birddog

‘Social B2B Branding’ – Notes From a Hardass Motherfu*ker

I’ve always been impressed by those who study beyond the point of parental coercion. So when I was invited to guest-lecture to university MBA students, the irony wasn’t lost on me. A lifetime ago I spent my time at the back of the class, stoned. Now I was at the front with 100 students scribbling notes.

My lecture was, ‘Social B2B Branding – Notes from a Hardass Motherfu*ker’. A fair title I thought – assessing changes across the social marketing landscape from the frontline (as opposed to the back of the classroom).

Businesses are no longer in full control of their brands. In a social economy, the connected networks of followers, fans and advocates determine how, where and when a brand is communicated among its audience(s). Brands are no longer the sole voice of authority. The audience forms its own opinions and creates its own content, which it shares with wider connected networks. It’s a scary proposition for B2B brand leaders more comfortable where ‘The Word’ resides within a controlled corporate website environment.

The university was scared too. I arranged a video of the presentation along with the slide-deck (search Scot McKee on YouTube and/or Slideshare). The MBA course leader said I needed, “to remove all of the references” to the university, “immediately”. They decided, “not to locate our brand next to the deliberately provocative brand image you present.” I’ve presented the same image for 25 years. They might have considered their position before I invested my time and energy into preparing the lecture.

The location of the presentation was a point of fact, not an endorsement. The university was a venue, my gateway to a wider online and connected audience – including potential fee-paying MBA students.

I was told, “Some in the university think that this experience is evidence that we should avoid such problems by never allowing recordings.” Mmmm. They clearly hadn’t been paying attention in class because my evidence from the ‘Turdy Brown Trousers’ Keynote address at the B2B Marketing Conference 2011 demonstrated that while I presented to around 150 delegates on the day, the subsequent distributed content has (so far) engaged over 5,000 people and reached tens of thousands more.

Anyone can say pretty much anything about the university. Students, visitors, journalists, bloggers… we express our views in a social market. A search of the university on Twitter reveals just such opinions. Lots of them. The point is that the university (and every other B2B brand) is not in control of opinion. The crowd is. Brands need to be able to crowd-surf. That means creating, influencing and shaping content – counteracting the negative and leveraging the positive. To lockdown communications in the social world is futile and from a marketing perspective, counterproductive.

I considered naming the university, but my lecturers always told me to, ‘read around the subject’ – to learn. In the first 2 weeks since releasing the video and slide deck, over 500 people have engaged with the content. The reach runs into thousands. The content has been redistributed by 3 university MBA courses in the US (that I know of) and the real growth spike hasn’t even started. It could all have directed potential MBA candidates to the university brand. Instead, they’re all being directed to my brand – ‘deliberately and provocatively’.

We learn at our own pace. Some business brands will be quick learners and achieve competitive advancement. The majority will follow in their own time, but the advantage will be lost. And some will remain ignorant motherfu*kers.

Scot McKee
Managing Director
Birddog Ltd.
+44 20 7323 6666
Twitter: @ScotMcKee
LinkedIn: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/scotmckee
Books: http://is.gd/mckeebooks

Photo Credit: http://is.gd/JJZmSq

Building Social Influence in B2B Marketing

There seem to be 2 notable benefits to growing social influence. People pay you to talk, and they give you free shit. Both offer a degree of comfort for the future.

I seem to have done a lot of talking in the last few years. Talking, writing books, talking about the writing and then talking some more. I’ve talked about Waterloo Bridge and pastries a fair amount in that time, but mainly I’ve been advocating the new social imperative for B2B brands in a rapidly changing digital economy. I’m not the first of course and hopefully won’t be the last. Only recently the very delightful Jo Porritt at Crowd Media drew my attention to The Cluetrain Manifesto which said pretty much everything I believe in – 12 years ago.

Yet while the written word holds meaning, the spoken word appears to hold value. It’s a reflection of our increasing video consumption in the digital age that I’m being asked to wave my arms, shout and stamp my feet in front of a live audience. My ‘performance’ is recorded and distributed to a wider audience internally and/or externally. Some people, including my clients, recoil from video, “Ooooh, no, I’d never do that. I’d be terrified… you never know who might see it… does my bum look big in this…?” etc.

I see it as an opportunity. I can reach many instead of the few. I can communicate the passion and personality of the brand and maybe, just maybe, if the message is ‘real’ it won’t feel like I’m banging my head against a brick B2B wall quite so much. Oh, and I get paid, which is nice. I admit that wearing makeup is still a bit of a challenge…

The free shit is nice too. Because of my growing ‘social influence’, I’m apparently the right kind of guy to talk about stuff. I deliberately avoided the word ‘promote’ there, because I don’t get paid for it. If someone sends me crap, I put it in the trash and tell the world it’s crap. If it’s something relevant to me or my audience and it’s good – I want to tell the world. Some digital ‘gurus’ are constructing a whole career around that very model. In my mind however, it’s just human nature. We talk about stuff – good and bad – and people listen, or don’t.

Someone sent me an email the other day. It might have been relevant, I don’t know because I trashed it. I simply don’t read cold emails anymore. By contrast, someone at Trend Micro visited me to deliver, explain and install a product called SafeSync that he wanted my opinion on. I’m glad he did, because it’s bloody brilliant. SafeSync copies all your computer files to the cloud, automatically distributes them to all your mobile devices, secures them as back-up and keeps them all in Sync. It’s ridiculously easy to use, quicker than Dropbox and cheap as chips. Yes, there’s still iCloud, but maybe Apple shouldn’t rule the world completely. SafeSync is a very good product. There is an SMB offering that suits me just fine so I’ll be rolling it out across the business. The ‘free trial’ model is as old as the hills, but the guy at Trend specifically selected me as an ‘influencer’. He wanted me to write about the product, not simply buy it. Double whammy then – I’m writing about it and buying it.

And that is how business will proliferate in the social economy. People connected to networks and networks connected to other networks. The people make the decisions and their communities hold influence. Businesses can serve up their offerings, but they are no longer the sole authority. Business brands would do well to remember their audience – how to connect to it and how it operates in a connected world. Oh, and carry an eyeliner. Always carry your eyeliner.

Scot McKee
Managing Director
Birddog Ltd.
+44 20 7323 6666
Twitter: @ScotMcKee
LinkedIn: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/scotmckee
Book: http://amzn.to/mOUKOH

Turdy Brown Trousers – B2B Marketing Conference 2011

I ponced around on stage giving a keynote presentation at the annual B2B Marketing conference recently. I swung my arms around and splattered the front row with spittle and grew increasingly red in the face as I tried to convince congregated worthies of the need to accelerate adoption of digital and social marketing practices. I can’t be certain, but based on the cheering, a certain amount of swooning and riotous applause, I’m calling it a win.

I called the presentation, ‘Turdy Brown Trousers’. It was perhaps a little unconventional. But then again, the whole point was to demonstrate that conservative and traditional communications in B2B are failing, while the opportunities for digital and social development are huge. Doing nothing will surely be the death of many business brands. Hopefully, I gave the audience several reasons to consider the state of their trousers.

This audience has been warned before that it needs to change policies and practices. It’s the speed of change (or lack of it) that is the current cause for concern. I wanted to demonstrate that the social opportunity was… ‘real’. Other presentations on the day focussed on what has happened in the past. Or they asked the audience to participate in the present. My interest was the future potential for the audience. It was a high risk strategy – not something that B2B is exactly famous for, but hey, someone’s got to do it…

So I announced on stage that although I had a captive audience, my real interest was the extended B2B audience outside of the room – i.e. The rest of the B2B world. For my business message to carry any real weight I had to reach more interested people – and I was going to do it, live, as I gave my presentation. I unsheathed my iPhone and told the crowd I was going to take its picture and tweet it.

At the end of my 15 or 20 minute presentation, we’d have a look at how many people I’d been able to virtually draw into the room and we’d track progress thereafter. They shuffled nervously in their seats. Nevertheless, on the count of three I made them all wave their arms in the air and duly tweeted the photo.

15 minutes later, when I’d quite finished reigning brimstone down upon the audience, I asked the Editor of B2B Marketing to reveal how many people had viewed the photo. “Um… it’s 25,” he said. I was a little disappointed – I was hoping for 100. Then, a voice from the back of the auditorium shouted, “Hit the refresh button!” Joel duly refreshed his screen and said, “Oh yes, sorry, it’s 289.”

In 15 minutes, one photo put more engaged people in the room than the entire marketing activity to promote the conference. By the end of the day, the number of views had reached over 600. Less than a week later the views were over 1,000. The figures are still climbing if you’d like to check.

The market has changed. Your B2B social audience is real, engaged, fast, responsive and growing. I needn’t have worried about the risk of tweeting that photo. What was there to lose? Nothing – I believe in the crowd. By contrast, the brands that continue to ‘wait and see’ risk losing everything.

Below, you’ll find the slide deck and accompanying live audio recording from my presentation. Enjoy.

Turdy Brown Trousers | Scot Mckee | B2B Marketing Conference by Birddogb2b

Scot McKee
Managing Director
Birddog Ltd.
+44 20 7323 6666
Twitter: @ScotMcKee
LinkedIn: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/scotmckee
Book: http://amzn.to/mOUKOH

B2B Adoption of Digital Strategies

I was speaking to a colleague at an agency in Chicago the other day because, well, because I’m just so cool and transatlantic and stuff. I said, “Dude!” a lot, and he called me, “Buddy” (even though my name is Scot…) and we generally pretended we were speaking the same language for a while.

We were comparing notes on the B2B brand and digital developments in our respective geographic markets and there was a comforting degree of similarity in attitudes and beliefs considering they’re, well, you know, American for a start.

There has undoubtedly been a huge level of interest in digital development within the B2B space in the last couple of years on both sides of the Atlantic, but we seemed to experience the interest in different ways.

In Chicago and across the US according to my friend, the B2B market has been slow to change and reluctant to adopt new channels or platforms of communication. Nevertheless, the market was steadily growing, coming to terms with a digital future and becoming more focussed on digital strategies. He wondered whether his positioning of offering Integrated Branding services carried sufficient digital emphasis.

I explained how the B2B market in the UK was a little different in its intransigence. There had been a veritable frenzy of early interest before reverting to type and doing very little to adopt digital and social marketing practices. ‘Mmmm… interesting…’, is about as close to the digital revolution as the majority of the B2B market is prepared to venture in the short-term. Having said that, the outcome over here has broadly been the same as in the US – a steady growth but limited adoption of innovative digital strategies. I made the point that ‘Integrated Branding’ is actually a very strong position in a market sector that is notoriously slow to change. The ability to develop and interpret brand strategy and apply it across traditional and digital channels is certainly closer to the expectation and comfort zone of the market than, say for example, ‘Willy-Trembling Digital Revolutionary’.

There is still an abundance of indecision and inertia as B2B marketers weigh the risks of following their experience in traditional communications against the potential rewards of following their audience into digital and social spaces. The market will change. It’s inevitable, because the audience has already shifted. But by the time B2B is fully committed, the brand building opportunity may be lost. Have you noticed how, already, we’re no longer calling digital developments ‘new media’?

New technology holds no competitive advantage if it’s no longer ‘new’ by the time you get around to incorporating it into your marketing plan. It’s just ‘technology’. Everyone has technology. The opportunity to be ‘first’ or ‘better’ or ‘innovative’ or ‘different’ is lost every time you say, “Let’s wait and see. Maybe next time…” The result of a conservative digital adoption policy is undoubtedly low risk. It’s safer not to experiment than to hang your ass too far out of the window, but it’s also a tragic waste of opportunity. The science of the practical triumphs over the art of the possible. Again. You may not have noticed the gap widening between the traditional and social B2B brands yet. But you will. Mind the gap.

Scot McKee
Managing Director
Birddog Ltd.
+44 (0)20 7323 6666
Twitter: @ScotMcKee
LinkedIn: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/scotmckee
Book: http://amzn.to/mOUKOH