How much longer will you subscribe to the notion that business customers aren’t using social media? Or, that the way B2C companies use it is irrelevant to your B2B firm? Each of those notions can be dispelled in the amount of time it takes you to say, “We’re different.” Here we go.
If your B2B company thinks it will let someone else be the pioneer you may want to consider this, a 2009 study by MarketingProfs found that ALL COMPANIES, regardless of model and size, are predominately using Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Blogs, and Linkedin. So, if the tactics are often the same, how do the lessons from B2C not apply? You won’t have to teach them how to interact. The B2C guys did that for you. Just don’t let your competition teach them how to connect with a B2B.
Even if you can’t offer a coupon (bet you could if you thought about it long enough) the core ingredients of social media success: storytelling, humanization, friendship, and purchase intent are not B2B or B2C items. They are human items and they apply as long as you have prospects, members, patients, prospective customers and employees.
Okay, so we’ve established that your B2B is just not that different from a B2C marketer in knowing which platforms matter. Still you insist that your sophisticated decision makers have no time for such foolishness. Oh yes they do. Forrester found that 81% of U.S. adults with an Internet connection use social media in some form. Further, last year’s Forrester study of B2B technology buyers found that they use social media nearly twice as much as U.S. adults overall.
Ok. Maybe I was wrong. You are different. But, you’re different because you’re not connected.
I’m at www.facebook.com/timcnicholson or www.twitter.com/timbigfish
Get Over Yourself
This weekend I saw “Social Network” (the movie) and knocked around a small artisan town. The two combined reminded me of a lesson as old as Dale Carnegie’s guide to friendship and how it might apply to marketing via Facebook. Here it is: to realize the potential of Facebook focus on other people and learn to listen.
Never mind sorting out fact from fiction. The movie is filled with lessons about doing life with others. Whether or not he has friends, Zuckerberg’s genius alone was not enough to propel his idea. Others inspired (albeit sometimes unwittingly) and connected him to the other people and resources to move his work along. The portrayal of Zuckerberg makes him out to be a self-centered, smart aleck know-it-all. However, I tend to sympathize with the notion of a guy who was so focused on an idea that he looked past the people in his life. Ironically, nothing really could have happened without those people and eventually about 499,999,990 or so more.
But life need not imitate art when art is all around in life. A fall day in Leiper’s Fork, TN was full of inspiration. An outdoor lunch at an all natural restaurant, live music, an art coop walk through and impromptu visit with an artisan tenant set all of my creative senses on fire. Info receptors were opened. Then an open-ended question posed to a local shopkeeper presented a lesson for marketers who use social media/networking.
She shared the origins of the community name including an anecdote about a gun duel featuring Andrew Jackson. She put founders’ names and personalities to the local boutiques. And later she pointed down the street to where a world renowned musician lives. I had valuable (even if for entertainment purposes only) new insight because the focus was on her and what she knew about the subject at hand. We were connected.
It reminded me of a lesson from Dale Carnegie’s book “How to Win Friends and Influence People”: people like to talk about themselves. There isn’t a single tech innovation that will ever change that. So as marketers we have to create moments that enable sharing and listening. At Bigfish, we call them interactions.
So how does the weekend translate to a lesson for businesses who market via Facebook? Two simple things:
1. Admit that you need other people to succeed.
2. Create interactions where you talk less and listen more.
Or if you'd prefer just one: get over yourself.
Want to be heard? Find me at www.twitter.com/timbigfish
Never mind sorting out fact from fiction. The movie is filled with lessons about doing life with others. Whether or not he has friends, Zuckerberg’s genius alone was not enough to propel his idea. Others inspired (albeit sometimes unwittingly) and connected him to the other people and resources to move his work along. The portrayal of Zuckerberg makes him out to be a self-centered, smart aleck know-it-all. However, I tend to sympathize with the notion of a guy who was so focused on an idea that he looked past the people in his life. Ironically, nothing really could have happened without those people and eventually about 499,999,990 or so more.
But life need not imitate art when art is all around in life. A fall day in Leiper’s Fork, TN was full of inspiration. An outdoor lunch at an all natural restaurant, live music, an art coop walk through and impromptu visit with an artisan tenant set all of my creative senses on fire. Info receptors were opened. Then an open-ended question posed to a local shopkeeper presented a lesson for marketers who use social media/networking.
She shared the origins of the community name including an anecdote about a gun duel featuring Andrew Jackson. She put founders’ names and personalities to the local boutiques. And later she pointed down the street to where a world renowned musician lives. I had valuable (even if for entertainment purposes only) new insight because the focus was on her and what she knew about the subject at hand. We were connected.
It reminded me of a lesson from Dale Carnegie’s book “How to Win Friends and Influence People”: people like to talk about themselves. There isn’t a single tech innovation that will ever change that. So as marketers we have to create moments that enable sharing and listening. At Bigfish, we call them interactions.
So how does the weekend translate to a lesson for businesses who market via Facebook? Two simple things:
1. Admit that you need other people to succeed.
2. Create interactions where you talk less and listen more.
Or if you'd prefer just one: get over yourself.
Want to be heard? Find me at www.twitter.com/timbigfish
Like It or Not It's All About Like
We started this year saying that someday your customer’s preference would dictate your company’s search engine relevance. That someday has come. The new Bing Facebook alliance makes “like” the new relevancy factor for search. So, what is "like"?
"Like" or not is the grade your business earned as determined by "the customer experience".
Your company and mine must be fully aware of the experience we create for our clients. We can’t cleverly weave our way through search engine formulas and hope to find some unsuspecting prospect who would become a customer. In the Participation Age your customers don’t care about some arcane search algorithm that revolves around keywords, referring links, dynamic content and other inane attributes. They care about what their friends think. Their friends are your recent and next customer.
Perhaps, like Bigfish, you’re not in the gadget business. You don’t cook pizzas. You don’t rent cars. You don’t iron shirts. So what is there to like? Well, every day you and your employees make impressions. You create an experience. Your company and mine are in the customer experience business. It’s the quality of that experience as seen from the customer’s point-of-view that will determine the “like” count on our Facebook business pages long after our personal social acquaintances have tuned out of our news feeds.
My colleagues will attest that I am highly sensitized to the customer experience factor. It’s in our name. If I walk into the development room kicking over waste baskets and spilling coffee, it’s not because my folks have performed poorly. It’s because I’ve been enraged to the point of disgust having just witnessed a so-called collaborating engineer or developer use fear, uncertainty, doubt and downright arrogance to bluff a client into submission. Thankfully, Bigfish Developers are sincere in their efforts to deliver a “treat them like the big fish” level of service but we all have our moments and I may have seen a tiny bit of our worst selves in the other guy. It had to be kicked and spilled on. It wasn't a like-able experience.
We’re a service business. Whether we’re developing words to convey our client’s message, drawing pictures to illustrate their ideas, building websites to enable their objectives, or connecting them to prospects and customers through social media – each interaction with them is the experience.
For every gift card or thank you note from a client there are five others we might not hear from. What was their experience? Did they “like” us or not? Guess we’ll have to Bing and decide.
Let's talk about it. I'm on Twitter at www.twitter.com/timbigfish
"Like" or not is the grade your business earned as determined by "the customer experience".
Your company and mine must be fully aware of the experience we create for our clients. We can’t cleverly weave our way through search engine formulas and hope to find some unsuspecting prospect who would become a customer. In the Participation Age your customers don’t care about some arcane search algorithm that revolves around keywords, referring links, dynamic content and other inane attributes. They care about what their friends think. Their friends are your recent and next customer.
Instead of “referring links” think “quality interactions”. Make each one count. Your customers will relate each of their experiences to their friends (your future prospects and customers) with a simple thumbs-up or down.
Perhaps, like Bigfish, you’re not in the gadget business. You don’t cook pizzas. You don’t rent cars. You don’t iron shirts. So what is there to like? Well, every day you and your employees make impressions. You create an experience. Your company and mine are in the customer experience business. It’s the quality of that experience as seen from the customer’s point-of-view that will determine the “like” count on our Facebook business pages long after our personal social acquaintances have tuned out of our news feeds.
My colleagues will attest that I am highly sensitized to the customer experience factor. It’s in our name. If I walk into the development room kicking over waste baskets and spilling coffee, it’s not because my folks have performed poorly. It’s because I’ve been enraged to the point of disgust having just witnessed a so-called collaborating engineer or developer use fear, uncertainty, doubt and downright arrogance to bluff a client into submission. Thankfully, Bigfish Developers are sincere in their efforts to deliver a “treat them like the big fish” level of service but we all have our moments and I may have seen a tiny bit of our worst selves in the other guy. It had to be kicked and spilled on. It wasn't a like-able experience.
We’re a service business. Whether we’re developing words to convey our client’s message, drawing pictures to illustrate their ideas, building websites to enable their objectives, or connecting them to prospects and customers through social media – each interaction with them is the experience.
For every gift card or thank you note from a client there are five others we might not hear from. What was their experience? Did they “like” us or not? Guess we’ll have to Bing and decide.
Let's talk about it. I'm on Twitter at www.twitter.com/timbigfish
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