The Results: Is B2B Content "Likeable"

A few months back, with Facebook’s announcement of a “Like” button for the web, I decided to run a quick, highly unscientific experiment to see if B2B content was “likeable”. Put more simply, is B2B content as likely to be shared in the social atmosphere of Facebook as it is to be shared in the more hybrid social/business atmosphere of Twitter.

While I will admit that I personally am more active on Twitter than on Facebook, I gave the “like” button a more prominent position at the top of the post to hopefully even the score a little bit. The results are dramatic – mentions of the content of this blog on Twitter generally fall around 20 or so mentions per post. Facebook, however, is lucky to get one or two likes or shares per post.

While many factors may explain this discrepancy, I suspect that the most reasonable explanation is the differences in social context between the two networks. Content must fit the context of the environment or it feels out of place and awkward, even if the participants are similar.



(as part of this post, I should mention that HubSpot's Blog Grader does a wonderful job of tallying all the Tweets/Shares/Likes for a blog)

Does this match with your experience of B2B content on Facebook? Read More...

Friends, Avatars, Countrymen, lend me your ears

David Meerman Scott had a great post the other day on “I do not friend logos”. Very well put, and I agree with him.

As you know we’ve been doing a lot of experimentation with the best way to apply social media in the B2B marketing realm, and David’s post hit on one of the biggest challenges we’re all facing – what to do about Facebook as B2B marketers. The numbers are undeniable, the active population on Facebook is huge. However, the challenge we’ve all faced, as DM Scott puts so well, is that companies are not really “friendable”.

So, how about a personality… in our next B2B marketing experiment, we’re exploring the idea of a corporate “personality” in the social space. For anyone who is part of the Eloqua community, you may already have met Drake. He now has a Facebook page, a growing bunch of friends, and a personality.

Having a personality is a good start, but how can one translate that into real market traction? For one, a personality opens up more avenues for having fun than a corporate logo does. As the first example, Drake has launched his first contest – take a photo with him, and you might win an iPad. Not something that would fly with a corporate logo.

Is this taking the idea of “personas” a bit too far? Will this crack the code on B2B marketing on Facebook? We’re not sure, but you’ll be the first to know. Well, maybe not the “first”; that honor might go to David Meerman Scott – he is, after all, friends with Drake on Facebook. Read More...

LinkedIn as Facebook for the Business World

(note, this post was cross-posted on It's All About Revenue last week)

I've long been a bit skeptical about the use of Facebook for sharing business content. It is a great medium for personal sharing, and works well when businesses hit on the rare, but brilliant creative campaigns that go viral because they are cute, funny, or whimsical. However, for content like whitepapers, it just does not work.

I'm currently running an experiment to see if B2B content is "likeable" on Facebook, and while I have not compiled the data yet, the answers are looking bleak.

However, interesting developments continue at LinkedIn, with their recent promotion of a sharing bookmarklet. The technology is really simple:

1) Drag the bookmarklet to your browser toolbar:


2) Click it to share any page you are on:

3) Your status is updated with that link:


But the implications are more interesting. By doubling their investment in the status update as a communication metaphor that Twitter and Facebook have leveraged with great success, LinkedIn seems to be attempting to become a similar communications hub for the business world.

Whether they will be successful in becoming "Facebook for the business world" is unclear, but there are a few factors in their favour, and a few against worth considering:

3 Factors working in LinkedIn's favour:
- their presence as the defacto network of business connections gets them over the hurdle of network adoption quickly

- their deeper knowledge of business profiles means that they can (theoretically) do a much better job of understanding influence networks than alternatives

- the gulf between our social selves and our business selves is probably implanted deep in the brain stem, and may be impossible for Facebook to overcome as an inherently "social" ecosystem


3 Factors working against them:
- they are late to the party when it comes to building a robust developer ecosystem to extend and innovate on the core

- their application usage scenario feels a lot more like a CRM system (looking up contact and company details) than a communication platform like Twitter or Facebook. Making this shift will be difficult

- Each network has an implied "hurdle" of becoming connected (Twitter is very low, for example). LinkedIn has historically been a relatively "high" hurdle, which doesn't lead to broad sharing of ideas through many loose connections


What's your bet? Will LinkedIn succeed with this initiative and become Facebook for the business world? Read More...

Is B2B Content "Likeable"?

With all the discussion about Facebook's new "Like" (or "Recommend") button for the web, I thought it would be worthwhile running a small experiment to answer the following question:

Do the readers of B2B content share more on Twitter or Facebook?

I will admit that I have certain biases, and I don't think that the human brain is very well adapted to truly merging business and social relationships as I wrote previously. However, in the interest of science, I thought the experiment was worthwhile.

I have reduced the automatic "sharing" options on each post to two - one that shares on Facebook, and one that shares on Twitter. I have historically been sharing content only on Twitter, so it has a bit of an advantage, so in order to somewhat compensate for that, I have added the Facebook sharing bar to the top of the post.

I could be proven wrong, but I suspect that, when I tally the counts a month or so from now, we'll see very little activity on Facebook in comparison to Twitter.

What have you seen for B2B content? Does it become shareable on Facebook? Read More...

Social Media Buzz at a Live Event

We just finished up Eloqua Experience 2009, which was a spectacular event all around. Marketers from around the world came to celebrate success, and we filled three days with great discussions, fabulous speakers, and new connections among the best marketers in the world. One of the aspects of the event that we were most excited about this year, however, was the concurrent online conversation and tremendous buzz that the event generated in social media. I was asked many times what we did to have that much social media buzz at a live event.




Of course there is no way to “manufacture” social media buzz at a live event, you have to have great content and things that people will talk about, but there are a few things you can do to facilitate and encourage the buzz.

In planning for the social media aspects of the event, our team used a 6 element framework:

Pre-Event Awareness

In order to ensure that everyone was ready to participate in the social media discussions at the event, we ensured that the pre-event communications began to seed awareness that there would be a strong online conversation. A Twitter hashtag (#EE09) was agreed upon by the events team over a month in advance, and was used consistently in any discussions of the event or tweets about it.

In order to ensure that the people most actively engaged in social media were well aware of the event’s social media elements, we spurred discussion of it in all relevant social media properties. A competition on the Eloqua Facebook page was created, with a Kindle as a prize, and that competition was then blogged and tweeted about, reinforcing the hashtag, and building awareness of the social media elements at the event itself.


Enablement

At the event itself, every effort was made to ensure that participants were able to join in the social conversation, and felt very comfortable doing so. As an obvious step, wireless access was available to all. However, often it is the more subtle social cues that help the most. Having a few of your own team with their laptops very visibly open and active at the keynotes and in track sessions communicates the message that it is okay to have laptops and cell phones out during the sessions.

For bloggers, a simple step is to have all relevant material that they might possibly need in order to blog about anything they saw at the sessions readily available to them. A blogger marketing resource site is a great way to do this, and we made the URL known through distributing business cards at registration with the URL clearly visible.


Encouragement and Bridges

The next step was to encourage people to participate and build a bridge between the conversation happening face to face at the event and the conversation happening online. In the main campground area, a large screen (the Tweetboard) was created that showed a continuous rolling feed of the online conversation and built a "bridge" between the online and offline conversations. Anyone nearby could immediately see the conversation that was happening and was encouraged to join in. (we'll be coming out with detailed instructions for how the Tweetboard was built very soon)

Each keynote then included references to the online conversation – the opening session with Eloqua CMO, Brian Kardon even presented the hashtag in letters over 8ft tall so there was no confusion. Subsequent day sessions each attempted to include a reference to a comment or observation that had been picked up online, continuing to drive awareness and participation.





Destinations and Discussions

Beyond the session content itself, the team worked to build a number of relevant destinations and discussions in order to keep the online conversation vibrant and flowing. These spanned many major social media properties including Facebook, YouTube, Blogs, and Twitter, and ranged from video channels to online contests. Each social media property then referenced the others, ensuring a continuously self-reinforcing cycle of discovery and engagement.

The vibrant Eloqua partner community was also engaged, and a number of contest, giveaways, and events added to the buzz and topics of conversation. As a few examples, a RockBand competition accentuated the “Rock Star” track theme, and contributed a lot of photos, and a creative Bingo game all done via a combination of marketing automation and text messages drove a lot of excitement and engagement.


Seeding

Even with that, ensuring that every track session was covered and not left out of the online conversation led to a careful “seeding” strategy whereby staff members were present in each session and would capture at least one or two salient points or quotes from the speaker if there appeared to be fewer active social media people in that session than expected. In most cases this turned out unnecessary, but formed a good starting point and fall-back strategy.


Post-Event Engagement

Ensuring that the rich social media buzz and engagement was not limited to the event itself, a series of post-event social media communications was planned to keep the engagement level high. Winners from the 2009 Markie Awards were first posted to this blog, pictures from the event will be streamed to Facebook, and videos from the event will continue to be presented on the YouTube channel.





Of course nothing is more important than interesting, cutting edge, and engaging content, but this 6 element framework helped us create one of the most talked about Marketing events of the year. 1000s of tweets, photos, videos, and new connections drove the community’s engagement and excitement higher than it would have been for those at the event, and allowed those not able to participate to have a better sense of the event without being there.

I hope this framework is helpful in planning your events, and if there are techniques you used to drive even more interest and engagement please do share in the comments below. Read More...

Market Relationships, Social Relationships, and B2B Marketing in Social Media

I just wrapped up a great book – Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely – that discussed, among many other things, the different relationship types we have between people; especially market relationships and social relationships. Dan’s example was a great one for capturing the essence of the challenge; you have a great Thanksgiving dinner with the family at your mother-in-law’s place, and everyone has enjoyed the great food, drinks, and conversation. The meal ends and you pull out your wallet to pay your mother-in-law for the great meal she has provided. Obviously a very awkward moment, and entirely the wrong thing to do.

Essentially, the situation becomes very awkward because you have flipped the relationship from one form (a social relationship) to another form (a market relationship). Neither type of relationship, by itself, is problematic. We provide and receive dinners based on our social relationships frequently, and we receive dinners based on market relationships each time we eat at a restaurant. However, it’s the flipping between the two that causes that feeling of awkwardness.

Social media, for all its promise, does not change the nature of the way we categorize relationships. It just makes those relationships more visible. One of the most common questions that comes up in discussions of B2B marketing is how social media can be used to drive revenue. It can, and there are many great examples of ways in which social media can be used to drive revenue, but none that I have heard of ignore the ways in which humans categorize relationships.

What I mean by that is that each of our presences on social media needs to fit neatly into a relationship category, or it will seem awkward. If we want to use social media to connect with friends, exchange photos, and share stories, great. If we want to use social media to educate, inform, and guide buyer behavior, that’s equally great. However, it is when we attempt to merge the two that awkwardness can result.

I’m not in any way saying that if you’re in a market relationship, you cannot be fun, engaging, and interested in a person’s family and personal life. You can, and it’s a great way to connect with people; in the same way that a waiter or waitress can be gregarious, social, and interesting. However, the relationship category is clear.

Many of the known successes in social media are clear market relationships. The team at Dell, ComcastCares, Chris Brogan, and the Kado Barbeque Truck are all clearly engaging us in market relationships within social media. They may be engaging, personable, and friendly, but there’s no awkwardness when they try to educate or guide our buying behavior, as we know from the start that it is a market relationship, and an ultimate goal is business.

If a social media strategy, however, relies on this boundary being crossed, it may face more of a challenge than you anticipate. Social media can be a great environment for ideas to spread virally. However, if those ideas would appear to change the relationship type, they will likely not spread. We forward viral videos to our friends that are funny, cute, inspiring, or provocative. These fit within a social relationship. We generally don’t forward videos that appear to be selling anything or promoting a product or company too strongly. This steps over the line into a market relationship.

Relationship types form an interesting framework to understand what allows certain messages to be forwarded and others to fail miserably. We have each seen examples of enthusiastic PR teams suggesting that we try to get everyone we know to pass along a great press release to their friends on Facebook. It does not work, as it is asking for a relationship (social) to flip to a different type (market). An interesting example, is the viral success that is seen in forwarding “friends and family only” discount coupons in retail scenarios. The sense that it is an internal only offer, rather than a sales promotion, allows people to pass it on in the context of a social relationship. Promotions that are just as strong economically, but do not have the “inside scoop” angle generally do not see the same level of success among groups in social media who mainly share a social relationship.

However, not all social media platforms are based on purely social relationships. People who connect on LinkedIn, for example, likely are sharing a market relationship, and may be more likely to share, discuss, and engage in pure business conversations. Twitter forms an interesting hybrid environment where both types of relationships exist.

Thinking about the relationships our initiatives are resting on allows us a new perspective on our social media campaigns. If the campaign relies on a social relationship becoming a market relationship, chances are it will not work. This transition is fraught with awkwardness and established etiquette, as much in the realm of social media as it is at Thanksgiving dinner at your mother-in-law’s.

Read More...

The Medium is the Message: B2B Marketing, Social Media, and Conversation Context

Ever since Marshall McLuhan published his 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, we have been familiar with the phrase "The medium is the message". The medium in which a message is delivered has as much of an effect as the content delivered in that medium.

Today's world of social media needs to be viewed in a similar light. The medium in which a message is delivered is as important to consider as the content of the message itself. As today's marketing organizations consider how to engage in social media forums, not considering the context of the medium being used can lead to a significant change in the overall effect on the message being received.

Social media sites are best compared to social functions in order to understand this effect of context. Like social functions, each social media context has a certain "vibe", which guides the conversation that is accepted.

If you think of this in light of social functions, it becomes clear that certain conversations are appropriate in certain social contexts, and not others. Business meetings are intended to be direct, on topic, and have an agenda-driven vibe. On the other end of the spectrum, parties have a social vibe and only social conversations are generally seen as accepted.

The use of social media for business shares a similar dynamic. The context guides the vibe, which guides the conversations that are accepted. Content of conversations cannot be understood separate from the context of the medium in which they are held.

I wrote recently about our Facebook B2B marketing strategy, which leveraged the context of the Facebook medium to guide the message being delivered. Facebook carries a very social vibe, and our goal with our Facebook strategy is to keep our conversations relevant to that context.

In the context of LinkedIn discussions as a medium, however, "talking shop" is much more expected and anticipated, so the messaging in that medium can be much more business oriented.

If a person at a party brings up a business conversation, or a person in a business meeting tells a party story, the audience is as much influenced by the out-of-context feeling, based on the medium, as they are by the content itself. It is the same in social media. A whitepaper on best practices may contain excellent content, but it is the context of the medium as much as the content itself that influences the audience.

When exploring B2B marketing in social media, understanding this context is critical to understanding how your message is received. McLuhan's prescient observation that the medium is the message is as accurate today as it was years ago.

Read More...

Our B2B Facebook Marketing Strategy

It's a work-hard, play-hard world out there, and there's nothing better to end a day of deep discussions on marketing than sharing a few drinks or going out to grab a bite to eat.


At Eloqua, we are lucky to have some of the most interesting, fun, and social customers around (they are marketers, after all), so when we started talking about what one might do with Facebook from a B2B marketing perspective, an obvious answer came up. Keep it friendly.


I suspect we're not the only marketing team who was on one hand intrigued by the reach and the buzz of Facebook, but on the other hand not quite sure what would work from a B2B marketing perspective. The idea of discussing the latest whitepaper or marketing best practices did not seem to fit the social vibe of Facebook. When the discussion turned to our customers though, we quickly realized that the social interactions we had with them were as interesting and valuable as the marketing discussions we had.


Another thing that we discussed was that many of our team will work with our clients remotely before ever meeting them face to face. Friendships develop over email and phone conversations far before having a face to face interaction.


So, our Facebook plan developed. We wanted to explore and expose the social side of Eloqua. As we go to events, share a few drinks with clients, or have dinner with marketing groups, we'll post the pictures on Facebook so the clients we are already friends with can get to know us better as people, and the people who have met at user groups around the country can reconnect online.


What is our business rationale for this? That's a great question. The Gallup organization did a workplace poll a few years back that observed that having good friends at work was a significant factor in employee retention (http://gmj.gallup.com/content/511/Item-10-Best-Friend-Work.aspx). Could the same idea hold in client retention? We're not sure, but it's fun to try, and a great reason to get more social with our clients.




Our commitment is that we won't "talk shop". Every marketer we have interacted with who experiences an Eloqua event and feels the vibe and energy of the community is excited to join it, and that is motivation enough for us. Will this strategy work, we're not sure, but as David Armano said the other day, we're all learning by doing - http://darmano.typepad.com/logic_emotion/2009/03/brands-will-learn-by-doing-get-used-to-it-.html




I'm interested in your comments, whether you're an Eloqua customer or not. What have you seen with this type of a B2B Facebook strategy? What has worked, what has not? What are your first reactions? If you are a customer, what are your thoughts on our Facebook presence? What would you like to see more of or differently about the social side of Eloqua? Read More...