B2B Use of Social Media

This is hardly a new subject. In the past I’ve suggested that business customers often have strong motivations for participating in communities and that corporations can dip their toes in the social media waters with internal applications.

When a newsletter from IBM crossed my desk this morning I was reminded of this chart from Marketing Sherpa a couple of weeks ago. They surveyed mid-sized and up B2B marketers about their plans for 2009. Identifying new audiences/quality lists had the highest priority, developing social media and integrating it into their marketing efforts was considered hardest, and the most common activity was developing traditional content. All of it makes sense, but clearly all of it is pretty traditional, quite the opposite of an interesting article in today’s iMedia Connection, which argues that all media is becoming social. Schumacher’s examples are mostly of consumer brands, but all his arguments apply to B2B also.
Pursuing one of the many links in the newsletter I came across an IBM white paper. It looks as if it is from late 2007, but the points it makes are relevant and still need attention from B2B marketers. This quote particularly caught my eye:

(Web 2.0 technologies) can enable large companies to more efficiently and effectively market to small customer segments that have specific interests or requirements. Without Web 2.0 approaches, cost constraints may force these companies to broaden their marketing message to appeal to the widest possible audience.

Isn’t that exactly what you see in the Marketing Sherpa chart; we need more lists with better names. Even if those lists are out there, and they often aren’t, isn’t this the higher cost approach IMB speculates about?

In the eyes of Big Blue, which is clearly interested in pushing its own social media technologies, what should enterprises do? They should:

• Harness the collective intelligence of your people.
• Discover and tap into specific communities of interest.
• Connect people to one another and to relevant information more efficiently.

None of that sounds radical or dangerous. Is it as hard as B2B marketers think it is?

Look at the technologies IBM recommends and their definitions:

• Wikis—Collective authoring environments that enable people to easily populate and edit a Web site based on project or community needs. Wiki is derived from the Hawaiian term for fast.
• Mash-ups—Applications that combine content from more than one source to create a new service.
• Blogs--Web pages where users can keep a personal diary or share information with teams, a social network, the company or the world, helping businesses to drive new viewpoints and harness the wisdom of crowds.
• Tagging—A method of tracking online items that can help you discover
related items and help improve searches and expertise location.
• Folksonomy—The categorization system that emerges from tagging.

Folksonomy—did IBM make that up??? Turns out they didn’t; I missed something else. Here’s an interesting brief description with a good link to some academic work. It’s the difference between a formal taxonomy and the categories that emerge from user tagging. The idea is appealing and reminds me of techniques from quality management that I’ve applied to website content to develop user-centered groupings. It works and user input has merit.

A new term aside, none of this is radical or even particularly difficult. IBM’s arguments about the value of collaboration—throughout the value chain—for increasing speed and improving business processes are hard to refute.

I add the argument that this allows the B2B enterprise to become familiar—maybe even comfortable—with these collaborative technologies. Letting customers participate is the next step. Customer engagement and true community is the result.

Isn’t it worth the effort?

The Super Bowl and New Media--One Last Time

It’s the Monday morning after and most of the pundits are working on Super Bowl ad reviews. My interest was UCG content, and I also watched for ads that were designed to drive traffic to websites.

Of the UCG contests I listed on Wednesday, the only winner actually played during the game was Doritos “Kina: Message from Your Heart.” Doritos introduced it by saying they were offering her a large stage, and as far as I’m concerned she represented the brand better than most of the celebrities that were ubiquitous (obnoxious?) in the agency-produced ads. The Upper Deck winner apparently made it to the game, but not to the advertising slapdown. Hope the KFC winner enjoyed his big party; the players followed league rules and didn’t engage in “hot wings dance”—thankfully. The NFL invited text messages to vote for MVP during the game, not an innovation, but engaging nonetheless.

I found myself watching for ads that were designed to drive viewers to web sites. It reminds me of the golden days of direct marketing in which a classic question was, “If it contains a 1-800 telephone number, does that make it a direct-response ad?” The answer to that is a resounding, “No;” the ad must have an explicit call to action in order for it to be direct response.

The same is true of listing your URL in an ad. It doesn’t qualify as direct-response but it’s still a reasonable thing to do as brand building. The usual suspects—GoDaddy with its teaser on the rejected ad and Sales Genie with its free sales lead offer—have drawn huge traffic in the past and surely did so last night.

The Tide ad in which the interview was disrupted by the talking stain was pretty bad. I took the bait and visited MyTalkingStain.com. Another contest, but this one is fast paced with daily prizes. It’s an application of mashups—pun intended. Another that had a direct call to action, even though I thought the commercial was uninspiring, was Sunsilk shampoo. It turns out that the tie in with the commercial that opened with Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe (young women even know who they are?) is a chance to become a “new international icon” by posting your hair-care story on MySpace. Well, maybe. . .

Because I found so little that was inspired or inspiring, my favorite hands-down was "Clydesdale Team.” How can you loose with a goal-oriented horse, a dog, and one of the most inspirational movie themes of all time? The one I disliked most was the first eTrade spot, which ended with the baby throwing up. Appropriate, I thought. It was closely followed by the Coke commercial that parodied political season. Neither James Carville or Bill Frist are particularly appealing personalities and the idea they would bond over a Coke is ludicrous. Actually I agreed with Bob Garfield who didn’t like most of them—does that make me an old curmudgeon? Seriously, Garfield's video has some social commentary worth thinking about in the struggle to be heard over all the advertising noise.

If you missed anything, AdAge has all the spots posted. MSN has them all and a contest to boot. Nielsen will do a webcast on its ad reviews today at noon. And all the rest of us self-appointed pundits will continue to pontificate for some time to come.

But enough’s enough. It’s time to get back to the serious business of a new media age in which our audiences are looking to us for more than the same old thing. For my money, they didn’t find it on the Super Bowl!
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Social Networks Getting Smaller?

Much has been made of the growth of the big networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. As this table from Marketing Charts shows, there’s good reason for all the attention. They have tremendous reach. It’s easy to liken them to shopping malls, with something for everyone.

So I was intrigued last week when I ran across this article in the New York Times. The idea of a social network just for your apartment building made me to search to see what was available. LifeAt is the firm referenced in the article. It’s pretty new and the application below seems to be the work of the property manager, but if the residents choose to participate it will become interesting and vital.


As I looked I realized there were numerous sites where one can set up personal networks and other sites that have local collaborative content like Topix.com. There are, of course, local newspapers, which are offering many kinds of user-submitted content and creating community around that.


I feel another mashup opportunity coming on. There is growing support for the creation of neighborhood or small town communities although sites like FatDoor are in their infancy. Or web-savy residents will build sites on their own, taking feeds from sites like CitySearch and Craig’s List. They’ll adding a lot of opportunities for their neighbor to provide content and they’ll not only have vibrant local social nets, they’ll also have ideal opportunities for local advertising. It won’t be a virtual community like Second Life; it may in fact, be a lot more useful and engaging—a new version of the local shopping papers, but one that’s personal and interactive.
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A Marketer-Friendly Mashup Tool

Mashups are a great way to attract attention and create engagement among customers and non-customers alike. The Frito-Lay contest for SuperBowl08 is an example of providing some tools and allowing users to make their own videos. This spring Heinz ran a college challenge contest in which they provided content that student teams could “mash up” in their own way to make ketchup ads.

Mash up sites have been around for awhile. There is AdCandy, which has gone through multiple iterations. Presently JetBlue and and Monster Energy Drink are running slogan contests, so they appear to be working on the mashup capabilities.

Many sites offer mashup tools. For marketers, most of these these are ugly places where they speak languages like JAVA, AJAX, Flash, ATOM, and lots of others that marketers just don’t speak. Until now, creating your own enterprise mashup--for either internal productivity or external marketing--has required some assistance, either a developer to do custom programming or an API like one of the many offered by Yahoo!’s Flickr site. Google Maps is very popular with local businesses because they can incorporate the mapping information into their listings and sites with ease.

The new web service announced by Microsoft last week at the Web 2.0 Summit last week in San Francisco may finally have made mashups a DIY activity for marketers. One of the product developers gives an interesting demo in this video.


Click here to view video.

Microsoft has further information on their Popfly site and – if you plan to call in a developer, background information on the Sliverlight site.

Now the challenge is to figure out how to use mashups effectively for marketing purposes. Contests are fine, but there must be more. Any ideas?

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