Dance With Strangers

When I think of a resource for B2B social media I think of Jeff Cohen and Kipp Bodnar because, well, they run Social Media B2B. Not many folks know what us B2B marketers are up against when it comes to integrating social media, but having read their blog and spent time with them both I always leave the conversation with new ideas and inspiration.`

Therefore I was really thrilled when Jeff asked me to sit (actually stand) down for an interview during SXSWi and I wanted to share:

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:

• Blog about the events you are attending, why and what you will be doing at the event.
• Set up Twitter searches for the show names or hashtags, connect with people talking about the event.
• Post events to LinkedIn (groups and their actual event feature).
• Send out an email to segments who may be attending certain shows with an offer (we have a super cool t-shirt).

If you don’t tell people you are going to be someplace, don’t be surprised if they fail to show up.

Conversation is defined, in many dictionaries, as the “informal interchange of thoughts, information, etc., by spoken words; oral communication between persons; talk; colloquy”.

Communication is defined, in many dictionaries, as the “imparting or exchanging of information or news”.

Let’s agree that the definition of Conversation should change a bit, to at least include “written words” along side those that are spoken.

Now, a question for you.

On Twitter, do you have Conversations or Communications with people?

On Facebook, do you have Conversations or Communications with people?

On eMail, do you have Conversations or Communications with people?

On the phone, do you have Conversations or Communications with people?

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.

The beginning of this year I found myself wrapped up in the conversation sparked by Peter Kim concerning the “echo chamber”. At the time I wrote a post “Think About It: Changing Your Social Media Habits” where I discussed how I was currently escaping the echo chamber, primarily because I was getting impatient with the discourse that is coming from marketers and ’social media types’. Truth be told that never happened…until now. The past thirty days I actually did escape my echo chamber.

Twitter stats for the past 90 days...

Surely I would love to regale you with my strategic plan to make this happen, but truth be told the past month found me spending much of my time focusing on our corporate blog, our corporate Twitter, the other facets of my work, travel to trade shows and of course my family. Pinpointing my focus has allowed me to do really fun things at work, which I’m going to write about next week, and center myself around our marketing plan for the second half of 2009. Not only did my personal Twitter activity drop by two-thirds, but I posted sporadically here on the blog (traffic went down by nearly half), rarely ventured to Facebook and didn’t even realize FriendFeed had a new UI.

On the flip side, I was in LinkedIn every day with our community of network engineers in our network testing tools group. Our corporate Twitter grew in followers and in it’s engagement with people. Last week our corporate blog recorded it’s largest viewership of 2009. And we just finished analyzing the positive impact of these activities and others on the leads that came in thus far. I escaped my personal echo chamber without leaving the world of social networks. Instead I was able to have conversations with folks about what we provide at BreakingPoint and it served as a great break from the social media/marketing echo chamber that had soured many of the social networks for me.

The echo chamber, the personal one that you may currently be living in, is a result of our own work. We have the power, at all times, to remove ourselves from this chamber, even if it means seeing our precious “follower” numbers plummet. For example, last week I got rid of one of my TweetDeck groups that was entitled “Social Media/Marketing Peeps”, leaving me with one group that simply reads “Friends”. There are approximately 50 or so people in this group, but during my Twitter hiatus they were the people I kept thinking about and wondering how they were doing and what they were up to…I missed them in my life. Perhaps I’m missing out on the conversations I once read from that larger group of marketing folks, but the beauty of social media is that you have the option to control who you are engaging with, when you engage, how and about what.

It comes down to a few simple questions to answer that will guide you:

1. What is my personal goal for using this social network?
2. What is my professional goal for using this social network? (Important for those of us also Tweeting for our company)
3. What do I LOVE about this social network?
4. What tends to frustrate me about this social network?

Yesterday I was back on Twitter in force for the first time and I got to catch up with folks friends AND engage with our community.