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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

The Yellow Lines | B2B Marketing Awards Finalist 2011 | Best use of Social Media

Social Media Campaign for Cobalt Telephone Technologies | RingGo

The Shifting Sands of Digital B2B Marketing

I confess to having had a moment of digital doubt. The stupid people are clearly getting to me. I think anyone with any degree of responsibility will have their moments of doubt – “Am I doing this right? Will it work? Is it worth it? Does my bum look big in this?” etc. Well, Ok, I’ve had mine. It came hot on the heels of the latest round of next generation digital and social ‘stuff’ that I now have to absorb, digest and, who knows, maybe even find a commercial application for.

Klout, the questionable tool for measuring social and online influence that everyone loves to hate, released a new +K ‘thing’. Across the social web, you’ll now find people ‘giving +K’ to their network colleagues. Well, my ego was immediately beside itself with envy and demanded that I receive +K from absolutely everyone. I fleetingly considered that this new Klout function might offer brands a point of competitive advantage, but mainly, it was about me. Naturally I read everything there was to read about the subject – of which there was a LOT on the social web – and it turns out +K isn’t worth shit. It’s just a way to ‘like’ and reward people for providing good service. Klout co-founder Joe Fernandez said in an interview with Marc Schaefer that, “The +K award does not affect your Klout score”. WTF?!

Then there was the Google+ scandal. Currently by invitation only, Google has released its own social network version of TwitBookIn. It has something to do with ‘circles’. I can’t tell you much more than that because the scandal is, I haven’t been invited. You can just imagine how my ego responded to that one… ‘+’ is obviously the new ‘#’. We will presumably all end up communicating in keyboard shortcuts. At least the meetings will be shorter:

“+?”

“:-(“

“!?”

“…”

“#”

“Bye”

And finally, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg cleverly identified a day in the calendar where Apple wasn’t launching a sleek, new, swipey, clicky thing and took the opportunity to offer his vision of the future of the social web. From what I can understand, Facebook will own everything and everyone, but only if you keep on using it. If you decide to use something else though, don’t worry, Zuckerberg will just buy it. Actually, he said that the future is about sharing and connectivity – which is cool.

So I unleashed the full might of my impressive social consciousness at subsequent business meetings only to be met with blank stares and polite (albeit slightly nervous) smiles. “That’s all very interesting Scot, but if we could just get back to the agenda of the LinkedIn engagement strategy, the Twitter account analytics, the community management profiling and the engagement hub – you know the stuff you convinced us about a year ago that’s starting to work now…?”

And for a moment, just for a moment, I thought, FFS (because I even think in text-based acronyms now…) why do I bother? Why am I troubling myself with the art of the possible when no one wants to ‘do’ it. At my time of life I could just send emails, proclaim that the Royal Mail had it right all along and wait for the pension to kick-in…

Then it struck me that the clients who were reluctant to consider ‘social media’ as a viable B2B communication channel a year ago were the ones bringing my attention back to the sophisticated brand, digital and integrated social strategies that we were now delivering for them. A couple of years ago they’d never have bought that plan and even if it could have worked, I wouldn’t have been able to deliver it. A year from now, they’ll be ready for the next step. I thought of all the business brands who still haven’t put a serious foot on the social ladder, let out a big belly laugh in an evil mad scientist kind of a way (Mwahhhhhaaaaaahhaaaa…etc.) and everyone shifted uncomfortably in their chairs.

The moment of doubt had passed. Your bum looks fantastically big in that, but hey, you can fix that with the right avatar. You can fix anything. Get started.

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

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