It was an animated round table webcast with some of the leading marketing minds making the business case for social media. LaSandra Brill from Cisco, Michael Brito from Intel and Janice Hall from the US Government’s CDC division agreed to be grilled and – although they felt the heat – came out alive. Check out the on-demand here. I’m glad you all enjoyed it – we had over 230 registrants and it was rated 4.8 out of 5.0.
With over 60 questions from LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, your e-mails and live questions, the panel was kept on their toes and was made to feel suitably uncomfortable about some grey areas of social media. At some times they were simply speechless: in the last quarter of the discussion, I challenged the panel with ‘social media must get connected to the revenue line to matter’ and there was a long, long pause. Only Janice bit the bullet and jumped in though that doesn’t really count though as she’s with a government entity who doesn’t care about posting a profit.
Some of the best practice insights from the round table:
- Start small, formulate a detailed plan which defines what you’re going to measure and how and make sure you have the tools in place to measure success/failure (these will vary depending on which medium you’re using). Find other members in your (marketing) organization who are willing to share the risk and credit.
- Ultimately, social media should be a part of everyone’s job – regardless of whether you’re in marketing, sales, customer service, management etc. 5-10% of everyone’s time should be spent on a social media component. To make this happen, management needs to ‘institutionalize’ social media as part of everyone’s ‘must do’ mix.
- Think about social media in the context of where it belongs in the marketing mix. It may be premature to look at this as a medium to build pipeline/generate leads. However, it is very powerful as a tool to converse with and listen to your existing community of customers or partners and generate product/thought leadership awareness.
- Understand what matters to your boss and the executive team so you can align your metrics and success reporting to focus on what matters to the management team. Maybe even establish ‘what success looks like’ in their eyes before they start considering this as a more widely used tactic and strategy.
- Don’t underestimate the cultural and ownership challenges when you think of cross-organizational social media adoption
Challenges remain however – LaSandra’s boss for example isn’t willing to put more financial or human resources behind social media although she has delivered such tremendous results and demonstrated measured success across four clearly defined criteria. Michael thinks that revenues wouldn’t suffer one bit if we pulled the plug on social media tomorrow and Janice is greatly helped along by the fact that the majority of her customers are consumers and her employer is not measured by profit – so 1.4m YouTube viewers for a H1N1 Flu video actually COUNTS. Also, who owns social media in the organization? Everyone? Or is it just the marketing team – and if so, which marketing team? Corporate, product or regional or all? We didn’t get clear answers on all our questions, but what is certain is that social media isn’t going anywhere and it is woven into the conversational fabric of all areas of B2B. We now need to formulate repeatable best practice frameworks and metrics which will give social media a credible seat at the B2B digital marketing table. It would also help if Twitter and the like could figure out how to make money – when you’re looking to make the business case for social media, it doesn’t help that the sectors’ protagonists have barely figured out how to generate revenues themselves.
