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

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/scotmckee
LinkedIn: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/scotmckee
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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
Books: http://is.gd/mckeebooks

The Business of Social Media

I presented the opening address at the recent B2B Marketing Forum for technology in London – essentially addressing a technology audience about the use of digital technology. Well, call me picky, but it struck me that I may well end up teaching my grandmother to suck eggs. If anyone should be fully aware of the potential benefits of using technology within their marketing communications, it would be this audience. So I took the liberty of adjusting the topic to the use of social media technology in the B2B space.

We’ve heard a lot about social media in B2B and indeed dipped a toe into the social waters. But finding actual stories about ‘here’s what we did and here’s what happened,’ are somewhat thinner on the ground. All talk and no action. So I used a story of a project that I had just finished to help the delegates understand the audience engagement opportunity that social media is creating – in this case a blogging platform. It wasn’t the technology that was the subject of the story, it was the outcome.

I gambolled about the stage demonstrating how, with the right content, tone and audience, a community of thousands could be engaged almost instantly. In this particular case, 20k unique hits were recorded on the blog site in 10 days, attracting over 800 visitor comments, also in just 10 days. I was still suffering from sleep deprivation having become ‘a blogger’ for the 10 days, which, let me tell you, is very different from writing the occasional blog, but that’s another story.

There were some good messages in my presentation too (if I may be so bold). Don’t underestimate the speed at which messages spread through the network – thousands of hits in the first 24 hours are achievable (even if surprising). Don’t try to predict the response – but be prepared to respond. Don’t assume you know what the customer wants – adjust the channels and content in real time. All good stuff.

At the end of my presentation, after the cheering and rapturous applause had died down, I was introduced to one of the delegates waiting to speak to me.

“Hello, I’m Scot McKee.”
“Yes, I know – you’re the guy who does the ‘Waterloo Bridge Report’ on Twitter.”
“Oh, eh, yes I am. You’ve seen that?”
“It’s genius! I follow it every week. Brilliant!”
“Right. Good. Umm, thanks very much…”
We chatted for a while, but I had to rush off to my next pressing engagement at the bar.

The Waterloo Bridge Report (#WBR) is a piece of trivia I have been tweeting for a few months. Once a week, on a Friday morning, I post a single tweet (140 characters or less) relating to whatever I see on Waterloo Bridge as I walk to work. Sometimes I attach a photograph. After the first few weeks, people started asking when the next one would be posted so I kept going but thought little more about it. Until the comment at the B2B Marketing Forum.

As I propped up the bar and shared my iPhone charger with an orderly line of power-starved delegates, I checked the analytics for my Waterloo Bridge Reports. It turns out that every time I post a #WBR, hundreds of people check out the comment and photograph. Not a few, not a handful – hundreds. My social media audience was engaged and I didn’t even realise it. Not only that, but, whatever I think, the audience has decided to latch on to the most random piece of bollocks I happen to have conceived. There’s a lesson there for us all.

I am the Managing Director of a top B2B brand and digital agency. I am THE AUTHOR of a #1 bestselling B2B book. I am a legend in my own lunchtime. Trust me, I tweet a load of random bollocks, but the #WBR is the one my audience likes.

They like it enough to attend conferences and remind me. They tell me at meetings. And they tell me again when they issue the Purchase Order. To some, Social Media is, and will remain, random bollocks. But to the more forward thinking brands, audience engagement equates to revenue. Personally, I’m of the considered opinion that random bollocks can also equate to revenue. Consider this my ‘view from the bridge’.

Scot McKee
Managing Director
Birddog Ltd.
+44 (0)20 7323 6666
twitter: @ScotMcKee