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The power of self-regulation in customer relationships

June 18, 2010 by

Simple things seem to be the most powerful, don’t they? I think that’s one of the reasons that when people write about an archetypal business, they often use bicycles.

Advertisement for Columbia Bicycles from 1886.
Image via Wikipedia

Clear, simple product that everyone understands, right? Everyone knows what a bike shop does. They sell and fix bikes and they offer accessories.

The bowl of quarters
But Chris Zane thinks of this simple business model differently. He sees it entirely as a service business. And he aims to give away (as in free) as many services to his customers as possible. To bring this across, he uses a simple metaphor: a bowl full of quarters.

In this video of a conference presentation Zane did (don’t bother with the whole thing, just scroll down in the box marked “Chapters” to “Zane’s Cycles”—it’s short and sweet), he offers the bowl to people in the audience and asks them to take from the bowl. He doesn’t tell them how many to take, he just puts the bowl in front of them.

The power of self-regulation
As you might suspect, nobody digs a paw into the thing and scoops out all the quarters. They each take one. This is the power of self-regulation.

The bowl represents the lifetime value of the customer. Zane did research on the bike industry and figures that the average lifetime value of each of his customers is $12,500—from the first bike they purchase to the last, as well as all the accessories. At a 45% margin, that translates to $5600 in profit.

When Zane started out, he faced competition from much larger bike shops, so he couldn’t afford to compete on price of the product.

Can you afford to hand out quarters?
Instead, he started handing out quarters. First, it was free one-year maintenance with each bike. Then when competitors matched it, he made it two years, and then finally, lifetime.

When a customer needs something small, like a nut or bolt, Zane trains his staff (and training is important) to just give them away. If a customer tries to fix a flat himself and screws it up, they get a new tube—no questions asked. After all, what’s a $5 tube when you have $5600 to spend?

For those of us struggling with B2B marketing and all its complexities, this will help clarify some core issues.

Watch the video and you will come away inspired to rethink how you relate to your customers and what your true costs are in serving them. You may even create your own bowl of quarters.

Please say what you think of the video in the comments section.

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Filed Under: Customer Relationships Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

Integrating mobile into B2B marketing

May 27, 2010 by

Great conferences have impact that lasts long after the day (or two or three) that they occur. MarketingProfs’ B2B Forum is one of those conferences. For example, the Twitter stream from this thing (#MPB2B) is still going strong weeks later. You should check it out; it’ll give you a great list of B2B marketers to follow.

Another sign of a great event is the people it attracts. I met two of my favorite B2B bloggers at the event: Christine Kerley (AKA @cksays) who writes CK’s Blog and Jeff Cohen (@jeffreylcohen) who, along with Kipp Bodnar writes the Social Media B2B blog. If you’re trying to stay on top of B2B marketing trends, you should be reading both of these blogs.

CK kicks butt and takes names. She collared me in the session I ran at the Forum on B2B mobile marketing and sat us both down with Jeff, who interviewed us about our views on the subject. CK has tons more content on B2B mobile that you should check out.

I’d love to hear your views on our interview.

B2B Mobile Marketing from Jeffrey L. Cohen on Vimeo.

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How Facebook’s privacy disasters will change B2B marketing

May 21, 2010 by

Have you ever noticed that your Facebook profile page looks like one of those horrible qualification forms that we make our customers fill out? If you go to Facebook and look at your profile, your immediate reaction is going to be that it’s asking for too much information.

Social media is beginning to teach us that long qual forms are going the way of the dodo. I’m still looking to pin down incontrovertible evidence of this, but anecdotally I hear from people that when they get rid of qual forms for their content the amount of engagement increases exponentially. The question that we’re asking Facebook is the question that we should be asking ourselves in our marketing: Do we really need all this information?

Facebook has built its business model around gathering as much personal information about us as possible. And just as our traditional thinking about qual forms is failing, so will Facebook’s personal-information-as-currency model. Both Facebook and we have traditionally believed that the content services that we provide—in our case studies, white papers, webinars, etc.—come at a price. It costs us money to produce this stuff, and therefore our consumers must pay a price. That price is personal information, company information, and buying intent. For Facebook, it’s personal information that advertisers can use to target us.

Customers are less willing to give up information
Especially as social media takes off, we’re finding that prospects and customers have less and less patience for giving us that information. The expectation on Twitter is that 99.9% of the time any link that you put in a tweet is going to lead to accessible content. Twitter etiquette, at least as I observe it, is that if the information that you’re linking to is gated, you take up some of that precious 140-character real estate to inform people of that fact.

It seems that Facebook has staked its future not on the interactions that occur between people on its network but on the idea that the value is in the personal information of its participants. This is a disaster if you ask me.

Now let’s compare your profile page on Facebook with your profile page on Twitter. It’s like the difference between someone asking for your e-mail in exchange for a white paper versus them asking for your salutation, your company size, when you are going to buy, your mother’s maiden name and on and on ad nausea.

The key is the interaction—not the information
See, what I think Twitter understands that Facebook and LinkedIn and all of the other permission-based networks don’t is that the key is in the interaction, not in the information.

I admit it; I’m a Twitter bigot. I find much more value in Twitter than in any of the other social media networks. So take my comments with a grain of salt. But I will tell you that this week I attended an excellent event run by Silver pop called the B2B marketing University in Boston. Because of my Twitter interactions with people in the B2B realm, I had all the information I needed to be able to approach four people I recognized at the event (if you’re reading this, you know who you are!) and engage them in real substantive discussions—even though we had never met.

I don’t know what schools they went to, or where they worked before their current jobs, but I know what they think about B2B marketing and I have re-tweeted their stuff and I know they’re smart. Those interactions on Twitter opened up a possibility of a relationship much more easily than being able to read their profile pages on LinkedIn or Facebook. I learn about them and who they are based on my interactions with them and in sharing content that is of interest to all of us.

Viral vs. permission-based
It’s this viral relationship model of Twitter that wins in every privacy showdown between Facebook and its users. There is a cottage industry developing out there for people who want to protect you from Facebook. Reclaimprivacy.org is a small browser based program that practices a kind of benevolent vigilantism and helps you change your vulnerable privacy settings. It’s a great service, but it only reinforces the perception of Facebook as Big Brother. The privacy issues for Facebook are going to be on the cover of Time magazine next week. There’s would be joy in Twitterville this week if it didn’t seem that the founders of Twitter have none of the ego and contempt for competitors that most businesses seem to have. (Of course, it may be a little bit easier to be this way when your own business model remains rather ill defined.)

I don’t know about you, but I’m always annoyed by people whose first question is what I do or what school I went to. But that is how we’re introduced to each other on Facebook and LinkedIn. I’d rather get to know you based on knowing that I have a shared interest with you. Frankly, I can’t imagine why 300 people would read my blog every week if that weren’t the basis of our relationship.

Ask for a relationship, not information
I think that as social media becomes more integrated into our lives and our jobs were going to see that just as with our content we are going to have to get to know one another through our interactions. We need to ask people for a relationship rather than asking them for their information. What if, next time you offer a white paper or video to prospects, instead of demanding their contact information, you invite them to join your community on LinkedIn, or sign up for an event, or follow you on Twitter? This would be the basis of a much more substantive encounter—and potential relationship—just as I had with my Tweeps this week in Boston.

We should all take a lesson from Facebook and understand that getting information from people is not a zero-sum game. It’s a gradual process—the currency of which is trust and exchange of value.

What do you think?

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Filed Under: Customer Relationships, Lead Management, Social Media Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Six ways that marketing needs to lead the organization in social media

May 14, 2010 by

Social media creates the need for marketing to lead within the organization.

At least that’s the conclusion we reached at ITSMA recently when we did our social media survey (there’s a free summary if you’re interested).

Now what do we mean when we say that? We mean that within the organization the leadership of social media is falling to marketing. We think that’s because social media is seen primarily as a tool for marketing. Therefore, the marketing group is becoming the default center of social media, right?

I’m really excited about this because it’s rare for a function like marketing to get an opportunity to lead the entire organization. But think about it. Marketers are the not the only ones who are going to be doing social media. Our subject matter experts (SMEs) are talking to customers. We’re seeing HR departments using social media for recruiting. We’re seeing companies use social media to bring customers into the product and service development processes to collaborate on new ideas and improvements. We’re seeing companies use social media for customer support. (Shameless plug here: My favorite B2B blogger Paul Dunay is going to talk about how Avaya uses social media for customer support at ITSMA’s Marketing Leadership Forum on May 25-26.) The entire organization needs to get involved in social media and marketing needs to lead that effort.

I have to say that we were pleasantly surprised and I have to admit a little shocked when we discovered that many marketers seem to get this intuitively—67% of marketers said they are taking on the responsibility of identifying the appropriate subject matter experts and assigning them to engage with their target audience and influencers in the online conversations that are happening out there.

But if marketing is truly going to be the catalyst for social media in the organization, many things are going to need to change. To be a leader, you have to have your own house in order. That means that marketers need to integrate social media with the larger marketing and business strategies. That’s why at ITSMA we’re calling 2010 The Year of Marketing Transformation (sound the bugles!—a little portentous, I know, but we really believe it and the data really shows it). And social media is the main driver behind the need for this transformation. We don’t think marketing can afford to continue doing more with less. With marketing budgets as percent of revenue being an all-time low — less than 1% — social media can’t just be another add-on to everything else that marketing is already doing.

Remember that marketing can’t do this alone. Social media gives us the opportunity to bring the rest of the organization into our efforts. But to do this effectively, we have to define new processes, roles and competencies for marketing and we have to play a large role in leading social media for others inside the organization.

So in our research and our discussions with members and influencers on social media, we’ve identified six major areas that marketers need to focus on to lead the rest of the organization effectively.

  • Research. We have to figure who we want our SMEs to talk to so they don’t waste their efforts.
  • Ideas and content. We need to create an idea engine within the organization to help SMEs come up with things to Twitter and blog about.
  • New roles. We’re seeing a role that is sort of a director of ideas and content emerge. Someone who helps identify smart ideas and people within the organization and makes decisions about how to develop them. We’re also seeing directors of community—Jeremiah Owyang tracks these people on his blog.
  • Governance. Social media policies are the foundation of social media governance. And even small companies can benefit from having a social media council. Listen to IBM’s Sandy Carter talk about how she set up a social media council in her group at IBM.
  • Training. We shouldn’t just turn employees loose without helping them learn about the tools. But we also need to teach them about the strategies for using those tools. Telstra has a cool example of social media training that anyone can watch.

What do you think? What have I left out here? Anything to add?

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Filed Under: Idea Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Social Media Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Why Tut would have been buried with his iPhone

May 7, 2010 by

Sure, sure, I know it’s Apple and Apple is to the ’10s what Sony was to the ’80s. But there must be more to the fact that the iPhone/iTouch are the fastest growing technology launch in history (and the iPad so far is on pace to outdo them both).

Now of course you know that the iPhone and iPad are popular because of the way they look. The smooth contours and the shimmering black glass bezels make the devices look more like something out of a Swarovski store than a Best Buy. They bring out our primitive attractions to the bright and shiny. (For sure Tut would have shoved some of the gold trinkets aside to be buried with his iPhone and iPad.)

The default Home screen of the iPhone shows mo...
Image via Wikipedia

But there’s something else here that brings out another primal drive in us. When you look at the screen of the iPhone or iPad you see beautiful little jewel-like icons beaming at you from beneath the glass. What I realized is that the iPhone and iPad aren’t just jewels, they are jewel cases. They contain our collection of applications. And these collections bring out our hunter gatherer instincts like any other collectable—from beanie babies to giant balls of string.

The reason is the iTunes/AppStore model. It lets us do everything that feels good about collecting:

  • Collecting is social. All collecting is driven in part by the desire to connect with others and show off and share what we have with them and talk about it all. Though iTunes could be a lot more social than it is, most applications have dozens or hundreds of reviews. The next step is to create communities around the applications so they can all geek out on it together.
  • Collecting is fun. Is there anything fun about collecting applications for your PC? Though the threat is much less than it was, installing new applications on PCs has always meant the possibility of taking down other applications or the computer itself. And the experience of finding and adding applications is almost always different from application to application. You can’t have fun when you’re anxious. Though the iTunes application store is tightly controlled—probably more tightly than it should be—it is easy and predictable.
  • Collecting is valuable. One of the most depressing aspects of PC applications is that they are basically time bombs that self-destruct with each passing generation of operating system or processor. Now, there’s no guarantee that our iPhone/iPad application collections will survive each new generation of device, but if they don’t, they’re cheap to replace. And in the meantime, they update themselves automatically. All we need to know when we’re collecting is that we’re not being idiots for investing our time in it (it’s okay to look like an idiot for what we collect—in fact, that’s part of the fun).

How to use iPhone apps for marketing
I’m not saying that the iPhone/iPad is going to take over the world, only that the model Apple has developed—and which every other phone manufacturers now trying to copy—is going to endure and will cross over into the business realm.

But as marketers, if we’re going to break into someone’s collection, the bar is set really high. Applications that convert your voice to text or instruct you on which turn to take are hard to top.

We must have the center of gravity for our mobile apps elsewhere. We need to create vibrant communities that customers will value so much that they will want a mobile application so they can keep up with the action anytime from anywhere. That’s how we get into their collections.

What do you think?

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Where is your mobile marketing center of gravity?

April 30, 2010 by

For marketers considering creating mobile device apps, the bar has been set very high. I mean, c’mon, a free app that gives you voice directions to your destination? An app (also free) that lets you convert your spoken words into written emails?

These are hard acts to follow. (I’m sure you have others; tell me about them in the comments—I’m an iPhone geek in my spare time.)

iPhone Geocaching Toolkit
Image by TahoeSunsets via Flickr

So how are we as marketers supposed to compete with apps like these? I’m going to be moderating a panel on this question (among others) at next week’s MarketingProfs’ B2B Forum in Boston.

From phones to computers
Mobile is going to become an important part of our marketing, whether we like it or not. The number of smartphones continues to explode. More important, the way that people use these phones is changing. According to a recent survey by ABI Research, 28% of respondents said that they access web sites from their phones at least once per day—up 75% in a year. And while 3G makes the download speeds bearable, the price of the handsets continues to drop—making them really cheap and increasingly functional computers.

Our customers and prospects—especially the younger ones—will be looking at smartphones as one of their primary computing platforms—if not the primary platform. I always take analysts’ forecasts with a grain of salt, but ABI’s prediction that mobile marketing (ads on mobile phones) will be a $4 billion business by 2014 makes you stop and think.

How do we compete?
I’m sure that there will be opportunities and reasons for B2B to advertise on these things eventually, but that’s the easy part. The hard part is finding a way to get and keep people’s attention by carving out a spot on the phones next to the magic voice and directional applications.

Seems impossible, doesn’t it? On the surface, yes. But the reason that these applications are so impressive is not because they were developed as standalone mobile applications but because they take advantage of a deep reservoir of thinking and intellectual property developed over many years—elsewhere. Dragon has been perfecting its voice-to-text abilities for decades through its PC software and MapQuest (I still prefer it to the Google Maps gorilla) has been honing its route guidance for many years.

Good mobile apps start somewhere else
Their mobile apps are like tender shoots that emerge from the trunk of the tree; with that supply of DNA, food, and protection, they have a much better chance of survival than a seed dropped on the ground.

I think that’s how we have to view mobile apps for B2B marketing. While it may be possible to build an outstanding standalone app that wows your audience, I think the chances are pretty similar to an individual seed’s chances of surviving to become a mature oak—really slim.

And Mother Nature doesn’t seem to mind having lots of oak trees that all look pretty much the same. Your audience will mind. And frankly, they are really, really jaded.

We have to think about how mobile can be like the tender shoot that sprouts from the well-established tree if we’re going to be able to compete effectively.

But first, we need to establish the reason for going mobile. We can’t simply create an application that links to static website content, for example. Mobile doesn’t magically make static content exciting.

There has to be a purpose behind adding mobile. At ITSMA, we’re seeing four main reasons for doing it:

  • Help. The classic B2B mobile applications have been internally focused, giving maintenance people access to service information while they are out in the field. Is there a reason for you to offer whatever help you give to customers through mobile? Could your salespeople benefit from mobile access to a sales enablement application giving them advice in the field for helping customers?
  • Location. The addition of GPS chips to smartphones makes it possible to use people’s location as a driving force behind the mobile application. Right now Foursquare is the Twitter of location. People like it, but they’re not quite sure what to do with it or how it can be used for marketing (and making money). One possibility is to use location at your events so that attendees can find each other or share schedules and information. But Twitter and Foursquare already do that, so again, you need something more behind the app than just the location feature.
  • Continuity. Do you have situations where customers and prospects feel they might miss something by being disconnected from you even for a short while? An example of this is user groups. I could see techies catching up on technical issues while they have some down time at an airport, for example.
  • Timeliness. Of course, the Blackberry is the quintessential timeliness mobile app. Is there any aspect of what you do that customers would want to be alerted about the moment it happens?

B2B mobile marketing case studies
At the MarketingProfs event next week, I’ll have two panelists who have sprouted shoots from the tree. (Both are winners of the 2009 ITSMA Marketing Excellence Awards—the 2010 Awards deadline is June and anyone can enter).

Xerox Global Services (XGS) built a mobile application as part of its internal sales tool called Competipedia. It’s a wiki-based tool where salespeople can go to find and share competitive intelligence. The mobile app that hooks into Competipedia is justified because XGS’ salespeople often need information while on the road (help) and can use competitive information as soon as it is available (timeliness).

Consulting firm CSC meanwhile, built a tree trunk called WikonnecT that is a B2B online community for the insurance industry. CSC added a mobile shoot to WikonnecT because its community is essentially a user group on steroids. CSC has been building the complex software that runs the processes of big insurance companies for decades—a kind of ERP for insurance. By making its software development processes transparent within WikonnecT—e.g., people can argue about and lobby for new features at any time and CSC responds within the community—there is a vitality to the conversation that satisfies the timeliness and continuity requirements for mobile.

As you can see, both Competipedia and WikonnecT’s success in mobile depends on having the center of gravity for the applications be outside the mobile apps themselves.

What do you think? Is this the way B2B marketers should approach building all mobile apps?

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It’s official: Marketing owns social media management. Now what?

April 16, 2010 by

We just completed our ITSMA survey on social media. I’ll be reporting some of the major findings here and at ITSMA.com over the coming weeks.

But one finding sticks out. Marketing owns social media management. That’s right. It’s our job.

In our survey, we asked, “In your company, is marketing the catalyst for social media being used by others in the company (product development, HR, etc.)?” 68% of our respondents said yes.

That means that if we are to keep up with our competitors, we’re going to have to take the lead on developing a strategy not only for marketing with social media, but for getting the rest of the organization involved as well.

Will social become a silo within marketing?
This has big implications for how we organize marketing. The biggest implication is that we cannot afford for social media to become a silo or an add-on to our existing marketing organizations. Marketing as a percentage of revenue for technology services companies is at an all-time low—less than 1%. The Great Recession certainly has played a role in that, but the percentage has been dropping more or less steadily since before the dotcom crash, when it averaged about 3%.

Back then, we could still run lush print ads, design fancy brochures and whitepapers, create monster trade show booths, and wine and dine CIOs at the Super Bowl. And to business people, that all represented value. Salespeople and businesspeople could see the talent and creativity in the ads and brochures, relationships being made at the events, and the business cards in the fishbowl.

Today, we do a lot less of that stuff. That’s not to say that these more traditional tactics don’t work anymore and should be abandoned. But we have to find ways to stretch the dollars we do invest in those tactics farther. And we have to use other tactics that, in and of themselves, build trust and relationships with buyers.

That’s where social media comes in. So much of what I see out there today treats social media as a standalone. But the real successes I’m hearing about in B2B use social media to support and extend more traditional tactics. Such as using online communities and social media to build up interest and discussion about our traditional live events both up to, during, and after those events.

Reorganize in an integrated way
So the question for marketing becomes, how do we integrate social media? That was the number one goal of respondents in our survey for the coming year.

Social media consultant Jeremiah Owyang has a good post about different ways that he sees companies organizing for social media that you should check out. It will jog your thinking. But the question I have after reading his post is how does this fit with our existing models of marketing?

As I told Jeremiah in a comment on his post, I don’t doubt the rigor of his (as always) insightful thinking. But I wonder, are companies really reorganizing around social—and should they?

From our research we see that marketing tends to own social media for the rest of the organization. So we’re really looking at how much the marketing function is going to change as a result of social. Today, we see most marketing organizations divided up between corporate and field marketing (central and local) and basically divided up between marcom and everything else. So the real question is how does social impact the ways that we organize marketing today and how does it integrate with the things we already do?

I don’t think we can afford to create a social media silo inside the larger marketing organization. Do you? How are you fitting social into your organizational models?

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Filed Under: ITSMA Research, Marketing Strategy, Social Media Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

How to establish a voice of authority in a blog

April 9, 2010 by

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about how to get others to blog. But it’s not enough just to support bloggers. For them to be successful, we need to help them establish their voices in a blog.

The way that we establish trust and relationships with buyers is through authority. We want readers of our SMEs’ blogs to see them as experts. But you can’t establish that authority by putting a link to their LinkedIn profile on the blog. You have to establish authority through the writing voice that your SMEs use in their blogs.

It would be wonderful if your bloggers were the only experts writing about their fields. If that’s the case, great. Stop reading. But most likely, there are already other experts out there who are more expert and write better than your SMEs. In this case, just showing how smart they are won’t cut it. SMEs need an angle. Here are a few to consider:

  • Lead a niche. Pick a subject that few others have staked out. SMEs with deep expertise in a particular niche can build a strong and loyal following—if not necessarily huge blog traffic.
  • Show your age. A former colleague that I really admire managed to mention his 30 year experience in marketing into the first minute of conversation with anyone new. The voice of experience is powerful.
  • Be timely. Being the first with the latest news builds authority.
  • Have the data. This is how analysts (like me) establish their authority. They can make assertions based on what everyone is doing—not just what they themselves think.
  • Aggregator. If your SME is a person who loves to collect information, then becoming an aggregator is a route to trust. People know that they can count on this person to provide or link to the most insightful information in the topic area—no matter where it first appeared.
  • Futurist. Some SMEs are always looking to see what happens next. If they are focused on developing new offerings, for example, this is a natural voice for them.
  • Iconoclast. SMEs can construct a great voice around questioning existing practices and trends. But be careful; these SMEs need to have thick skins and handle negative comments constructively.

What suggestions do you have for establishing a voice of authority in a blog? Let’s get a conversation going.

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Filed Under: Blogging, Idea Marketing Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

How to build emotional engagement in B2B marketing

April 2, 2010 by

I got a really interesting question last week through my Skribit box: How do you use emotional engagement when talking about dry technology?

This may be the ultimate question in B2B, especially as we struggle to integrate social media into the overall marketing mix.

Let’s face it, even if it was possible to curl up in front of the fire with a glass of wine and our B2B products and services, no one would do it. Most of the things we sell are about as emotive as army ants.

That’s why I’m going to answer the question (and invite accusations of copping out) by saying that we shouldn’t try to use our dry technologies as the basis for emotional engagement.

We have to stop torturing ourselves trying to write interesting things about our dry technology. That’s what has led to the horrific vocabulary of mindless marketing speak that makes us utter things like “demonstrable value” with straight faces while deluding ourselves that it leaves an impression on customers. (Hey, it was the best thing we came up with at the meeting, so why wouldn’t customers like it, too!?)

Where are thepeople and the stories?
Journalism has long understood that people respond to other people and to stories. Those two things are built into the process. You get fired if you don’t interview people and feature them in your story. And you never get any interesting assignments if you aren’t able to communicate information through a narrative structure—a story with a number of star characters and a beginning, middle, and end.

It’s the same in B2B. It’s why our latest ITSMA marketing budget survey shows (free summary available)that thought leadership has risen to a higher priority level than in any recent year. Ideas can create an emotional connection. Okay, so it’s not big emotion, but it hits some buttons:

  • Gratitude. This company understands my pain
  • Loyalty. I may need to keep an eye on these guys in case they say something else that moves me.
  • Respect. These guys are smart.
Press photo of Sockington.
Image via Wikipedia

But for all of these things to hit, customers need to be able to connect them to people. Social media offers some new ways for us to build emotional connections with customers by connecting them with other people and their stories. (Ever wonder why Sockington is so popular? Even making a cat more like a person works.) Blogs let us feature our subject matter experts (SMEs) not just as brainiacs but as people that customers can eventually feel comfortable reaching out to directly. Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. all do that, too.

But let’s not get too hung up on social media. This has to permeate all that we do. It’s why those expensive private events work so well.

What do you think? How do you use emotional engagement when talking about dry technology?

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Filed Under: Blogging, Customer Relationships, Social Media Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

How to get others to blog

March 26, 2010 by

One of the biggest challenges for B2B social media marketers isn’t creating content, it’s helping others create content.

Marketing is the default head of social media management in most companies. And while marketers can create some social media content, they can (and should) rely on their subject matter experts (SMEs) to create most of the stuff that’s going to build trust and relationships with customers.

At our two ITSMA briefings this week in Boston and Washington on social media, (we have two more coming up in New York and Santa Clara, CA that you can attend), marketers offered up a common complaint: They have a hard time getting their SMEs to start contributing (and keep contributing) content.

It’s no surprise. Creating content such as blogs is hard. That’s why marketers have to step in and help out. Here are some ways to do it:

Send them what interests you. If you’re in tune with your SMEs, then what interests you should interest them (at least from a business perspective—no need to go nuts and take up golf). Set up an RSS feed of key news sources and bloggers and forward the good stuff to your SMEs.

Get ideas from customers. When blogger’s block sets in at IBM, bloggers can get inspiration through software that lets customers suggest the topics they’d like to see covered. (Okay, so you need to work for IBM to access it, but Skribit is available to the rest of us.)

Filter research. Customer research can provide tons of fodder for content, but you can’t just dump it on SMEs unfiltered. Pick some key themes and ask them to comment on them.

Incite them. If you see a controversial assertion or question somewhere, forward it to your SMEs and ask them to craft a thoughtful (not attacking) response and link to the original through their content.

Interview them. If your star SMEs are struggling to come up with ideas for starting a blog or for keeping one going, start thinking of yourself as a reporter. These people are your beat. You don’t have to write their posts for them, but you must interview them regularly to find out what they are hearing from customers and what trends they are seeing in the market. Just as reporters take the heat for missing a story or failing to file regularly, you have to take on the responsibility for making sure these people keep posting regularly by checking in with them regularly and getting them talking. Record the interviews and get them transcribed. Then take a look at the transcript and highlight the sections that you think would be interesting for them to write about.

Have regular pitch meetings. Very few writers are able to get their best thoughts out on paper without some help. That’s why magazines and newspapers have pitch meetings, where writers blurt out their rough ideas and get feedback from others on how to turn those ideas into cogent stories. This all happens before the writing begins. When you check in with your bloggers, ask them to talk through their ideas before they start writing. It will improve the quality of their posts and it will also help you keep them focused on the issues that matter most to your business.

Create an editorial calendar. Companies have strategies and goals. Marketers should use them to help inspire their content creators. Pick topics that matter to your customers and your business and ask your SMEs to create content for those topics. Create an editorial calendar with a new topic at least each quarter (e.g., sustainability or cloud computing). Then make a plan for hitting those topics in as many different types of content as possible (blog posts, conference presentations, videos, etc.) so that buyers can consume the information in any form they choose. And target that content to all of the stages of the buying process so that anyone encountering your content will find something that speaks to them personally.

Hire a content director. Have you noticed what’s been happening to the media lately? There are many unemployed journalists and editors out there. Hire one to help your SMEs develop and disseminate their ideas. Journalists are trained to separate the compelling ideas from the chaff and develop them with supporting evidence and case examples.

Buddy them up. If your SMEs refuse to go solo because they think it will be too much work, find them a partner or partners to share the load.

Write for them. If all else fails, you can interview them and use the transcript to write something yourself. Just don’t relieve the SMEs of the responsibility for feeding you the ideas and thinking.

What have I left out? How do you encourage your content creators?

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