Last year at SXSW a few of us had a little fun with a game we call B.S. Bingo. You take a bingo card and you add the most popular “lingo” that you might hear during an event like SXSW, specifically the Interactive portion. Below is the 2010 version, enjoy and remember it is all in fun. Big thanks to so many of you on Twitter/Buzz who helped populate this year’s SXSWi bingo card:
Download the SXSWi Bingo Card.
From time to time I’m asked about social media guidelines for a company. Typically the person is putting something together and an executive has quite smartly stated that the employees need some guidelines. Now the original statement they made may have even said the dreaded “r” word, but either way the goal here is pretty straight forward. Or at least it should be. Your ultimate goal in creating social media guidelines is:
To produce a thorough but easily readable document that provides all employees a practical guide on how to interact within the context of social networks realizing that they are employed by said company.
Let’s break those down a bit further.
Thorough
Easily Readable
Practical Guide
How to Interact
Social media guidelines are not rocket science, but they should provide people with a clear guide on how to participate in social media.
Thanks to Jim Storer for the inspiration needed for this post.
It’s event season for most B2B companies, particularly in the technology world. In the next six weeks I’ll be going to a bunch of shows for BreakingPoint, mainly to demo our cyber simulation capabilities to folks. As you prep for your upcoming schedule of events how are you telling your community that you will be out and about? Couple of suggestions:
If you don’t tell people you are going to be someplace, don’t be surprised if they fail to show up.
Hat tip to Pam O’Neal who found what seems to be a new advertising opportunity for Google search? Notice how when you start to put search terms in you get the regular drop down of results, but the first one is in instant link. Is this paid?
What is the one habit you can’t kick? You have one; at LEAST one. Want to know one of mine? I have to drink two cups of coffee in the morning and then one diet Coke with lunch and then one more coffee at 4pm. There you go, I’ve included a habit with my obsessive compulsive disorder. Habits come in a variety of flavors, ranging from innocent to life-threatening.
Habits are often placed in a negative light, and in most cases rightfully so. Yet as a B2B marketer one of your goals is to create habit-forming campaigns in order to lead generation and cultivation. Why do you use drip email? Why do you execute webcasts on a monthly basis? Why are advertising buys predicated on daily, weekly or monthly runs? The list goes on and on, but ultimately you should be planning out your activities so that you can take advantage of the natural habit behaviors of humans, which I assume your customers are ultimately, until the robots take over.
The first time I came across this concept was after reading Habit: The 95% of Behavior Marketers Ignore
It’s time to introduce habitually good marketing to your audience.
eMarketer had a nice recap today on two new studies of spending outlook for B2B marketers in 2010. First was BtoB Magazine’s updated look at marketing spend in 2010 and the second was a survey by Visible Technologies and SiriusDecisions. Both had some interesting points that stuck out to me immediately:
Interesting and concerning from my point of view. Let’s start from the top.
In 2009 how much money did you spend on “social media”? In 2010 how much money do you plan to spend on “social media”. Excluding salaries, if you answered anywhere above $1 you are spending too much on social media. The reason is simple; social media is not an item to be bought or sold, rather it is a strategy of communication and engagement within marketing, as well as throughout your enterprise. Certainly there are tools that you can buy that help you with social media, but those are tools to use across the board in communicating in a more social manner. These tools help proliferate marketing campaigns that are focused on lead gen, email, web and even direct marketing. Therefore the spend number should fall into those categories and not one that determines social media spend. Don’t spend money on social media, spend money on marketing and communications tools, then proliferate social media into your communications DNA.
What? Hold on now. This is a study of B2B marketing leaders correct? I’m not arguing with the first number, that is a smart way to look at social networks. Your role, however, as a B2B marketer is to generate business and business comes from leads. 100% of all B2B marketers should be using, or at least figuring out how to use, social networks to generate leads. It might not happen, but if someone ever asks you what your primary goal is for any B2B marketing campaign, lead generation better enter the equation.
This stat stumped me more than any other, and unfortunately I do not have access to the full report so I’m working a bit blind. However, if you look at the list of reasons why B2B companies use social media the “generate awareness” garners the most at 25%, followed by customer engagement, analyst/influencer engagement, market products, monitor and respond, competitive tracking and other. What is missing in this list? Lead generation and/or revenue building! I’m not disagreeing with all the other reasons, they are certainly needed, but how do you not at least have lead generation as one of the main reasons you would use a social media marketing strategy?
Again, revenue should be used much more than 12% of the time to determine ROI of social media. Let us reiterate that social media is a communications strategy within your marketing campaigs, and the vast majority of marketing campaigns you run should have a revenue goal attached. Therefore it is one of the only sure fire ways to measure ROI, and truly the only way that your CEO wants to see it represented. As for web traffic/response rates, I’m also surprised to not see this a bit higher. Perhaps it was the wording of the question and the fact that most good marketers now realize that web traffic means little to nothing, whereas web activity and analysis is what is truly important.
Surveys and poll numbers can be shaped however you want them to be shaped, obviously, but some of the numbers that came out of these studies certainly see the recognition of social media as a certifiable strategy. The challenge in 2010 is going to be educating people that it is a strategy, that it can bring in certifiable revenue and that you can truly measure the ROI of your social media strategy.
If you don’t know what your customer is thinking about you right now you aren’t asking.
Ask and you shall receive.
Listen and you will learn.
Don’t let a day go by when you don’t know what your customer is thinking about you.
Last month, when you told me how many Twitter followers you had by simply inserting it into the conversation, much like you would tell someone about the weather during your vacation, I ignored the cry for validation.
A few weeks ago during another awkward social media “tweetup”, when you casually dropped your Hubspot Twitter Grade when talking up the waitress, I swallowed my retort since it actually looked like you would get her number.
Last Monday, on a chain of emails that was supposed to be about a possible fantasy football league trade, you actually typed the words “The way Frank Gore is running the ball this season reminds me of how I created that series of Posterous posts on graffitti and linked it to my Flickr group on urban art.” I didn’t even reply.
And last night, over a beer, you mapped out in avid detail your penultimate plan for aligning your 20,000th Tweet with your 10,000th follower, your 1,000th Facebook Friend, your 500th FriendFeed subscriber and 50th FourSquare badge. I drank.
You have been my friend for a long time so let me just tell you this as straight forward as I can. Nobody cares about your personal social media numbers. Nobody wants to know how many follower/friends/subscriber/badges you have “collected” or what you plan to do during an artificial social media milestone. Most people won’t tell you this, but I know that deep down, below your glazed over eyes from staring at your TweetDeck columns, my old friend is still in there.
Remember the numbers you used to care about? No? Let me remind you.
The night before my wedding you told me about how you came up with that killer marketing campaign that increased recognized revenue by 285% in one quarter.
While I was on a business trip in Europe you sent me an email, excitedly detailing for me a new blog post you were writing that would kick off an online resource center for your community of 500 app engineers.
The day I introduced you to my second son we spent a lunch where you used approximately 15 napkins to illustrate for me how you were going to use SalesForce.com, WebEx and some homebuilt application to launch a fully integrated online demo system, with the goal being to reduce your company’s current sales cycle by three months.
I miss my old friend. The one who knew which numbers mattered.
As a kid I loved watching the NBC pre-game show for their coverage of the National Football League (NFL) and for years I simply figured it was nostalgia of a time when I was falling in love with football. Bill Simmons, a columnist for ESPN.com, shed a bit more light into my memory of NBC’s coverage showing how pre-game shows in the 80s and early 90s were made up of a couple of people giving full on analysis of the upcoming games. This weekend turn on CBS, Fox, NBC or ESPN and you’ll see four, five and even six people all sitting behind a desk talking football. These panels of analysts shed little light on the actual football game and end up being confusing and wholly void of entertainment.
Sitting in the audience watching panels at conferences has become a similar experience. Typically these panels are comprised of three to four subject matter experts and a moderator; at BlogWorld Expo I saw panels with four and five people, plus the moderator. Many of the participants on the panels were smart individuals and people that I have known or read for years. Yet in the panel setting they simply could not provide valuable information. When you have that many people on a panel you create inefficiency and the negative results include:
It is hard to create a solid panel these days, particularly in the social media echo chamber, but it is not impossible. Having participated in and moderated panels I’ve made many of the mistakes above, but hopefully learned some lessons along the way. After sitting on the B2B Social Media Panel at BlogWorld I started to jot down five rules for creating a solid panel for a conference (many of which Kipp Bodnar, our moderator, achieved):
The easiest way to get a panel together is to gather people you already know, perhaps colleagues or friends. Unfortunately this creates a panel filled with people agreeing with one another and providing many comments that are inside jokes. Additionally you start seeing, and hearing, the same people saying the same things at different conferences. By choosing strangers you eliminate these dangers, introduce some fresh blood into the process and potentially providing the audience, and the moderator, with some surprises. A stranger, of course, isn’t someone you simply pull off the street. Look for a blogger you have read for a long time or a contemporary at a competitor. The resources are out there, so make the effort to put together a group of people who are not intimately familiar with one another.
The key word, as always, is “proven”. Thought leaders without practical experience on the topic at hand are immediately discounted by the audience. Too often, panels are full of smart people who love to provide businesses advice, yet have never sat in the same chairs of their audience. People want to hear about what the panelists have learned after implementing programs or practices, the good and the bad. They do not what to hear from panelists who have great creative ideas but have never actually done the work themselves. This is a familiar call here at Dance With Strangers, but remember to pick people who have dirt on their hands.
Being prepared is paramount of course, but going too far will create a static round of questions and prepared answers. Provide your panelists with details on the topic and how you will structure the conversation, how you want them to introduce themselves and perhaps the kick-off question. Otherwise keep it loose and you are going to provide the audience with a more entertaining conversation and you will also keep your panelists on their toes throughout.
Now be careful here, your panelists have agreed to do this panel for you, so you’re not in the business of putting them on the hot seat. If that is your goal you should suggest a one-on-one or debate-style presentation. However, you do want panelists who are engaged throughout the session and provide them with questions that energize their answers before they even start speaking. The first start is what I mentioned above and not scripting out the conversation, but the other element is steering the direction of the conversation in a way that was perhaps not expected, but you know will be more helpful for the audience.
A few weeks ago Jeremiah Owyang argued that we need to integrate social into our presentations whether they are keynotes, panels or something in between. The reason many give is that you need to be able to answer questions being asked on Twitter or redirect the conversation based on critiques being voiced online. As long as you can see the audience this is wholly unnecessary and in fact creates a panel and moderator that seems disinterested. During BlogWorld Expo I saw panelists typing away on their iPhones or laptops and on several instances needed to ask the moderator to repeat a question because they were so busy Tweeting. However, while at the MILCOM show in Boston a few days later I sat in on panels that were also discussing social media, this time the use within the military, and the panelists looked the audience in the eyes the entire session. It makes a huge difference! If you want to gather questions from Twitter you can do that at the end very quickly. Put down the iPhone folks and provide the audience with the information they came to hear.
Agree? Disagree? Did I miss something?
One of my favorite ad campaigns currently running is from the folks at Intel highlighting some of the folks who have made great innovations in technology under the mantra “Our Rock Stars Aren’t Like Your Rock Stars”. If you haven’t seen the ad here is the 30 second spot featuring Ajah Bhatt, the inventor of the USB:
The ad is really well done on a lot of levels; visual, funny, repeatable and adds a personality to a company most people outside of technology only know by the sticker on their PC. However, the message is something I grabbed onto since the term “rock star” has become a ubiquitous term throughout marketing and particularly social media. Plug in “social media rock star” into Twitter search and at any given time you can create an immediate list of 20 such folks. Perhaps they are all rock stars, I don’t know, but I find the term amusing and the way it is thrown around these days down right laughable.
Friends, this is a rock star:
And, for me, this is a rock star:
You probably don’t know the man in the bottom picture, it is Vint Cerf. You might not even know his name. But you use his invention every single day (hint: you are using it right now). The point is a simple one, the term rock star differs depending on the industry and company you keep, but ultimately the term should be reserved for a small batch of luminaries. Fame is not the only prerequisite for being a rock star and neither is the descriptor trademarked solely by musicians, but there certainly should be more regulations before you claim someone, or yourself, is a marketing/social media rock star.
In the marketing world, not surprisingly, we have usurped the term to describe anyone who does something new or simply got their job done. Stop the ubiquity of the term. You don’t see the Baseball Hall of Fame letting in players like Don Mattingly. A terrific player, of course, but a hall of famer? A baseball rock star? No!
Thus I’m making an open plea to our community to prove to me that there are actual rock stars in marketing. People who made an enormous difference with their contributions to our industry. They are people who act and do not simply talk. A Marketing rock star:
My guess is our industry, over time, has had merely a handful of true rock stars. Think I’m wrong? Prove it in the comments or stop using the term rock star, unless you are Tweeting @bono.
