Musings of a Marketing Maven

After wrestling with taxes and Sched­ule C arcana, it’s a relief to blog. (I’m sure the IRS would pre­fer my cre­ative ener­gies go elsewhere…!)

While work­ing with a client on ini­tial strate­gies for social media mar­ket­ing, I keep being reminded of how much murkier the B2B social media land­scape is. Almost all the pun­dits you talk to have cut their teeth in the con­sumer mar­ket­place, and all their exam­ples focus on mega brands like the iPhone or Nike. Things just aren’t the same in the enter­prise soft­ware marketplace.

In my client’s case the con­ver­sa­tional vol­ume is quite low: in a 30-day period there are just hun­dreds of men­tions of their prod­uct cat­e­gory across the blo­gos­phere, and even fewer of their cor­po­rate brand. And only dozens of men­tions of their cor­po­rate brand in con­junc­tion with the prod­uct cat­e­gory. Need­less to say, they need more buzz…

Start with a Lis­ten­ing Strategy

A key moti­va­tion for my client is to share their “thought lead­er­ship” with busi­ness lead­ers and opin­ion influ­encers in their mar­ket­place. They’ve got lots to say, the sub­ject mat­ter is com­plex, and the impli­ca­tions can be mis­sion crit­i­cal for their customers.

How best to engage is a burn­ing ques­tion. With roots deeply entrenched in long-form media (such as books and long arti­cles), they’re try­ing to envi­sion the right bal­ance of publishing-style approaches and the social media dialog.

Like most tech­nol­ogy com­pa­nies, it’s hard for them to push plat­form con­sid­er­a­tions to the back­ground so they can focus on audi­ence, busi­ness objec­tives and com­mu­ni­ca­tions goals first. They employ lots of smart peo­ple, and tend to get tan­gled up in how to com­mu­ni­cate (which blog­ging tools to use, which plat­forms to lever­age) rather than what to say, to whom, and where. (They’ve even got a cadre of folks who want to cre­ate a next-gen social media platform.)

They’re updat­ing cor­po­rate poli­cies, elim­i­nat­ing many of the “thou shalt not’s,” and try­ing to imag­ine how best to incent the peo­ple they’d most like blog­ging on the company’s behalf.

For­tu­nately, they’ve been read­ing Forrester’s social media reports and talk­ing with lis­ten­ing plat­form ven­dors (which is how they know how low the con­ver­sa­tional vol­ume is at present). Like most B2B mar­ket­ing orga­ni­za­tions, they’re cop­ing with a lean staff and too much on their plate already. They don’t have the man­power to search all the blogs and other social media on a reg­u­lar basis using brute force methods.

Brute Force, or Automated?

The engi­neers on board have enthu­si­as­ti­cally demon­strated the many tools that can be used to search the blog post aggre­ga­tors, YouTube, Flickr, Twit­ter, et al. Given capac­ity con­straints the engi­neers’ sug­ges­tions are falling on deaf ears within the mar­ket­ing orga­ni­za­tion. (Think: Mars ver­sus Venus.)

The mar­keters would like to mon­i­tor the buzz, see the pat­terns unfold, and track changes in sen­ti­ment and brand per­cep­tions. (They love the con­cep­tual map­ping of brand asso­ci­a­tions.) On the face of it the claims made by the lead­ing lis­ten­ing plat­form ven­dors (com­pa­nies like Nielsen Buzz­Met­rics and TNS Cym­fony) seem pretty appealing.

But with ser­vice pric­ing in the $50-100K range (and up), they’re fac­ing inter­nal resis­tance and sticker shock. The sci­en­tists and bean coun­ters on the staff won­der how they can jus­tify such a big invest­ment to track activ­ity that’s unlikely to be sta­tis­ti­cally sig­nif­i­cant. So far the replies by the ven­dors rely on jus­ti­fi­ca­tions for vol­umes that are typ­i­cal of B2C com­pa­nies, not B2B spe­cialty play­ers like my client.

It will be inter­est­ing to see how this unfolds, to see if the case can be made on the basis of qual­i­ta­tive ben­e­fits and the value of “direc­tional indicators.”

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