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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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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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How to use social media for B2B

March 19, 2010 by
Making Friends - Marketing Cartoon
Image by HubSpot via Flickr

I want to do something ambitious and I’m hoping you’ll help. I’d like to create a guide for how to use social media in B2B that does not involve talking about the specific tools—as least not in the top line.

I think it’s important to try to do this if we’re going to get social media integrated with the rest of marketing. It’s also important if we’re going to stop talking so much about the tools and start talking more about what to do with them.

I started trying to do this a year or so ago by talking about the four components of social media management. I wanted to focus the discussion on things that we differently in social media. Here they are:

  • Monitor. Find and track the relevant conversations in social media and online.
  • Engage. Take an active role in social media by engaging with customers and influencers in the various forums where conversations are taking place.
  • Manage. Take an active role in facilitating and managing conversations, such as creating a blog or community.

The next step is to categorize how we use social media in these different areas and how our actions hook back into the rest of marketing.

Monitor

First, here’s what we do as part of monitoring:

  • Track conversations about your company. You need to know what’s being said about your company online. Pretty obvious, right? Trouble is, we’re finding in our research that most companies stop here. There’s much more that we should and could be doing with monitoring.
  • Develop a target audience. Monitoring can be used to discover customers and prospects that are most relevant for your offerings by observing the patterns and topics of their conversations. All of the major social media tools have search capabilities, and there are specialized monitoring tools that have more powerful searching abilities. Offline research and segmentation are important pieces of this effort.
  • Discover influencers. By monitoring conversations online, we can find the people inside and outside our companies that say smart things. Monitoring tools help determine how much impact these smart things are having on our target audiences. For example, the number of RSS subscribers bloggers have, the number of comments to the blog post, the number of page views, etc.
  • Gather research. Social media are repositories for discussions and content on every possible topic. Search tools can help you mine that data.
  • See the distribution of conversation. Some monitoring tools let you segment the different types of social media to determine where conversations are happening—such as blogs vs. Facebook.
  • Trend the conversation. Some of the tools let you analyze the direction and popularity of conversations over time. This is helpful during important periods like new offering launches or in the aftermath of a crisis.
  • Determine share of attention. You can track the amount of conversation about you versus your competitors.
  • Identify influential sources. The tools can determine the popularity of conversations and the sources of those conversations. This helps you decide which blogs you’d like to do outreach with, for example.
  • Locate the conversations. Some of the tools let you see the geographic locations of people involved in the conversation.
  • Track propagation. Track a comment from a blog post all the way through to mainstream media.

Engage

Here are the things that we do to get our companies involved in the social media conversation:

  • Identify subject matter experts (SMEs). It’s up to marketing to find SMEs who can engage in the conversations that are most important to your target audience.
  • Assign SMEs to engage with key influencers and/or topic areas. Think of this like the old beat system in newspapers. You want to have someone knowledgeable get involved in the most important and relevant conversations. Marketers and PR people can help by monitoring conversations and alerting SMEs to the topics and conversations they should get involved in.
  • Create social media policies for engagement—and support them. One of the things that’s new about the social media conversation is that engagement can’t be vetted by PR. We have to trust employees and SMEs to engage on their own, otherwise our conversations become stilted, one-way messages. Social media policies help the organization understand how to engage without getting in trouble. Some organizations have created support channels for employees to ask questions about the guidelines. Others have set up training programs for employees who will engage in social media.
  • Gather information by asking questions. Asking for information helps deepen social media relationships. Taking a poll in a LinkedIn or Facebook group, asking for input from Twitter followers, or asking for information through comments on blogs are some of the ways to gather information. If you can link to a survey and promise respondents some level of access to your findings, you can create a powerful source of information.
  • Build influence by answering questions. Social media is all about sharing—whether that be pointing to good content (yours and others’), or sharing expertise and experience. By pushing SMEs to engage with the target audience in these ways, you help them build up trust and loyalty among customers and prospects.
  • Create continuity. As we start showing up regularly in social media, we build up a sense of regular connection with our target audiences. That, in and of itself, helps build trust and stronger relationships with audiences. This sense of continuity helps fill in the gaps in communication that we have with the traditional campaign style of marketing. For example, when SMEs speak at conferences, they can engage conference attendees before, during, and after the event to follow threads of conversation through to their conclusion.
  • Promote other types of marketing. By engaging, we can share links to the various other forms of marketing content that we produce, such as white papers, events, Webinars, etc.
  • Seed discussions. Using social media, we can drive interest in other forms of marketing by posting provocative questions or information. For example, posting a link to a survey that you reference in a white paper or will discuss in an upcoming event helps drive interest—and may even provide valuable research.
  • Get people together. B2B buyers value peer connections above all else. By having your influential SMEs help introduce them to one another, you can help build a stronger relationship.
  • Locate others. Using mobile applications to engage with others is going to become important in B2B in the coming years. Knowing where others are at any given moment will give marketers opportunities to link peers at conferences or to have real-time conversations, for example.
  • Build loyalty be being timely. SMEs that can be counted on to contribute to conversations quickly will become very popular among their social media followers.

Manage

In our ITSMA research, we’re starting to see marketers manage conversations through social media, whether it is groups on LinkedIn and Facebook, blogs, or private communities. Managing the conversation takes more time and resources, but it can pay off in a number of ways:

  • Develop and test points of view. Managing the conversation through vehicles like blogs and communities gives you a ready test bed for getting help and feedback on ideas that you are trying to develop into thought leadership.
  • Extend conversations. Managing the conversation gives you a way to keep your target audience’s interest by bringing in conversations from other marketing channels and giving them a permanent home.
  • Closely observe behavior. By capturing a target audience within your own community, you can get much richer data on their actions, needs, and interests.
  • Reuse and re-purpose. Managing the conversation gives us ways to stretch our content further. Blog posts can riff on other marketing channels or revisit pieces of them. The episodic nature of blogs and communities lets us sprinkle content through them like bread crumbs in the forest.

Does this all make sense to you? What would you add? Please help with your comments.

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There is no social media strategy, only marketing strategy

February 24, 2010 by
The Twitter fail whale error message.
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I’ve been working with my colleagues at ITSMA on another survey on social media for B2B marketers that I hope you’ll take by going here.

As we put together the questions, we struggled with the issue of social media strategy. I resisted treating it as a standalone in the survey. I’m hoping that all the articles, books, and blogs I’m seeing that look at B2B social media strategy in isolation are a function of our excitement over this new channel (and don’t get me wrong; it is really, really exciting).

I’m also hoping that the excitement (and the needs of social media consultants and authors to drive their businesses) will not drive us to distraction. B2B marketing lays the path to a sales discussion and supports relationships with existing customers. Social media is another channel—one of many—for making the connection and building the relationship with customers.

Social media is no silver bullet. Other channels are more effective for reaching high-level B2B buyers—and that situation may never change. I say this even after discounting ITSMA’s recent research showing that marketers don’t see social media as being very effective components in their marketing strategies. It’s clear that social media are still new and most B2B marketing groups haven’t gotten the hang of them yet. It’s too early to reach any definitive conclusions on effectiveness.

It’s tempting to say that because B2B sales are highly dependent on relationships, social media will eventually reign supreme. But I think the nature of B2B makes it harder for companies and customers to have a satisfying relationship that’s entirely virtual than it is for B2C companies.

We all know that B2B decisions take a long time and are made by committee and logic rather than individuals and impulse. It’s hard to imagine that kind of a complex, long-term, multi-person relationship ever happening entirely or even mostly in social media. At the C-level especially, face-to-face remains the killer app for everyone involved.

What’s been proven to work in B2B is for marketers to reach out to prospects with smart, engaging, educational content that leads to trust. The trust leads to a more personal relationship and hopefully, a purchase.

Looking at social media in isolation distracts us from the real revolutionary trend, which is that marketing strategies need to shift to an emphasis on content and relationships.

Social media simply makes starkly plain what we’ve known for some time but haven’t had to face yet: We don’t have a lot of content capable of generating trust and relationships.

Trust comes from buyers deciding that providers are as interested in their concerns and needs as they are in selling stuff. The only way we can do that is by providing a range of different content—thought leadership, news, education, training, support—in a range of different channels—events, white papers, communities, private meetings—at all phases of the buying cycle.

If you look at social media in isolation, you’re not going to see the larger strategic issues until they slap you in the face—blogs with nothing to write about; LinkedIn groups with no substantive conversation; Twitter streams that link to nothing but brochures and press releases.

That’s why I’d love to see the social media conversation turn more towards integrating social media into the overall marketing mix and arming marketers with the additional skills they need to make it happen. It’s why I left strategy and metrics out of the four components of social media management. The strategy is a marketing strategy and the metrics should happen across everything you do. I’m trying to get at the issues of integration in our survey, and will report on our findings.

What do you think? Are we overemphasizing social media strategy at the expense of overall marketing integration? Please let me know.

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Why the volume and quality of interactions with customers has to pass for social media ROI

January 22, 2010 by
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I wish I could say that social media leads to sales. I really do. But I can’t. And I haven’t encountered anyone else who can either, have you? So when we think about social media ROI, we need to make a leap of faith. We need to believe that more engagement between our companies and the people we want to reach is a good thing that ultimately leads to sales—but down a long, narrow, winding path with a few jumps between cliffs thrown in there.

To make ourselves feel a little more comfortable with this idea, we may need to categorize social media with something whose hazy ROI we’re more familiar and comfortable with: PR.

There have been research attempts made to uncover and evaluate methods for measuring the ROI of PR. But you’re not going to like them.

Jumping through ROI hoops
Techniques include measuring the:

  • Value of impressions. We track the marketing mix (including PR) over time against trends in sales. Lots of variables there.
  • Return on media impact. This is the number of articles or blog posts that mention the product or service measured against the trend in sales. Again, tough to isolate PR’s role.
  • Value of earned media. This is what it would cost to place an ad in a magazine vs. the cost of getting the story placement. The PR cost is usually less and the value is usually larger, but by how much? Old beliefs about the relative value of earned media vs. advertising are all over the map—and probably need to be revised in the age of social media.

But ROI has to be there, right?
Still, we know in our bones that positive word of mouth has a positive effect on sales. We just have a hard time proving it. The only effective argument I’ve heard recently is that we embed calls to action in social media that drive readers to a landing page where we capture their information and start nurturing them as leads. But without good systems for tracking those leads from social media all the way through a sale, it’s difficult and expensive to do. And it leads back to the problem we have with PR. Did the social media impression really lead to the sale?

As with PR, perhaps all we can do is establish that social media was at least a guidepost along that narrow rocky path to a sale.

Volume and quality of interactions
So if you buy that leap of logic, let’s say that blogs are another channel, like PR, in a marketing mix designed to familiarize customers and prospects with our companies and us. And if that’s true, then we should try to increase the volume and quality of interactions with have with customers and prospects through social media, no?

That’s when things start to get easier. We can more easily measure engagement in social media. Especially on blogs.

For this reason, I think we need to think about blogs as the center point of a social media strategy. Aside from the corporate, a blog is the mother ship of social media interaction and content. And blogs are really measurable. In fact, we can do a lot of it for free. Here are some metrics, mostly for blogs, that help build engagement with customers and prospects. Please tell me what I should add or take away. And if you have the magic sauce for social media ROI, please douse us with it!

(For much more on the social media ROI topic, see this terrific list of resources compiled by Robin Broitman at Interactive Insights Group called the Social Media Metrics Superlist.)

  • Connect to your most important keywords. SEO is really a fancy term for constructing your sentences carefully—especially your headlines. If the intention of your blog is to drive traffic to your main website for lead generation, then you should be using the keywords on your blog that matter most on your website. To oversimplify it, if you want to sell more ERP software, you should use keywords like “enterprise software,” a lot on your blog so that Google associates your blog with your company’s area of expertise.
  • Grow the number of influential referral sites. “Owning” a keyword term in Google searches is nice, but building traffic to your blog through references on other blogs and websites is the key to sustained, long-term growth. Obviously, the more influential the referral site the better. But we’re not talking just sheer numbers here. For example, being listed on the blogroll of a highly respected blogger, analyst, or journalist not only generates traffic; it also establishes you as an authority among the people who care most about the subject you’re blogging about. That authority begins to have exponential effects over time. You and your posts are referred to more often as the network of referrals grows. The growth in traffic then confers its own authority—you get lots of visits so you must be smart. It becomes a virtuous cycle.
  • Don’t forget the outbound links. We all tend to obsess over the number of mentions with get in blog rolls or our influence rank in Technorati. But we often don’t stop to think about whether we’re linking to anyone else’s blog. One of the cornerstones of social media is sharing. Be generous with links to other blogs and websites and others will return the favor and build your traffic for you.
  • Understand the location of your audience. In Google analytics, you can drill down by country—even by city—to see where your traffic comes from. Comparing the geographical distribution of your blog to your company’s website should give you a sense of whether your blog is hitting with the same areas of the world as your website. It could also reveal potential new areas of focus for your salespeople.
  • Measure endurance. Good blogs hold people to the page they’re viewing. So time spent is metric to track to see if people spend more time reading over time. Bounce rate is a good metric for websites because it helps show whether people are finding what they’re looking for. But it’s not so good for blogs because blogs generally only have one or two pages—a page for the posts and a page for “about me” or “contact me—so the bounce rate is going to be higher for blogs by default. You read the post, you leave. Google analytics also has a metric for loyalty—the numbers of repeat visits over time—that shows whether people are sticking with you.
  • Find and nurture your VIPs. It’s hard to measure the number of people who care about and are really influenced by your blog. So I apply the old subscription model. If people care enough to want to know when your next post comes out, they are engaged. If they also comment on your blog, they are friends. Make a list of the people who subscribe to your blog through RSS and e-mail and match them up to your comments. Those who both subscribe and comment regularly are your VIPs. RSS+comments=VIP. These are the people who matter; they should receive responses to all their comments and an e-mail thanking them for being such a valuable collaborator. If they happen to also be customers, then all the better. But just don’t try to sell them. They know where to find you.
  • Use Twitter for blog PR. If Twitter isn’t one of your highest-ranking referral sites, you’re not using it properly. Twitter is the logical front end to a blog post. It’s where you distill the post down to a nugget and put a link next to it. There are even tools like Tweet This, that can be set up to send a tweet based on the title of your post automatically. Or a tweet can be the inspiration for a blog post later on. Regardless, blogs and Twitter accounts should be joined at the hip, because Twitter is a powerful traffic builder to blogs.
  • Use URL shorteners to gauge subject interest. By using a URL shortener like bit.ly within a Tweet, you can track how many people click on the content link you offer in your tweets. Sure, the language of your tweet counts in building interest, but if you link to content that is directly related to your tweet, it’s a good gauge of how popular the subject is among your followers.
  • Use social networks as water coolers and newsstands. LinkedIn and Facebook have groups where you can post elements of your blog post as a question, or post the entire thing as a news item. Track the number of comments and views to the things you post. The numbers aren’t too big here generally, as the group tools on these sites are crude and many group leaders don’t spend much time filtering out the self-promoting jerks that litter these things with spam. But it’s a way to expose your blog to new faces and engage in dialog away from the blog.
  • Build cross-referencing across social media tools. No social media tool is an island. All should cross-reference each other at every opportunity. So for example, your blog comments on other’s blogs should contain your Twitter handle and a link to your blog. The communities you belong to should all Your LinkedIn profile should display your most recent posts and tweets, and your blog should display all of the above. There’s no real way to measure all this from what I can tell, but it isn’t hard and it can’t hurt.
  • Embed and measure calls to action. If we can get people to a landing page, we should. Social media offer plenty of opportunities for doing that. And sometimes social media becomes the end in itself. For example, the landing page could be for a LinkedIn group you manage rather than the traditional white paper, newsletter, or Webinar. Social media gives us ways to build relationships with customers that white papers or newsletters can’t.

What do you think?

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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: , , , , ,
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