Imagine that you are charged with launching a social media program for your product group. You ask your agency to develop a campaign. You think through the risks and rewards and go for it. Now, consider your counterparts in the other lines of business (LOB) in your organization who are doing the same thing. At any given point, each LOB may be thinking about or executing:

· Best practices

· Listening tools and campaigns

· Social media guidelines

· Outside and inside resources

· Platforms and social assets

· Research

· Advocate identification and activation

· Measurement

In fact, here’s the scary scenario: each LOB may be going down these paths separately and independently. At ComBlu, we’ve seen this over and over, and this practice is almost as prevalent today as it was during the wild, wild gold rush days of social media. Let’s think about what this really means.

· Scenario One: Group A wants a listening program and goes out and gets a license for a tool and trains some people to use it. At the same time, another group, licenses an entirely different tool and assigns one person to be the “chief listener”. Yet another group hires an agency to listen and respond for them and a fourth LOB contracts for a huge “listening study”. Yikes!

· Scenario Two: Now, these same four groups all decide they need social media guidelines. They each either develop their own or hire someone to do it for them. The result: four separate, sort of similar guidelines across four different LOBs.

· Scenario Three: Three out of these four groups all buy the same study from Forrester or another respected research firm

· Scenario Four: Two of these groups each buy a different community software platform and later decide they want to integrate their community experiences..

You get the picture. No standardization. No governance. No cost sharing. No knowledge sharing. No Center of Excellence (COE).

Many brands have Centers of Excellence for shared services and resources across their organization. A marketing department might have a COE for interactive, research, experiential, etc. And, a few are starting to add social marketing or social media to the COE approach. They are creating and sharing guidelines for listening and social media interaction, standardizing to a single community platform and listening tools, buying research once, and so on. Some are even meeting regularly to discuss best practices and parse their individual experiences with a vender, campaign or tool. But, here’s an interesting observation: they are not eating the social dog food. For the most part, the COEs are not using social tools to facilitate sharing and conversation about experiences, resources and approaches. They aren’t using rating and ranking systems to review venders or to get a view into planned programs that might provide insights or leverage between divisions, geographies or LOBs. They aren’t creating UGC or aggregating thought leadership information. They aren’t saying: “we’re in the early planning stages of research about XYZ that might benefit others. Let’s form a group and plan and co-fund it.”

One of the missions of ComBlu is to help organizations socialize their business model and supporting operations. We think brands would be better served by taking a COE approach, and using social tools to accelerate and facilitate adoption. The prize? Efficiency, effectiveness, bandwidth, cost savings and

So here’s the thing: I talk to tons of people every day. Some want to chat about community strategy; others want my grandmother’s recipe for strawberry mess. (It’s yummy) Community and cooking are equal passions of mine so people ask me about both…a lot. In either case, I never stop to consider: am I answering this question as a business professional or as a consumer. I just draw on the appropriate expertise and give my best advice and counsel. If I was having these conversations in a community, I’d gravitate towards places that congregate around community best practices or haul my virtual self to a foodie hot spot. Again, I’m the same person in either place. The only thing that changes is the topic and location.

So, I’m confused when I hear folks in the b-to-b world proclaim that social marketing doesn’t “work” in their industry, marketplace or environment. Huh? People don’t stop having conversations, seeking and making recommendations and taking the advice of known subject matter experts because they are in a b-to-b “place”. As a matter of fact, isn’t this the very essence of thought leadership, the core of b-to-b marketing? Business-to-business is not just selling auto parts to government motors. We live in a service economy where businesses sell high value services to other businesses. These businesses differentiate themselves through their human and intellectual capital and their collective thought leadership. The old-school thought leadership model was a three legged stool: conferences, publishing in third party journals and research/white papers.

Several factors have impacted this model: shrinking news holes, time starved people who can not ‘commit’ to the dense white paper you just published, dwindling conference attendance and younger decision makers who prefer newer, more social channels. This diagram shows how the thought leadership approach is changing.

Lead generation has always been and always will be a social activity. Think back to the old user groups in the tech industry that morphed into online forums and now are full blown online collaboration networks. Social media competence is a must for today’s thought leader. When was the last time you were at a conference that did not give out the conference twitter address or where the real action happened through tweet-ups? GE recently sought internal social media users to serve as mentors to others in the company. They teach each other how to set up a Linkedin account, upload video and comment on blog posts. The goal is to get people comfortable with social tools.

Today thought leaders need to think like a publisher. Content needs to be both smart and approachable. The voice should not be stiff, formal or corporate. Those days are gone. Remember, people are people whether they are reading an eBook or a recipe. Channels are a mix of traditional and new; some are even self-created. Smart b-to-b marketers have their own YouTube channel, LinkedIn groups, and Slideshare accounts. Content spreads virally through content syndication and aggregation. Giving customers and prospects tools to make this easy is a great way to deepen a relationship. Your people need to learn how to tag and re-tag content as well as create link juice. Many organizations have already figured out blogging, podcasts and webcasts, but have not figured out how to syndicate their content or grow their audience.

If done right, communities can be an ongoing research engine for thought leadership. You can use them to recruit people for surveys, gain invaluable insights and feedback that can be packaged for syndication across a variety of channels. You can use blogs and tweets for trend spotting. Many industry analysts signal what they’re working on through Twitter; ditto for reporters, trade groups, government bodies and academics. You can learn a lot about emerging trends and package your intellectual capital to leverage promising platforms.

This barely scratches the surface of how b-to-b enterprises can embrace social marketing and freshen their approach to thought leadership. If you’re interested, I have a deck on Slideshare that explores this a little more. Or, maybe you just want that recipe for strawberry mess. Here you go:

Strawberry Mess

1 pint whipping cream

1 quart fresh strawberries

2 TBS. sugar

½ cup mini marshmallows

½ cup fresh squeezed lemon juice

Remove green stems from strawberries and slice thinly. Add the 2 TBS sugar and ½ cup lemon juice. Let sit for 15 minutes.

Whip cream until stiff (Don’t do too long or it’ll turn into butter!) Fold in the strawberry mixture and the marshmallows.

Fold into a freezer-safe container. My grandmother always used the metal tray of her ice cube trays, minus the metal cube divider. But, you can use a bread pan or a smallish plastic storage container.

Freeze until solid. Take out of freezer at least 3 hours before serving. Scoop out like ice cream and go, “yum”.

Tags: thought leadership, strategy, ComBlu, social marketing, social media strategy, business-to-business marketing,

There is an interesting question.  First, you have to put a definition on what social media is.

This might seem like a silly thing to do for some, but I imagine if you ask the CFO of any business (big or small) what their definition of Social Media is, you’ll get a funny look like, “Huh?  What?  Why are you wasting my time with that kind of question?  I have all this red ink and you want to talk about what?”

So here it goes.  Social Media, defined in part within Wikipedia:

“Primarily, social media depend on interactions between people as the discussion and integration of words to build shared-meaning, using technology as a conduit.

Social media utilities create opportunities for the use of both inductive and deductive logic by their users. Claims or warrants are quickly transitioned into generalizations due to the manner in which shared statements are posted and viewed by all. The speed of communication, breadth, and depth, and ability to see how the words build a case solicits the use of rhetoric. Induction is frequently used as a means to validate or authenticate different users' statements and words. Rhetoric is an important part of today’s language in social media.”

Hmmm.  Sounds like a text book entry (under GAAP Principals), so let me translate.

“People sharing insight, ideas, know how and content with one another using a variety of content mediums that reside on the Internet.”

There.  Social Media in a nutshell.

Why is the reality of social media activity important and why should our fictional CFO care?  For that matter, why should anyone else care besides the marketer? 

Why?  Because social media and the knowledge that can come out of it provides the business a significant strategic advantage.  So who else should care and why?

Well, here are a few, other than our CFO and the CMO/marketing team of course.

1.  CEO.  Social media activity is an accurate barometer of brand equity and corporate reputation.  What social media is comprised of (i.e. what’s inside of UGC) is telling as to the company’s current profitability and future performance.  How hard does the company need to work to maintain market share?  Lots goes into this analysis but social media provides a very real comparable metric to help measure whether the company’s internal metrics are accurate and why.  Being able for the CEO to provide real insight at a shareholder meeting or an analyst conference call is important.  It’s doubtful the CEO will reference his source as a social media output, but that’s not the point here.  Social media’s underlying value is.

2. COO.  Why?  Social media activity both internally and externally can indicate well the business and its resources are aligned within the marketplace to deliver on projections, plans and results.  Social media metrics can be compared with operational plans to see if the plans were realistic in the first place, on target or slightly off.  Social media tools and metrics can offer operators ‘real time’ adjustment indices if used properly.

3.  EVP of HR.  Social media isn’t limited to external venues.  How engaged is your brand and your team.  How collaborative are they (or are they capable of being based on the infrastructures and culture in which they operate)?  There are some big brands that are absolutely committed to this.  One old-line brand, a leading insurance provider even makes this a metric that is presented to the board of directors along with things like net profit.

4.  EVP of Sales.  Sales has a lot it can learn from social media.  Value proposition is best delivered from the mouths of customers themselves, as the sales department always has a primary goal-close the transaction.

5.  VP of CRM.  Once the sale is closed, who owns the customer?  Most likely the CRM team does.  They get measured on support costs, call duration in-bound requests, churn and a whole lot of other customer-stickiness metrics.  Social media helps to deflect a lot of these costs, as well as, understand what’s driving inbound requests and churn.  Microsoft gets this.

5.  EVP or VP or Product Development.  Necessity is the mother of invention.  If you want something to work a certain way, you create a work around.  Sometimes, understanding what those work arounds are helps teams innovate.  Sometimes, it’s just asking for ideas.  www.ideastorm.com is the obvious example.  There are dozens of others…good and bad (i.e. that work and don’t work).  Intuit works.  MyStarbucksidea.com doesn’t.

7.  Institutional and individual investors.  Another  part of doing good homework.  What are customers saying and how well is the brand listening?  There is an old-line manufacturing truism.  To understand how well run a manufacturing company is, simply look at it’s loading dock.  A neat and orderly loading dock says the business is on top of things.  Broken pallets, trash and disarray speaks volumes,  You’d be surprised how many savvy investors who bet (or did before the meltdown) on manufacturers did this kind of homework.  Social media can provide the same sort of insight if approached correctly.

Here’s a proof point.  This factoid was provided by my friend and colleague Barak Libai, professor at Tel Aviv University and Advisor to WOMMA and is taken from a good book by Gupta and Lehmann on "Managing Customers as Investments"  and relates to Cox Communications.

You can see that the defection rate for customers who use the product in a wider way is much lower. Much of this wider use comes from formal and informal social media activities (people helping, showing and spreading the word.  This can translate to double the lifetime value!  

Double…that’s a lot of coin, my friend.

Can social media rewrite business rules?  I am here to tell you that that it already is.  So where are you?  Ahead of the curve or behind it?