If you’re following the rise of social networking and social media in business and in particular the business of politics, then be sure to read this article from NYTimes this morning.   The essence of the article is summed up in this quote:

” … as  it [the new White House staff]  tries to accomplish what aides say is one of their most important goals: transforming the YouTubing-Facebooking-texting-Twittering grass-roots organization that put Mr. Obama in the White House into an instrument of government.”

Regardless of how deep your interests in party politics run, what’s going to be fascinating to observe is how the traditional broadcasting networks will manage a head-to-head meeting with the Obama ‘network’.  No president has leveraged the power of the Internet and all the social networking tools before.  This is going to be a fascinating year of change for every business, organization and political activity.

Tom

Here’s an illustration of the way things are changing so you/your company can help Marketing and Sales use the Internet to build engagement and trust that lead to greater numbers of qualified prospects.

I’m going to take some liberties here and poke a bit of fun at traditional marketing, for the sake of making a point. Traditional marketing efforts in B2B have been largely focused on driving traffic to a landing page with enough enticements to move people through the long sign-up form in hopes of a payoff, such as a white paper, at the end. I once heard a presenter says that it’s analogous to what we do in Texas with cattle at branding time: We try our best to get ‘em to move through a chute with various enticements and prods in order to count ‘em and brand ‘em so we know our total worth in beef.

What’s on offer now is a perspective that lets the most interested or qualified prospects through the filter, but does it in a different manner. Think about all the traffic interested in visiting your site (a product site or social networking component of your site, or your media content, now spread all over the Internet). This traffic falls into one of three types: Yahoos, Bluebirds or Shy Yesses.

The Yahoos are a small percentage of people on the left side of the bell curve that are lost or kicking tires or whatever, but you’re not marketing to them.

The Bluebirds are the visitors who come to your site on purpose and engage directly. You focus on moving them into the sales process directly. You’ve been a Bluebird, haven’t you?  When you just call up and order something directly from a company–no salesman contacts you–that’s a bluebird sale. It’s the small percent of the bell curve on the right-hand side and, regardless of their numbers, you’re really not marketing to them either.

In the middle of the bell curve of behavior is the Shy Yes traffic. These are all the people coming to the website or bumping into the hundreds of podcasts and blog articles your company has distributed all over the Internet for the last few years. These people have some particular interest. Likely they have a need brewing on the horizon but the last thing they want is a sales guy calling, and they sure don’t want to tip their hand by filling out a long form just to get a white paper and then have someone start hounding them.

Long before a salesman comes into the picture, your company gets involved in a scoping or planning session to do something and wants to figure out how to proceed before getting vendors all hot and bothered.  This is the makeup of a Shy Yes. I’m sure you can think of other behaviors of people finding your content and hovering over product pages, checking things out.

What’s needed are ways to entice or engage the Shy Yes with small pieces of interaction … what you get is more and more of his/her attention by satisfying their need to learn more, to ask questions without worrying about a sales guy calling, to be better informed about making budgeting decisions on projects.

I think of the social media (audio podcasts, video podcasts, blogs, comments, and so forth) and social networking (being a member of a community to exchange useful perspectives and information on pertinent topics) as a kind of birdseed.

Remember when you were a kid and you went to the park? You’d put a few pennies into a seed dispenser so you could feed the birds. At first you would just run and throw the seed at the birds, thinking you were giving them what they wanted, but the birds would fly away. Over time, however, you noticed people who were sitting patiently on benches and had birds eating out of their hands. You noticed that the people got up slowly and put food down in small, separate portions, giving the Shy birds the seeds and space they needed to build trust. Over time the birds developed enough trust in that relationship to come right up to the person on the bench.

Social media and the container for engagement/social networking are the birdseed. They are what will draw the attention of the bulk of the web traffic poring over your site each month. This is the Shy Yes traffic, picking up information piece by piece, engaging more and more with your company. They spend more time on your site, which is garnering more of their attention during the day, and maybe in the evenings on their iPhones and iTouches. You’re there, and when they are ready they start to communicate with you because you’ve made it easy.

There are so many more ’seeds’ of engagement now with social media and social networking, compared to the old days of only one landing page per 45-day sales campaign. And now every touch point can be counted and used for gentle encouragement to offer help or for the Shy Yes to contact you when they want to know more.

As I’ve said many times before, none of this replaces traditional marketing efforts. Those will always be with us and always have value. I’m simply introducing a new perspective on other ways to find qualified prospects from the web using the various social tools now at hand.

Tom

One reaction I’ve noticed while performing social media assessments and giving social marketing strategy presentations to prospective clients is the worry in their eyes when the discussion comes to creating content for a multitude of online social media distribution channels.

B2B companies that already have a fairly well-defined traditional marketing group think a particular way, so it’s important to align your thinking with their current focus on product announcement dates, press releases, white papers, conferences, and so forth. If you can position your social media strategy to align with what they already know, you’re more likely to get them thinking about what’s possible instead of putting up roadblocks. All too often their worrying comes after you explain ‘how and why’ to use a variety of social media channels like Twitter (micro-blogging), blogging, audio and video podcasting, and various RSS tools to help with Internet visibility (and engagement, if they have a social networking site already or plan one soon).

One of their concerns is how in the world will they come up with content for all those channels (not to mention, who’s going to do that) and another is when to use all those social media channels of distribution. I have a simple way that gets folks enrolled.

A traditional marketing person’s ‘style’ of thinking is often calendar-based, meaning they look at least 6-12 months out (especially given they have a yearly budget to spend). I suggest that they consider two ‘types’ of content workflow, one that somewhat synchronizes with the scheduled marketing events for the year, and the other being more asynchronous, to fill in the gaps. Big waves and little waves, I call them.

The big waves utilize variations of existing content to repurpose and retransmit the news about the product release/update into your blog, Twitter, and one or more audio/video podcasts (either at your site or ‘with’ others who podcast about your products to their audience).

A specific scenario might be: Collaborate with the Product Marketing manager who knows everything about the product to get the typical white paper that is such a part of traditional B2B marketing efforts. Think about the subtopics discussed in that white paper and write one or more blog articles which relate to, and link to, the white paper. Consider some creative way to write short, text-based interviews with the white papers’ author(s) or related industry experts. This is a great way to start and gives you a segue from yammering on about the technical nature of the product to actually focusing on how ‘users’ are adopting the product. Keeping a keen eye on comments and emails will guide you in the direction to take those blog articles.

And remember, every time you blog also post a Twitter note about the blog(s) and, where appropriate, mention the availability of that white paper with a URL to it.

Next, schedule an audio or video podcast on the product (or service) release. Just have a conversation about the product, not a word-for-word redo of the white paper. Think about how Robert Scoble does his interviews with product managers and CEOs of smaller companies. It’s just 10-20 minutes and they talk about topics relevant to the product and how it makes life easier for the customer in some fashion. You will, of course, post a short blog article with a summary of the podcast and a link to it, as well as a Twitter with a URL to the podcast and/or blog article.

An important strategy to keep in mind: Whether you’re doing podcasts yourself or with a outside vendor, make certain they show up well in the search engines. Make sure the RSS feed is syndicated to all the major RSS aggregators so you get maximize visibility of that content. If you’re expecting a lot of traffic and comments you may want to configure a ROOM in Friendfeed.com or some other tool for monitoring the comments.

The idea here is to post content that’s fairly synchronous with your existing marketing activities. I say ‘fairly synchronous’ because it’s critical that the posts be thoughtfully timed. There are often reasons to post slightly before or slightly after the event. For example, traditional marketing activities include real-world social events you attend, like mixers, conferences and so forth, that are planned for the year. These are always good opportunities to blog, Twitter, post pictures, capture short videos and so forth, all aligned with your existing calendar of activities.

Now for the little waves of social media content. Just think of these as ’salt and pepper’ to keep alive the listener’s ear. If you already have one or two posts regularly coming from your big-wave planned marketing activities, then you might not see the need to sprinkle in little-wave blog posts and Twitters. But if your product release dates are, say, once a month or less, then you’ll want to find ways to talk about what’s going on in the industry, find out what other bloggers are saying about your product or company (setting up a custom room in FriendFeed may help here) and repost the ones that have some bearing on the product, especially those that mention creative ways to use your products and services.

As an aside, give the following a read for helpful hints in Tweeting news about your company.

Keep in mind that anyone who is reading RSS feeds like blogs and Twitter is reading a number of them at once. They are often scanning for news of interest and, at times, resending what they find to others. Regardless of how often you post for your company, make it educational, directly useful and/or highly interesting. If you don’t have anything that day or that week, breathe, relax and focus on when you will have something. I know that the mantra is post often and be regular, but I don’t think that’s all that useful, especially for B2B-type companies to be that stringent. It’s better to focus on quality of what you’re creating versus quantity. This isn’t a race it’s about educating and engaging with others and this is what will get their attention so you’re remembered.

If you have any questions or have a different opinion, be sure to let me know.

Tom

Part 1 – download

Part 2 – download

“Twenty years from now we’ll look back and say, ‘Gee, telephone numbers were a goofy thing,’” predicts Internetologist Len Hause

Part 1 – download

Part 2 – download
In this Talking Portraits interview, Hause predicts that phone numbers will no longer be needed. After giving a summary of the evolution of telephone numbers—from simple 4-digit numbers accessed through a local exchange to today’s numbers that designate locality, region, state, and nation of origin—Hause describes how content and context (the mode of transmission) are becoming more and more orthogonal (independent of one another).

Given the number of choices we have now, including Internet voice applications that use only name-based addressing, Hause describes how and why the telephone number as we know it will give way to a futuristic persona-based system that allows us to contact one another using a names.

Bio

Len Hause is an Internetologist and founder of MashBrain where he consults on Internet marketing and technology strategies. He was a Fellow of the Technical Staff, Associate of the Science Advisory Board, and Marketing Director at Motorola where he spent more than 30 years in management roles and as an individual contributor. He has been recognized as a pioneer in the adoption of Internet protocols and culture within the Enterprise for collaboration and organizational learning. While working in the semiconductor business, he learned firsthand about the importance of the convergence of the Internet and cell phone technology.

Hause frequently participates on executive, educational, corporate, and government advisory boards and consortia. He is also an active member of Austin’s musical community. He holds a BS degree in Electrical Engineering from Lehigh University. (more…)