March 9, 2010, 9 a.m. Pacific Time, 11 a.m. Central Time, 12 noon Eastern Time, 5 p.m. UK Time
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? Join this roundtable discussion as experts from eBay, Edelman Digital and Yelp provide insights on how we’re social media today and what the future holds for this space.
As per usual, the panel will be grilled and either emerge frazzled, shining or both…questions include:
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?
Register free by clicking on the ‘attend webcast’ button below.
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.
In the run-up to next week’s round table on ‘making the business case for social media’, I have been getting great questions and feedback from various LinkedIn discussion groups. I look forward to what promises to be a very compelling debate with Intel, Cisco and the US Government’s Center for Disease Control on the grill.
Unlike consumer marketing, B2B allows us to be very precise in reaching targeted audiences through a variety of channels. Yet for many, social media is still a black hole when it comes to 1. profiling the target audience, 2. measuring engagement and 3. tracking ROI (and many more things that I couldn’t be asked to list). And with Web 2.0 communities giving a voice to buyers who can now share their experience and disappointments with their global peers, we’ve got to get on top of this. We know that social media can’t be ignored, but from speaking with my own clients, I know that marketers are not exactly being empowered to make the right decisions on integrating social media into the mix. There’s a lot of fluff and not enough substance – and in B2B, you need hard data to justify any investment: whether it’s time, money or both. So Forrester decided to survey 1,200 business technology buyers and found that they exceed all previous benchmarks for social participation. They also did a little data collecting and audience profiling on the way and are sharing itsy bits of this knowledge for free and even making it user friendly to play around with (browny point to Forrester – but that doesn’t mean they won’t get grilled ).
The tool (see below) helps you design marketing programs that not only capitalize on emerging social behaviors but also fundamentally change the nature of the marketing relationship between B2B buyers and sellers. You can get them to profile your customers in this way, but but there’s a custom price tag with that. Unfortunately, some of the categorizations are cryptic enough to require the underlying report which you can buy for $495. This debate has only started – be sure to join the round table webcast live or on-demand.
When: 24 September, 2009 live and available on-demand afterwards (register for free below)
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
The sceptical marketer
Really? Social Media for Business? I mean, seriously – social media networks haven’t even figured out how to monetize their own communities properly. Social needs some time to grow up before I can trust it. With my budgets being scrutinized, I cannot afford to spend money on anything I cannot track properly…ROI is everything these days – plus, it’s so time-consuming!
The socialite
Are you kidding me?? Dell has earned 2 million USD through @DellOutlet via Twitter referrals. The YouTube/Facebook/MySpace generation is now moving into the board room – they’ve stopped (only) eating pizza and are now buying your products. They’re using social media as the new word of mouth. I would look at standing out from your peers by doing fresh stuff that connects to the bottom line. Social media does.
Management
I don’t care what you do, just make sure it makes us money and aligns with brand. Oh – we will want a quarterly report on everything you’ve spent and how it created tangible and meaningful opportunities…that’s if you want a budget next quarter.
And YOU?
What is your view? What do you want to hear? Tune in, take part in live polls, ask the panel questions in real time on the day or e-mail me now: vpg at thegrilling dotcom
I look forward to your participation – sparks will fly, the business case for social media may or may not be made…
).
