Scroll down to listen to the on-demand round table webcasts.
June 2010
Isaac Garcia, Co-founder & CEO at Central Desktop
Ross Fubini, Chief Evangelist & Co-Founder at Cube Tree
Mike McGurkin, VP Services & Support at Newsgator
We explored microblogging and social collaboration in the enterprise.
Landscape – Where have we come from and where are we now?
- Communications such as mobile or e-mail have become ubiquitous
- Consumer world has adopted microblogging and social media fully
- Professionals are starting to follow suit…or are they?
Grilling question: time suck? Is this creating noise which decreases workforce efficiency? (e.g. IM)
Grilling question: it’s great that collaboration is accelerated, but what effect does that have on data governance and security?
Live polling question: are you using microblogging or social collaboration in your organization? (yes, no, don’t know)
Where are companies successfully deploying microblogging and social collaboration? Internal vs. External Communications?
- Status updates improves task management (context on progress)
- Organizations are using microblogging as a way to escalate support issues in call centers
- Sales & marketing examples
Grilling question: how successfully have these apps been integrated into core platforms such as Helpdesk Support, CRM, ERP or Marketing Automation systems
Grilling question: how realistic is it that companies will create systems outside of the above core systems
Live polling question: Do you think microblogging and social collaboration… 1. increases workforce and operational efficiency or 2. decreases workforce and operational efficiency?
Adoption & The Future
- Are professionals deploying these tools on an ad hoc basis or do many organizations centrally purchase/roll out microblogging and social collaboration?
- What needs to happen for these tools and techniques to become as ubiquitous as e-mail or mobile (is that realistic)?
Grilling question: with these tools and techniques being so early stage, is it possible to make the business case without hard data demonstrating ROI?
Live polling question: Following this round table discussion, are you more likely to adopt enterprise microblogging and social collaboration within your team or company? (yes, no)
April 2010
To attend the recorded round table webcast, simply click the play button below.
Andrew Kordek, Manager of Optimization at Groupon, Inc
Stephanie Miller, Vice President Market Development at Return Path
Naylor Gray, Director Global Marketing at Frost & Sullivan
Tune in to this recorded round table discussion, where we looked at how relevant e-mail is in today’s digital marketing landscape. As per usual, the panel was grilled and either emerge frazzled, shining or both…topics include:
What Hasn’t Killed Email Yet?
Unique and Interesting Uses of Email Marketing
Email Throughout the Lifecycle
Making a business case for segmentation and targeting, vs. just broadcasting the entire file
How to be Really Good at Email Marketing in a Multi Channel Context?
March 2010
To attend the recorded round table webcast, simply click the play button below.
Richard Brewer Hay, Chief Blogger at eBay
Michael Brito, VP of Social Media at Edelman Digital
Michelle Broderick, Marketing Director at Yelp
According to a survey by Edelman, just 25% of consumers say they trust their friends to give them good information about a company, compared with 45% in 2008. Social marketing is built on the idea that people trust their friends more than they trust official voices so what does it mean for the future of social media? Tune in to this roundtable discussion as experts from eBay, Edelman Digital and Yelp provided insights on how we’re social media today and what the future holds for this space.
As per usual, the panel was grilled and emerged frazzled and shining…questions which were tackled included:
Is trust in social media dying?
Do social media platforms need to change in order to adapt to peoples’ behavioral evolution on the web? How so?
Is there a difference in the community’s trust when we compare transactional and non-transactional social networks?
Is the future of trust likely to be the migration towards official voices or your friend’s recommendations?
February 2010 – Search marketing ROI re-examined – is it really working?
To attend the recorded round table webcast, simply click the play button below. With search now firmly established in the digital marketing mix, ROI metrics are evolving. It started with hits, then moved to click-through rates and finally conversion. This round table discussion looked at today’s search market, explore best practices on measuring search ROI and look at real life examples to establish the effectiveness of search in building brand/messaging awareness and demand. The panel will tackled questions such as:
- How do we think of search ROI today?
- What are the best practices for measuring ROI in search?
- Is search money well spent?
- Have you seen some alternative applications for search?
- The future of measuring ROI?
December 2009 – ONLINE vs. ONSITE events: what’s the future? (thank you to David Pitta for stepping in as a guest grilling host as I was coughing uncontrollably for 7 days straight)
David Rich, Senior Vice President, Program Strategy/Worldwide, at George P. Johnson
Cathy Breden, Executive Director at the Center for Exhibition Industry Research and Chief Operating Officer at the International Association of Exhibitions and Events
Pam Didner, Global Integrated Marketing Manager at Intel
As face-to-face event attendance continues to decline, professionals are increasingly turning to web-based events to educate themselves and inform their purchasing decisions. With this trend gaining momentum, marketers are trying to figure out what this means for their marketing mix. In this session, the panel tackled questions such as:
- If offline events are less profitable for its organizers, will inventory subside?
- Can online events match the networking-power of onsite events?
- Does digital budget allocation need to be exponentially increased to handle this shift? Will budget shift to digital marketing?
- Are online events a replacement for physical events?
- How does social media affect the offline vs. online debate?
November 2009 – Do Analysts Still Matter?
Michelle Accardi, VP Marketing at CA
Naylor Gray, Global Marketing Director at Frost & Sullivan
Chris Ross, VP Marketing at Burton Group
October 2009 – Making the Business Case for Social Media
LaSandra Brill, Manager, Web & Social Media Marketing at Cisco
Michael Brito, Social Media Strategist at Intel
Janice R. Nall, Director of the Division of eHealth Marketing at the National Center for Health Marketing, part of the US Government’s CDC
Moderator: Val-Pierre Genton, VP of Business Development at BrightTALK
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. 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.
