Brand

14 June 2011

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

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Social Media

13 August 2009

Crowdsourcing for B2B Marketing

I’ve been talking to people (anyone who’ll listen actually) about ‘crowdsourcing.’ They’ve listened to me, mostly, and then looked at me like I’m a twat. So I started to doubt my own visionary forward thinking brilliance and thought maybe I’d best just shut up and sit down. But then again, I’ve never been one to run from a stupidity contest so I thought I’d persevere. In years to come you can all look back and say, “That McKee bloke – genius.” Or, alternatively, “twat.”

Crowdsourcing is a term first attributed to Jeff Howe in 2006, a tech writer for the US magazine Wired. It broadly means using the power of many to solve problems. Rather than rely on a single person within an organisation or even an entire department, whole companies their clients and people you don’t even know can contribute to solving a particular corporate challenge. It’s all served up on the interweb via your website or chosen flavour of electronica (intranet/extranet/landing page/microsite/social media/forum…) and the corporate entity gathers opinion and content from far and wide. Think of the principal of opensource applications and you’re on the right lines. If thousands of developers around the world can freely contribute a little bit of code in their spare time, it doesn’t take long to produce an entirely open/free platform to challenge the likes of even Microsoft. The same principal can be applied to any challenge where many hands can make light work. It’s a bit of a big deal. One that the B2B marketing community has thus far almost wholly ignored.

I’m surprised at the limited adoption in the B2B space because I do believe I’m in love with the whole concept. Brand strategy formulation is all about gathering opinion and establishing a cohesive, compelling story that the audience will believe in. Brands aren’t about guidelines or products or services, they’re about feelings – how people feel about your brand. Rather than being restricted to the views of a few key stakeholders in a workshop and a couple of focus groups, what if you could open up the brand discussion to the people who really matter – the prospective customers – and have the whole world tell you how they feel? Well, actually, you can. How cool is that? And yet, when I offer the service to companies that I understand are seeking that very customer insight, I’m still being given the ‘twat’ look…

There are many fairly dull examples of crowdsourcing I could offer you, but that wouldn’t really inspire or excite. But by relaxing the definition slightly, I can perhaps demonstrate the power of Social Media to shape how companies can affect or be affected by how people ‘feel’ about their brand.

‘United Breaks Guitars’ started as a music video protest by Dave Carroll, a musician who had his guitar broken by United Airlines baggage handlers. United refused to pay for the broken guitar so Carroll wrote a song, produced a video and posted it to YouTube. Google it and enjoy the video. Then think about the Mashable report that the video was viewed three million times in its first ten days of release and almost doubled again ten days later. In the first 10 day period it generated 14,000 viewer comments. Not many of them were very complimentary about United. You can now download the song on iTunes. Dave Carroll was crowdsourcing – using a wider audience to gather opinion and influence brands (his and United’s).

Best Buy, the large U.S. retailer has been using internal crowdsourcing for over a year. Their ‘Company as Wiki’ YouTube video clearly articulates the benefit of empowering staff to contribute to management thinking and processes to improve the brand. A new idea for a store can be conceived by any staff member, posted to the Best Buy site for comment and discussion by other members of staff. The good ideas rise to the top and management are able to fund the best projects immediately. Best Buy is currently considering how to use crowdsourcing for its external audience.

So. I’m ready. Who wants to play? Genius or twat? Let the crowd decide…

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

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Social Media

23 April 2009

B2B Marketing Entrepreneur?

I’ve always been deeply suspicious of anyone introducing themselves as an ‘Entrepreneur’. It’s one of those wank words I find impossible to say out loud. Women don’t seem to like the word ‘moist’, but for me, it’s ‘entrepreneur’. Eww. I’m less disturbed when the term’s used to describe someone else. It’s strictly the self-use of the word that bugs me. So, “Richard Branson is an entrepreneur”, is wholly acceptable. “Hello, I’m Bob. I’m an entrepreneur”, isn’t. See what I mean? Wanker.

So when I walked into a client meeting I was relatively relaxed as the introductions were made and the Marketing Director said, “…and this is Bob.” It was only when Bob himself then repeated, “I’m Bob – I’m an Entrepreneur”, that I knew we were all doomed.

I’d been asked to the meeting to discuss social media, something I’m increasingly integrating into on and offline marketing strategies so I was slightly perplexed as to why we might need an ‘entrepreneur’ in the room. Was it just in case a brilliantly creative idea sprang out of our conversation and someone needed to throw money at it? Or maybe if we had a good idea, but suddenly and mysteriously ran out of creativity, we might need Bob to step in and… ‘preneur’ over everyone? His role wasn’t clear. And I didn’t like him. Mainly because of his self-proclaimed title.

I let it go for all of about a minute and a half and then said, “So, Bob, what does an entrepreneur do then?”

There was a pause while he composed his best Dragon’s Den stare and he replied, “I seek the alternative.” I waited for the subject in his sentence, but it never came. That was it. Bob sought ‘the alternative’. I admired the brevity, but I wasn’t really any the wiser. “I suppose people ask you what ‘the alternative’ is quite a lot?” I enquired oh so casually. “No” he said.

Everyone shuffled their papers and cleared their throats so I kind of knew I was supposed to shut up. But that’s never stopped me before and I wanted to understand his purpose in life. “Well, are you entrepreneurial in the social media space?” “No”, he said, “I think social media’s a complete waste of money.”

Now that, I thought, was interesting – for someone who ‘seeks the alterative’. Social media is surely THE alternative at the moment. Markets have changed, audiences have moved, tools have improved, knowledge is being shared and the world is responding to new ‘social’ methods of communication for their brands – we’re all doing at least something in the social media marketing space now even if it’s just blowing the dust off our Linkedin accounts and trying to make sense of Twitter. Of course, some brands are doing considerably more in the social space – they’re using social tools to create very active, vibrant communities online, they’re harnessing customer opinion, influencing perceptions, engaging in conversation and debate, they’re even transforming sales methods, processes and revenues.

Those companies are re-capturing audiences that had been lost to the internet and are finding new audiences at the same time. In a commoditised marketplace, those companies are achieving elusive competitive advantage by staying a step ahead of the competition and finding their social voice. And they’re doing it in truly creative ways – using music, video, photographs, conversation. What’s ‘the alternative’ anyway – another brochure? Really? Is that really going to work this time around when it hasn’t worked for the last couple of years at least? The companies that will survive and accelerate through the recession are learning to balance traditional communications strategies with the social mandates of their audiences. If the customers want it – you’d better deliver it. New, inspired, thinking and brand development starts when digital and direct strategies are properly aligned and it’s the steps forward in social media that are truly… ehh… “entrepreneurial”. Oops.

Naturally, I regurgitated those thoughts in a demented stream of consciousness mad professor kind of way and only stopped to draw breath when spots started appearing in front of my eyes and I thought I was going to faint. Waste of money? My arse. In the last 12 months the current British Government has increased the Gross National Debt by more than the combined total of Governments over the last 300 years. Now THAT’s a waste of money. I dunno – somehow I expected an ‘entrepreneur’ to know the difference. Does that make me the real entrepreneur, the alternative… or the wanker?

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

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Social Media

13 February 2009

B2B Social Media – The Art of Conversation

There seem to be two issues of note this year in the B2B marketing space. I don’t typically declare those issues so early in the season for fear of peaking too early and looking like a twat, but this year I’ll make an exception. There are definitely two conversations – the agenda and the hidden agenda. Here’s how I see them unfolding…

The agenda is the recession, the economy, the C word, the shoot me now and let’s just end it all agenda. It’s a reasonable agenda – Lord knows we’ve heard enough from the Markets, the City and the ‘experts’ to know that we’re all doomed. The doomiest of the doomed are the people, businesses and services with the prefix (or indeed suffix) of ‘marketing’. So we’re all going to die and everyone wants to talk about it – to shoo the evil voodoo away, a bit like saying the word ‘cancer’ out loud.

That’s a very dull and depressing agenda and is it really what we want to spend the next year(s) talking about? People will lose jobs, businesses will close, the world will change. I’m still not getting anything helpful or interesting out of this conversation and on the basis that I’m not actually going to top myself just yet, I’d quite like to move forward. Thanks for asking.

I’ll concede one point on the recession agenda. For the foreseeable future, B2B clients and agencies are going to have to try different things and deliver results. Sound familiar? Uh huhh, thought so.

The far more interesting hidden agenda was just warming up last year when the economic shit hit the fan – it’s the Social Media Agenda. Has anyone noticed how social media has been spreading like a disease, except it’s not a disease. Social diseases are completely different and absolutely not on the agenda. It’s the overnight sensation that’s taken about seven years to appear overnight. Everyone, but everyone’s had a look at Social Media and formed an opinion – waste of time, waste of money, don’t understand it, can’t see the point. Or maybe they’ve become social media ‘experts’ with a view on what will and will not generate revenue and offer value and produce returns. Everyone’s full of shit of course because there are no experts, no one knows what’s going to work and the whole space is a complete land-grab.

I had a punt at twitter the other day and it’s like the WILD WEST out there. But I started some conversations. And they’re carrying on. I revisited Linkedin too – I’ve never really bothered with it before, but I was able to create a permission-based network of almost three hundred people interested in Birddog conversations in a few days. I’ve got absolutely no idea what I’m going to do with my twitter streams or my Linkedin network – yet. But I do know that, so far, almost everyone – client and agency has missed the point of these technologies. The point is the conversation.

The conversation is, for the first time, being shaped and determined by the customer not the provider. That was always the intention of the Social Media model – it’s very ‘Web2’. There’s a good argument that says ‘conversation doesn’t pay the rent’, but inevitably, new things take a while to figure out and I have the impression that the moment’s arrived. Or it’s at least arriving. There’s plenty of tech geekery around the subject and there are a load of no-marks professing to know all the answers, but there’s also a growing conversation. A movement. It has nothing to do with the people who think they know the answer to ‘Social Media Revenue Generation Models’. It’s just about the people – having the conversations and working it out for themselves and with each other. And from those conversations comes the revenue. Just as it always has.

This is the agenda. It’s still hugely unpredictable which makes it easily dismissed, but it’s a beautiful thing because nobody’s screwed with it yet. Those who have tried to manufacture a set result have been left behind by the power of the people who have other expectations and (for the first time?) the ability to shape outcomes.

So as B2B clients and agencies and brand champions and marketers how are we all going to reinvent ourselves? How will we be ‘creative’ in a Web2.0 world? How will we promote our brands when we can’t ‘push’ messages but have to learn how to ‘pull’?

We’re going to watch the weak and the irrelevant wiped out by the recession – that’s a given. Then we could spend the next several years talking about how awful it all was. Or we can try being creative again. Whatever happens, don’t waste a good recession…

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

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