Brogan Declares Social Media Not Dead But Boring

Today’s selection is…

Chris Brogan’s latest piece which shows that those who were in first, had to go out first too. I remember Chris from his presentation at Like Minds 2010 in Exeter where I keynoted too: he was passionate, energetic… and warning the world that something big was happening.

with Chris Brogan after Like Minds 2010

All that is gone now! three gazillion repetitive blog pieces later, you now know everything about how to optimise your corporate Twitter account and/or how to trick (or survive) Facebook’s ever-changing edge rank algorithm. Or rather, you don’t! because possessing focus focusing on tools is useless! Take a bit of hindsight with this piece and find out why…

by Chris Brogan

Isn’t it time we started telling bigger stories than this?

When Julien Smith and I wrote The Impact Equation, we had a very specific goal in mind: help people get attention, understanding, and eventually a relationship of value. We built the book around the premise that well-defined goals were needed to craft ready-to-understand ideas, and that people could build a platform to spread those ideas to a network of people who cared enough to share those ideas with others. That’s the simplest possible summary of the book.

What people maybe thought they were getting was a book about social media and social networks, about marketing and campaigns. Some people believe that’s what Julien and I do. Social media are a set of tools. They’re not all that interesting to talk about in and of themselves. The “gee whiz” has left the station. We want to talk about action– or if you’ll pardon the self-reference, impact.

via Social Media Isn’t Dead: It’s Boring.

my tips for social media management in Romania and elsewhere (5/5)

This is the script of an interview I gave for a Romania business journal “Business Review Romania” in June 2012. The interview is published in instalments. This is part 5 of 5

Name a few examples as to how social media management has helped Orange get more brand awareness?

In most markets in which it operates in the consumer space, Orange has a very good brand awareness not to say the best. So social media isn’t really used for this at Orange. We tend to use it more for image, co-creation (like with the http://sosh.fr entry level offer in France), brand and user experience (see http://pinterest.com/liveorange or http://pinterest.com/orangefrance to name but a few recent examples), charity (check the French Orange foundation blog http://www.blogfondation.orange.com), user relationship (like Orange helpers in the UK: http://oran.ge/KqyW3r) and brand nurturing (like Facebook Romania https://www.facebook.com/orangeromania for instance). These are only a few examples from different countries but there are many more than this.

The only counterexample I can think of is the one I’ve been involved in for 3 years between 2008 and 2011, and it is related to the b2b arm of Orange, that is to say Orange Business Services (http://orange-business.com) . It is understandable that being in 220 different countries and territories as Orange Business Services is, means that there are vastly different levels of brand awareness in each of those geographies. Social media can come be useful in the areas in which we are not operating in the consumer space in order to boost the knowledge of Orange Business as well as our skills. It has proven very successful in many instances, we have even been able to use the blogs to initiate sales at a later stage (this is ‘pre-commerce’ again).

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[1] Check my personal blog for this topic at http://visionarymarketing.wordpress.com/category/b2b-marketing/

[2] http://bitdefender.com

[3] http://ronewmedia.ro

[4] Small Office, Home Office, i.e. very small or independent companies

[5] Media Aces is the French association of enterprises involved in social media, of which I am the President. My work on the four different types of brand in social media is available at: http://bit.ly/4brandtypessm

[6] Oscar Wilde quotes at: http://oran.ge/owildetalk

[7] Check the ‘worldwide’ tab on the http://facebook.com/Orange page

[8] http://timeline.orange.com

[9] Re. Andy Sernocitz ‘Word of Mouth Marketing’ check http://oran.ge/asbooks on Amazon

my tips for social media management in Romania and elsewhere (4/5)

This is the script of an interview I gave for a Romania business journal “Business Review Romania” in June 2012. The interview is published in instalments. This is part 4 of 5

What do you think the ratio for the implementation of social media campaign should be in the entire media budget of the company? How was this situation at Orange?

To begin with, I do not like the term “campaign” which I find too military and aggressive. Eventually, social media marketing is a new form of marketing, more respectful, more centred on our customer’s interests and requirements, based on the principles of crowd sourcing and customer centricity. So I ban this kind of language as well as other terms like “targets” which are often times the staples of traditional marketing but are outdated and not applicable to social media marketing. Despite what most people think, social media marketing has to be thought of in the long-term, not in the short term.

using military analogies for communications? not a good idea … From bastille day

My second recommendation would be to build engagement and then spend money, not the other way round. First, I always start building the network using content. This is what takes the greatest part of our work and energy. Each time I am in charge of a new digital department, I start working on my content strategy and building the content, both externally and internally, which will fuel my digital strategy. Once I have done that, I can start crystallise communities around the content which we have created, as well as adapt the content to the liking of our audiences. The second step is to grow the network so that it reaches a critical mass. The third stage is to create synergies between the pages and the different platforms that we use: the Facebook hub on all Orange pages[7] is a good example of that, or Orange timeline[8] which groups or Twitter accounts around Orange. But it is also a matter of linking platforms and blogs to one another, both at Orange, and with Orange partners outside of the company.

Once I have sorted out all my budgets, and made considerable savings, then and only then can I invest my money, with great care, on advertising to promote this content and bring back traffic to my main platforms. This is a slightly more lengthy approach, but it pays in the long-term and is incredibly strong in terms of resilience.

My last recommendation would be to say to companies that they shouldn’t spend millions on word-of-mouth because word-of-mouth is supposed to be cost-effective; otherwise this is just advertising and advertising works best in traditional media[9].

My main frustration with regard to social advertising is to see that mainstream social media platforms have done very little to reinvent advertising so far. Innovation in that space is not on par with what we are supposed to expect. But this will probably change in the medium-term, hopefully.

As to Orange Group, this is how we work. I still haven’t spent a dime to grow the http://facebook.com/Orange page and yet we grew it from 40,000 people in May 2011 to over 215,000 a year later! Similarly, our Group Twitter account (http://twitter.com/orange) was brought from nothing to close to 9,500 followers in just a year, through sheer organic growth and content sharing.

Now that we have grown a critical mass, we might consider advertising to speed things up or bring them to the next level, but I do not expect those spends to grow out of proportion and much in excess of 10% of my overall budget, in the very long run.

 

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[7] Check the ‘worldwide’ tab on the http://facebook.com/Orange page

my tips for social media management in Romania and elsewhere (3/5)

This is the script of an interview I gave for a Romania business journal “Business Review Romania” in June 2012. The interview is published in instalments. This is part 3 of 5

Can you give us 5 tips as to how company can manage a crisis through social media?

In fact, despite what most people think, and despite the usual romantic stories told about Internet crises and rumours, managing crises is a long-term rather than short-term exercise. Crises in social media in fact, reflect what is bad with your company, not what is wrong with your community management or the way you handle it. Here are my 5 tips about managing crises:

picture cc 2012 Yann Gourvennec (abstract album)

1. fix internal problems first: things that you do in your day-to-day business may be kept hidden, but not in social media. Eventually, social media tells more about the way that you are organised internally than about anything else,
2. work on the process: if you are making things up as you go along when a crisis arises, and then build the process as it happens, it means that you have done something wrong. You should work on that process from day one, before a crisis takes place,
3. make your PR go social: don’t put all your eggs in the same basket; your PR and social media departments should work hand-in-hand. There is nothing that the community management team should do without referring to PR when a crisis arises, and vice versa, there is nothing that PR is aware of that should not be communicated to the community management team, inclusive of the stances which have to be taken and displayed. Don’t take the Lone Ranger approach by letting community managers express themselves in the name of the company even though they haven’t received clearance for it. This applies to large companies and mostly listed companies, for which external communications are extremely critical, and may not be applicable to smaller enterprises,
4. prepare for the worst to happen outside normal working hours: my experience of crises online has shown that the worst problem often occur on a Friday night from 8 pm onwards or during the weekend, or at night. Work with vendors in order to set up round-the-clock moderation when necessary, in multiple languages when you are a worldwide company namely,
5. set up your alerting system: not to generate alerts in real time all the time, but mostly when something bad happens so that you know in real time when you have to do something when it is really necessary.

All these are applicable to companies with a strong brand awareness only. Listed companies rank high on the agenda with regard to crisis management issues and the need to industrialise the process around them. On the other side of the coin, other companies with weak brand awareness would gain from a negative crisis rather than lose. If your brand is entirely “under the radar”, and no one is talking about you at all, then having a crisis means that at least people will talk about you; even though the experience may be unpleasant. As Oscar Wilde once put it: “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about[6].”

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[6] Oscar Wilde quotes at: http://oran.ge/owildetalk

my tips for social media management in Romania and elsewhere (2/5)

This is the script of an interview I gave for a Romania business journal “Business Review Romania” in June 2012. The interview is published in instalments. This is part 2 of 6

Give us 5 tips for a Romanian company (a corporation, and medium-size company) to build brand awareness with social media

At first sight, one may think that social media marketing is only devoted to large corporations which can afford to hire big enough teams to manage such new activities.

But I think it’s just the other way round.

One of the biggest beauties of social media is that it makes word-of-mouth marketing accessible even to those who have very little means. Hence, unless you are a small and medium-size enterprise with difficulties to cope with your own business and not enough time on your hands to visit your customers and do your everyday work, I would suggest on the contrary that you use social media to gain brand awareness and do business.

small is beautiful

In fact, with social media you don’t actually do business directly. You do what Bob Pearson would call “pre-commerce” (Jossey Bass, 2011), i.e. you create the conditions for people to buy your products or recommend them to one another.

As a rule, large corporations have already built brand awareness (this is why they are large, in essence); what such companies might seek in social media marketing may differ significantly from what small and medium-sized companies may be looking for.

SMEs and Soho[4] businesses are by definition lesser-known and  have to build their brand awareness in the first place.

Having said that, I can deliver 5 general tips for enterprises which are ready to jump on the bandwagon of social media marketing:

1. first and foremost, know thyself and use social networks consistently with regard to your image, and your overall marketing strategy (for different types of brands and strategies, check the work the non-profit Media Aces[5] did with brand monitoring company Synthesio,
2. don’t shift your focus from business to social media: obviously, social media should support your business by enhancing your brand experience, awareness and/or visibility. If it distracts you from doing business, then don’t do it,
3. focus on content: if you are in b2b, it will have to be very professional (in-depth articles about your visions and technical prowess for instance); if you are in b2c, your content has to be essentially entertaining, mostly on Facebook, on which users rarely want to be bothered with serious stuff but are more interested in games, polls and interaction,
4. be yourself: there is nothing worse than bombastic boasts (such as “we are the leaders!” mostly when it’s not true and that you are only a leader of a niche therefore not a leader) or salespeople trying to sell their wares on social media. Think of keeping your readers/users and customers happy first, and then think of yourself. Be simple and natural, and when you produce content make it interesting for them, and not for you!
5. “socialise” your website: not by multiplying Facebook buttons, but by making your (interesting) content easier to share.

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[4] Small Office, Home Office, i.e. very small or independent companies

[5] Media Aces is the French association of enterprises involved in social media, of which I am the President. My work on the four different types of brand in social media is available at: http://bit.ly/4brandtypessm

my tips for social media management in Romania and elsewhere (1/5)

This is the script of an interview I gave for a Romania business journal “Business Review Romania” in June 2012. The interview is published in instalments. This is part 1 of 5

What trends have you identified in corporate social media management at the moment? Does Romania align to these trends (or what must Romanian companies do to do that)?

I have highlighted 10 major trends in the management of corporate social media in 2012 in a post which is available at http://oran.ge/10smtrends. This post served as a basis for my presentation at the Ronewmedia conference which took place in Bucharest on May 16^th, 2012. Rather than repeat what is said in this blog piece and was again developed during my presentation, I will attempt to sum it up in a few words:

First, social media is reaching maturity stage and is no longer considered an innovation. Second, barring a few exceptions (if you sell extremely boring products like plastic tarpaulins for instance), social media is now part of everything we do, and has become an integral part of digital marketing; b2b is no exception, on the contrary. Digital marketers who have failed to delve into the nitty-gritty of social media, have missed something big and they had better catch up. Lastly, social media is no longer restricted to a particular team within the digital department; it has to be used by each and every one of us in business.

Very few companies are an exception to this rule; the impact on b2b marketing might even be more important than that on b2c marketing, however counter-intuitive it may seem[1]. As to Romania, it is obvious that we are talking of a country in which there is already a very high level of IT knowledge and expertise, as you know there are even some international high-tech giants which are Romanian such as bitdefender[2] for instance; so it would be irrelevant to treat Romania separately from the rest of the world. Having said that, there are real regional differences in social media adoption both quantitatively and quantitatively, but the results of these discrepancies are sometimes surprising. If I look at the profile of the users of the Orange Worldwide page (http://facebook.com/Orange) you might be very surprised to learn that Central and Eastern European users amount to more than 35% of our overall users: Poland is by far the biggest fan base in our portfolio, but Romania is not very far behind in proportion, given it is a smaller country. More than 5% of our users are Romanian in fact! And our local Romanian Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/Orangeromania) is also booming with more than 164,000 likers.

So, Romania and Romanian companies are not out of sync and are part of this globalised world like anyone else. Only a handful of emerging countries as well as Iran and Russia standout; the Ronewmedia[3] conference provided enough evidence of the latter in its first panel.

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[1] Check my personal blog for this topic at http://visionarymarketing.wordpress.com/category/b2b-marketing/

[2] http://bitdefender.com

[3] http://ronewmedia.ro

Intuit: the social media manager who found his job with social media

Intuit is a company offering business financial solutions for small businesses. It has been awarded great distinctions including the great place to work award by Fortune. This presentation was delivered by Björn Ühss, global social media manager at Intuit at the useful social media conference which took place in London last week. It was about the changing landscape and mindset of Social Media:

[Björn Ühss, in the background, behind Amber Hayward, became Social Media manager after targetting his future employer via LinkedIn adds]

“One of the things that changed is that social media reached the C-suite and it’s more and more of a priority. At Intuit it is coming from the CEO, it’s a business decision” Björn Ühss said. “It’s not a marketing decision and it concerns everyone in the company” he added.

According to Ühss, Edelman ranked Intuit quite high in the hierarchy of companies using social media too. “Starbucks has issued numbers whereby 38% of their fans are more likely to visit the stores when they have seen a branded message” Björn Ühss went on. “Social Media has now reached considerable scales. Besides, Facebook has now become a giant and is on a buying spree like former high tech giants were a few years ago”.

The presenters stressed that the recent IBM CEO 2012 study predicted that in five years’ time, CEOs will be hired not only on their credentials but on their ability to manage their e-reputation and that of their company.

Björn Ühss gave us his check-list on how he got social media implemented at Intuit:

1. How social is your CEO? lead by example
2. is your culture ready?
3. who are your social media supporters?
4. where are your customers?
5. what data can you use?

Intuit has also managed to make social media work for sales with £99 sale add campaigns (“despite what people say” both presenters emphasised).

But the most interesting thing maybe is that Björn Ühss himself found his job with the help of social media. He posted adds targeting Intuit executives until they thought to themselves “we’ve got to hire that guy” Intuit’s Amber Hayward, social media marketing manager concluded.

using social media to stir passion #csmb2c

Richard Ayers (a former BBC journalist) has worked for Manchester City and BFI (British Film Industry) recently and he has shared his experience running social media for both of these organisations at the usefulsocialmedia conference today.

BFI has been around for 100 years and is behind each and every film. But the organisation isn’t known at all. The passion though is overwhelming, be it for films or football. Richard showed how similarly – even though the two companies are very different – social media can be leveraged for both subjects.

Man City business Case

[Richard Ayers showing the fans invading the Man City pitch: passion!]

Manchester City is an organisation which is ready to embed social media almost naturally Richard explained. They even chose the hashtag #together and it came naturally, as they asked children from school to share their feelings about the club in the “Manchester and me” project. And there is a “fascinating dynamic about connecting local and international”. TV formats were used (“inside city”) so that engagement between players in the tunnel were filmed and the videos were even 9 minutes long and retention rate was 90%.

“Of course we have a Facebook page, and an app and all sorts of things” but Richard said that it was mostly about “connecting online with the real”.  They even decided to build a community in Arabic (@cityarabia) and all that was required was to ask fans to run the service Richard added.

“Numbers shot up and there was no advertising” and “we did it via proper engagement and  not looking at the numbers” he concluded for that part. As to the nasty stuff surrounding football such as racism for instance, “we just don’t deal with that” Richard said “we are keeping away from that”.

BFI

The BFI is full of wonderful cultural artifacts, some dating from the late 19th century. Richard and his teams found a lot of remarkable material about Doctor Who and even pictures of the shooting from the Starwars film in the Tunisian desert … “and all that was sitting in a bunker!” This is an amazing thing and “this is only the tip of the iceberg” Richard added. Hitchcock was a British film-maker and one of his film is 39 steps so they used the 39 steps metaphor in “39 steps to Hitchcock”. We are at the beginning of  the journey “and we are cleaning up the pages now”.   “The BFI is non profit, but there must be a way that it can make money out of this incredible content” Richard said.

Richard showed us a lot of other examples from BFI but they all boil down to the fact that – even though the organisation isn’t known at all – the content that it has is immensely interesting and can be used to stir passion in the fans, be they football or film fans. What Richard hopes is that, by using the same method for BFI, the company will be known to all soon.

KLM: how to pilot social media for clients’ benefit

Anna Ketting was presenting  for KLM today at the usefulsocialmedia. Her presentation was definitely aimed at better using social media for customer interaction.

KLM has a small home country and market. 70% of its traffic to KLM.com is coming from paid channels. Google for instance is one of the biggest beneficiaries in that department. When Anna started working on that 3 years ago, questions arose so as to “spend less on paid media”. Discussions ensued, campaigns too (25,000 followers on Twitter joined in) … and then there was the ash cloud. The day after the ash cloud, Schipol Airport was empty but all the phone lines went down! This is when KLM started answering questions via Twitter and Facebook. They had so many questions that they put together a 140 staff organisation to address all these questions 24/7.

[Schipol Airport on Ash Cloud day!]

“In 2 week’s time, this incident showed our management  that social media was useful!” Anna added.

3 main strategic pillars for social media at KLM.

1. customer services: address service issues and have the necessary feedback. This enables to pick up on the complains and solve them.
2. brand & reputation: that’s a straightforward department – such as was demonstrated by Heineken. Southwest had a very bad example with “Southwest breaks guitar” which did a lot of bad publicity for the brand. “This is what you don’t want to happen”.
3. commerce

KLM started with campaigns, went through service and is now putting products worth sharing online. In March 2011, wit the fly2miami campaign, KLM sold the first-ever flight on Twitter.  In May 2011, the tile and inspire campaign enabled users to propose “tiles” which then decorated a plane (120,000 of them on the whole). In September 2011, the Dutch airline launched “livereply” a video made with real-life employees who advertised live customer service on Twitter and Facebook 24/7. “This worked great for employee cohesion” Anna added.

KLM–Livereply video : approx. 350,000 views so far

Now KLM is no. 2 on Facebook and no. 1 in terms of engagement. “We’ve also had a lot of failures” Anna Ketting said, reinforcing that trial and error is necessary – as in many areas – but maybe even more in social media. Very reasonably she concluded by saying that all of this social media stuff doesn’t matter if you aren’t able to deliver your core service properly.

Social products

After two years of being focussed on social media, KLM decided to go out of communications and delve into how social media would enhance products.

1. Meet and Seat: share your social profile, see who will be on board, and pick a seat next to the person you are interested in … as long as she/he agrees to it. This generated huge media attention because it’ is focussed on the user and not on the company
2. trip planner (launched a month ago): based on questions by KLM customers : use facebook to talk to your friends, find a date and book!

KLM Trip planner video

What I liked about KLM’s approach was that they managed to take social media back closer to business and its clients. Anna told us that KLM’s social media team is made of 14 people. Facebook is still on KLM’s radar for social commerce, but isn’t really considering it short term though.

Sabre holdings: the great community race

On March 29 I attended Sabre’s presentation at Blogwell in NYC.

a presentation by Susan Via, Manager Community Marketing and Engagement & Lorie Robinson, Product Marketing, Sabre holdings

Sabre is a major player in the airline reservation industry. Passenger reservations, cruise schedules etc. Some years ago, Sabre went on to embark on a community programme. There is a Sabre community portal, password-protected and a hub, which is Sabre’s Facebook-like business networking portal. The hub is a tool that Sabre’s customers had asked for. The objective was to increase employee engagement to improve customer experience. Yet, some of the engagement they got from employees was not always up to scratch.

This is why Sabre took a step back and launched the Great Community Race! The races stretched over a period of 3 months.  A minimum of 3 tasks were assigned to each team. Bonus points were granted and at the end a judge awarded prizes. The aim was to get over the “I don’t have time to do that” syndrome.

The result was pleasantly surprising. Some teams had given themselves  names, and the sense of competition and camaraderie was high. 4 awards were granted: 1) highest cumulative score 2) product suite with highest score 3) team with high score (not highest) but consistent approach 4) teams new to community

The result is seen by the team as an overall success:

• 23 teams fully engaged
• above 3,000 portal content items published and created
• average blog posts/ month up 573%
• portal accounts increased by 7%
• hub accounts increased 9%

Lessons learned

• having fun is useful in that process
• so is Executive involvement
• assigned tasks was appreciated
• Sabre thinks they should have done this even earlier
• it’s not a one-for-one return (“because we engage more doesn’t mean customers will”)

some of the next steps include:

• community certification programme
• strengthening of community interaction to increase sales’ understanding and participation
• develop detailed external social media plan in order to decide how to best use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other tools.
• the race ended recently, and the Sabre team wishes to move forward with was is going to be next.

Sungard harnesses Yammer to leverage employee creativity

The 4th and final Blogwell presentation which I attended on November 9 in Philadelphia was dedicated to Sungard’s experience. Sungard (the host of the November 10 private SMBC conference; this is a private member event so no reporting on that, sorry!) is one of the largest Software and IT companies in the US. The presentation was delivered by Leah Patterson, who is in charge of the Corporate Social Media strategy at Sungard.

I found Leah’s presentation particularly inspiring. Her involvement and dedication were very convincing and I liked the way she emphasised the fact that a lot of work is required to make things work. Sungard’s strategy to get employees on Yammer also shows a lot of openness and insight. Internal IT looked into the matter and everyone agreed that “in-house wasn’t going to work” Leah said and this is why they chose Yammer. The sheer number of employees on Yammer is impressive and shows how effective the facilitation of that internal community is. At the same time, Sungard’s involvement into external communities is done with tact and shows a lot of respect for customers, which is in my mind a recipe for success.

We’re on Twitter, now what?

Sungard thought about jumping right on and they figured 3 main things: 1. people were talking but Sungard wasn’t part of the conversations 2. competitors were (just) ahead of Sungard 3. users were in there too! So Sungard jumped in the water and created accounts on all platforms. But how could Social Media be used as a way to harness the power of conversations?

Social Media gives Sungard the ability to build on the existing community work already started at Sungard years before that. They saw that big brand advertising was far less meaningful than peer to peer communications and this is why Social Media is useful to them.

We don’t use this to sell our products

“We don’t want to be part of these conversations to sell our products”, Leah added, “we want to be part of them because we want to understand how to make our products better”. As a conclusion, Social Media work isn’t just a “marketing thing” Leah said.

All Sungard employees will soon use Yammer

With Yammer, Sungard managed to harness the power of social media in order to trigger passionate discussions and Leah is now working with the security and IT department in order to get the entire 20,000 employee community on Yammer. As of now, Sungard has 10,000 members on its Yammer community (see photo) and 500 groups, and they are even using Yammer to do crowdsourcing. Apart from Yammer, Leah stresses Sungard is also using LinkedIn.

What metrics? Yammer has in-buillt stats. Apart from that, Radian 6 i sbeing used for external community discussions and the team is still working on how they are measuring the results and effectiveness of its initiatives.

Lessons learnt

• lesson 1 is that you need to know why you want to be on these communities above all
• Internal benefits:
• breaking silos: because Sungard is acquiring companies from all over the world, Social Media is useful
• Social Media gives people a voice
• External benefits:
• What do you want to learn from other participants
• What will participants gain from being involved
• What ideas/strategies can we crowdsource within our community?
• lesson 2 is that you should create formal guidelines to provide structure: moderator guidelines, community terms of use, user expectations and Social Media guidelines
• lesson 3 is to get involved and understand that this kind of work requires a lot of work and that it requires resources

Don’t be prejudiced: b2b is the future of social media!

Time and time again, I have heard people say that b2c is better suited to social media than b2b. As a matter of fact, I am not at all sure about that. The fact that there are fewer b2b brands jumping on the bandwagon is probably more due to the maturity of that sector than the fact that the medium is not adapted to b2b.

Indeed, if one wants social media to have an impact, one needs to foster collaboration and create communities, which is generally done through 3 main things: passion, mutual help and common benefit. These 3 common ingredients of collaboration and social media are in fact very commonplace in the b2b arena; communities are often smaller, more specialised, but also very focused on their abilities to deliver and

illustration & maps by Mongabay.com

always ready to debate on technical points, points of view etc.

Besides, business to business is far less exposed than consumer marketing. In the recent Nestlé example, in which the Swiss firm has not quite been able to appraise the situation and deliver appropriate responses, online fighting with Greenpeace and other activists on social network is an unfair battle for b2c brands. The leeway that brands have in such cases to defend themselves is not very significant – and the case made by Greenpeace is a bit overwhelming too (see maps on the right hand side, courtesy of mongabay.com). Indeed, Nestlé uses Palm oil, which is both an issue from an ecological and dietary point of view, granted; but all mass producers of foodstuffs use palm oil because it’s cheaper and plentiful (now we know why). When activists target a company like this one, the result can be terrible, even though I am not at all certain that Facebook will have the best of Nestlé, the effect on brand equity is still very bad at the very least. At the end of the day, the Swiss manufacturer has yielded to pressure, but instead of turning this into a customer benefit, it’s more a matter of acknowledging their “mistake” and trying to catch up with the criticisms.

As far as b2b is concerned, there is less resentment, clients are more prone to negotiate than complain online, and they also know that when complaints are voiced too crudely online, it’s not always good for your own – and your company’s – reputation either. Besides, in b2b it is also easier for clients to make their points directly to sales and/or marketing. I have heard example in the United States of software vendors (I cannot quote brands) having problems with former employees who avenged themselves by becoming trolls (that is to say online detractors on forums ands social media), but in general the b2b environment is more straight-laced and more likely to trigger responsible discussions.

One may argue that you might get fewer comments on b2b social media and blogs in particular (at Orange Business Services we got 1,500 in 2009 only, so it’s not too bad in fact) but when we get some they are a lot better and more interesting than most of the comments that you get in b2c. Most of the time, they are passionate discussions about in-depth subjects, including complex points of views and explanations. How complex can you get on a consumer product? Usually, it doesn’t get very far or it gets round in circle. In b2b, co-creation and co-innovation is already old-hat, so why not use the Internet to pursue the discussion online?

Such discussions and comments enable one to improve one’s products (it happened to us 4 times in 2009), and it can even help us improve our knowledge when an Internet reader remarks on one of our articles, corrects our mistakes and helps us improve our points of view and visions. A little counter intuitively, I would even venture to say that b2b is the future of social media, because it is b2b brands which can actually most benefit from the use of these tools. We established the proof of this with our @orangebusiness twitter account by placing our brand in the top 10 French brands on Twitter, right behind worldwide renowned brands like Louis Vuitton or Yves Saint Laurent (source:  [Fr]01 informatique, May 2010) and even above Air France. Yet, being popular on the web with a brand like Air France is a lot easier when you think about it, the competition should even be unfair. No, it is unfair; but such is the passion triggered by what we did collectively that we are on the verge of building what is the nirvana of social marketing: a community (Air France already has one, it was created by one of their fans but it’s hard to admit that you have to relinquish the responsibility for your brand even though this is the right thing to do when a community already exists).

http://twitter.com/orangebusiness is the 6th French brand on Twitter (source: 01 informatique May 2010, April numbers)

Lastly, it is difficult for a b2b firm to do traditional advertising and namely TV commercials. Often, budgets are tight and TV commercials require vast amounts of money while delivering sometimes variable results. Into the bargain, most b2b players are reluctant to spread the word about niche products on popular TVs networks. Social media, on the contrary, proves an efficient and economical way to market b2b products: in other words, Nestlé less needs Facebook than we need Twitter (mark my word, I didn’t write does not need Facebook).

B2b is really well suited to social media even though this is not what you will find on the headlines because its subjects are more technical and — if taken at face value — less pertinent for consumers. But at the end of the day, this is also what keeps trolls at bay!

And this is also why a lot of b2b marketing budgets are dormant due to the lack of new ideas whereas so much can be done.

note : the illustrations and pictures are from Microsoft clipart gallery

(2/10) My top 10 tips for implementing social media

continued from part one, this article will be published in 10 instalments

two: do not confuse comments for collaboration

Comments mean reaction, not action nor pro-action. On the contrary, collaboration is about working together (cum-laborare in Latin). And it is about working from the bottom up (Howard Rheingold talked about the guy in the basement). This includes encouraging people from the shopfloor to come forward and also letting clients talk to one another. Not all companies are prepared for this, and it may take a while before they are. Besides, if this is incompatible with your core strategy, check the following rule.

to be continued …