birddog

Building a B2B Customer Community

A client mentioned to me recently the pressing need to deliver, “strong results, quickly,” from the community engagement programme I was being asked to deliver. I’ve been asked for that before of course. Almost every time a client or prospect sticks their hand in the air it’s to ask for the required strong results in a timeframe that almost always equates to the specifics or generalities of, ‘quickly’.

So, once and for all, the desire to build and manage an online community of brand evangelists is admirable. Well done. That’s the right path. Customers have moved online and you want to communicate with them on their terms within their online environments. Good news. But. (You knew there was a ‘but’ coming, right?)

But, you can’t snap your fingers and build an engaged community. You can’t bitch and moan and delay and procrastinate and squeeze costs and when you finally take an incremental step forward (usually a small one) expect the miraculous creation of a venerated online citadel overnight. It doesn’t work that way – for all the reasons that you originally agreed to. It’s the customer’s community. Unless and until you prove otherwise, your brand is the guest. Whether your brand is a welcome guest, a tolerated one or a toothless, flatulent aunt who sups tea out of a saucer, depends in no small part on how ‘quickly’ you press for ‘strong results’. Rome wasn’t built in a day. No one in the history of the world has ever delivered a website on time. So why is there the expectation that social community building is a switch-on, switch-off commodity?

It’s the opposite. Online communities need beliefs and principals on which they can be built. They need nurturing and inspiring. Content needs to be created and crafted and curated and shared and distributed. Personalities need to be identified. Influencers and influences need to be moderated, adjusted, supported. There’s a whole world of pain you’re about to switch on and you are clueless because you’re still treating it like a mailing campaign from the late ‘80s.

There was a certain comfort in the tactical campaign delivery of yesteryear – design it, print it, mail it. Achieve a predictable response from a predictable channel and then do it all over again. But community engagement isn’t a tactical play. It’s strategic. Building online relationships requires a fundamental shift in marketing perspective. It’s not promotional, or lead generating, or conducted at arms length. It’s attitudinal. It’s behavioural – how an organization feels about customers and prospective customers – and it’s conducted up close and personal for the whole world to see and engage with. Or not.

Either way, on the subject of Community Engagement, you’re no longer allowed to ask me to ‘deliver strong results quickly’ – not unless you have the first clue about quickly delivering strong, integrated, digital, social and content strategies to sit alongside them. Quickly is the decision you should have made five years ago. Quickly is the speed at which news travels within your competitors’ established online communities. Quickly is how our meeting’s going to end.

The results may come quickly, or they may not. At which point, you have a choice – tactically try to put the genie back in the bottle, or, strategically, make a longer term investment in the needs of your customer instead of the short term needs of the quarter end figures. Whatever you decide, at least you know how to attach some urgency to the matter now. Move quickly? Yes. Deliver strong results? Absolutely. In the same sentence? Forget it. From now on, ah izz juss gonna take mah time…

Scot McKee
Managing Director
Birddog Ltd.
+44 20 7323 6666

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The Definition of ‘Social ROI’ – The Pushmepullyou

I’m becoming a little tired of knobs using ‘socialisms’ – words and phrases that sound like English, but aren’t. They’re intended to make the user appear desperately clever and the recipient stupid. ‘Monetizatory’. ‘Accessibilitization’. ‘Engagementized’. And the rest. Knobs, the lot of them.

Social media requires a degree of initiative and a willingness to experiment. Not much else. Clients would like immediate ROI, but that’s incompatible with the social medium and making up words like ‘inter-engagementary’ is a poor alternative to just saying, “You can’t have immediate ROI”. Social media offers an opportunity for brands to engage with customers and prospects on the customer’s terms and you need to view ROI as a longer-term goal. It doesn’t need to be any more complex, we shouldn’t attempt to justify it any further and we certainly don’t need to make up wank-words.

Agencies pushing the agenda are using language to make the simple appear complex in the hope that it also becomes more believable or valuable. Clients remain unable to justify investment in something that has no logical or immediate value to the traditional marketing model.

I don’t actually care. What I care about is my Pushmepullyou from Prycie.

In a random conversation with @Prycie on Twitter, she asked me what my, “Fave animal,” was. I picked a Pushmepullyou from Dr. Doolittle. Obviously. Within a few minutes Prycie had sent me a left-handed drawing of a Pushmepullyou. She had cut a tendon on her right arm, so was using her left hand. She shared photos of the post-operative scars and the cast on her arm and we chatted about her other drawings too – the slow loris, the elephant…

That’s it. That’s all there is to this story. Prycie isn’t a client or a prospect. I’ve never met her. Our conversation could be measured as a quantifiable ‘engagement’ or ‘interaction’ or whatever the corporate machine is chasing as justification for the time invested, but I’m not going to. It just ‘was’. One small example of the shit that goes down in the social world thousands of times a minute every day.

The value of social media (beyond the immediate enjoyment of the conversation itself) isn’t going to be felt in engagements or interactions. Measure them by all means, but that’s just a score and the score doesn’t represent ‘value’. The value is derived from the on-going and cumulative influence of individual and/or brand personality within a growing online community.

I received an email from someone the following week that started, “I saw the Pushmepullyou picture last week and laughed. It started me thinking and I was wondering if you could help with my latest challenge…” That email was from a prospective client hiding in the shadows and listening somewhere from within my online community. I didn’t know that. I wasn’t expecting the email. I didn’t care about that either. But I care now – because in their own good time, the prospect has decided that I might be able to help.

That’s where the value is. We really don’t need big made-up words because it’s all pretty obvious. B2B brands are still trying to push ‘the sale’. In a social economy, brands should allow customers to buy when they’re ready. It’s all about the ‘Pullme’, not the ‘Pushyou’. It’s a different kind of animal.

Scot McKee
Managing Director
Birddog Ltd.
+44 20 7323 6666
Twitter: @ScotMcKee
LinkedIn: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/scotmckee
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How to Produce a B2B Social Media Strategy in 10 Executive Steps

Eric Schmidt, Co-founder and Chairman of the $29 billion online search engine, Google, recently commented on the company’s failure to capitalize on the social networking boom, “I clearly knew I had to do something and I failed to do it. A CEO should take responsibility. I screwed up.”

Businesses that recognize the need, “to do something”, but have yet to commit to an integrated social media strategy need pointers. The world has changed. Audiences are no longer as accessible through traditional communications channels as they once were – they’re ‘social’. The CEO may not be as familiar with the social community as the audience itself, so it’s the executive audience that needs to understand and appreciate the new, social, marketing goals. Everyone talks about ‘why’ businesses need to engage audiences with social media, but the investment only happens when The Board understands ‘how’ a social media strategy will be systematically and methodically implemented to the benefit of the shareholders. Social media is not a radical new ‘panacea’ – it’s just another way to do business.

Here are Birddog’s 10 steps to systematically planning and delivering a social media strategy that Senior Executives understand and support:

Step 1. – Objectives/Approach
Agree objectives from the outset. Unless price discounting or using an alternative promotional model, social media will not ‘generate leads’ directly. Conversation, community and engagement will support the audience. In return, the audience will support the brand with referrals, recommendations and ultimately, customers. Awareness and advocacy, not ‘hard sell’.

Step 2. – Review B2B Social Channels
Review and discuss available types and channels for engagement. Less experienced socialites may be unaware of the tools and the possibilities. Identify the channels most likely to suit the business, the brand and the audience early in the planning process.

Step 3. – Social Research
Visibility of the existing social landscape is key to social understanding. Where (if anywhere) is the brand already active? Where are competitors active? Where is the audience active? Undertaking initial research and providing insight from the results identifies opportunities and creates benchmarks for future activities.

Step 4. – Creative Platform®
Social media does not exist in isolation. Creative development is required to effectively integrate social activities with existing brand and communications assets. Personality, tone and character, rarely exploited in traditional communications are crucial to developing content for social media. Workshop(s) and consultancy delivers the ‘right story’.

Step 5. – Channel Selection & Engagement Planning
By understanding the social landscape, the correct channel opportunities for the brand can be identified. Engagement planning starts with the internal audience. Social media is the responsibility of the organisation not the individual. Assessment of internal capabilities allows external planning, but not before a Social Media Policy (however simple/complex) is in place. Channels, engagement and policy need structuring before launch.

Step 6. – Social Media Implementation
Once the necessary channel assets have been created, work begins on Content Planning. Content doesn’t produce itself. Blogs, pictures, video, audio, online PR all have to come from somewhere – initially, the content plan is where structure and responsibilities will be scheduled and agreed to enable the Community Manager to activate the various channels.

Step 7. – Social Media Monitoring
It’s all measurable. Every click, every view, every new follower, every ‘re-tweet’. Measures of success will be benchmarked and tracked over time to assess performance. Analysis and reporting allows ongoing optimisation of channel activities and budgets in real time. Birddog currently has 25+ social measurement tools in use and/or on trial.

Step 8. – Social Media Skills Transfer
The business commitment to social media should not be static. Resources, budgets, channels and campaigns change continually and the Social Media Strategy needs to accommodate those changes. Internal Staff Training on each of the channels being used improves internal engagement and reduces external/outsourced costs over time.

Step 9. – Agency Engagement
The choice of a social media partner and terms of engagement (project and/or retainer) will be subject to competencies within each step of the social media strategy above. Many agencies talk about B2B social media, few have the clients, case studies and statistics to demonstrate proven experience. Learn from the mistakes of others.

Step 10. – Beyond Social
Social media is one component of a broader marketing strategy that incorporates digital and brand planning as well as offline communications. It’s important not to isolate social media as ‘separate’. Look for the commonality and overlap in order to integrate (thereby reducing costs and maximizing ROI for the business).

Funding is always easier to secure once there is understanding, engagement and a business case. Birddog’s ‘How to Produce a B2B Social Media Strategy’ delivers all three in methodical, manageable steps. The alternative is to say, “I clearly knew I had to do something and I failed to do it. I screwed up.” No one in the boardroom knows where the social revolution started, but they all remember the screw-ups…

Scot McKee
Managing Director
Birddog Ltd.
+44 (0)20 7323 6666
Scot on Twitter