maybe) They Read
Now, before I tell you what that fatal flaw was, I need to tell you how people read whitepapers. The first thing they do is skim. They read the headline, then they scan the rest of the opening page for similarly digestible content—e.g., a secondary headline or “kicker” that explains the point of the story in slightly more detail, pictures (and captions), etc. Often, readers will make a decision about whether to continue at that point, without having read any of the actual text of the article itself. For B2B readers, this is especially true; they aren’t curling up on the couch with this stuff. They do it to become better informed or because they have been asked (i.e., ordered) to research the topic. Whether it’s a printed whitepaper landing in their mailbox, a link in an e-mail newsletter, or an organic search on Google, this whitepaper is either standing in the way of getting other work done, or is part of a pile of similar content that they are wading through to glean some new insight.

The Curse of the Big, Gray Slab
Can you guess the fatal flaw in the whitepaper? When you stripped away all the beautiful surroundings and just looked at the text of the articles, each was one long, gray slab. There was nothing to break it up, nothing to give the busy reader’s eye and brain a break. Not a single subhead, not a single informational graphic (a cardinal sin when you have survey data, as this company did) or a bullet-list sidebar-not even a drop-cap to break up the sections of the text.

That whitepaper was a beautiful, five-figure waste of money and talent.

Good B2B Thought Leadership Has to Be Loooong…
I’m still waiting to read a good B2B technology whitepaper that really breaks new ground and is fewer than 1000 words. I just don’t think it’s possible. We sell very complex products to highly educated people who expect at least some degree of intellectual rigor in their reading materials. That’s not a formula for brevity. So we need to find ways to make readers more comfortable on their long journeys through our content.

…But Formatting Makes It Seem Shorter
Formatting is the best tool we have to do this. I used it to make this 7000-word tutorial on ERP software navigable—to the point where as of last year it was still getting 20,000 web hits per month. I set it up like a tech FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions). I tried to think of all the questions that someone new to ERP might ask (as well as those they might not know to ask, but should) and we listed them all at the top of the first page (and each page thereafter). Every weary researcher clicking through to it from Google can see at a glance what he or she is in for. Don’t have time to read it all now? Come back and click on the questions you didn’t read yet. The piece became so popular that college IT programs began creating permanent links to it on their websites (which partly explains why the traffic is so consistently high-professors are assigning it every term).

Of course, the web makes the need to format well even more important. However, unlike print, where the natural tendency is to make everything long and unbroken, on the web the tendency is to clutter the page with as many options as possible. The goal for both types of media should be to present readers with a clean, thematically unified page with unified elements.

Formatting That Shortens the Story
Here are some formatting elements to consider online and in print:

  • Write headlines that instruct and inform. When I joined the staff of one magazine, our impressively educated editors tried to outdo one another with clever puns and literary references to the point that the headlines were unintelligible. They were writing for each other, not the readers. Every headline has to answer the question: why should I spend any time reading this? And remember to get keywords in there for the Google monster.
  • Tease the point of view with kickers. Just beneath the headline, there should be a couple of sentences that explain what they can expect to learn (also good for feeding Google). Most readers still haven’t decided whether to read the story after reading the headline. Use the kicker to hook them.
  • Tell a story with sub-heads (as I’ve done in this post). Every few paragraphs, there needs to be a sub-head to give the reader a visual break. Use those sub-heads to tell the story of the text in shorthand. They may be the only things that anyone reads all the way through.
  • Highlight your stars with call outs. Call outs (or pull quotes) are indispensable because they add a nice graphic element to the piece. It’s also a great way to sell your practitioners and subject matter experts to the audience by quoting them. But as with subheads, they need to tell a coherent story within the story.
  • Break up the text with bullet lists (like the one you’re reading). Okay, how many of you skimmed this post down to this bullet list before starting to read in earnest? Lists give the reader value without making them plod through the whole piece. Lead each bullet with a short, highlighted introductory sentence to pull the reader in. Use action verbs and make calls to action wherever possible.
  • Keep sidebars short and self-contained. Thought leadership needs to be long, but sidebars really do need to short, without exception-never longer than 500 words, but more like 200 or less. Sidebars should be self-contained. No one should have to read the main story to understand the sidebar.

The Formatting Should Tell Its Own Story
Before sending your next whitepaper to the copy editor, check your work by reading just the formatting around the story. It should tell a story, offer facts and statistics, and outline calls to action. In other words, the formatting should offer some of the same value to readers that they would get if they actually sat down and read the piece from beginning to end. It should offer so many points of entry to the main story that skimmers go back to the beginning and become readers.

We can’t expect people to read all that we write in B2B. But we have to impart a sense of value with everything we do. That’s why formatting is so important. Don’t let the skimmers turn the page without giving them something to remember you by.

Filed Under: Idea Marketing Tagged With: , ,

Analytics means looking ahead

December 12, 2008 by

I want you all to throw out whatever definition you have in your heads for analytics—just for a moment—so we can talk about what analytics should mean. If there’s one thing I’d like to bring across to you it’s that analytics is about looking ahead—about being predictive. What most of us do today with analytics is report. We look at what we have already done and report on it. Analytics is much more than that. It is about making future decisions with more certainty of success.

And in these times, we must make the right choices in marketing—choices that will translate into revenue. There simply isn’t any room for mistakes right now. So the timing of the online briefing that I’ll be doing on December 16 about marketing analytics is pretty good.

In our presentation we are going to talk about three things you can do today to start improving your ability to predict. First, we’re going to talk about methodologies for analyzing marketing programs’ success before you have to commit the big bucks. Second, we will talk about why finance is a key player in helping you improve your analytics program. And we will talk about how you can start to shift the culture of marketing and your business from what I call a talent approach to what our friend and colleague Tom Davenport, who recently presented at our annual conference, calls a fact-based culture. By the way, Tom has written a book called Competing on Analytics that you should check out if you haven’t already. I’ll also reveal some selected findings from our recent survey on marketing analytics.

I think it’s important to distinguish analytics from metrics because I see these two get jumbled together a lot. Analytics is essentially gathering data and looking at it to gain insight, while metrics are the descriptive performance measures that we use to gauge progress.

The goal of both metrics and analytics, of course, is not just to track and measure marketing programs, but to build business success. To that end, we have created what we call ITSMA’s Analytics Best Practice Model. I won’t go through all of the elements of it in detail here, but these are the basic goals:

  • One is to find and coordinate the data we need across the organization so that we can start to make better decisions across all of marketing and the business, not just in selected pockets.
  • Second, we want to create a link with finance—where the analytics experts are—to start to look at marketing programs as part of a greater whole. it’s great to optimize within marketing, but as we all know, marketing is just one piece of business success.
  • Third, we want to create a fact-based culture.

We’ve all heard of gut-based decision making, right? I get this vision of a fat guy with a cigar chomped in his mouth and his suspenders between his thumbs barking about how “My gut has never failed me yet!”

That’s not it at all. Marketers don’t operate from the gut, we operate from talent. We rely on our talent to develop creative programs that will, in general, be successful.

What we have not done in our organizations is to make room for the facts before we start to exert our creative energies. We tend to think that we have hired good people and they should simply go forth and do their best.

But we need to create the organizational patience—the time and tolerance—to gather the facts about the prospects of success before we go forward. And that means that we need to change our thinking to be more like financial analysts and engineers.

More left-brained, in other words.

Good car companies don’t skip crash testing of their new models, even if the new model is not much different than the previous ones that have done just fine in testing.

What do you think?

Filed Under: Marketing Metrics and Analytics Tagged With: , , ,

Get Beneath the Surface with "Deep Metaphors"

August 19, 2008 by

We often complain that B2B products and services don’t appeal to customers at a personal level. But maybe we’re just not trying hard enough.

Jerry Zaltman, a Harvard Business School professor, has an interesting theory about how to reach customers below the surface, called “deep metaphors.” In this excellent interview, Zaltman defines deep metaphors as “fundamental frames or lenses that we use to orient ourselves to the world around us. They work largely below awareness or in our subconscious minds and shape and reshape just about everything we think, feel, hear, say, and do. They are almost a secret or hidden language of thought and action.”

As an example of how to reach the subconscious, Zaltman shows a Michelin tire commercial in which a baby is sitting inside a tire that is floating on water during a light rain. Inside the tire, pairs of stuffed animals surround the baby—any resemblance to Noah’s Ark is purely intentional, says Zaltman. In interviews that Zaltman did with viewers of the commercial, he heard Michelin portrayed as the holder of safety for families.

In all, there are seven deep metaphors, says Zaltman. In this article, they are defined as:

  • Balance (equilibrium)
  • Transformation (changing states or status)
  • Journey (as in life)
  • Container (keeping things in and keeping things out)
  • Connection (feelings of belonging or exclusion)
  • Resource (providing survival)
  • Control

Counted together, these seven metaphors account for 70 percent of our inner feelings, according to Zaltman, who helps companies uncover these metaphors through extensive interviews with customers through his consulting firm.

It’s an expensive process, no doubt. But it got me thinking. Perhaps we could use these metaphors to guide some of our programs with customers in B2B.

I think B2B technology marketers should pay particular attention to the metaphor of connection. In hundreds of interviews with technology people, I’ve always noticed their passion for the profession. Indeed, I think technology people are more loyal to their community of practice than they are to their companies. Anyone willing to work for free (as in the open source movement) is fired by passion.

And two of the passions that fire the open source movement are connection and recognition. In survey after survey of open source contributors, they always cite recognition by their peers—as expressed by downloads of their code—as their main motivation.

I think we in marketing should keep this quest for connection in mind when developing our programs and campaigns. What do you think?

Filed Under: Marketing Strategy Tagged With: ,

What Habits Do We Want to Instill in B2B Buyers?

July 18, 2008 by

In the West, we tend to think of disease prevention as being all about vaccinations. But that’s because we have institutionalized all the other ways of preventing disease, like clean drinking water, sanitation, and regular bathing. In part, we’re safer from disease than people in other parts of the world because we can afford to do all these things while others can’t.

But according to this article in the New York Times, it’s also because marketers have trained us to be clean. It’s a habit, not necessarily a choice. It is one of many automatic habits that constitute 45% of our actions every day, drilled into us by Consumer Packaged Goods companies like Procter & Gamble. Evidence for this is in the developing world, where diseases and other problems caused by dirty hands kill a child every 15 seconds, according to the Times. And the article claims that about half those deaths could be prevented with the regular use of soap.

But getting people to use soap is hard. Our regular use of it is the result of hundreds of millions of dollars spent by the CPG companies to find the “subtle cues in consumers’ lives that corporations could use to introduce new routines.” The routines are reinforced, of course, by relentless advertising.

Not all the campaigns work. A Vanderbilt study cited by the Times said that some anti-drug campaigns actually made viewers do more drugs, while anti-AIDS commercials raised the rates of unprotected sex.

The trick in getting people to wash their hands, according to researchers, is to get them to associate a specific action with specific places or moods. In places like Africa, that meant getting people to associate going to the bathroom with “a sense of disgust” that would cue people to wash their hands. Since bathrooms replaced open pits for many people, they often didn’t see the act of going there as disgusting but rather an improvement.

So a consortium of advertisers created a series of ads showing people emerging from bathrooms with purple stains on their hands to build the disgusting cue. It worked. Hand washing went up dramatically.

This kind of story reduces marketing to its most elemental level. But it also makes you think. If marketing is all about cues and habits, what kinds of cues and habits are we instilling in B2B buyers?

I know the habit we want to instill: that buyers associate us with learning. Thought leadership is the cue and an association with learning is the habit. In every interaction with our companies, buyers need to believe that they will learn something about their businesses that they didn’t know before.

What are the cues and habits you are instilling?

Filed Under: Marketing Strategy Tagged With: ,

How Can B2B Use Apple's "Skim and Penetrate" Strategy?

April 17, 2008 by

Apple is on the verge of making real inroads into the business market, say analysts and academics in this Knowledge at Wharton article.

Yeah, we’ve heard this before.

But maybe this time it’s really going to happen. We’ve all heard about the encroaching consumerization of IT, as the lines between home and work blur and employees bring their applications from home—the most successful of which worship at Apple’s altar of intuitive interface design—into work with them.

Apple is riding this wave with its iPhone. As a marketer, you can’t help but wonder if there was a method to Apple’s madness of making the initial iPhone irresistible to consumers but nearly unusable for businesses. Think about it. Apple is nowhere in the enterprise today. Which do you think would work better as a strategy for breaking into that market:

1. Another cry wolf declaration from Apple that (yet again) it has a product that works as well for businesses as it does for consumers—which falls on deaf ears in the IT department, or

2. Optimize the product for consumer use and convert vice presidents of sales into frothing iTards who start peppering the CIO with emails about how great the phone is and demanding that they equip the sales force with a PDA (which the iPhone is, after all) that actually works and is easy to use.

A Wharton professor, Peter Fader, has anointed the latter as a bone fide strategy, calling it “skim and penetrate.” Here’s the core part of the article that you should memorize:

“Fader calls Apple’s approach a “skim and penetrate strategy” in which Apple “skims” a group of early consumer adopters—say CEOs enamored of a new gadget—and later hopes that these adopters will evangelize the product and help it reach broader adoption.”

My question for you is, how can this strategy work for B2B providers that have not burnished a shiny reputation with consumers? Strip Apple’s allure down to its essence and you get two things: ease of use and elegant design. Two attributes that haven’t exactly caught fire in B2B.

Okay, so consider the skim and penetrate part of this. How could B2B players get “consumers”—i.e. business people who matter–to evangelize your products to the organization? I’m going to get a little silly to jog your thinking. Could there be a “home” version of your software that’s free to use—and that may not even come close to mimicking its enterprise functionality. Indeed, it may have different function entirely, but simply introduces people to you and and your products?

In B2B, the attraction and evangelizing is reversed. IT falls in love with a B2B product and tries to sell it to the business. It’s usually a disaster, because what’s optimized for IT—I’ll categorize this loosely as rational appeal—rarely works for business people, who respond to emotional appeal: look, feel, application to their personal goals.

Yet what is optimized for the consumer can be made to work well for IT.

Is Apple on to something here that we have missed?

Filed Under: Marketing Strategy Tagged With: , , ,

Getting Started in Social Media: An Interview and Podcast with SAP's Steve Mann

March 19, 2008 by

Podcast: Getting Started with Social Media with SAP’s Steve Mann Part 1

Podcast: Getting Started with Social Media with SAP’s Steve Mann Part 2


Here’s my edited interview with SAP’s Steve Mann, who is creating and implementing a social media strategy for the B2B software giant. With his personal interest in science and sociology, Steve has some insightful views on the human side of implementing a social media strategy. I’ve also included a two-part, edited Kochcast with Steve if you’d rather listen than read.

Chris Koch: Steve, what do you think should be driving B2B companies’ strategies in social media today?

Steve Mann: The dynamics of most markets have changed dramatically over the last few years. We have gone from being a supplier-centric economy where the supplier is in control to a buyer-centric economy where the buyer is in control. And these buyers are demanding transparency from their suppliers.

One of the best ways to drive that transparency is through the use of social media. It has become a conversational economy where customers expect to be able to talk to suppliers and they get really turned off when suppliers talk at them. Social media is what enables that conversation between the suppliers and buyers to happen.

Chris Koch: We’re getting a lot of questions from ITSMA members asking, Where do I start with a social media strategy? There are so many different things that they could be doing, that many don’t end up doing anything. What’s the first thing that people should do to get started?

Steve Mann: It’s been our experience that there are a lot of things happening in companies around social media which organizations don’t even know about. So, one of the first places to start is actually to take an audit of what’s happening in your organization.

Through our audit at SAP, we found that there are a number of grassroots initiatives around social media that we are really happy that we know about for two reasons: Number one, we can take advantage of synergies in those efforts and number two, we can use the enthusiasm and the passion around these grassroots initiatives to drive an overall social media strategy.

So, for example, SAP has an internal social networking project that launched a couple of months ago called “Harmony,” which has over five thousand SAP employees involved.

And another good opportunity is our SAP Developer Network and Business Process Expert community platforms, which, combined, have over one million community members already.

Chris Koch: Can you talk a little bit more about Harmony? How did that get started, and what are the goals of that?

Steve Mann: Well, it got started because there was a realization that we needed a better way to connect individuals with one another inside SAP. The informal networks that people create at SAP are very powerful in helping you perform your daily business tasks and so we wanted to create tools that enable individuals to make those connections easier and to collaborate more effectively.

But Harmony also comes from the realization that our employee base is changing rapidly. There are 76 million millennials—people born after 1977—that are now entering the workforce, and one of their expectations is that they have the tools and the technology that enable them to easily collaborate across functional groups. Harmony does that.

Chris Koch: What are some of the highlights of Harmony’s functionality?

Steve Mann: Well, for us it’s the ability to profile ourselves and to develop expertise roles and a behavior-based profile of an individual. Say somebody is looking for a person who has social media skills and customer experience skills. They can do a search on Harmony and my name will pop up. So it enables you to easily identify those individuals who you could need on any given project.

Number two, it will also allow integration into SAP’s transactional systems—obviously, we use our own transactional systems. Harmony enables you to run the workflow and the processes that support any given project at SAP.

Chris Koch: What prerequisites do you need to have internally in terms of social media before going externally?

Steve Mann: Number one, do you have a culture where you allow experimentation and have a high tolerance for failure? Because frankly, failure is big part of social media and social networking initiatives because we are still so early in the evolution of strategies and technologies.

For example, if you are a very strong command-and-control type of organization, it may be much more difficult for you to implement either an internal or external social media strategy. It’s difficult to maintain that traditional sense of control in an organization that truly implements a 360-degree social media strategy for both internal collaboration as well as for external collaboration with the market.

Secondly, do you also have tolerance for negative commentary in the market about your organization? If not, you should stay away from social media because customers will see through any efforts to control them or their messages.

The third assessment factor is to discover the real pain points that can be addressed with a social media strategy. Is it my communication strategy? Do I need to be closer to the market? Is it around co-innovation? Am I not being innovative enough in my products and services or is there not enough uptake of my products and services and if so, why?

Well, to answer those questions, I need to get closer to the market and one of the best ways to get closer to the market is to co-create with customers and partners.

Chris Koch: Can you give us an example of how you would use social media to do co-creation with customers?

Steve Mann: Let’s say that I am planning SAP’s next-generation CRM system. We go out and solicit “voice of the customer” input into the product development cycle. We ask customers what they need in terms of capability that we should be delivering into the solution. So the customers are actively influencing what the product does from generation to generation of that product.

We also do that on the content side. We have many plans to develop user-generated content. Many times customers and prospects do not necessarily want to speak to a supplier. They would rather speak to another customer.

And so by enabling a prospect to talk to an existing SAP customer, there is a user-generated content component. For example, the content that a prospect is getting about SAP solutions could potentially come from another customer and not SAP. That is in fact what happens today on SDN, the SAP Developer Network.

Chris Koch: How do you know whether your existing customer service infrastructure is ready to handle all the communications that occur in social media? For example, let’s say a customer posts a complaint on a blog. There is an expectation in the back of his or her mind that somehow everyone across the company is reading this and that someone is going to get back to him.

Steve Mann: The first issue is don’t do social media if you are not willing to hear negative things about your company. It’s a conversation and in any conversation there are positives and negatives and you have to take the good with the bad.

Secondly, when an individual gives feedback to a company—no matter whether that feedback is negative or positive—that individual deserves to be engaged with. And so the people, the processes and tools need to in place to engage with that individual and not only say, hey, we heard you, but here is what we are going to do about it.

It’s critical that organizations realize that social media drives a greater degree of customer intimacy than ever before. You are much closer to your customers and they are much closer to you, which is a good thing and a bad thing.

It’s a bad thing in that if you don’t manage it well, it can hurt your brand. It’s a great thing in that customer intimacy promotes greater customer loyalty, customer loyalty promotes more repeat business, which in turn promotes greater satisfaction with the brand.

Chris Koch: Let’s talk about content. Marketers hear over and over—and ITSMA research shows—that customers want to talk to each other and get peer recommendations. But then marketers set up an online community and nothing happens. Nobody says anything; it just dies. What content should marketers provide so that you can generate some real good discussion?

Steve Mann: Well, again it goes back to this notion of co-creation. I would never just create a forum for a customers to talk without first figuring out what customers want to talk about.

And the way you do that is you need to interview a lot of customers and really understand what’s on their minds, what issues they would want to talk about and then you build the community of interest that will focus on those issues.

You then have to market these capabilities just like you market anything else. People need to know that they exist. People need to understand what the value would be to them and what the benefits are to them for becoming members and taking time out of their day to participate.

Then, finally once you get those folks in there, yes these discussions need to be moderated so that they stay on track. But my advice to companies that are looking to do this is to stay out of the way and let the customers talk to one another.

Great things will happen when they have the opportunity to talk to one another, but you have to provide the forum, you have to provide the right topics and you have to provide the right moderation.

Another equally important strategy is to go to where our customers are and listen and participate in their communities. SAP has other communities like ASUG, SDN, BPX, and Diamond where we engage customers directly. Through participation in these communities we not only hear what our customers are telling us but we begin to understand what they are saying.

Chris Koch: Should you create communities around fairly narrow topic areas? Is that more likely to get them talking?

Steve Mann: Well, I think that’s a very good point, Chris. As a matter of fact, my prediction for 2008 is that you will see a lot more closed and proprietary social networks developing rather than these large, broad, open social networks like Facebook and MySpace.

Chris Koch: And why is that?

Steve Mann: Because I think people want to coalesce around specific interests and talk to people who have expertise and capability in their particular area. It goes back to this notion of compelling content. If you are a lawyer and you want to find compelling content, you should go to a social network that focuses on lawyers—same thing for physicians, or engineers, or high-tech guys like me.

Chris Koch: People come to us all the time and ask, what technology should I start with in social media? Blogs? Podcasts? Second Life? I don’t think this is the right way to approach it, but people always seem to want to lead with the technology. What do you think?

Steve Mann: I get the same questions all the time. Chris, it’s an impossible question to answer because there are hundreds of different solutions out there. When people ask me this question I ask what business problem they are trying to solve. Once they have told me what the business problem is then I will recommend a solution.

Chris Koch: Okay, let’s talk about the future. In our research people say that the most bang for they get for their marketing buck comes from in-person meetings around a topic or thought leadership. Should the goal of social media marketing be to create an online version of those in person meetings?

Steve Mann: That’s an interesting question. I can tell you what’s happening in SAP. One of the things we are doing is exploring virtual events and bringing people together online in virtual event spaces to really interact and collaborate with one another.

We’re building out some tools to do that now and we are going to be holding one of our first virtual events shortly and the goal is not necessarily to replace real time events because there is nothing like networking in real time with other individuals.

But the goal is to provide alternative methods of communication and collaboration. There will always be other opportunities to do that real time networking and we will never move away from those, but it allows us in a cost-effective manner to really bring people together for collaboration and knowledge transfer and that’s what it’s all about as far as SAP is concerned.

Chris Koch: Let’s talk about other ways social media will impact existing marketing tactics. For example, how do you see the traditional case study changing?

Steve Mann: First, I would move away from static customer stories and replace them with live reference stories—such as videos that tell the story.

Barring that, I would want to try to get the customer to blog about his experiences, or allow me to record video about his experience or his company—to make communications and entertainment merge into something of real “communitainment” value. In that way I think you drive a level of stickiness around the content that you could not possibly achieve in a standard, static case study.

Chris Koch: You talked about the rise of the Millennials before. Can you say more about the generational issues that will impact social media?

Steve Mann: There are going to be and continue to be generational differences in the way people consume content and information and you need to take a multi-generational approach to how you communicate with your market. I actually recommend that companies hire inter-generational experts.

Chris Koch: What do you mean when you say that?

Steve Mann: Individuals that have expertise in understanding generation differences both in your workforce as well as in your market and can help you attune your strategies to those generational differences.

Chris Koch: So would that be like a change management consultant?

Steve Mann: Well, these individuals really will do a number of things for you. First, they will educate you on the intricacies of intergenerational differences between Millennials and Gen Xers and Boomers. They will help you construct your appropriate plans to inform and educate not only your executives, but the people who have to tell the stories to the market. And they can help guide you on tone, process and policy for each specific generational segment.

For example, Boomers may not care if your IT department blocks access to Facebook from inside the firewall, but the Millenials will. They have an expectation that those tools will be available there for their life, both professional and personal. Social media is not some passing fad with them. They are digital natives. They have grown up with the Internet and they expect to be able to access it whenever, wherever, and however they want. It’s really important to understand that their individual values are not going to change over time. So if companies want to attract, retain, manage and motivate young employees and customers over the next generation of workers, it’s the companies that need to adapt—not the workers. That’s the big one.

Finally, you need to train your leaders to lead differently. The leader almost has to be a little bit of a therapist, because the individuals that you are working with to deploy social media are very self-sufficient individuals who are highly networked and highly collaborative to begin with. They require more passive listening and a teaching management style. You need to set expectations carefully with them. I know I am focusing a lot on the human side here, but I really believe that it’s the human side that makes a technology implementation effective.

Chris Koch: Meanwhile, all we keep hearing about is RSS and other technologies.

Steve Mann: Yeah, I mean if you think about it, if the goal of SAP’s social media strategy is to create increased collaboration and intimacy between individuals, well, what I am asking of these individuals?

I am asking them to become more social and frankly you either are social, or you are a little bit social, or you are not social at all…it is who you are. So all you can do is give them the tools and techniques to be social in the workforce, but that means you need to manage them differently, you need to lead them differently and you need to set expectations differently.

Chris Koch: Can existing communities and social media tools like Facebook be substitutes for building your own tools?

Steve Mann: Well, I think that if you are a brand that will resonate well with the demographics of Facebook, then you can go ahead and generate a Facebook page and you should try to use the social ads and infrastructure that Facebook or MySpace provides to do that.

Marketing has gone from a mass volume broadcast one side suite or a message platform to a one-on-one, word of mouth, referral based marketing model. We have actually gone back in time to the 1600s and the 1700s, as Seth Godin characterizes it. Facebook and MySpace provide excellent environments for trusted referral marketing and that is why we have talked so much today about this notion of creating compelling content in communities where the supplier can step out of the way and connect prospects to the customer. Because at end of the day that is trusted referral marketing, it’s one-on-one marketing, and there is no more powerful type of marketing than that.

Chris Koch: What lessons would you recommend that B2B marketers take to heart from what the B2C is doing in social media these days?

Steve Mann: Oh! Good question. All I would say is that it goes to that notion of trusted referral marking and that B2C marketers and B2C tactics in general have infiltrated the B2B space.

So those customers who used to do a search on Google and used to talk to other people and check out the reputations of folks recommending a book or a soft drink, well you know what, those same people are using those same tactics in a B2B environment. And so those same environments where powerful B2C communication takes place are also ripe and right for B2Bs.

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