Useful Social Media Top 10 Articles on Social Media Evolution for 2013

Join the community on:

Twitter: @usefulsocialFacebook: /usefulsocialmediaLinked in: linkd.in/USMgroup

Sign up for our corporate social media newsletter at www.usefulsocialmedia.com/newyork

from usefulsocialmedia.com2012 HIGHLIGHTS

The most popular articles of the last twelve months

www.usefulsocialmedia.com/newyork

2

Foreword

2012 has been a big year for social media practitioners.

It’s the year when your remit expanded – exponentially.

From a role focused primarily on engaging with customers for marketing, it has evolved and flourished into something that impacts on many more areas of business operations.

And that means that right now, the social media director’s role is one of co-ordination, of strategic thinking, and of convergence.

As the executive at the vanguard of social adoption, you have seen first-hand the revolution in corporate-consumer relations. Somewhat inevitably, that means it is you who has been tasked with responding to this revolution on behalf of what is often a large, slow-moving and resistant corporation.

Perhaps the most obvious impact on you is the need to work closely with an ever-increasing roster of business units and departments

No longer is your time spent with marketers. Now, you work with the communications team frequently, and the customer service department routinely. Those of you further along the road are working with the innovation and product development teams. The luckiest are meeting with the C-suite on a weekly-basis.

This drive to convergence, to uniformity of response and the breaking down of silos is a response to the consumer-corporate revolution. Because for the last year – and for the foreseeable future - your consumer expects to talk with your business on a one-to-one basis.

And that means there must be one voice talking back. And you, as the social media director, are responsible for defining and co-ordinating that voice.

Our collection of popular articles from 2012 reflect this evolution in your role, as well as taking a look to the future.

We have several articles on how social media has impacted on the customer service department, and several looking at impact assessment and how one can define the value of social interaction.

There is coverage of big data, of regulation and legislation, and there is a collection of articles on social media for b2b businesses – an often under-represented group. Finally, we take a look at what your peers believe will be the key trends for 2013.

We hope you find the collection useful. And we’ll look forward to conversing with, and working for, you and the corporate social media community in the coming year!

It promises to be an interesting 2013,

Kind regards,

Nick JohnsonFounder Useful Social Media


3

Contents

The three key marketing trends for 2013 – based on feedback from 100+ CMOs and other senior executives

Social Law: Social Media Regulation and Policy

The power of social Customer Service

The five best brands on social media – according to corporate practitioners

Measuring the value of social media

Social media analytics tools – tested and rated

How b2b companies can build a truly social business

Social media and b2b communications

Key steps to integrate social media into your customer service function

Big Analytics: Social media tracking and analysis

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10


4

Over the summer, the Useful Social Media team have been doing some fairly intensive primary research with CMOs and other senior executives working in marketing around the world.

Again and again, the same three themes came up. Broader than ‘social media’, they will nevertheless have a huge impact on the role of the social media practitioner in 2013 and beyond.

Below are the three themes, with a short explanation as to what this theme is, and why it should matter to you:

THEME ONE: Customer-Centricity: How to put your customer at the heart of everything you do

Essentially, we’re talking about getting to know your customer better, putting them at the heart of your business, and using that knowledge to improve your operations (and I don’t just mean marketing).

You can break customer-centricity down a little further, into four key goals:

• Know your customers better: Dig into your data to learn who your customers are and how to target them

• Put your customers at the centre of decision-making: Internal structures and processes to ensure your customer has a voice in every level of your organisation

• Move beyond demographics to individuals for effective marketing response

• Learn how to make efficiencies through better targeting - saving time and money

THEME TWO: The Accessible Consumer and increasing marketing complexity (incl. SoLoMo)

Over the last few years, the ways a company can engage with a consumer has increased exponentially. Social, local, mobile, augmented reality, QR codes - all these new channels have come onto the scene, while the importance of email, digital advertising, TV, direct mail and other more traditional channnels is not in question.

There is a huge opportunity here - for more complex, tailored, and - above all - engaging, marketing from brands to customers. However, there is also an enormous challenge - complexity. And it’s a pressing challenge - currently, mass marketing has a 2% response rate, and that’s declining. And there’s a knowledge gap - 70% of CMOs believe marketing complexity will be ‘high’ or ‘very high’ in the next 5 years - but less than half of them are prepared to cope with it.

So what are the key issues that CMOs are wrestling with when dealing with this change?

• How do they work internally to shift traditional thinking regarding campaign management, channels and approaches - to catch up with the new consumer

ARTICLE 1:

The three key marketing trends for 2013 – based on feedback from 100+ CMOs and senior execs

Nick Johnson September 18, 2012


5

• How can their company leverage the fact their consumer is more accessible than ever. Specifically, how should one manage multiple vertical campaigns through social, mobile, local and other channels

• Is it possible to finally crack the age-old problem of creating consistent local messaging for a global business

What do you think? Are we right? Is increasing marketing complexity because of increasingly accessible consumers a key issue for you right now?

THEME THREE: The Death of Push Marketing and ‘traditional’ company-consumer relations

So it turns out that mass marketing now gets a 2% response rate. And it’s dropping.

Unsurprising, really - whenever anyone asks consumers what they want, it’s pretty rare they say “Boilerplate sales messages please”.

Your customers now want valuable, long-term engagement with a company that seems to give a damn who they are and what they care about.

Our third theme is the need for CMOs to completely shift how they engage with their consumers - from short-term, mass market, declarative messaging. Now you’ve got to create long-term relationships, based on valuable content and conversations.

Talk like a human - and sing from the same hymn-sheet

The advent of social media has meant that the world of separate internal and external messaging has disappeared. If a customer talks to your Customer Service department, they expect the same response they’d get if they talk to marketing, or sales, or engineering. Creating a unified external face is critical. If you want to build long-term relationships, you’ve got to have a consistent, human voice - coming from all levels of your organisation.

Create valuable content to foster meaningful relationships

Further, customers are no longer happy with receiving badly-targetted sales messages. When social got popular and companies jumped on the bandwagon, they expended all their efforts gathering followers. And then they tried to sell to them.

Didn’t work.

Customers don’t want exclusive deals. Or interesting new products. They want valuable information that matters to them.

So content creation and distribution is the second piece of the puzzle. You’ve got to create content that is engaging, relevant and of value to your consumers.

So, two more problems to wrestle with. First, you’ve got to get every internal department singing from the same hymn-sheet. They’re all external-facing now, and they’ve got to act like it.

Second, if you’re going to raise awareness, build relationships, and engender loyalty, traditional marketing doesn’t cut it. Start generating (good) content.

There’s a lot on your plate…


6

The days of anything goes within the social media space are gone. Regulation and legislation now have a profound influence on your company’s social media policy

In the 1990s and early part of this century a few things happened: First the Internet arrived. It feels a long time ago but it’s a very recent thing. Then almost immediately people started making wrong assumptions: that if for instance a photograph appeared on the Internet, it was free to use on any other website. Even professional newspapers were guilty of this and found themselves in court for copyright and intellectual property infringement.

To an extent this still goes on but most participants have adjusted to the central truth: this is the Internet rather than the Wild West and you can’t simply help yourself. Until, that is, you end up in social media in which case a number of liberties are still taken – until a corporate takes some control.

Take the company making satellite navigation systems whose research and development personnel were tweeting about future product developments and how great the next generation of products were going to be – very much before the company was ready to release them. This needed some sort of policy statement to mitigate trade secrets being lost.

There are other less well-intentioned examples, and even as this article was being written a high profile case in which an employee complained about being fired because he was actively looking for further employment through LinkedIn went against him. The employer argued, successfully, that he was criticizing the company in public.

Examples

The way to avoid these issues is to develop a policy and share it with employees so that they understand the implications if it is breached. A good first step is to ensure that they understand the old rules count just as much in cyberspace as in the real world – so if they betray a commercial confidence online, then it’s as serious as if it is done in the pub.

Ideally the policy should be evolved before such a breach. John Whiting, head of online solutions for professional services company Deloitte, explains the first thing his organization did was to get all possible stakeholders involved. “Deloitte formed its social media policy following consultation with a range of departments across the firm, including Marketing, PR, the online team and Risk,” he says. The idea was “to ensure the firm balances the benefits of the innovation, opportunities and flexibility that social media offers while, at the same time, protecting [the company] from potential risks, including protecting client confidentiality and guarding against reputational damage. Deloitte’s policy has evolved as we have observed usage, alongside other Deloitte member firms’ experiences as our confidence in the medium grows.”

The benefits can be considerable, particularly when social media structures are put in place internally: “One example of Deloitte’s successful use of social media is Yammer, the internal social networking site,” continues White. “Deloitte’s use has grown organically to involve 5,000 of Deloitte’s people, who actively speak to each other on the site about projects, issues and challenges they are facing. It is also used to conduct internal research, request information and share relevant news stories.” However there is another caveat:

ARTICLE 2:

Social Law: Social media regulation and policy

Guy Clapperton January 19, 2012


7

keep telling people about the risks. “Deloitte has put in place the relevant safeguards and regular educational updates in order to remind members of the rules in place to protect client confidentiality.”

Context

International digital security specialist Gemalto has better reason to be aware of implications of staff talking out of turn and internal confidentialities than most – not because of any bad experience but because of its security remit. The man responsible, Tim Cawsey, head of branding and public relations, explains that there were wider issues. “We spent some time coming up with internal policies for social media use as part of a wider social media strategy we created at the end of 2010,” he says. “Social media access has been allowed within the company for a few years now. As we have a large technical community (more than 1,500 engineers help design our solutions) these are typically early social media adopters.”

This could have meant people were very much at the aforementioned Wild West stage of adoption so it was essential that the company had the right policies in place quickly. “Our policy boils down to two main points: A. Don’t give away any confidential information. And B. Do state that you work for Gemalto if you discuss our solutions in social media – i.e. don’t astro-turf. Social media offers great possibilities for our employees to network with customers, prospects, partners etc. When tweeting from a personal account we ask them to make it clear that their opinions are their own and not Gemalto’s.” His own Twitter profile has a typical disclaimer: “Views here are personal” – simple as that.

Content

Every social media policy needs to look inward and outward to cover internal as well as external interactions. The important thing is that your policy needs to run through all interactions. It needs to apply to the tone as well as to substance – so responses to customer complaints need the same tone as marketing messages no matter how got-at an employee might feel. There can be no snapping, and no “mavericks” who want to strike out with their own individual style under the company name unless your company policy is to encourage an individual style!

There are laws and regulations – libel, copyright infringement – which apply in cyberspace just as they do anywhere else. These shouldn’t need restating but as in the Deloitte example, reminding people they exist never does any harm. The internal, company-specific rulings can be more fluid and harder to apply unless they are stated overtly, which is where an explicit policy written alongside all stakeholders is a business essential.

Legal Eagles

There are a number of laws and guidelines that should be followed in any social media engagement. Data Protection applies online as well as offline and legally enforceable confidences clearly need to be kept; likewise libel and defamation laws need to be observed – although common sense should intervene before anyone wants to publish anything libellous in the first place.


8

Social media is a form of publishing so copyright will rest with the writer unless they are a member of staff writing on the company’s time, in which case the company will own the rights. This applies regardless of the subject; the fact that it’s about your company doesn’t mean you own it. Given that social media is publishing it’s important to bear in mind that contempt of court applies and there have been test cases.

Again, common sense should intervene before hate crimes, racism, sexism or other antisocial behaviours become an issue. These are laws; consider also the regulations and guidelines enforced by, for example, the Advertising Standards Authority, which includes strictures on misrepresentation and honesty in statements.


9

We all know that social media has become a game changer in how modern businesses operate. Research indicates that 80% of companies plan on using social media for customer service delivery by the end of 2012. And 62% of consumers have already used social media for customer service issues.

However, social often starts with an opportunistic marketing department looking for some cheap brand building opportunities. There’s often no clearly defined organisational model – and that leads to problems of ownership, of responsibility and productivity.

Customer service has entered a new era. The advent of social media has delivered a seismic shift in how customer services are now delivered to consumers. For corporations, strong responsive customer services have always been important, but today, consumers have the power and are increasingly demanding more efficient responses from the brands they buy from.

There is also a commercial component to this activity. A recent US study showed that over half of consumers that follow a brand’s tweets for instance, are more likely to buy from that brand with two-thirds also likely to recommend a brand to friends and family. One of the most important components of this relationship is the level of customer services that is received. Developing positive sentiment via customer services activity is now critical for all corporations.

Often, a company will rely on the advocacy that is gained via its products or services. Tweets, Likes and reviews should all be fostered, but research from Bazaar Voiceclearly shows that good general product reviews are all well and good, but when it comes to customer services, different customer behaviour is seen.

“Many consumers are clearly unwilling to evaluate a product’s quality separately from their experiences with brand representatives,” states Bazaar Voice. “A great product won’t save brand word of mouth if the company doesn’t support customers with good service.”

Bazaar Voice continued: “Though reviews are inherently product-specific, brands shouldn’t overlook the massive opportunity to learn more about how customers view other elements of the brand like customer service. Rather than waiting for and reacting to individual inquiries, proactively search for customer service issues in user-generated content. When appropriate, responding to service complaints in line with a review shows other customers that service teams are truly listening to their feedback, and can present an opportunity to turn a negative experience into a positive one.”

ARTICLE 3:

The power of social customer service

David Howell September 12, 2012

Average rating based on 5 Star Scale

Average rating for reviews with customer service mentions

Percent of reviews with customer service mentions

91% lower average rating when tagged with customer service

All c

lient

s

Man

ufac

turin

g

Appa

rel

Hom

e im

prov

emen

t

Mas

s m

erch

ant

Reta

il

Fina

ncia

l ser

vice

s

Con

sum

er e

lect

roni

cs

Hom

ewar

es

Spor

ting

good

s

18%16%14%12%10%8%6%4%2%0%

5.04.54.03.53.02.52.01.51


10

Making connections

How customers are contacting the brands they buy from has also rapidly evolved. Telephone and email have now been overtaken by tweets. The immediacy of Twitter is highly attractive to consumers that want to make fast and efficient contact regarding a customer services query; but for corporations, responses by Twitter are also now demanded and within a very tight time frame. Indeed, a study by Burson Marsteller has shown that corporate users actually favour Twitter.

“People want to interact and connect with these major companies, and these platforms are the bridge directly to the heart of these organizations,” said Burson-Marsteller Chief Global Digital Strategist Dallas Lawrence. “What’s even more impressive is how much companies are engaging back with followers. Seventy-nine percent of corporate accounts attempt to engage on Twitter with retweets and @-mentions, and 70 per cent of corporate Facebook pages are responding to comments on their walls and timelines.”

There is also the question of ownership. In the past, customer service was just one department within a corporation’s hierarchy. Today, the socialisation of businesses means social media is a company-wide issue. However, many corporations now have specific teams to manage their social media connections, with customer service response being a key component of these teams.

Julian Heerdegen, CRM Evangelist at SugarCRM advises: “Be careful about separate departments. Separation is an invitation for the creation of silos, which in turn are the death of a unified customer experience. Data quality also becomes an issue. Customer service, call centre, marketing – should have access to an intuitive CRM system that integrates with relevant social media channels.

“You need to ensure that any interaction between the company (regardless of department) and a customer, via any kind of media, social or traditional, is tracked in a CRM system and available to every eligible employee with customer touch points. Otherwise, sooner or later, customers may get the impression that your company has a selective memory – something that happens way too often.”

With Arnold Ma, Digital Marketing Director at Qumin commenting: “Consumers are all powerful these days and they know it. If companies get it wrong when they have any form of dialogue with them there are very few second chances if any. And they will make their thoughts public. The key point is that a twitter or a Facebook message can be seen by the public, and poorly handled or a lack of response will be there for all to see and therefore very damaging to the company. Especially with ‘zero moment of truth’, customers are now able to search for sentiments that surround companies before they make buying decisions.”


11

Are you listening?

% saying Yes

38 %

57 %

54 %49

%

65 %

Do you expect the company to read your tweet?

Age 18-24 25-34 35-44 45-54 55+

Modern customer service is now social. There is no denying that the influence of social media on customer service has been profound. However, corporations are still struggling to maintain a high level of communications using social channels.

Last year Evolve 24 found that when a company did respond to an enquiry via Twitter, this was welcomed by the customer concerned with 86% stating that they loved to be contacted in this way and that over three-quarters were also satisfied with the response they received.

Complaints are increasingly being handled via social media interaction that much is certain. Consumers also have little patience when it comes to responses to their complaints via social networks – notably Twitter. Consumers today want an almost instant response to their communications with a brand, none more so than when this communication is a complaint.

The metric is simple: The faster your corporation can respond to these communications the higher your brand advocacy will be. Businesses like John Lewis showed they clearly understand this metric by being 32% faster than other brands according to the last survey from Brandwatch. This equated to a response time of 3 hours and 23 minutes on average per contact via Twitter. How long does your company take to respond?

Research also commissioned by Brandwatch shows British brands are ignoring priceless customer service feedback offered by consumers on Twitter and Facebook, opting to respond as quickly as possible to each complaint rather than learn lessons from them.

The online study, which questioned over 2,000 British consumers on brand interaction, found that half (50%) of respondents actually complain because they want companies to learn from their mistakes. The finding countered the misconception that peoples’ main reason for making a complaint is to embarrass brands publically, with only 17% stating they complain about a brand for this reason.

Has anyone from the company contacted you about your complaint as a result of your Tweet?

n = 1298

yeS29%no

71%


12

The survey ran in conjunction with the Customer Service Index (CSI) 2012, Brandwatch’s annual report into social media customer service. The CSI 2012 study found that although brands have had a year to learn from the lessons offered by social media feedback, customer satisfaction levels still have not improved. Only three of the 40 brands analysed emerged with a score above zero – indicating that their customer service experience was successful overall. In fact, over half (52%) of all customer service experiences were classified as negative.

This comes despite the online YouGov survey showing a clear opportunity for brands to learn from online interactions with consumers and use social media to change for the better:

• 36% of online respondents who interact with brands on the Internet do so to complain.

• 27% of UK adults online interact with brands on the Internet at least once a month.

• 44% of respondents who interact with brands on the Internet use online interactions to request information.

• 26% of UK adults online share information about things they buy online.

• 19% of UK adults online discuss what they think about brands.

“Some people just love to complain – you can’t get away from that fact. But what our results also show is that consumers are sharing information via social media because they genuinely want brands to be better at what they do. The problem comes when brands think they know best. They’re behaving a bit like teenagers, and being too petulant to actually see what’s in front of them,” said Giles Palmer, Founder and CEO of Brandwatch.

“Speed isn’t enough. Too often, when faced with a negative comment brands are too quick to ping back an automated message. Perhaps this is the industry’s fault for placing too much emphasis on speed of response. It’s not about speed: it’s about understanding what your customers are taking the time to tell you, learning lessons, and acting on this feedback.”

Ultimately customer services will become a social exercise. The trend is clearly for consumers’ to increasingly use their favourite social networks to make contact with brands and businesses. At the moment, these comments are all too often negative with corporations placing too much emphasis on speed of response and not the quality of the conversation, and what they can learn from these interactions.

However, there is a sea change taking place where customer service provision is being socialised. Those companies that understand these changes and put in place systems to manage these conversations will be the commercial winners.

Vit Horky

Co-Founder and Managing Director of Brand Embassy

Q Who should handle customer service delivery over social media? The customer service department? Your call centre? Your marketing team? Or a separate social media department?

A The objective of social media customer care is the same as traditional customer service. It is part of the role of the customer care employees to make dissatisfied customers happy. However, because most social media can be seen by many others in a public space, some of the responses should be pre-prepared or approved by the company’s PR department. Corporate clients using Brand Embassy usually select the best employees


13

from their call centres and train them to get familiar with the social media customer service to provide the best possible results.

Q How can corporate users of social media overcome organizational challenges when they are trying to apply social to their customer services?

A It’s simple. If the company’s management believes that they need to improve the public image of their brand due to a significant number of customers repetitively complaining, then creating an internal process is the next logical step. It is important to engage and motivate various key influences among customer care, marketing, PR and social marketing teams and set clear responsibilities and realistic expectation focused on improving customer satisfaction and not sales.

Q How can corporate users make their workflow more efficient by breaking down the traditional silos to make social media customer service a team game?

A By integrating a specialised social customer care software, that not only leverages the active listening to customers on various social media sources, helps to engage the customers in the easiest and fastest possible way and analyses the efficiency of the team workflow. Can I use my response to motivate other community users to follow-up? Have I satisfied more customers today than my colleagues? Am I compensated based on the customer satisfaction with my work?

Q How can nurturing social media conversations create real business value that a corporation can measure?

A The company should apply a set of KPIs for social media customer care. Looking at not only the traditional customer service metrics (SLA – First-Response Time, Solution Time) but also social media-specific metrics (Resolution ratio – Number of conversations solved in a public space vs. turned to private conversation, Sentiment Analysis – number of positive vs. negative comments) and marketing-specific like NPS (Net-Promoter Score) measured right after the customer service conversation.

Q How can the socialisation of customer service benefit a corporation’s bottom line – from efficiency savings to upselling, reduction in call centre contacts to disaster mitigation?

A Businesses have never before had such a great opportunity to proactively listen to millions of their customers every single day and truly understand their problems. Moreover, by moving customer care to public space the companies have an instant opportunity to motivate their customers to help to others on a peer-to-peer basis.

My estimate is that the volume of customer care inquiries on social media will reach 50% of the total inquiries in just two years and because businesses can incorporate their brand advocates to resolve up to around 70% of enquiries, the companies can decrease their costs of customer service by almost 40%!


14

In researching for our annual State of Corporate Social Media briefing, we asked 650+ corporater social media practitioners about their colleagues.

Specifically, we asked “Which 3 companies are best at using social media?”.

And now the results are in – so I thought I would share them with you. So, without further ado – the top 5 (in order), according to 650+ social media practitioners are:

• Starbucks

• Coca Cola

• Dell

• Zappos

• Ford

The most obvious point I’d draw from the list above is that I’d be willing to bet that – had I asked the same question this time last year – the same 5 would come up. Is corporate social media development stagnating? Where are the new leaders?

Second observation is that none of these guys are b2b companies. It’s – perhaps unsurprisingly – an exclusively b2c list. The top B2B company, by the way, is IBM – way back in 10th place. It’s unsurprising, I suppose – the b2c companies are those which are more in the public consciousness – and, at least at the moment, social media appears to lend itself best to creating a large volume of fans and then engaging them. B2B social works quite differently, and doesn’t appear to be as advanced at this stage.

ARTICLE 4:

The 5 best brands on social media – according to corporate social media practitioners

Nick Johnson February 10th, 2012


15

The metric of ROI is losing its weight within the social space and giving way to ROE or Return on Engagement. With the rise of social networks how does ROE apply to B2B enterprises? Dave Howell reports

How to measure the social activity that B2B companies are involved in has been a contentious issue since the inception of social networks. Applying the traditional metrics of ROI or established KPIs failed to deliver the meaningful insights that businesses were looking for. In the brave new world of social marketing a new way to measure the effectiveness of campaigns was needed.

Placing a metric on brand advocacy, reputation or engagement, which can be intangible business assets in a B2B organisation has been difficult. However, some form of measurements are developing that all organisations in the B2B sector can use to gain some insight into the effectiveness of their social media activity.

The current measurement of Facebook engagement for instance has been called into question. Wisemetrics have analysed the current Facebook metric and found it to be lacking in some areas, proposing that an additional metric – which the company details – should be used instead.

Addionally, Social Bakers adds their own angle on how social metrics should be calculated stating: “We at Socialbakers believe and our clients’ successes stand as proof that the best way to compare social performance is to analyze Engagement Rates. The beauty of this calculation is that it can be applied for any social network that uses public data, such as Twitter and Google +!” Social Bakers propose these formulas for engagement rates:

ARTICLE 5:

Measuring the value of social media

David Howell August 8th 2012


16

Businesses can use the metrics that are currently available, but what is clear is that for specialist tracking some form of bespoke approach will be needed. For businesses operating in the B2B space, these metrics could be evolved to be highly specific, but would then deliver reliable insight into the social activity and the return taking place.

Measuring social

For all businesses in the B2B sector, evolving their social media and how its results are tracked is a top priority. As Christine Crandell writing in Forbes states: “Lessons learned along the way brought the end of social media and shaped the next era. Using Facebook for customer support or as a B2B sales channel was a great experiment that didn’t really pay off. Yet it fundamentally changed the balance of power between the buyer and seller as well as redefined how work gets done. The next stage of social’s B2B evolution focuses on ROI not because it is ‘cool’ but for the significant leverage it can have on achieving business objectives.”

Developing an insight into the value that social media can bring to an B2B organisation takes time and effort says Sandy Carter, VP of social business sales at IBM: “Realizing a meaningful ROI depends on how you deploy social. The key to remember is that you will not see results out of the box.”

But can businesses actually place a value on the social media activity they are spending resources on developing? Two companies think so. Bulmers recently stated that a Facebook fan was worth £3.82 per week to the company. How did they come to such an accurate figure? Their research carried out by TNS was crude and had a number of caveats including the likelihood that Bulmers fans who interact the most with the page would have a clear bias towards the brand and would have been the most likely of all our fans to see the status update calling for people to complete the questionnaire. Nonetheless, these results are extraordinarily positive.

And another company that has come out with figures based on its use of social media is Eventbrite that last October looked closely at its exposure on Facebook and Twitter claiming that the former generates £2.25 in additional gross ticket sales on average with the later worth £1.80, with the business network LinkedIn coming at £1.24.

Vanessa Hope Schneider

Eventbrite Senior Public Relations

Managerof Brand Embassy

Says Vanessa Hope Schneider, Eventbrite Senior Public Relations Manager: “Social media is really important for Eventbrite—both as a brand, and as part of our product offering. One of the ways in which Eventbrite was able to spur early exponential growth in our user base was to be one of the first partners with Facebook, back in 2008. Our founders saw that people were copying event information from Eventbrite events and posting it on their Facebook walls. We wanted to make that process of sharing far easier, and when we integrated Facebook sharing into our platform, growth really took off. Facebook is now the #1 driver of traffic to our site, which makes sense, because Events are inherently social.”

£2.58

£1.21

£0.47

£2.25£1.80

£1.24

Pounds per share in the US

Pounds per share in the UK


17

Value propositions

How B2B organisations approach their development of social media metrics will need to be more holistic, as by their nature, these networks offer a plethora of data, all of which will feed into the equation. Recently the Altimeter Grouplooked closely at ROI in the context of social media.

Susan Etlinger, an industry analyst with Altimeter Group said: “In our research for this report we identified six primary qualitative and quantitative approaches and developed three case studies that illustrate how organizations measure the impact of social media on revenue. But while these six ingredients are consistent, the emphasis each company places on them depends on the nature of their business.

“There is no “one-size-fits-all” approach. The following pages aim to identify and describe — based on business, product, media, and customer type — the most effective “recipes” for measuring the revenue impact of social media that we have seen adopted to date. The volatility of social data and the pace of change mean that tried-and-true measurement methods are no longer enough. Social data is different. The old rules don’t apply.”

A healthy ROE can be quantified, but in an age of social media, the results of the ROE will be different for each company. And perhaps this is the crux of the mater when social media metrics are considered: It’s impossible to use an off-the-shelf approach. For B2B companies in particular that may be trading in highly specialised sectors, the ROE metrics they develop will have to be themselves highly specific to reveal the returns that each company is expecting.

Jan RezabSEO, Socialbakers

Q How are B2B companies measuring the effectiveness of their activity within the social media spaces they use?

A Many are watching it live, nurturing their communities and seeing them grow. Others are seeing the results directly through increased sales or contacts. And some don’t really care as the investment is low and they can afford to play around in the space without making full use of it.

Q Is ROI really appropriate for the social space? Is ROE (Return on Engagement) more useful? But how can companies measure this ‘engagement’?

A ROI is important to any business. Social media campaigns, provided they have built an audience to speak to, are much more cost effective and have greater impact than any traditional advertising, be it television, outdoor or print. Traditional advertising, no matter how finely targeted, is ‘push’ publicity. You’re pushing something on a random group of people regardless of their interest in your product, your pitch or your offer.

This irritates people, it bothers them, they see it for what it is: advertising, a sales pitch and they tend to tune it out. Social media is ‘pull’ advertising. You provide a space for a group of people that have self-identified as having an interest in your brand. They want to know about your brand, your product, your company. You are speaking to the choir at that point. They, in turn, can share that information with their networks, provided they determine it would be relevant to others.

Regarding B2B, traditional marketing is limited to trade shows, trade mags, or a slick


18

website, among few others. Word-of-mouth and established reputation is the best means to secure a deal in B2B. Word-of-mouth is offline social media. With social media, reputation is established openly for all to see and comment.

ROI in social media is ROE. There’s little difference. The level of engagement in your message or medium is your first metric. Then the actual return can be measured in terms of increased sales, increased customer loyalty (less turnover), or even more engagement, ie. more posts, more comments, more shares, more fans. All this leads to a wider, yet more dedicated customer base. When you listen to your customers, they tend to pay more attention to what you actually have to say.

Q For B2B companies is ROI from their social media activity more about improving their influence within their particular market segment?

A Not exactly. It’s about having a group discussion and working together to create products and services that better serve your customers and ultimately your bottom line. Hopefully, you’ll allow your ‘market segment’ to have a greater influence on you.

Q Are there any particular tools that B2B companies can use to measure their ROI across social media?

A Absolutely, and we make them. Analytics Pro allows you to track, compare and maximize your social media ROI, while Builder Pro allows you to manage all your social media networks, campaigns and relationships in a single integrated tool.

Q What is your key advice to B2B companies as they develop their metrics for measuring ROI from social media?

A If you don’t spend time in your social media space, your customers won’t either. Make it interesting. Add value. Make it worth their while to become more engaged with you. And most importantly, listen to them and incorporate their ideas and feedback into your business at any level.

Q Do B2B companies try and apply social media that is really more appropriate for B2C (Facebook for instance) when other social networks would be better exploited?

A Any company just needs to be relevant to their audience, regardless of platform. They need to choose the platform that best suits their needs as well as those of their customers. They need to create the space where their customers feel comfortable in coming or go to the space where their customers are.

Work smarter, innovate, listen to your customers, be adaptable, use all of the resources at your disposal. Don’t be afraid of taking a chance. Build relationships and reputation. Be responsive and responsible. And be accountable and reliable. Breathe.


19

Using social media isn’t enough; effective use is what counts. But how do you know if you’re being effective? Analytics. There are dozens of social media analytics applications that will help you measure and analyse your use of the social media platforms. But the precise solution will depend very much on your particular problem. Here we look at six that might help.

THE VERDICT:

Radian6 is expensive, but excellent for the larger company that has either much to gain or a lot to lose from its social media visibility. It is particularly good at separating and categorising sentiment. At the very basic level, this means it can separate out and analyse personal and brand conversations – which could be important, for example, to prevent personal popularity disguising product disappointment.

At a deeper level, it will enable you to distinguish between positive and negative brand or product sentiment. Excellent reporting, including graphs over time, help you understand what events are good or bad for your company; which people or publications are advocates or critics of your products; and how you are doing in relation to your competitors.

This is perfect fodder in planning future campaigns. We particularly like the ability to highlight negative sentiment. Since unfounded (and founded!) rumour and gossip spread faster than wildfire across the social platforms, being able to analyse this negative sentiment in real time, provides the perfect weapon for effective fire fighting.

• Implementation: 4/5• Versatility: 4/5• Usability: 4/5• Value for money: 4/5

USM OVERALL RATING: 4/5

ARTICLE 6:

Social media analytics tools – tested and rated

Kevin Townsend December 16, 2011

Radian 6

DEVELOPER Salesforce.com

SOLUTION Radian6

CONTACT URL www.radian6.com

PHONE +1 888 672 3426 OR +44 (0)203 468 3939

PRICE From $600 (up to 10,000 mentions) to $4000 (up to 200,000 mentions) per month, or custom pricing based on requirements


20

THE VERDICT

Klout is not merely, but perhaps best viewed as, a social visibility meter: it rates your online visibility on a scale of 1 to 100. It’s detractors say it merely measures your internet noise; but the reality is we can no longer ignore Klout.

Thomas Power, the founder of the Ecademy business network, told me that recruiters in the States are beginning to demand candidates’ Klout score as part of their CV – and won’t countenance an applicant with a score of less than 50. The reason is obvious: a high Klout score demonstrates an ability to fully engage with the outside world, and that is essential in modern business.

Klout analyses your presence on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and other networks to rate your True Reach, Amplification Probability and Network Influence. While the algorithms that provide the score are still far from perfect (but continuously being improved by the Klout team), you cannot afford to ignore it.

Thomas Power has a Klout score of 65. When he saw my score of just 30, he commented, “You realise that makes you a social muppet.” The reality, however, is that it puts me at a distinct disadvantage in the modern business world. Having said that, Klout is not without its critics: there are some concerns over privacy and Klout.

• Features: 3/5• Implementation: 3/5• Versatility: 2/5• Usability: 3/5• Value for money: n/a


Klout

DEVELOPER Klout

SOLUTION Klout

CONTACT URL www.klout.com/

PHONE via web form

PRICE Free


21

THE VERDICT

TweetDeck is a little disappointing. In itself it can hardly be called a social media analytic; it’s more like a social media organizer (and for that it is excellent). It helps you monitor subjects of interest across Twitter, Facebook, FourSquare and Buzz. Buzz? That’s what I mean about being disappointing: it offers you Buzz (which no longer exists) but not Google+.Frankly, it is best with Twitter, which is not surprising since it was bought by Twitter last May. What Twitter will do with it, if anything, remains to be seen. TweetDeck’s strength is in helping you rapidly and continuously research a subject or person or product or company of interest. You do this by creating a new column on the subject, which displays all the relevant postings. It doesn’t understand analysis and has no comprehension of sentiment. It does, however, make it relatively easy for you to do a visual analysis yourself. A useful free tool, then, for the sole trader, but of little use for corporations.



TweetDeck

DEVELOPER Twitter

SOLUTION TweetDeck

CONTACT URL www.tweetdeck.com/

PHONE via the internet: twitter.com/about/contact

PRICE Free


22

THE VERDICT

NodeXL is definitely one for the geeks. It is a free open source Excel template built around network analysis theory. The result is a powerful and immensely flexible tool, provided that you have the time and understanding to use it.Most of the mainstream social media analytic programs use algorithms to automatically extract the data you need from the enormous pool of useless noise and useful data; and it’s only the useful data that you seek to use.

NodeXL is different: you build relevant data rather than extract it from the noise. Consider this: build a list of journalists, build a list of bloggers, build a list of publications, map them together and then use NodeXL to visualise the relationships. Pretty soon you’ll get an excellent view of prime influencers. Build other lists and map them.

You’ll discover which publications or blogs are most likely to carry your stories. And because it’s open source, you can add to or amend the template as you wish. One option, of course, is to use the mainstream social analytics to discover the lists you use in NodeXL. The bottom line, though, is that NodeXL serves the same purpose as all social media analytics: to help you discover the information you need to develop effective campaigns.



NodeXL (used to be called .NetMap)

DEVELOPER Open Source

SOLUTION NodeXL

CONTACT URL www.nodexl.codeplex.com/

PHONE Discussions page: www.nodexl.codeplex.com/discussions

PRICE Free


23

THE VERDICT

It is tempting to say that Sprout Social is the poor man’s Radian6; but that would be a disservice. It is, however, fair to say that it bears some similarities to Radian6 at a fraction of the cost – making it more suitable for smaller and medium sized companies.At one level it is an excellent aid to measuring and managing your social interaction with all of the major platforms. It gives you a score per platform rather than the overall social media Klout score, so you can see at a glance where you need to improve.

And it provides excellent demographics on your reach. Its analysis tools help you understand the effect of individual engagements so that you can more effectively plan future campaigns; and the ability to integrate Google Analytics allows you to monitor the effect of these campaigns on traffic to your website. Overall, especially since it offers a no-hassle 30-day free trial, Social Sprout is certainly an analytic worth evaluating.

• Features: 3/5• Implementation: 4/5• Versatility: 3/5• Usability: 4/5• Value for money: 4/5


Sprout Social

DEVELOPER Sprout Social

SOLUTION Sprout Social

CONTACT URL www.sproutsocial.com/

PHONE +1-866-878-3231

PRICE From $39 per month (up to 20 profiles) to $899 per month (unlimited profiles)


24

THE VERDICT

PeerIndex is a social media reputation and authority rating platform – in other words, a British-based alternative to the American Klout. Some people will be attracted simply because it gives an apparently higher score than they get with Klout – notice that this social muppet’s PeerIndex is 35 against his Klout of 30. But notice also that Ecademy founder Thomas Power is even further away on 71, which is to be expected.PeerIndex rates on activity, audience and authority; and as with all the analytics programs it does so using its own proprietary algorithms. But I have some concerns here. Users can generate their own rated ‘groups’ or lists of individuals. This, in itself, is a good thing. I checked the UK journalist group curated by Sarah Booker; and found that I have the same PeerIndex as the Times political columnist Danny Finkelstein.

So, if you use PeerIndex to find a UK journalist with reputation and authority, I have to tell you that there is nothing to choose between me and dannythefink. I’m waiting by the phone.



PeerIndex

DEVELOPER PeerIndex

SOLUTION PeerIndex

CONTACT URL www.peerindex.com/

PHONE www.peerindex.com/help/contact

PRICE Free


25

It’s no good just opening a Facebook page and writing a few tweets, today enterprises need to become ‘social businesses’ but what does this mean in the B2B context? Dave Howell reports

There is no denying that social media has profoundly impacted all businesses. Much that has been written about social media has been within the B2C context. But as social media reaches more B2B companies, these corporations are realising that they need to ‘socialise’ their enterprises if they are to remain competitive and stay relevant and dynamic within their market sectors.

Social media has transformed the personal relationships of millions across the world, and a similar affect is being felt within business too. “Interacting online with colleagues, customers, prospects, and candidates is largely how business gets done today,” stated the iPass Mobile Workforce report. “The use of social media is an excellent way to make and nurture these connections.”

However, companies in the B2B sector often don’t use the social networks available to them with anything near optimum efficiency and don’t have a well-defined roadmap to socialise their businesses. According to research by Satmetrix and Net Promoter 60% of businesses do not have an integrated social media strategy.

The last six months have seen a big increase in the use of Twitter and Facebook while YouTube and corporate blogging activity remains steady.

By The Numbers

56% of FTSE100 companies now have an official Twitter account, up almost 25% in six months and 40% since this time last year.

38% have an official Facebook presence, up more than 50% since December.

44% have an official YouTube channel, a slight increase over six months but up a third since November 2009.

Nine companies are active on all four channels, up from seven companies six months ago.

30% are active on three or more channels, up 17% in six months, while 46% use at least two channels, up from 40% in December.

34% have no social media presence but that figure has dropped from 46% six months ago.

[Source] The Group

In addition, 67% of companies don’t measure or quantify social media – increasing to 75% for B2B companies. And for those that do have some form of quantification, 56% just count the comments and followers. Only 4% have any form of sentiment analysis.

“Businesses recognize the need for a social media strategy, however many are challenged in putting an effective strategy in place,” said Richard Owen, chief executive officer, Satmetrix. “While 77% of consumers post about products, 67% of businesses have no means of measuring what is being said, and less than one in 20 have any insight into the sentiment of what is being said. This is both a huge threat and a massive lost opportunity. Not only

ARTICLE 7:

How b2b companies can build a truly social business

David Howell August 8, 2012


26

are companies running the risk of losing customers by not addressing their issues shared online, but they are also walking past the opportunity to capitalize on positive comments made on the social web.”

For B2B enterprises moving their operations to embrace social media will clearly have a major commercial benefit for their entire company. Social businesses are now not just about Facebook likes or Twitter followers, but how companies interact with their customers right across their business’ landscape.

Social business

Companies in their B2B sector can also use their commercial partners to develop the social aspects of their businesses. Dell for instance now offers its customers social media training that Dell describes as “to help our partners fully leverage social media tools to improve the lines of communication while elevating their own marketing efforts.”

To develop a meaningful and commercially rewarding social media enterprise, B2B companies have to move away from the departmentalisation of social media as just marketing for PR exercises, and embrace the social networks right across their businesses. Social media today needs to be part of the DNA of every B2B organisation. Only those companies that have aligned social media with their core business plans and expansion goals will see the rewards from becoming a social media business.

Global Dawn defines social business as: “The creation of shared value for everybody in a business value chain, including the customer and the communities they live in, online or offline. Social business has evolved from multiple sources and is taking business in a new direction. From the development of micro-finance to today’s customer ecosystems, shared value and social business is all about empowering people and creating a more collaborative human-centred business environment.”

B2B companies that can develop their own social ecosystems aimed specifically at their market sector will move their businesses into the social space and make closer personal connections with customers and commercial partners alike – something that is at the heart of what it means to be a social business today.

“From our 2011 Global Chief Marketing Officer Study, we learned organizations are still focused primarily on understanding markets, not individual customers,” stated the latest CEO Study from IBM. “More than 80% of CMOs rely on market research and competitive benchmarking to make strategic decisions. While these traditional sources of information are still valuable, they offer little insight into individual customers. In contrast, blogs, consumer reviews and other unstructured online sources can reveal customer sentiment at a personal level, in context. However, relatively few CMOs are exploiting these new sources: only 26% track blogs, only 42% track third-party reviews and only 48% track consumer reviews.”

Andrew Yates, CEO, Artesian Solutions says: “Smart businesses have realised that today’s customers have all the power; they are connected and empowered and leading a social revolution. As a result, modern businesses need to be agile, engaged and transparent in order to engage with both clients and prospects. Key to achieving this goal is the ability to integrate new technologies and social media into commercial strategies. Only then


27

can businesses listen to their customers effectively and better understand where the opportunities or issues exist.”

And does developing a social business in the B2B sector differ from developing a social business in the B2C sector? Julian Heerdegen, CRM Evangelist at SugarCRM commented:

Julian Heerdegen

CRM Evangelist at SugarCRM

“The biggest difference for now is that B2Bs and B2Cs typically have a presence on different types of channels. B2B social business will take place – in large part – on global professional networks such as LinkedIn or in strong local contenders like Xing in Germany and Viadeo in France. B2C social business, engagement and visibility will largely take place in mass channels like Facebook, Pinterest and YouTube, so those developing a social B2C program should focus their efforts on these types of channels. That said, once a B2B social business initiative is past the development phase, it is entirely reasonable to broaden a conversation that may have started in a professional network to a channel where consumers are like Facebook or YouTube, thereby creating a bigger impact.”

B2B connections

Becoming a social business also now means leveraging the commercial relationships that B2B enterprises already have. Social media in the B2C sector has shown how powerful social connections can be for brand advocacy. For B2B companies that want to socialise their enterprises this will often mean not doing this alone. As social means just that: developing a business that reaches out to its customers and partners, B2B enterprises are forging new relationships as their businesses socialise.

Partnering, of course, introduces new kinds of risk. In a world of increased transparency and instantly disseminated social media, organizations are often judged by their partners’ actions, not just their own. The practices of any part of a globally distributed supply chain can tarnish even the most highly regarded brands.

Ross Breadmore

Consultant at NixonMcInnes

Says Ross Breadmore, a consultant at NixonMcInnes: “The enterprise must consider why it’s looking to become ‘social’ – is it to sell services, learn about new products, help customers, or something else? Once this question is answered the enterprise can begin to create social spaces, profiles perhaps that suit the above objectives. With this, new roles, processes and cultural norms will be required to deal with the various and considerable inputs that social can bring.”

With Dan Zucker, social media manager at AutoDesk commenting: “Initially, we viewed social media as a tool to help drive brand awareness and post purchase activities. As a company that has traditionally been focused on the B2B space, applying social media to demand generation activities seemed inaccessible. We’ve now seen tangible instances of social media playing a much more prominent role in demand generation activities such as events and promotional offerings. For example, our Americas field marketing team recently created a video about our Amazingly Easy promotion, which was widely distributed through Autodesk owned social accounts.”

Artesian Solutions’ Andrew Yates concluded: “Social business has the potential to put an end to the large faceless corporations of the past, with smart organisations starting to realise the opportunities that social media offers for building customer relationships. By being able to filter through the huge volume of information that is being generated online,


28

and turn this data into actionable insight about customers and prospects, businesses will be able to anticipate buyers’ needs and engender brand loyalty like never before. As a result, we anticipate the future of social business in the B2B sector will continue to grow in importance and actually become vital to the success of all organisations.”

Xabier Ormazabal

Director of Product Marketing,

salesforce.com

With Xabier Ormazabal, Director of Product Marketing, salesforce.com concluding: “The responsibility lies with everyone in the organisation. For the social enterprise to become a reality, everyone within the organisation must be in a social mindset. While technology can play in a role in terms of opening up the platforms over which conversations can occur, it merely facilitates our innate human ability to communicate.”

Being a social business is now a prerequisite for success in the B2B sector as the IBM CEO Study succinctly pointed out: “The CEOs of B2B organizations were also quick to note that social media is not just a business-to-consumer phenomenon. As a U.K. CEO from the media and entertainment industry pointed out, “Our B2B customers are also consumers of social media; you cannot split the two.” And an electronics industry CEO from Japan described how his organization is helping B2B customers innovate by “incorporating the end user’s voice directly into product development.”

B2B organisations can see that social media in the B2C sector has transformed customer relationships. Socialising their businesses now will ensure that B2B companies can tap into this rich vein of relationships that are set on a huge upward trajectory.

Stuart McRaeCollaboration & Social Business

Evangelist, IBM UK

Q What does being ‘social’ mean in the B2B context?

A Organisations have quickly learned that a social business isn’t a company that just has a Facebook page and a Twitter account. It’s one that actively uses social networking and social media technologies to build relationships between its employees, partners and customers to produce better business outcomes. A social business means that every department in the organisation uses social networking the way it uses any other tool and channel to do its work. It’s an organisation that integrates social networking tools into its traditional business processes to fundamentally impact how work gets done to create business value. A social business utilises social software technology to communicate with its ecosystem of clients, business partners and employees.

Social business is a strategic approach to shaping a business culture, highly dependent upon transparency and trust from executive leadership and corporate strategy, including business process design, risk management, leadership development, financial controls and use of business analytics. Social business drive engagement that helps the organisation deepen customer relationships, generate new ideas faster, identify expertise, enable a more effective workforce and ultimately drive its bottom line. The result is a nimble, agile business that outperforms its competition.

Q What are the key steps to ‘socialise’ a B2B enterprise?

A Companies must make sure that employees can work productively regardless of location, organisational silos, time or device – not just with business applications, but also with their colleagues and partners. Managers must have instant access to data that allows them to match the right people with the right skills and with the right projects, regardless of title or rank or salary level. Teams need to be able to come together quickly


29

on demand and disband when no longer needed. Communities of expertise should form organically as needed, rather than according to organisational structures. Employees need quick access to relevant and timely information, and ways to easily share their knowledge effectively across the whole organisations.

Q Where do you think responsibility for the social aspects of a B2B enterprise should reside? Who should be driving this aspect of the business?

A Social collaboration is something that will eventually pervade all aspects of a business, from marketing to manufacturing, sales to human resources, executives to the shop floor.

Today, ownership tends to reside in the part of the organisation that is fastest to recognise the value social business brings. Sometimes it is marketing because of the need to use external social media and sentiment monitoring. Sometimes it is HR or communications to improve talent management or staff morale. Sometimes it is manufacturing to improve business processes and time to market, or sales to increase revenues. In one case, a Vice President for the customer took ownership as an overarching initiative to serve customers better.

Ownership may depend on the biggest challenges the organisation faces, but the most important thing is that it resides at a senior level, where its ability to improve all parts of the business can be recognized.

Q Can you point to any B2B enterprises that are getting ‘social’ right?

A Omron, an organisation helping to automate machines and factories all over the world, has created an award-winning business intranet based on IBM technology helping to create a single-source communication and collaboration platform for all European employees, helping boost innovation and creativity.

Slumberland Furniture stores have 125 geographically dispersed retail locations in the U.S., has created SlumberLink, a business intranet that gives all 2,300 Slumberland employees centralised access to pertinent, up-to-date information and functional applications. Role-based access by department and store allow employees to easily find relevant, up-to-date information previously printed in the store operations manual, including areas such as human resources, sales administration, merchandising and marketing. Video content is uploaded, stored and delivered to assist in training initiatives.

Berlitz a global education company has created an enterprise-wide intranet that leverages social networking and collaboration technologies. The organization as transformed a regionalised operation into an agile, global company able to deploy higher quality educational offerings for 12,000 HR employees around the world.

Q How does developing a social business in the B2B sector differ from developing a social business in the B2C sector?

A In the B2C sector, social business strategy is often driven by marketing’s need to use social media as a marketing channel and the social networks to engage with customers. Internal social collaboration then emerges later as a business need to allow the organisation to respond to the demands of customers it is engaging with through social channels.


30

In the B2B sector, social business strategy often starts with the need to improve how the organisation responds to their customers, rather than how it interacts with its customers. Internal expertise location, knowledge sharing and community building dominate as ways to improve business outcomes and so customer experiences. To do this effectively, it is often also necessary to extend use of social collaboration to partners.

There is also a trend starting to emerge in the B2B sector when the customers start to adopt social business. They then begin to prefer suppliers that embrace social channels, driving the change upstream.

Q What does the future of social business in the B2B sector look like?

A Over time, social business will become simply Business. The external channels and internal tools for social media, social networking and social collaboration that dominate the conversation today, will be simply integrated into the toolsets that organisations use to do business. The big change will not come from the tools themselves, but from the way they enable organisations to take the principles of engagement, transparency and nimbleness to new levels, improving the customer experience and internal organisational effectiveness.

Ultimately all business is driven by one imperative: to serve their customers better than their competition. Externally, social business provides new ways for companies to understand their market and engage with their customers. Internally, social business lets them use that understanding to create better products, faster; to resolve customer problems, faster; and to improve their business processes, and make them faster too.


31

Can social media make the same impact in the B2B world as it has in the B2C sector?

There’s no denying social media is now a powerful force in the B2C world, but does social media work in the B2B space? Why would you want to create a customer service channel on Twitter or Facebook when you probably already give customers a dedicated account handler?

Peter PetrellaCreative Director,

at Gyro

Peter Petrella, Creative Director, at Gyro specialist in B2B social media communications believes one of the key reasons to take up social media in the B2B channel is that businesses only really see one part of their customers, but by engaging in social media they get a new and better insight into how they’re perceived.

“If you look at a business like Apple they make an active choice not to engage in social media. They let everyone else talk about them but they don’t engage in that channel. They have a great reputation. However, they do take a lot of flack on social media. Also their customer service tends to be quite remote and hands off unless you walk into a store.”

Guy Stephens, Social media consultant, at Cap Gemini agrees. “In my mind there’s no distinction between social media for B2C and B2B. They are still people with issues, they just happen to use social media to resolve those issues. Even if you don’t open a channel you are going to get comments on social media. People can say and do what they want. They can go onto Twitter and ask questions and say anything about you. I think for companies it’s not ‘should we be doing it?’ but ‘when can we do it?’”

Heavy machinery manufacturer Caterpillar use social media to support their dealerships and sees social media as central to their business. Kevin Espinosa, Social Media Marketing Manager, at Caterpillar Customer Services Support explains. “We built our social media strategy on four pillars: social listening, promotion, thought leadership and customer support.

“However anytime – regardless if you’re B2B or B2C – you open up a social channel you automatically get enquiries and questions, so the customer support part of the pillar comes by default.” It’s also a channel you shouldn’t ignore warns Espinosa, “Social media is the new public telephone, but it’s not a one-to-one conversation anymore it’s one-to-many. So it can be very damaging if you let that phone ring and not pick it up to answer those enquiries.”

B2B strategies

Once you’ve made the commitment to social media the first choice you have is which channel do you use? LinkedIn would appear to be the most B2B friendly social media channel but it may not be the right place for your audience.

Petrella’s advice is to look first and see where your users are, and what they’re saying before you decide on a channel, “LinkedIn gives you a very narrow focus and actually it’s a bit of a beauty parade. Businesses need to identify the places where the chatter is happening. We work with HP and they have lots of their business around large-format professional printing with a very dedicated customer-base that are very vocal but you tend not to see them on Twitter. What they use is forums.“

ARTICLE 8:

Social media and b2b communications

Marcus Austin August 21st 2012


32

Cap Gemini take the notion of social media one step further than many businesses and also allow their employees to actively use social media, however this can give rise to some problems as Stephens acknowledges: “At a corporate level there are certain channels that we officially recognise on Twitter and LinkedIn, and as an employee I can – within the bounds of our social media policy – do what I want in terms of Twitter and blogs as do any number of people. And I do get asked questions about Cap Gemini and either somebody on the official accounts will step in or I will answer it.”

Talking sense

For many businesses there’s a notion that they need to talk in a different way because they’re talking to businesses rather than consumers, and this should also be reflected in their social media approach. Petrella however argues that businesses should think differently when it comes to social media. “At the end of the day, whether or not you’re a consumer or someone who engages with a business you are dealing with people. The B2B bit is the red herring the thing that people should focus on is people and you forget that at your peril.”

Stephens also thinks it’s dangerous to follow other businesses just because they’re been successful on a certain social media channel. “In the B2B space you have companies like Screwfix who are doing interesting stuff with communities and are reaching out via Twitter, and businesses will try to bench mark against Screwfix, or Amazon or BT. However, social media is so specific and so individual to a company it doesn’t necessarily make sense to do this. It really is about understanding how you do business and how you engage with your customers and how they engage with you.”

A danger faced by all entrants into social media is, not understanding the immediacy of the channel, as Espinosa explains: “We make sure that we answer social media questions just as fast as we answer the phone. If it’s a quick question like ‘who is my local dealer?’ then it’s answered right away. If it’s more of a big issue, like customer satisfaction, or if it’s something that’s quite technical then they will acknowledge that they’re working on it, so the public can see that Caterpillar has answered that telephone, but what they will do is take it off-line, resolve the problem and come back online and post the resolution.”

However, Stephens warns that becoming to obsessed with the speed of reply can cause problems. “You have to be careful that you don’t get into the trap that says I can see everything in real-time so I must resolve everything in real-time. Companies have got unstuck by that. What I think is important is if there’s and issue and a company has seen some tweets what you have to do is acknowledge that tweet as quickly as possible.”

Customer support

While this may seem like a lot of work, the information that the channel provides can be invaluable particularly to a big worldwide business like Caterpillar. “When you aggregate data from your social media customer support and social listening you start to see the themes and where you are missing opportunities with your customers, and we use that data to drive our customer support strategy and our content strategy.” said Espinosa.


33

Ultimately what many businesses want to do with social media is to increase their revenue and create new opportunities and this is something that Espinosa has seen with Caterpillar’s B2B strategy. “Turning customers around is one of the big things we want to do with social media. We think a negative post is one of our biggest opportunities as you can turn them around and make them an advocate. Especially when you respond to their issues. Recently a customer from Poland tweeted that they wanted to rent 49 haulers from Caterpillar but didn’t know who to contact, and we worked with the dealership in Poland to close that rental deal the next day.”

Adding, “We say that social media from a customer perspective is the first line of defence and also the last line. Sometimes people will come to the Caterpillar social media channels without first calling the dealership and asking them for help, and sometimes it’s the last line of support when they are really frustrated and the dealer is not helping them or they’re not getting what they need from Caterpillar.”

We leave the last words to Petrella to sum up social media B2B best practice: “What you need to do is embrace the market and go with the grain. Don’t try and create communities, find what’s happening out there, find the conversations that are going on, try to answer their needs and strike a chord with the themes and trends that are going on, and augment that, don’t try and force people to come to you.”


34

Using social media as promotional collateral is of course an excellent idea, but the sheer amount of blatant sales messages is starting to put a lot of people off. Nobody believes in free iPads anymore (from the amount of promotional Tweets offering them you might wonder whether anyone actually pays for the things) so corporates that want to use this type of promotional message have to be a bit more methodical.

The trick is to incorporate social media into the sales process whilst not sounding salesy – which is going to mean getting it into the customer service function as well, as people expect to be spoken to individually.

Jonny Rosemont

Head of Social Media, DBD Media

Jonny Rosemont has extensive experience of this. Now head of social media at consultancy D B D Media, he previously worked at John Lewis where he devised launched and implemented the social media strategy. The important thing, he suggests, is establishing where your customers are talking about you – this is likely to be Facebook and Twitter if you are consumer facing – and by talking to them individually it should be possible to work out what sort of interaction is going to work en masse.

Resourcing is then something to consider. “Behind the scenes you need to establish the workflows and processes to be able to respond and resolve any issue,” he says. “Make sure you invest in a technology solution that a) alerts you to the conversations around your company and b) enables you to assign, respond and engage with the individual customer circumstance. Clearly define who’s role and responsibility it is to engage in any given circumstance and develop a tone of language, response SLAs (service level agreements e.g. how quickly you are going to respond) and approach to resolving the issue – e.g. most customer service issues are better taken offline so provide an email and contact name who the email would be addressed to.

“If it is not about issues and is about general customer interaction this should reflect how you interact with your customers in your wider business i.e. be helpful, provide expertise, don’t be too pushy. Written words are often misunderstood so don’t over complicate your language. Link to content (e.g. product pages) to help paint a picture or direct people to product.”

The company also offers loyalty programmes, and here Rosemont is adamant you need to go beyond loyalty vouchers, particularly in the online world. “At John Lewis we understood that the relationship a customer has with the brand is significantly based on their experience with their chosen shop and its Partners (staff),” he says.

“As a result a lot of the communication that’s pushed out through the social media channels is about promoting in-store activity – what is happening at individual shops, what the shop Partners are recommending in terms of product etc. The Facebook page includes an application that highlights the key activities and events happening at the individual John Lewis stores, and the highlights are also communicated through the Facebook wall and tweets. The hosting of special Q&As with key members of staff has also been popular. Loyalty goes beyond offering simple vouchers and offering a wider service that’s of value to your customers.” Creativity, then, is a vital element.

ARTICLE 9:

Key steps to integrate social media into your customer service function

Guy Clapperton February 29th, 2012


35

Making connections

Generally staying in touch is another area in which businesses can do well, he says, as long as they appreciate this is more than just another email. “If you are hosting an event for example you don’t just provide details of the event, where it is etc., you also provide post event analysis, photos from it etc,” he comments.

“With social media it is a much more rounded experience. Staying in touch via social media also benefits from the additional social layer. By you “liking” a brand you choose to receive information, by engaging your friends and contacts might be encouraged to do the same or engage around your activities. The brand needs to communicate what it is people will be getting when liking the brand – will they be getting news, enter unique competitions etc.? It’s important to manage people’s expectations.”

Vince Tseng, MD of Squaretrade UK, cites an example of his company engaging extremely well through social media. “If your customers are fans, social media can be a great way to expand your brand to other customers as well,” he says. “SquareTrade ran a very successful campaign which led to 10,000 sign-ups, using a combination of Facebook and direct mail to encourage our customers to take part in our referral programme, which offers incentives to recommend SquareTrade products. We firstly used a direct-mail to target previous customers who weren’t members of our referral programme.”

It’s at this stage of the campaign that an old friend made an appearance. “SquareTrade then added a Facebook sweepstake that gave away 50 Apple iPad 2 tablets over the course of five weeks,” he explains. “Consumers who entered the sweepstakes were automatically enrolled in SquareTrade’s referral programme and asked to refer friends via email, Facebook, Twitter, Blogger or posting an embedded code to their personal websites. If a winning consumer had entered the giveaway via a referral, the referring friend also received an iPad 2.”

It’s important to match the giveaway to the target audience of course. And in this instance in spite of the cynicism many of us feel when we see the “win a free iPad” signs coming up, it clearly worked spectacularly. For corporates that understand how direct marketing campaigns work, applying a social media component is the logical next step. Clearly if handled correctly linking a campaign’s collateral with customer service messages can deliver a holistic approach to marketing activity that can be highly effective.


36

Social media tracking is evolving quickly with some platforms offering sophisticated analysis. How do enterprises in the B2B space gain insight into how effective their social media activity actually is? Dave Howell reports

The big data that corporations are now having to manage means in essence gaining meaningful insight into their customer bases and commercial partners. In the B2B space social media has become a new way to make what can be highly lucrative connections that simply would not have been possible a few years ago. However, with the torrent of data that is now flowing into your business, how do you analyze this information and ultimately lever this data into potential sales leads?

The McKinsey Global Institute report commented: “Digital data is now everywhere – in every sector, in every economy, in every organisation. While this topic may have once only concerned a few data geeks, big data is now relevant for leaders across every sector, and the consumers of products and services stand to benefit from its application.

“The ability to store, aggregate and combine data and then use the results to perform deep analyses has become ever more accessible as Moore’s Law in computing. Leading companies are using data collection and analysis to conduct controlled experiments to make better management decisions.”

Data insight

One of the fundamental aspects of analysing the big data in your company is this information delivers potential leads that can form the basis of marketing campaigns. For the B2B sector that is characterised by highly focused relationships with customers, the big data in your business can give your marketing the edge it needs.

A recent report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau in association with theWinterberry Group said: “The plethora of first-party data now being amassed and analyzed by both publishers and advertisers is being used to build rich audience profiles that, marketers say, can enhance advertising effectiveness by enabling improved targeting and message relevancy. Today’s dominant approach calls for the development of unique customer/prospect profiles, which are then segmented and modelled as the basis for identifying what are commonly called “lookalike audiences” for follow-up marketing across channels.”

What is clear is that in the B2B space in particular levering of big data to build rich audience profiles is a critical skill to develop within your corporation. Extracting the information your business needs to build these profiles is now a commercial imperative. And what businesses in the B2B sector are now realising is that traditional analytical models and the use of established business intelligence sources need to be radically altered to deliver the new insights that the B2B sector requires to forge new and profitable relationships.

Advanced data analysis can come in many forms. Vendors in the traditional business intelligence sector are quickly updating their tools to take advantage of the new channels of information that social media is delivering. IBM sum up these new tools as: “Data mining, predictive analytics, simulation and optimization. Both predictive analytics and simulation are methods for creating a model, which is a logical representation of a problem or a process. When data is available, predictive analytics techniques are used to create the model. When there is little-to-no-data or the data is unreliable, simulation can be used to create the model using business rules.”

ARTICLE 10:

Big Analytics: Social media tracking and analysis

David Howell August 7th, 2012


37

Vendors that are currently offering analytical solutions for big data analysis includeSAP, Kognitio, ParAccel, SAS, Cloudera (that distributes open source software based on Apache Hadoop), Google’s BigQuery and of course IBM. “To get the most out of big data, you need tools and platforms that can analyze diverse data types, and you may need tools that can handle the velocity of streaming data in real time,” advises TDWI Research.

One corporation that is levering the information flowing into its business is Ford. Speaking to ZDnet their Big data analytics leader John Ginder said:

John GinderBig Data Analytics

Leader, Ford

“We recognize that the volumes of data we generate internally — from our business operations and also from our vehicle research activities as well as the universe of data that our customers live in and that exists on the Internet — all of those things are huge opportunities for us that will likely require some new specialized techniques or platforms to manage,” said Ginder. “Our research organization is experimenting with Hadoop and we’re trying to combine all of these various data sources that we have access to. We think the sky is the limit. We recognize that we’re just kind of scraping the tip of the iceberg here.”

Big analytics

Often corporations can become paralysed with the sheer volume of information they have available to them. Erik Brynjolfsson, professor of management science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management, says: “It’s not just big data in the sense that we have lots of data. You can also think of it as ‘nano’ data, in the sense that we have very, very fine-grained data – an ability to measure things much more precisely than in the past. You can learn about the preferences of an individual customer and personalize your offerings for that particular customer.”

In their report into big data analysis, Forsyth Communications state: “Studies show that a majority of organizations aren’t sure how to maximize the demonstrable value. Some business leaders see only the mounting costs of storing so much data, not the value in it. The big data imperative is not to discard it but to use it to begin an analytical journey leading to better insight all round.” Says Michael Olson, founder and CEO of Cloudera: “Businesses that are getting all of these status updates (on Facebook) and user-generated messages today need to understand all this and how to digest it.”

For the B2B enterprise focusing the analytics in use is the key to delivering convertible leads. As Mark Dunleavy, Managing Director at Informatica describes: “In a recent Ovum Research study, entitled Optimising Enterprise Applications: The Data Connection, providing a single version of the truth was ranked as the foremost challenge facing IT executives today. Gartner, meanwhile, ranks a single view of the customer as second only to improving reporting and analysis as a tactical master data management goal.

“Achieving a single source of truth across applications is high on the agenda for businesses - there is an obvious need for comprehensive master data management. And this single view must encompass data from multiple business functions and multiple sources – including, more than ever before, social media data.”

The B2B sector because of its highly focused customer base is perfect to exploit the insights that big data can offer. The McKinsey Global Institute report concisely summed up


38

the opportunities that big data can offer to all B2B corporations: “The use of big data will become a key basis of competition and growth for individual firms. From the standpoint of competitiveness and the potential capture of value, all companies need to take big data seriously. In most industries, established competitors and new entrants alike will leverage data-driven strategies to innovate, compete, and capture value from deep and up-to-real-time information.”

Dai CleggBig Data

Evangelist, IBM UK

Q Clearly the analysis and practical application of the information contained in Big data is the driver for all corporates. How are enterprises approaching the analysis of their data silos at the moment?

A Big data is irrelevant until you analyse it. And the first place is to start is by deriving value from existing data sources. So we do see companies trying to build a unified corporate enterprise data warehouse, but that’s really an idea whose time has past. And that is why I see the characterisation of Hadoop technologies as just a way to ingest unstructured data into a relational database. It’s a very powerful concept when that is a requirement – as it is for many use cases, but the idea that it is the only use case is flawed. There’s just too much data and the cost of cleansing, loading, managing it all into one place doesn’t make sense.

Some silos are legitimate data marts – so for example, telco companies will often offload call data records for billing, churn analysis, network performance analysis and other applications. And there are analogous use cases in every industry, which means the right architecture is a federation of stores. We have this concept emerging of what Gartner calls the Logical Data Warehouse and what IBM is delivering to customers asSmart Consolidation. But you have to acknowledge the need to apply some analytical techniques across multiple platforms – searching for patterns, exploring different sources, correlating different sources. IBM recognised this challenge – which is why it acquired Vivisimo – who lead in this space.

Q Does the big data from social media need to be approached differently to big data gathered from other areas of a corporation’s activities?

A The key difference with social data is that it is unstructured text, whereas most corporate data is structured. People often don’t think of instrumented data or sensor data as structured. But it is possible to know exactly what each bit or byte it represents and it is easily transformed into a relational structure, so it can be analysed in the warehouse. And many organisations use this approach.

Point-of-sale data from retailers is market basket analysed (to reveal combinations of products that tend to be bought together) and smart grid data and other network sensor data is analysed to optimise network behaviour and predict failures. Sometimes the economics of such an approach might favour Hadoop analysis on commodity hardware, whereas time to value might favour an existing warehouse with high productivity tooling and existing skills.

Genuinely unstructured social data is typically very low value per byte. Most tweets tell you nothing and maybe, at best, add a minute weight in the pan of your analytic decision-making. So the Hadoop approach– low cost, more amenable to textual analytics – would be strongly recommended for social data.


39

Q Is the main problem with big data especially from social networks the fact we don’t yet have any established metrics that corporations can use to measure and analyze their social media data against?

A Not necessarily. Where social data is most immediate and has most value is in crowd sourcing applications. So, for example, a movie studio might re-edit a trailer in the launch of a blockbuster mid-campaign, responding to the tweet-stream about the characters in the trailer; this happened with Planet of The Apes reboot in 2011. Caesar, the chimpanzee character, was given more prominence in the re-edit because he was creating the most positive sentiment.

Social media gives you access to much larger samples for what would have traditionally done with more limited focus groups or other small sample survey techniques. So even though a single tweet may be unreliable, or un-interpretable, if you have hundreds of thousands of them, you can have high confidence that they are representative.

Q Who should be analysing the big data that a corporation has pouring in? Is this an IT issue, or a marketers responsibility?

A IBM’s experience is that there is most success when the line of business embraces big data. IT is the enablers, and in many cases are the pathfinders trying to push an ROI to the business. But real progress seems to depend on the business recognising the value, either because IT enabled their vision or because they just ‘get it’. Luckily marketers of all lines of business have the most to gain and are pre-disposed to want more data from more sources. Is it Marketing’s responsibility? Not specifically, but you’re right that if they don’t step up it’s going to be slow going.

Q Can Big data offer the level of personal connections that brands want to make with their customers?

A I think so. I always liken it to high quality service in a restaurant – where the staff are practically invisible (I’m talking very high quality!) but where the appear from nowhere to top up the wine or whisk away the starter plates before you even realise that it needed doing. When a brand can give that level of service to you online, there will inevitably be lots of people who will find it invasive or just creepy. I know lots of folk who don’t actually like that level of restaurant service, though I do, when it’s done right. But over time we’ll come to expect it and then rely on it.