From the trenches: B2b social media strategy

Social Media: Background

Social media revolves around conversations, community, connections and social networks. Social media encourages contributions and feedback from the interest group. Social media compared to other known forms of media (newspapers, TV, Business journals, etc) primarily differs on the interactivity and engagement process. The fundamental difference in offline and social media branding is that while former adopts more of a push strategy, the later is a pull strategy. User and internal customer generated content is used to inform, listen and engage the various stakeholders. In the traditional approach, the engagement is transactional, marketing objective is mostly to inform the user and user participation in content creation and enhancement is minimal and comes at a significant cost. Social media exploits the reach and richness of the medium to involve users at an early stage of content creation, quality check and also distribution through +WOM, while ensuring lower transactional cost. For startups and established firms, social media makes a lot of business sense because the social media tools enable free and easy to manage. In this paper we present the collective experience Browne & Mohan consultants had in defining the social media strategy, the roll out, impact assessment and do and do nt.

Building a B2B social brand: The Process Flow

The process for building a successful social brand requires certain steps to be followed sequentially as shown in figure 1.

Online purpose: Brand as complement, or replica or experience. Shared understanding of social media amongst stake holders: employees, marketing, sales, etc Social media Expectations (Brand/revenue growth)

Target customer, geographies, communities of interest, communities of consumption Own or join the communities of interest Platform selection offerings: Blogs (external or internal source), tweets, Videos and presentations, etc Tools

Content Themes: Product, competition, industry evolution, customer pain areas, corporate positioning of best practices Content type: informative, referential, comparative and endorsement Content Map User & Employee engagement

People: followers, fans, influencers , leads, time of engagement RSS feeds, email registrations or event attendance, likes, dislikes, comments, trackbacks, forwards, completed profiles, brand mentions, sentiments. Review & Act

Figure 1

Building a social brand broadly involves four stages: vision, target audiences & platform selection, content & engagement model and finally metrics & review. 1. Visioning Visioning fundamentally involves aligning all the stakeholders in an organization to the purpose of social media presence and objectively defining the purpose of social media presence. Clarity of what the social media is expected to be ensures the purpose, positioning and alignments are attained without much confusions amongst the actors involved. A company may chose social media to complement its physical media activities or just replicate the physical media content on the social media. A company can also choose to offer social media as an experiential platform to engage and deepen the relationship with its clients and employees. Brand as an extension is a practice where brands execute partial activeness and commitment in the social media sphere supported by extended brand values with respect to online user expectations. Brand as a comprehensive experience maximizes the return on user interactions with clearly chalked out social media strategy, fruitful in-depth engagements, higher user and employee empowerment. For a successful branding as a complement the organizations need to have a systematic committed and long term basis bent towards social branding. The engagement dimensions must change with respect to social media platform characteristics. An explicit understanding of the purpose of presence in social media, whether it is for branding or revenue growth would help define the focus and implementation of right activities. Social media involvement rests on the core values the company wishes to reinforce in the social media or at least appear to be doing so. The objectives for engaging in social media could be to highlight the values of respect, responsibility (including CSR) or signal innovation, as highlighted in the Table below. Table 1

Engagement Values at Company Level Transparency Protection Respect Responsibility Utilization

Explanation of the same Authentic content and conversations Respecting consumer privacy Respect for consumers views,opinions,suggestions Sense of ownership for the conversations, content and participations Adopt the best practices in social media

2. Target audience & platform selection In the second stage, target audience and platform selection decisions including who the target customers are, what geographies to target, what would be the communities of interest (that espouse interest in what the company intends to focus on) and what are the actual communities of consumption (those communes that drive demand).

Having identified the target customer segments and the communities, companies should define the breadth of platforms they are likely to use, whether their social media engagement would be restricted to Blogs, tweets, etc or cover the complete gamut of community sites, video and presentation materials, social communities, etc. Most companies, given the investment and resource commitments required, opt for Blogs (company & subject matter experts), professional communities on Facebook, Linkedin, corporate presentations and videos showcasing their organizational prowess and customer case studies. Table 2 Platforms Blogs Facebook Deployment Company Information, insider & 3 party branding, Employee Engagement & Interaction No of users, youth connect, user experience sharing, product evaluation, user feedback, communities of interest, managed 3 party promos, drive traffic, User engagement for new product, promotions, contests Microblogging, status updates, celebrity branding, market announcements, Announcements, updates, senior management interviews/opinions, community of practice, CEO branding Hiring, professional networking, branding, information sharing visual promotions, corporate video, expertise, customer experiences, Sharing of Photos, Albums, reinforcing celebration. Personal Networking, drive traffic, youth connect, user experience sharing
rd rd

Twitter

Linkedin Youtube Flickr Orkut

Once the platforms are selected, companies also need to focus on various tools they are likely to use to engage, track and manage the social media. Companies need to plan PR and media management tools (for assessment of opinion and views about the company or its products. Ex: Reputica) , tracking tools (Converseon, Who's Talkin, Social Mention, Trackur, Viralheat, and Netbase Consumer Insights& Who's Talkin, etc), and security tool (Fraud protection, security, and threat detection. Ex Filtrbox, KnowEm).

3. Content & Engagement Models Social media content strategy design is a very innate aspect to drive any social media engine. The content connects and glues the members in a community. The content creation can be user generated content (UGC) or company generated content. Content themes could be around product (features, novelty, price & other advantages), competition (strategies, their product/service comparison, marketing and other related strategies), customer pain areas (what are the key pain points, what solutions are customers interested, how to solutionize the requirements, etc), industry evolution (how is the market evolving, new designs, standards, regulation, etc), best practices or differentiated process (what new practices is the company adopting, its value, etc), awards & press mentions as shown in Table 3.

Table 3 Product, features, Company achievements, announcements Customer pain areas, how they can be addressed, what are customer expectations, solutions that have failed to deliver, etc Competition, comparison, Industry trends, what new technologies, service and business models are likely to emerge, why companies must prepare themselves for the future

We find four content types Informative, Comparative, Referential and Endorsement most effective for b2b markets. The informative content type is good-to-know or for-your awareness type of content typically presenting personal with respect to the product usage, benefits, or feature positioning. Comparative content is more focusing on highlighting the differences between the process, services and products, key user differentiators, etc. Referential content is posting from the company side announcing the projects won, orders successfully completed, project highlights, etc. Endorsement is content from the customers highlighting why they selected the company, what advantages they benefited, etc. Table 4 lists the content types and highlights some examples. Table 4 Content type Inform comparative Referential Endorse example Have released to new virtual personal assistant (VPA) that offers takes all the pain away from delegation and multitasking While EMC, IBM and other vendors may be offering price advantages only:, KREATIO stands out for value for money, high modularity, ease of deployment WCM roll out at IDG proves .... We are happy to share the business advantages we got from deploying effipay

A key element of social media strategy is the level of involvement of users or employees in content generation, community building, etc. Empowerment guides the level and ways an employee can engage with the user. Some companies may prefer to exercise higher guided control involves centralized control over messaging and information flow while limited guided control focuses on social brand enhancement through increased user and employee participation, information exchange and content co-creation. Higher guided control follow a centralized engagement, content generation, follow ups and messaging tightly controlled with low user/employee participation. The main focus is on brand reinforcement and effective brand reputation management by cutting down the noise around a brand. The noise attenuation is made possible by representing the employees as brand defenders. Some companies pursue the mid position in the guided control spectrum have a partial company and employee involvement. They are neither into compulsive positive brand reinforcement in the user imagery nor an immature and weak social brand to engage with. The balanced guided control facilitates in social brand evaluation and brand reinforcement accordant to the brand evaluation outputs received.

Limited Guided Control

Higher Guided Control

Guided Control Spectrum

Figure 2 User and employee involvement rests on the core values the company places on consistency in content, community and communication strategies. Table 5 captures the core values at employee or a user level.

Table 5 Engagement Values at Individual Level Adherence Responsibility Empathetic Behavior Open mindedness Explanation of the same Adherence to social media policies and online social media principles A sense of ownership for the conversations, content and participations at individual level A good listener, addressing unmet customer needs and wants. Open to negative comments and criticism

4. Metrics, Review and Act Continuous evaluation of social branding exercise is needed so as have timely implementation of the needed change. while several measures could be used to measure the effectiveness of social media, we find some of the measures such as return on participation, return on involvement, return on attention, return on trust and return on conversation are rather cumbersome to capture and or at best some estimates. Our experience indicates the measures should be easy to interpret, offer insights to all actors involved in the organization. Table 4 presents the measures that can be easily captured and measured to evaluate the effectiveness of social media spends. Table 6 Measure No of followers, Fans, Influencers Sales leads Engagement on the site RSS feeds Email registrations or event interest Likes, dislikes, forwards Brand mentions Sentiments (positive or negative statements) Periodicity Weekly, Monthly, quarter-wise Monthly, quarter-wise Monthly, quarter-wise Weeks, Monthly, quarter-wise Event related Weekly, Monthly, quarter-wise Weekly, Monthly, quarter-wise Weekly, Monthly, quarter-wise

Recommendations

1) Define the very objective of social media engagement. The objective can be to influence the
prospects for a product purchase, increase the brand awareness or creating buzz. The content should always be brand values centric. 2) Identify the preferred content forms by target audience. Content forms can be video, white papers, blogs and podcasts. For a sales centric engagement the preferred content form is video due to the marketing strength of viral video and prominent social networks. For an idea centric engagement the preferred form is company blogs and white papers available onsite. 3) Customize content to community & social media platforms. It is very essential to understand user characteristics, their preferences and ensure the content is appropriate to that platform. If targeting a matured user identify the top industry issues, top bloggers, the thought leaders and the platforms used by them and structure the content right. 4) Use insource/outsource resources. Using both internal and external resources would benefit the company to portray neutrality and self-interest in tandem. Moreover, the content generation is derisked as not just the quality of original content matters, but also the quantity. 5) Engagement cycle should be active and involve multiple levels in the organization & its ecosystem. Social media engagement is a continuous process Involve many people from your organization and partners to benefit from scale. However, clearly define and control the content and its distribution. Referential and endorsements from external sources matters online.

Browne & Mohan insight are general in nature and does not represent any specific individuals or entities. While all efforts are made to ensure the information and status of entities in the insights is accurate, there can be no guarantee for freshness of information. Browne & Mohan insights are for information and knowledge update purpose only. Information contained in the report has been obtained from sources deemed reliable and no representation is made as to the accuracy thereof. Neither Browne & Mohan nor its affiliates, officers, directors, employees, owners, representatives nor any of its data or content providers shall be liable for any errors or for any actions taken in reliance thereon.

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