social media marketing strategy – Page 3

SocialMedia in the Underground World of B2B

I just returned from SXSW Interactive, it was my first experience attending this event and I was thrilled be a part of it. If you’ve heard from others that it has to be experienced to be understood, it’s true – I’ve never seen anything like it. There was an incredible vibe from the massive amount of high energy innovators who are all on a quest to lead the future of digital & social innovation. Representation ran the gamete from small start-ups to well established global brands leading the way and shaping this exciting period of our history.

I had the privilege to represent IBM Social Business leadership by participating in a panel: SocialMedia in the Underground World of B2B #SMB2B in which we discussed many of the pressing issues of implementing social media programs and leveraging social media as a competitive advantage from a leading B2B brand perspective.

Melissa Chanslor from Text 100 Moderated the panel. Participating along with me were marketing leaders Duane Schulz – Xerox, Jeanette Gibson – Cisco and Shanee Ben-Zur – NVIDIA.

6978068783_39b928c399-300x224 — Left to right: Melissa Chanslor, Shanee Ben-Zur, Jeanette Gibson, Duane Schultz and Susan Emerick – Photo courtesy of Text 100

Here’s a summary of key points I shared based on our IBM Social Business leadership initiatives:

– Conduct social listening research to better understand how and where your constituencies are participating in social and apply insights gathered from the research to your marketing planning process and tactical execution roadmap.

– Deploy subject matter experts (SMEs) to build relationships with key influencers and those that follow them based on your understanding of the social ecosystem. This approach will position limited, high value resources strategically to drive business outcomes.

– Support SMEs to build their personal as well as your brand’s reputation by implementing employee enablement programs that support high value thought leaders to engage in the right place, at the right time in a secure way. Set clear priorities for engagement.

– Help SMEs understand the many benefits of committing to sustaining engagement by sharing examples of other leaders like them who’ve successfully established a position of authority as a trusted topical thought leader.

You can listen to the panel on the podcast on demand to hear the honest dialogue and many great recommendations shared amongst the team. Thanks to Constantin Basturea you can also read a summary of the Twitter steam on Storify

Traits of Subject Matter Experts who are successfully sharing their knowledge and expertise through social networking

Over the last few years I’ve been working with colleagues across my company to provide them guidance on becoming more effective with sharing their domain knowledge through social networking and collaboration. Many Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) I’ve worked with often ask me “What characteristics are common amongst those that are the most effective and influential?” The following is a collection of my observations as well as some suggestions from my work enabling the social workforce.

Be true to yourself

Always be true to yourself when you engage in social activities. When establishing a social presence it should be an expression of who you are and what you want to share with others about what you know. Consistently present yourself, using the same tone, in every interaction and communication. Know yourself and be authentic. Be Genuine. Be Real. Be yourself – only you can do that!

Putting yourself out there

I find that the SMEs who become known are those that are comfortable collaborating, commenting, and publishing in social environments in a sustained and highly engaged way. You should assess your comfort level with establishing a public persona. By nature, being active on social means you are putting yourself out in public. When doing so, being honest about who you are and what you know is critical. You need to be comfortable and have a willingness to share your name, your thoughts, opinions, and recommendations to help others who seek your domain expertise. Doing so will help build your character and establish credibility. As you think this through, know your limitations. If you are not comfortable with sharing your knowledge and expertise in such a public forum, you should recognize and respect that.

What are your goals? What do you want to accomplish?

Are you looking to monitor competitors, connect more closely with your customers, or to establish yourself as a prominent thought leader in a particular area? Think about your goals and what you want to accomplish before you get started. Establishing goals will help you to be true to yourself, know your limitations or obstacles as well as provide you context for which tools and venues you should consider as best fit to match your intentions.

Know your audience

Successful SMEs listen to their audience and are willing to leverage listening tools to gather social intelligence and identify the existing social graphs of those they most want to connect with. Consider enhancing your online professional network by:

– Studying your target audiences wants and needs

– What questions are they most commonly asking?

– What issues/problems are they looking to solve?

– Understand the knowledge sought – do you have something of value to offer? Knowing what is happening TODAY in product or technology vertical is critical

Gather social intelligence to better understand the social ecosystem

– Pay attention to where they most often participating on-line

– Which venues? Which communities? Which forums?

– Who are they connected to?

– Who are they influenced by?

– Are you connected with them? If not, why not? Perhaps you should be

Know the rules for engagement

If you are sharing your professional knowledge about a brand or product, you should be sure that you understand the way that topic, brand or product should be represented.

– How should the technology, product or brand be referenced?

– Understand the messaging

– Understand the keywords and natural language your audience uses to discuss the topic, brand or product

– Understand what is OK or NOT OK to share

– What digital assets are available for you to share which would help you help your audience further understand?

Only the passionate survive!

Those that have deep subject matter expertise to share and are passionate believers that knowledge they possess is of interest and will benefit the community they intend to share it with, are the most successful at building a degree of influence. They are relationship builders at heart, who are comfortable with and find value in creating relationships digitally. Successful SMEs are on a quest to make connections and deepen relationships with those who are seeking and understanding of the topic that they are passionate about.

Commitment to sustained engagement

A key trait of successful SMEs is commitment. They strive to sustain engagement long term, while growing and evolving their participation over time to achieve personal and business objectives. They understand that it takes time to build credibility, trust and a degree of influence. They understand that it requires a long-term strategy.

Inquiring minds want to know

Curious by nature engaged SMEs don’t pretend to have all the answers. They know that ambiguity breads commentary and feedback. They often leave the last word to their audience. Doing so allows them to learn more about their audiences needs. It also provides them a way to be responsive to the topic/discussion in a more engaged and relevant way.

Karma

Successful SMEs understand the basic premise of cause and effect, what goes around comes around. They strive to serve the needs of others while receiving insights for themselves. They know that what they publish is permanent and can not be taken back. Remember, if you publish something inappropriate, embarrassing, or hurtful, there will be a record for years to come.

Do you have ideas to share on guiding and enabling SMEs? I’d love to hear them.

Defining your social strategy

As you begin planning your social strategy, it’s important to do so with a focus on customer relevance.

You should learn how your target audience is currently using social media, how they’re engaging, what their general preferences are and where they’re participating most often. Looking at a combination of these factors will help you ascertain the value of one given venue versus another, and help ensure your engagement plan is on track with an eye towards maximizing potential. The best way to get started is to develop an ongoing social listening practice that informs your overall social outreach plans. Doing so will ensure that you are targeting your audience with precision.

Social engagement planning with your target audience top of mind

For each social outreach effort, you must determine who you are trying to reach. Historically, this has been done through market segmentation, but the rise of digital media requires us to think differently about the people we wish to engage and how best to connect with them. You should define your target audience sets and then consider:

Who are you really trying to reach?

How will you identify & locate these target audience(s)?

What are their demographics?

Where do they most often participate online?

What are their issues & ambitions?

How do you describe their current relationship to your organization?

Are they positive, negative or neutral toward your brand?

What are their shared pain points and interests?

Once you have these answers, work to define the value your brand provides to the target audience and build a team of Subject Matter Experts who can engage with the audience and share their domain expertise and contextually relevant content. The more targeted and specific you are up-front about your target audience, the easier it will be to create an integrated digital and social outreach plan they will respond to.

Social media can play an integral role in your brand’s overall marketing plan, but like any other tactic or channel, it should not be approached independently.

Rather, social should be incorporated into your larger digital strategy and connected to other properties where and when relevant. When planning to leverage a social presence it’s important to understand what role you expect it to play in supporting your overall business and marketing goals. This will not only help you frame your approach, it will also help put in place measures to monitor performance, progress, and success.

Social media is not just another venue used to push out content; rather, social gives you the ability to connect your target audience with with members of your brand team and other individuals who have a stake in your brand’s message. It’s about helping you develop long-term relationships.

Targeted social media marketing engagement

How will you ensure that your social marketing engagement is on target to support your brands marketing priorities?

A lot of B2B social media marketers struggle with how to sustain the social engagement of their Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) with the target audience. I’ve done a good amount of work in this area and have built an approach I call social ecosystem mapping. In this post I’ll share the inputs required for building a social map. I’ll also provide you some tips on how to organize your social coverage model, selecting the best suited SMEs for engagement and how to support them with content.

Taking the time to build a social map will position your SMEs not only to represent their expertise but also to express brand/product value in the exchange. Ultimately SMEs will be well supported to sustain social engagement long term with the target audience as brand evangelists.

Social ecosystem mapping

Here’s an outline of the steps to build an informed engagement plan based on social research and marketing priorities

Prerequisites:

1. Prioritize the idea/message for which you want to be known based on your business priorities and marketing objectives
2. Monitor the dialogue by conducting social monitoring research based on the key topics of contextual relevance
3. Analyze research findings and use the insights to inform your engagement plan and set priorities

Now you’re ready to build a map of the social ecosystem based on these insights.

By topic map out:

1. Communities and top domains for targeting
2. Influencers/Authors that are considered leading authorities in the dialogue
3. Select the best suited internal SMEs for engagement. You will want to choose those that are well positioned to provide sought after expertise and can provide business value in the exchange. (There will likely be multiple SMEs, try to map them to support the outreach based on their ability to support the progression stages mentioned in #6 below)
4. Determine the SMEs enablement requirements based on an assessment of their social readiness and develop support
5. Evaluate content requirements; determine the assets required to support SMEs in their ongoing dialogue.
6. Select assets. It’s best to map the assets out by the progression path of the dialogue. For example classify assets based on consideration stages: Awareness, Consideration, Interest, Evaluation, Final Selection, Sale and Post Sale
7. Prepare assets for digital distribution, optimizing content for search, content tagging etc.
8. Determine an editorial calendar. Timing and cadence. This will need to be built based on your content develop process.

With this social ecosystem mapping complete, you are now ready to provide it as guidance to your team of SMEs. I have found SMEs to welcome this kind of engagement guidance. It helps them to focus their time and effort in social where they will provide the most value. It also ensures that their outreach is aligned to your brands business priorities and marketing objectives. Supporting them with content at each stage ensures that they are on brand/on message. If they follow the map, they will be well positioned for effective long term engagement that will drive business outcomes.

9. Activate SMEs to establish & build relationships in targeted communities, top domains and with key influencers.

Relationship building on-line takes time. With this map SMEs will focus their efforts on nurturing the most important, high value relationships in the target segments. Ultimately, if influencers receive value from your SMEs they will become advocates & foster advocacy on behalf your brand sharing with their followers & extended networks.

10. Ongoing monitoring and measurement is imperative to ensure that you stay abreast of changes in the social ecosystem. Providing you an understanding of what’s working or not working in the engagement model. Be prepared to take action based on what the measurements are telling you. Make necessary adjustments. Measure if these adjustments have a positive or negative impact. Social ecosystems are dynamic so you will want to be fine tuning your engagement model on a regular basis.