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Why Twitter is for old people

June 16, 2009 by

Like many, I’m a late convert to Twitter. I avoided it for defensive reasons. I’m one of those boring people that eats the same thing for lunch almost every day. So I figured I wouldn’t have much to twitter about. I also figured that Twitter would appeal mostly to young people interested in flirting with one another in 140 characters or less.

But then I tried it and I realized that the hidden power of Twitter is in another kind of human appetite: learning.

Twitter doesn’t just add another one of those annoying Web 2.0 verbs to the English vocabulary (by the way, the co-founder of Twitter, Biz Stone, says the correct form is “to twitter”) it adds new meaning to an oldie: to follow.

Now for an old fart like me, the concept of following someone in Twitter has a much different context and meaning than it might for, say, my daughter, who is a tween and is not on Twitter. To someone her age, the concept of following immediately conjures up the issue of personal relationships—who you hate and who you like—and status—who is popular and who isn’t.

Viewed in that context, my reaction to Twitter is the same as her’s: “Yuck.”

Follow to learn
Thankfully, adults have another context for developing relationships: communities of learning. And it’s in this sense that Twitter is a goldmine for B2B marketers. Think about it. You can seek out the best thinkers in marketing—people that you’ve paid money to go see at conferences—and listen to what they have to say anytime, for free. I quickly discovered that I didn’t have to twitter about my lunch (PB&Js most days—hey, I’ve loved them since I was 5 (see how boring this is?)) and that the people I want to hear from aren’t doing that either (though the air travel tweets get a little old—travel twittering seems to be one of the few “what I’m doing now” things that people feel is worth telling everyone about, perhaps because people generally think that traveling demonstrates importance and coolness and also because its something that some people just do an awful lot of).

The two subject areas I’m most interested in in my role at ITSMA are B2B marketing in general and social media in particular. I started following people whose blogs I like in those areas and things took off from there.

An entrée to the cocktail party
The wonderful thing about following (in the business context) on Twitter is that it’s like being at a cocktail party where you see a circle of people having an interesting conversation that you can just break into—without having to know any of them or having to say something interesting. You can just listen. Even better, you’re able to send those people a signal that you think that what they have to say is interesting enough to follow. And that can be a nice ego stroke for them (if they don’t already have 40,000 followers).

Indeed, I was surprised to see that some well-known social media and marketing experts who I think have interesting things to say followed me back after I followed them. Very cool. It gives me a way to gradually get to know them and for them to get to know me—and it’s an ego stroke to think that they might actually think I have something to teach them (or they could have their Twitter accounts set up to automatically follow those who follow them). But if they don’t follow me, who cares—it doesn’t have the same social weight attached to it as getting snubbed by the popular kids in middle school (not that that ever happened to me). Nobody knows but me. And I still get what I want most out of the relationship, which is to learn.

And I’m learning a lot. Twitter for business fills a learning gap that blogging used to fill but from which most good blogs graduated from early on: linking. I don’t think much of blogs that just post links to other stuff, unless the links are organized into useful lists, which take time. I think blogs are for thinking, not linking.

But Twitter is limited to 140 characters, so linking is pretty much the only way to add real value. And now when I do my morning research and find something interesting—but not interesting enough to spark a full blog post—I can twitter it so that others can learn what I’m learning.

Create your own ad hoc community
And to my relief, that’s exactly what others are doing with Twitter, too. Like any good social media tool, Twitter’s foundation is conversation and community through sharing. I’ve already developed what I think is a powerful network of B2B and social media thinkers that is in essence an ad hoc online community.And I have lots of people working to build that community for me. As I follow more people and more people follow me, I get constant suggestions for new people to follow who I’ve never heard of before but who have interesting things to say.

There is a nice spirit of sharing among the people I follow that is self-perpetuating and contagious. For example, after shamelessly sucking content from the people I was following for a few days, I started to feel an obligation–and a challenge–to start contributing. There’s an element of competition driving this, too. You start thinking, hey, I can find some cool stuff too, you know!

Linking to learn
I immediately started to feel a responsibility to start Twittering links that I think could help others in my position. The news, advice, and references I get each day from my Twitter “friends” is better than any Google news or blog feed. Furthermore, by seeing the occasional comments about the links, I can start to develop a point of view about the content.

Every B2B marketer interested in learning more about their profession should have a Twitter account. It’s the first step to creating a personal social media platform. More about that next time.

Have you tried Twitter yet? Tell me about your experiences so far.

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

How customers will react to a crisis in your company and what to do about it

June 5, 2009 by

I’m continuing the discussion I began in my last post about when a crisis hits a brand. Geoff Dodds, Julie Schwartz and I brainstormed the different responses customers can have to a crisis and the steps you can take to address the problems.

Breaking the promise
When a crisis hits, customers make a decision about whether the promise of a brand has been broken and whether the relationship can be repaired. There are some important factors that will influence their decision and that should be considered in any brand decisions:

Existing brand image. Well-known brands have built up trust with customers and have farther to fall when a crisis hits. Coca Cola’s disastrous introduction of New Coke nearly destroyed the company because it broke the promise of continuity and reliability that had been built up with customers over the course of decades. Meanwhile, when startup airline ValuJet suffered a series of safety problems and a fatal crash in the late 90s, it quickly changed its name to AirTran. ValuJet’s lack of widespread recognition in the marketplace meant that the switch happened with little fanfare. Today, few people remember that AirTran (while certainly not a household name, either) was once ValuJet. (ITSMA’s Brand Equity Index provides a model for understanding a brand’s current image.)

Association of blame. In the court of public opinion, customers make a decision about whether the company as a whole is to blame for the crisis or whether the crisis was the work of a few rogue individuals acting outside the norms of behavior. When Computer Associates’ CEO Sanjay Kumar and some of his senior financial managers were indicted for securities fraud in 2004 for overstating company earnings in the late 90s, customers viewed the problems as the work of a few individuals rather than a sign of corruption throughout the company.

Collateral impact. If the crisis radiates widely beyond the company and damages other companies, the impact on the brand may increase. GM’s brand reputation has suffered as its missteps have affected its many suppliers, adding fuel to critics’ assertions that GM is bringing down the U.S. auto industry as a whole.

Ethical and moral impact. If the crisis is seen as being morally averse, or causes harm in ways that seem ethically and morally averse to the average person, it will affect the pace and depth of losses. When Enron management hid the company’s losses from the public and employees—even as managers cashed in their stock—and employees’ life savings evaporated, the company became permanently associated with greed and corruption. Similarly, when executives from Enron’s auditing firm, Arthur Andersen, refused to accept full responsibility for Andersen’s role in the scandal, trust in the company imploded—along with the company itself.

Speed of response. If companies are seen to be reluctant to respond to a crisis or its complications, it could have a negative impact on customer retention. For example, when certain models of Ford’s Explorer experienced tire blowouts, Ford delayed taking action with customers, blaming the tire supplier for the problems. But customers had not bought their Explorers from a tire manufacturer; they had bought them from Ford. They expected Ford to respond immediately to their requests for help. When Ford did not respond right away, it caused serious damage to the company’s reputation with customers.

Scope of response. Customers have a tendency to “forgive” brands that take more steps to resolve a crisis than the average person can envision or may even think necessary. When Johnson & Johnson responded to the Tylenol crisis by swiftly removing all bottles from the shelves (rather than just those in the areas where tainted bottles were discovered) and promising protective packaging to prevent that kind of crisis from happening again, it actually enhanced J&J’s reputation for safety and enhanced the brand’s position with customers.

Striking the right tone. Customers become highly sensitive to a company’s marketing and advertising messages in the aftermath of a crisis. If, for example, a company responds to a crisis by aggressively marketing itself to replace lost business without addressing the crisis or its impact, the company’s brand image will suffer. Marketers need to persuade the marketplace through the media that the crisis is being dealt with professionally and properly and there is clarity around the governance of the organization. Marketers should focus on getting that message out, not directly but through the media in as controlled a way as they can.
For example, when Oracle was found to have overstated its revenues in 1991, it removed its head of finance and brought in a new CFO, who announced that the company was changing its sales practices. Always known as an aggressive sales company, Oracle changed its practices for recognizing revenues so that salespeople would not be tempted to sell software before its official delivery date could be confirmed. Meanwhile, the company kept up its emphasis on research and development so that customers would see that it was still committed to offering leading edge products. The company took a different approach with customers and prospects, saying, “We’re a new Oracle.”

Use research to understand the context

In times of crisis, research with the following groups is especially important:

Customers and prospects. Research needs to be done with customers to get an aggregate sense of the degree of continued faith in the company and its ability to deliver.

Employees. Sales and delivery people are excellent barometers of the crisis because they talk directly to customers and prospects about their fears about doing business with the company in the wake of the crisis.

Analysts and influencers. Industry and financial analysts will likely have differing opinions about the current and future prospects of the company. But companies also need to find out what is being said about the company through other channels, such as the blogosphere and in customer forums.

Make choices about a brand’s future

We see B2B companies have three choices to make for their brands in the aftermath of a crisis:

  1. Retain the existing brand as is. In this case, marketers work to restore faith and credibility in the company through other means than a brand change, such as customer outreach, a change in management, change in processes, or other steps.
  2. Alter the brand enough to signal a new era. In the aftermath of its accounting scandal, Computer Associates decided that shortening its name to CA and changing its logo was needed to demonstrate that the company had recovered and was taking a new direction.
  3. Create a new brand identity and position. Going this route takes longer and costs more, but may be unavoidable if the crisis runs too deep.

A brand in crisis can be rescued—even enhanced
Customers and prospects are better informed than ever, thanks to the Internet and global connectivity. Companies in crisis need to act quickly. They need to act with absolute integrity and transparency in the wake of the crisis so that customers and prospects understand that the crisis was an anomaly that will be fixed. They need to do research to understand the impact of the crisis on key stakeholders and the business and prepare a response that goes beyond the expectations of these stakeholders. Through these steps, companies can rescue—and perhaps even enhance—the brand image they have so carefully cultivated.

Timing is important in making brand decisions in the wake of a crisis. Providers need to be able to predict the point at which the brand is beginning to erode irrevocably and intervene before that happens. But gaining the ability to be predictive requires research.

Filed Under: Brand, Reputation, and Positioning Tagged With: , , ,

The first steps to take when your brand is in crisis

May 22, 2009 by

I had a great conversation recently with two of ITSMA’s brand gurus, Geoff Dodds and Julie Schwartz. We put ourselves in a hypothetical situation that some of you may have faced for real: when something bad happens that involves your company–think Tylenol poisonings, accounting scandals, etc.–what do you do to protect the brand image you have spent years building up from crashing down around you? And perhaps more importantly, should you let the brand crash–i.e., start fresh with a new name and image?

We agree that there are a few steps that you have to take right away before making any drastic decisions about the ultimate fate of the brand:

1. Respond quickly. Everything that a brand stands for is up for grabs during a crisis. Customers and prospects will be anxious to hear whether they were right to place their trust in the brand. And they won’t wait long before making up their minds. Quick response is critical to making sure that the perceptions attached to the crisis don’t become permanent. Before making any drastic brand decisions, it’s important to clarify what will be done to rectify the crisis and to understand the impact of the crisis on the business.

2. Be transparent. As soon as you have an action plan in place for the business, communicate it. Be open and honest about what happened and what is being done to fix the problem.

3. Assess the pace and depth of customer losses. The most important vital signs for companies to monitor in the wake of a crisis are the pace and depth of customer losses. Factors that will impact the pace and depth of losses include the following:

  • Low switching costs. If the costs of switching to another provider are low, customers may panic and try to switch in the immediate aftermath of the crisis, increasing the pace and depth of losses. If switching is difficult, the pace of loss will likely be slower.
  • Dire predictions from analysts. If Wall Street and/or industry analysts are outspoken in predicting that the crisis will have a substantial impact on the provider’s ability to do business now or in the future, it could precipitate a stampede.
  • Level of commoditization. If the provider’s offerings are not substantively different from those of competitors, brand loyalty may be slim and customers will be vulnerable to aggressive poaching by competitors.
  • Length of the crisis. If the crisis is something that can be resolved relatively quickly, press and analyst attention will likely die down quickly too, perhaps decreasing the long-term pace of customer losses. However, if the crisis results in a lengthy public investigation, the long-term impact could be severe.

Have we left anything out? Please let me know.

Next time, we’ll get into some of the specific customer reactions to a crisis.

Filed Under: Brand, Reputation, and Positioning Tagged With: , , ,

Want to get along better with sales? Find a way to work together.

May 1, 2009 by

Right now, it seems that the gap between sales and marketing is mostly papered over with technology. For example, the trend towards creating a closed-loop lead generation and nurturing process between marketing and sales is a positive step, but it seems like a bridge across the chasm rather than a true route to collaboration. Sales and marketing create a shared definition of a sales-ready lead, implement software to track leads from marketing to sales and back to marketing, and then go back to doing their respective jobs in isolation.

In typical functional fashion, sales and marketing have gravitated toward things that the other can’t or won’t do. To greatly oversimplify it, sales sells and marketing does that mysterious “creative” thing it does. Few salespeople or marketers feel qualified—or interested—in crossing over to the other side.

Many organizations we talk to are baffled about how to bridge the gap. They try to do it with golf games or off-site team-building exercises. That can help, but salespeople and marketers need more concrete reasons to work together.

It’s all about that basic mammalian instinct: empathy. It’s much easier to see the value of someone else’s work when you’ve tried to do the same thing yourself. You need to find tasks that both sales and marketing have a need for and interest in, but that make sense to share.

Our research on Account-Based Marketing has revealed a few such tasks:

  • Customer understanding. In B2B, both marketers and salespeople know the value of learning about customers’ business issues and needs. And both know how to gain that understanding. But it makes sense to collaborate. Salespeople are best equipped and most motivated to understand the “now” of the account: what has already been sold to customers and what they are most likely to buy next. Marketers can use those contacts to start building a larger context—the business issues that cross functional, corporate, and vertical boundaries. Marketing needs this information to create thought leadership and marketing materials designed to reach many different clients at once.
    Salespeople may have this kind of broader perspective, but more than likely they don’t have time to gather it. However, they know (or can be convinced) that having this deeper level of information will enable them to have more intelligent conversations with executives at prospect companies, spot additional opportunities to add value, and build more trusted relationships. Why? Because it is a deeper, more thorough version of what they already are doing to make the sale.
  • Sharing what works. Salespeople love to get clear, simple tips on what’s working for others. Marketing can help. By doing research within multiple accounts, marketers gain invaluable perspective on broad customer trends and best practices for reaching customers. Marketing develops an institutional memory that can help salespeople create shortcuts by identifying what has worked in the past and what has not, what resources may be appropriate, and what company assets exist that can help.

What do you think?

Filed Under: Sales and Marketing Collaboration Tagged With: , ,

Why bother with idea marketing? Five questions and answers.

April 10, 2009 by

This post is from a real query I received from a client this week. The questions display a healthy distrust for accepted wisdom, which I like, and provide a good test of the thinking behind thought leadership marketing. See what you think of my answers:

  • How did thought leadership initiatives in companies begin? Thought leadership marketing is based on the academic research publishing model, in which academics created journals built around a peer review process. The journals have boards made up of top academics in a given field. They review submissions from other academics in the field and approve them for publishing in the journal. The most famous business incarnation of this model is the Harvard Business Review, which began publishing in 1922. When the consulting industry began soon thereafter, McKinsey took the academic journal model and applied it to its marketing, which resulted in the McKinsey Quarterly.The Quarterly is the first real example of thought leadership marketing. It looks and feels like an academic journal but it is essentially a marketing vehicle because it focuses mostly on ideas, research, and case studies generated by McKinsey consultants and an internal research group. It is staffed by editors who work exclusively for McKinsey and are not academics. The Quarterly is the first and still the most successful form of thought leadership marketing. Other companies have adopted pieces of the academic research publishing model for their own thought leadership marketing. For example, many companies carry out primary and secondary research and publish it; they may also use that research as the basis for an opinion piece that speculates, based on the research and the experience of subject matter experts, on trends in a market vertical.
  • Is it only focused in knowledge intensive industries? This depends on whether the products and services themselves are knowledge intensive. In industries where the product or service is very information intensive, such as research, management consulting, technology, aerospace, etc., you will find that the importance of thought leadership marketing is greater than in industries where the products have less of a knowledge component, such as manufacturing and retailing. However, every industry has an element of thought leadership potential, because all companies are eager for information about competitors, best practices, and process improvements. This led to the explosion of the trade magazine industry during the 1960s-1980s. Even in industries with low information intensity in their products—coin-operation laundry franchises, for example—there was a trade magazine offering information about how to improve business practices. Thus, thought leadership is applicable to any industry with interest in competitive information and process improvement.
  • Why did companies start focusing on it? Marketers began using thought leadership when they recognized that customers and prospects were growing weary of salespeople trying to sell them products without knowing about the business issues that customers and prospects faced. Thought leadership became a way to demonstrate knowledge of prospects’ business and vertical market issues and to suggest solutions to those issues. It became a way to build trust and interest among prospects and to build a relationship with prospects based on knowledge rather than product information. Especially in B2B, where the products and solutions are complex and usually need to be adapted/customized in some way, developing the relationship through knowledge helps demonstrate to customers that providers can go beyond the product specification sheet and help them with their business needs.
  • How was it different from branding/other marketing initiatives that were carried out earlier? Thought leadership is different because it focuses on educating rather than selling. Thought leadership, done well, provides information about the prospects’ businesses and verticals that helps them determine how to address business problems they face. Thought leadership changes the dynamic from selling what you have to helping customers figure out what they need.
  • Why is focus on thought leadership important for companies in knowledge intensive industries now? Thought leadership is a way to engage prospects and customers earlier in the buying cycle, in the Epiphany Phase. Especially in B2B, products and services are becoming more complex and sales cycles are getting longer. Thought leadership is a way to provide helpful information to prospects and customers early in the buying process, before they have fully articulated their needs. Early engagement builds credibility and creates a stronger relationship. Thought leadership also opens up the possibility for thought leaders to establish their companies as preferred providers by helping customers formulate the projects that become RFPs.
Filed Under: Idea Marketing Tagged With: , ,

The four components of social media management

April 3, 2009 by

Marketers need a simple, clear way to think about deploying a social media strategy that does not start with technology. Here’s my view of the four main components of social media management for marketers:

Monitor
Monitoring is finding and tracking the conversations that are occurring about your company in social media and online. Even companies that have no intention of pursuing a social media marketing strategy must monitor what’s being said about them. It’s important to know who is saying good things about your company but it’s even more important to know who is saying bad things. Negative comments-especially those that expose a legitimate flaw in a company’s products or services-can snowball and be picked up by the trade and business press.

Monitoring is also the foundation of a social media marketing strategy. Before companies begin talking, they have to listen. They need to identify the most important influencers in their markets and track those conversations. Understanding the tone and subject matter of the most popular conversations in the market will help companies develop and fine tune their own social media voices.

Engage
Engaging occurs when companies decide to take an active role in social media by engaging with customers and influencers in the various forums where conversations are taking place. Examples include public blogs, social networks, and industry communities. The goal in social media engagement is to influence participants to have a positive impression of the company through factual, verifiable contributions from company employees and subject matter experts.

Marketing should monitor social media carefully and assign subject matter experts to track particular blogs and influencers. There should be an escalation process for pushing issues around the company to the people most qualified to respond to them (all practitioners, not marketing or PR people).The key to engagement is that providers do not try to control the conversation, as in traditional marketing, but that they influence the conversation in the following ways:

  • Find relevant online communities and blogs and build relationships with discussion leaders and members
  • Become regular contributors to influential blogs and be willing to weigh in on issues not directly related to the company’s products and services
  • Respond to customer complaints
  • Link customers to more information and offer to follow up directly

Manage
Managing means that companies take an active role in creating conversations about the company. Examples include:

  • Corporate blogs. If companies can break their traditional habits of trying to control the conversation and squashing criticism, corporate blogs can help improve perception and awareness. Corporate blogs can be managed by marketing, but shouldn’t be written by marketing. Customers want to hear from subject matter experts and influencers.
  • Public and private online communities. Besides creating online communities in business-oriented third-party hosted social media venues like LinkedIn, companies can start their own communities, both public and private. For example, Indian outsourcing and consulting company Infosys developed points of view about four emerging trends in global business: the growing impact of emerging economies such as India and China, demographic shifts in age and working populations around the world, technology ubiquity, and increased regulations. It then created multiple hosted forums, both public and private (C-level executives often prefer private communities because they fear speaking up about their companies in uncontrolled public communities). These communities have both online and offline components, and Infosys’ marketing group works to build participation by publicizing the communities and inviting key customers and influencers to participate.

Integrate
Social media efforts need to be integrated into a company’s more traditional marketing channels such as conferences, events, reference programs, and websites. Social media is notoriously difficult to measure and ROI is unclear. Therefore, social media should be used as a platform to drive traffic to the channels that are easier to measure and have proven ROI. There should also be a way to get customers and prospects from social media into systems for tracking and managing interactions (e.g., CRM).

As I mentioned in my last post, social media can also become a supply chain for the development of thought leadership.

The integration of social media with more measurable channels—downloads of the white paper that lead to a sale, or the conference presentation that result in a sales call, for example—is the most reliable way to demonstrate the value and ROI of social media.

What do you think?

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

Integrate social media into your idea marketing supply chain

March 26, 2009 by

I know from our research that marketers are sick to death of hearing about Web 2.0. But at the same time they acknowledge that they haven’t done much with it.

I know why people are so sick of it. It’s because it’s presented to them as a bunch of technologies that seem disconnected and overwhelming. Podcasts, Twitter, linkedIn, Facebook, videos, blogs—right now it seems like the path to marketing hell is lined with Web 2.0 tools.

But if you start thinking of these tools as a supply chain for the development of thought leadership, they start to sound a whole lot more useful and less threatening.

For example, point of view is the essence of good blogging. Readers expect strong opinions backed up with research and experience. Find out who inside your company is blogging on their own and you may find some new subject matter experts who can help develop and refine thought leadership. Record internal subject matter experts giving conference presentations and release them as podcasts and use the transcripts as fodder for blog posts. Use research results as the content for a time-boxed blog. Run the results on the blog and see how subject matter experts and customers react. Use their reactions to refine the content further. When you run out of results, shut down the blog and put out the summary report or whitepaper.

Blogs are still so young that we haven’t yet seen that they are going to have lifespans like anything else. As I’ve said before, I think a lot of marketers look at blogs as life sentences: How the heck do I keep this thing going for the rest of my life? The answer is you don’t have to. Most people find blogs through searches rather than subscribing to them anyway. If it’s useful content, people will appreciate finding it even if the blog hasn’t been updated in a long time.

But the point is that thought leadership doesn’t need to be finished before getting it out there. The process of developing a point of view, research, and case studies takes time. The advantage of the new forms of social media is that they are informal and episodic by their very nature. The phrase to be continued is in the DNA of all this stuff. You can come back around to the same idea endlessly in a blog as long as you have something new to say each time or a different twist on it.

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

How marketers should handle the second wave of social media participation

March 20, 2009 by

Social media is moving up the demographic ladder, zeroing in on the sweet spot for B2B marketers: the 35-49 age group. A report from Nielsen confirms it. That new friend of yours on Facebook may control a multi-million dollar IT budget.

The demographic change is driving a new wave of newbies inside corporations to look at social media. Since this second wave is likely to be more influential inside the company and with customers than the first, twentysomething-based one was, it’s worth looking at how B2B marketers should position themselves both internally with employees and externally with customers.

Let’s look at internal first. There are some important prerequisites that need to be in place if marketing is going to be able to serve as a source of information about social media to employees—and be thought of as a competent manager of the organization’s social media presence. I see two big ones:

  1. Know what your employees are doing with social media. Responsibility for what employees are saying about the company will eventually make its way to marketing, so marketing needs to find out what employees are doing with social media. Think of yourself as a venture capitalist rather than a cop (though every company should have a social media policy). Seeing how social media happens organically among employees can give you important insight into potential new thought leaders, as well as a handy test population for gauging which tools employees are most comfortable with and, therefore, which ones might be best for integrating into conversations with customers.
  2. Create permission. Having a set of social media guidelines is important, but those guidelines should be simple and shouldn’t patronize employees with a lot of detail. The policy should demonstrate trust in employees rather than trying to CYA. Rather than saying “Don’t lie,” say, “We ask that employees conduct themselves as they would in any business situation—with honesty, integrity, discretion, and respect for their audience.” That’s about all you need. Companies should also ask employees to post a disclaimer on their blogs and offer suggested language for it, but should not punish those that fail to do it.

    However, permission isn’t just about setting rules. It’s also important to demonstrate permission through action. The CEO should blog to employees, and a few top thought leaders and subject matter experts should start their own personal blogs to set the tone and demonstrate that the corporate culture is ready to give up the iron grip of control over the conversation both internally and with customers. A few showcase social media examples from important individuals inside the organization will energize others and help set the tone for dialog that matches with the culture of the organization. Customers buy from you because of who you are as an organization as well as the products and services you offer. So the tone of your social media communications should match your organizational personality.

    You also need to get permission from IT. Again, this isn’t meant in the literal sense—there are plenty of ways to get around IT with social media. But social media is not very secure. So involve IT in the planning of a social media strategy. Don’t let IT dictate what employees can and can’t do with social media (they may want to ban it altogether), but collaborate with the IT leader on policy and keep him or her informed about what employees are doing. Remember that many of these tools start within the IT community, so IT can be a great source of advice and a bellwether for new trends.

What have I left out? How do you “manage” social media at your organization?

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

Create an idea network

March 6, 2009 by

Time and again, I see companies relying on their marketing departments to develop and disseminate what they think is thought leadership. And marketers think they are doing a great job because they are so good at disseminating the stuff. They put those case studies out there on the web site, push them out through PR channels and reuse them in all sorts of different forms, from podcasts to videos to conference presentations.

The dissemination is great. But what we need is more focus on the content generation. Of course, not all of this is under marketing’s control. I’m sure many of you have pleaded with your businesses to offer up content and they haven’t stepped up. But you have to try harder. Thought leadership should be managed by marketing, but it can’t be sourced from marketing.

I’ve offered up an example of how you could create a thought leadership engine inside your company in the slides from a (free) presentation that I link to at the bottom of this post. If you do nothing else, get a budget for creating internal knowledge share sessions.

Any company should be able to get executive commitment to make employees present their latest hot projects or thinking that is coming out of work with customers. You can have weekly or monthly presentations and sweeten the pot by setting it up as an awards program, with the best submission receiving stock options or a gift card.

The other key elements are research with customers and among competitors and some kind of external check and balance, whether it’s creating alliances with academics, research consortia, and/or analysts. There needs to be a way to test your thinking with third-party experts to make sure that your ideas are worth pursuing.

The idea here is to create a closed-loop cycle that includes internal subject matter experts, customers, external resources like academics and analysts, and primary and secondary research. You start with a nugget of a POV and you put it through this cycle and refine it with all those constituencies. And then send it around again. There no reason why you can’t do this in stages-build upon the POV and report it—then report it again when you have more to say and more proof points.

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

Filed Under: Idea Marketing, Uncategorized Tagged With: ,
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