Redefining Engagement to Understand the Future of Marketing

Published in ClickZ on July 15, 2015.

Media and technology are continuing to merge providing business opportunities that will engage customers in new ways.

Digital marketing transformation is occurring within enterprise companies across the globe as they seek to better understand their stakeholders who have infinitely greater control. This is not new, we knew this shift to the empowered customer has been happening for years, but it seems to have reached a tipping point.

Businesses of all sizes are (truly) embracing the concept of customer centricity and understanding that marketing is no longer a department, because everyone (customers and employees alike) has a voice that can be amplified through social and mobile channels. Every interaction with a customer is part of their experience with your brand. It is why companies are focusing on employee engagement now more than ever - employees are the face of the company to the customer.

Effectively tackling customer engagement today can certainly be overwhelming. Look at this list of over 2,000 marketing technology vendors that ChiefMartec.com's Scott Brinker has compiled.

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Above: The Marketing Technology Landscape, January 2015.
Image Credit: Scott Brinker/ChiefMartec.com

And while at VentureBeat's GrowthBeat Summit in Boston last month, Brinker pointedly called out that "the tech is a distraction," but the fact that marketing is changing "in fundamental ways" is what is driving the landscape so radically. We now need to weave a company’s storytelling into digital experience – and digital itself is changing.

Internet-of-Things (IoT) is coming online rapidly. "IoT provides a new channel to reach customers through devices and interaction points", with Goldman Sachs predicting that IoT has the potential to connect 28 billion "things" to the Internet by 2020, ranging from bracelets to cars," says Cynthya Peranandam. This is providing business opportunities to create new revenue streams by effectively engaging customers in new ways.

But let's take a look at some of the near-term changes in the space. LUMA Partners has forecast the top 5 trends for 2015 and beyond are:

• Programmatic
• Mobile
• Omnichannel/personalization
• Identity
• Convergent TV

I encourage you to check out LUMA's "State of Digital Media 2015" presentation to understand these trends in detail and how media and technology continue to merge. Review it alongside Mary Meeker's "2015 Internet Trends" report for a full view into current and future state of how we will engage with customers and each other. I find it helpful to stay informed of these trends as they will quickly be upon us to develop strategic engagement strategies as part of our ever-evolving marketing plans.

We live in exciting times and I can't wait to see the incredible marketing that is created on and from these new insights and platforms!

LUMA's State of the State 2015 at DMS 15 from Terence Kawaja

2015 Internet Trends Report from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

IBM’s Michelle Killebrew Discusses the Growth of Social Content Strategy

Published on CONTENT STANDARD by Skyword on February 18, 2015.

Social media and content marketing go together like peanut butter and jelly. However, creating a content strategy that takes advantage of social media’s growing power isn’t that easy.

In this week’s Innovator Series interview, I speak with Michelle Killebrew, program director of strategy and solutions for IBM’s Social Business arm. Killebrew has spent the last five years at IBM working to improve demand generation and social content marketing strategy on a global scale. Today, Killebrew answers my questions about her approach to social content marketing—as well as how IBM encourages employees to think differently.

Question: What are three ways you know your social content strategy isn’t working, and how can you course correct to see improved results?

1. Listen: The most basic evidence of engagement is a bidirectional conversation with your audience. If they are not conversing with you as a brand, then you are not engaging them in a discussion—you are talking at them through various channels. Be sure to have a community manager overseeing each of the channels that you are interacting in, and arm them with both the tools and policy to effectively respond to your audience. It’s important to understand how your audience wants to be engaged; not everyone uses the same platform to engage brands. And don’t forget to empower your employees beyond those community managers. Your employees can be your best brand advocates, and we all know it takes a village. Encourage all employees to take an active role in social engagement and content creation.

2. Analyze: Look at engagement metrics to see what is resonating. There are many tools and key performance indicators (KPIs) to investigate here; start small and expand to delve into deeper insights. Look at social interaction metrics to see which conversations are resonating, who’s in the conversation, and to determine your share of voice around a topic. Look at site metrics for engagement with the content that you’re driving to. Things like site visits, returning visitors, conversion metrics, sharing metrics can all start to inform how you optimize your content strategy.

3. Think and Learn: Hopefully most of us realize that just because we’ve always done things a certain way doesn’t mean we should persist. Things are changing so quickly that we need to think about why we’re creating content; in the B2B space we’ve traditionally created white papers, but what are we trying to achieve? We’re trying to inform a buyer about something, so we should consider if we can achieve the same goal more effectively with a video, an eBook, or an infographic. Remember that your audience is going to have different content preferences based on things like where they are in the buyer journey, device, learning style, and personal taste. We need to learn from each other. Read trade publications. Be observant of good marketing in action in both B2B and B2C spaces, think about what made it compelling, and apply those concepts to your initiatives. Understand how other marketers are applying strategies around marketing, social, and publication platforms.

Q: How can you improve user experience to surprise and delight your audience?

Understand Your Audience: Think through your audience’s likes and dislikes and create personas and profiles around them. Do you know their major turnoffs and turn ons? Before you even begin designing an experience, make sure you have a baseline understanding of who they are. Blanket campaigns are no longer effective today because we are trying to reach a “market of one.” You need to personalize the experience to their preferences. You should look to your analytics to fine-tune your understanding over time.

Provide Value: Make sure your experience provides the individual with value. You need to truly think of the person you are creating for: What is going to serve their needs? Can you answer a question or entertain them? Can you offer them content to save them time in a way your competitors can’t? People are busy; provide them value—they’ll appreciate it!

Be Beautiful: Literally. Your user experience needs to offer visual appeal and intuitive functionality. In order to compete for attention, your visual creative needs to be distinct and engaging. It needs to capture the eye and pull it in. The design of the user experience needs to be intentional, providing clear calls to action or value propositions for the individual.

Foster Engagement: If your content is good, people will want to share it with friends, peers, other brand loyalists, and, ultimately, the world. When you think about your user experience, part of that planning should be around planned sharability. Make it easy for your audience to share content, engage with others, co-create, and further the conversation, and make sure that you’re part of that conversation, listening to ideas, frustrations, and new opportunities.

Iterate and Optimize: Instrument your digital experiences, look at the metrics, and, more importantly still, take action on the insight! Look at what your audience is gravitating toward and create more of it. Be intentional in your pursuit to understand whether is it theme or format. For instance, is it a high-value microsegment of your audience that you should customize a new experience for? Never stop iterating.

Q: Can you offer some examples of successful IBM content marketing campaigns?

The Rethink Campaign: A demand generation campaign that was created based on the learnings of several years of campaign optimization (from Coremetrics, acquired by IBM in 2010). Thinking through the 11 new audience profiles in eight recently acquired companies we needed to speak to, the value proposition for each, and the type, quality, and quantity of content was the challenge here; its success was based on driving marketing qualified leads (MQL). Ultimately, MQL and sales qualified leads (SQL) were the success metrics here, but along the way we optimized based on conversion and interaction data.

The Economist Social Business Leaders: An IBM-sponsored awareness campaign that co-branded with The Economist and celebrated the achievements of social business leaders in a variety of accomplishments, including internal collaboration, sophisticated customer engagement, philanthropic endeavors, and more. The success of this campaign is based on visibility and awareness: social impressions, site visitor data, and influencer engagement.

Q: What advice do you have for marketers big and small when it comes to social content strategy?

I was asked at a conference recently if a midsize business should split its social channels as it ventured into a new direct-to-consumer model, adding to its bulk manufacturer-to-installer sales model. The product was the same, but the value proposition to each audience was drastically different. In this case, it was fashion versus function. My advice: Split the channels so that you can effectively engage with the audience’s unique perspective (if you can support the channels effectively). We all know that you can’t create a social engagement channel and then not monitor it for interaction, questions, trolls, or worse. If you don’t have the resources to split the channels to ensure that they are unique, develop a content marketing strategy that engages with each audience based on their specific value propositions, especially around key events. As your resources grow, prioritize the most effective channels to support (in a measured way) those audiences.

Q: Are there any in-house mantras for how IBM approaches this discipline?

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One of the (many) wonderful things about IBM is that we truly believe our employees are the best representation of our brand; in fact, it has been said that IBM employees are our brand. To this end, we were one of the first companies to create a Social Guideline for employees to engage and advocate on the company’s behalf. These guidelines were created in 2005 (before Twitter, and only a year after Facebook was founded) by crowdsourcing across the hundreds of thousands of employees through our internal wiki. The intention was to unleash the smart and wonderful people of IBM to engage with users, buyers, inventors, thought leaders, students, and the world.

At IBM, our in-house mantra is “You are our brand: Go out and represent our brand!”

World-Class Customer Service in the Digital Age

Published in ClickZ on May 14, 2014.

The combination of the best possible tools for social marketing and the best possible customer service representatives will result in a unique, engaging experience for your customer.

We all know the power of a great customer experience or a terrible customer experience - 95 percent of people share bad experiences vs. only 83 percent that share good, and 58 percent are more likely to tell people of their customer services experiences than five years ago. (Zendesk)

But there is much behind an excellent customer experience. Leading organizations realize that social business is more than just "doing social media"; they need to provide an excellent employee experience and are harnessing the power of social networking to innovate, deliver valuable experiences, and engage with customers in new ways - sometimes even going above and beyond to deliver a juicy steak right to a customer's plane terminal.

So, they're integrating social communication into the very fabric of their organization, beyond just the realm of customer service and support.

Companies need to rethink operations, policies, and infrastructure to better serve customers, because social business is about much more than any single social network; it's about putting the customer at the beginning, middle, and end of your organization's focus.

I'm sure most of us have seen these statistics before, and we know that digital technologies are playing a large part in how a brand interacts with its customers - and how that brand is perceived by its customers.

That's because customer service has become a key differentiator. In an age where a company and its competitors are all reaching out and interacting with the same customer through multiple channels and touch points, everything hinges on customer experience.

• How does the customer interact with your brand? 
• How does your workforce interact with your customers? 
• What tools do you have at your disposal to better understand, interact, and serve your customer?

These are important questions, because the answers determine the kind of experience your customer has when engaging your company - and they also determine if the customer will continue to engage, or jump ship to a competitor.

Industries and CXOs agree: Many of today's customer experience challenges can be overcome by digital fluency.

And, within the next few years, we will see nearly 70 percent more CXOs using digital channels to more fully engage with customers for a stronger customer service experience across every point of interaction.

And social business goes much deeper than just an improved customer experience. It allows you to engage people as individuals, not segments - offering personalized value at every touch point.

By delivering a high-value, personalized digital experience to prospects and customers, you can drive higher revenue. Up to one-third of all consumer spending is influenced by social interactions, accounting for $940 billion annually (McKinsey).

Digital customer service experiences must be:

• Engaging: putting the customer in charge, letting them drive the experience
• Compelling: matching and exceeding expectations
• Consistent: regardless of device or channel, and
• Relevant: the digital experience must know who the customer is, where they are, and what they're trying to achieve. 

Customers satisfied with their digital experience have made 30 percent more referrals. And happy customers call customer service about 62 percent LESS, making very happy employees.

Ultimately, savvy companies understand one truth: that customer service is at the core of customer experience.

By delivering exceptional experiences for your customers, your organization can turn those customers into brand advocates, working for your brand and spreading your messaging across every channel - sharing stories, writing reviews, and recommending products or services to friends.

Did you know that:

• A company with 100,000 brand advocates can reach 60 million people. (Zuberance)
• A 12 percent increase in brand advocacy generates a two-fold increase in revenue on average. (Fred Reichheld, HBS Press)
• Seventy-two percent of adults who had a memorable product or service experience said they took positive action, with 57 percent communicating their positive experience to others, and 41 percent recommending that someone make a purchase. (Harris Interactive)

Social is a natural platform for this - we call it Social Business.

A successful social business will:

• Understand the individual customer by getting the data necessary to anticipate user needs, spot trends sooner, and optimize a digital commerce strategy.
• Foster meaningful interactions through consistent and seamless multichannel experiences, allowing them to reach wider audiences and gain individuals' trust.
• Embrace transparency with open, authentic social interactions and community-based customer service.
• Unleash creativity by using rich media management tools to rapidly respond to changes and new opportunities in the marketplace.

But where do you start? You start with people - both your customer and your employee. Engage your customer through an enabled, empowered workforce. Listen to what your customers are saying across every channel through open communication, use analytics, and put the insight gained to good use so you can create a better, personalized customer experience.

Give your workforce - from the call center to the boardroom - powerful analytics so they can provide better service and solutions to your customers.

Give them the social and analytics tools they need to better interact with the customer, on the customer's terms.

And furthermore, a social business leader uses social tools to determine the best behaviors and traits needed for positions involving any kind of customer interaction, optimizing your customer service by using the most qualified and best-suited employees.

So it's the best tools in the hands of the best possible workforce - coming together to craft a unique, engaging experience for your customer.

Social Business is More than Businesses Using Social Media

Published on SmartBrief for Social Media on March 13, 2014.

SmartBrief on Social Media, the daily snapshot of social media news and insights, has relaunched as SmartBrief on Social Business. This new focus reflects the broad changes to business in the social media era, from marketing to customer service to revenue models. As part of the relaunch, we’ve asked industry leaders to give their thoughts on what it means to be a social business. Today’s post is from Michelle Killebrew, strategy program director for IBM Social Business.

In September, I wrote a commentary for ClickZ on what it means to be a social business and how it’s different than just being a business that uses social media to interact with customers and prospects. My thinking has evolved in this rapidly advancing area, but I still see social business as focused on “people-centric engagement,” including consumers, employees and citizens.

Social media continues to mature as both a channel and a market in its own right. It’s even becoming an agent for social change. Technology made it possible for us to connect, and now social media has made it possible to do it in a more organic, human way. Facebook and LinkedIn are each coming up on their 10th year, and Twitter is now six years old. Together, they’ve fundamentally changed how we engage with each other online. Millennials who grew up in a social world are entering the workforce and becoming active citizens. What happens next? Social business.

I believe that social business is the next step in the evolutionary process in the day-to-day functions of digitally enabled enterprises and governments. Much in the same way that the Internet revolutionized how we all work in the era of e-business; social processes, technology, and mindsets will revolutionize how people in organizations connect, collaborate, and share knowledge.

A social business is a connected organization where the expertise of the individual is accessible to all because of the ability to collaborate. Internal and external social communication fuels the development of new product and service development by employing social listening and analytics. It’s the application of the new communication medium that was introduced by social media into the very fabric of how we work and interact.

A social business creates a digital ecosystem that enables the easy transfer of ideas from inside the organization to outside the organization (and back again).  We see crowdsourcing becoming increasingly mainstream, and we all know that ideas spark further ideation and innovation – it’s a wonderful snowball effect.  This collective concept can be applied to virtually anything, from internal policy creation to new product innovation.  It fosters workforce collaboration, and it also extends into customer experience.

By creating these dialogs in the digital world, we leave behind footprints of data that can help us further understand our constituents both as unique individuals and groups with common interests. This data is immensely valuable in providing us the means to appreciate intention, motivation, and sentiment, and it makes it possible to optimize experiences for our employees, customers and citizens. As we become more sophisticated at mining this information, we’ll be able to streamline interactions and better serve people’s needs – both online and off.  (As my colleague Wyatt Urmey put it, “boundary workers” who sit right at the boundary of knowledge workers and service personnel, will “take us from ‘the coffee is on aisle six’ to ‘the coffee is on aisle six, but I see here you like dark French roast, and we have that on sale this week on the end cap of aisle five.’” Social and mobile technology is making it happen.)

But all of this doesn’t come without a price. All of this wonderful, transparent collaboration and all of this amazing data is valuable, but we need to think through how we protect people, data and our intellectual property.  As we adopt social business practices, we need to think through how we empower people to become involved in sharing ideas. We also need to provide guidance as to what constitutes oversharing outside of the organization.

At IBM, we did this through a crowdsourced policy creation that identified what was appropriate to communicate via social media. The policy is public and can be leveraged for your own guidelines. Additionally, as we consider the world’s ever-increasing reliance on the massive amounts of data we all create, cyber security will continue to be a focus for all organizations — especially those seeking to optimize digital experiences for their customers and constituents.

It’s simple. Social business is much more than just social media. Social business is about people-centric engagement. Socially enabled organizations will flourish and out-perform their competition by providing better experiences. They’ll also be better-equipped to retain the top talent, the most valuable customers, and the most engaged citizens.

Finally, we need to remember that social business is more than just business — it’s about people.  It’s about a young girl in Boston who recovered from a serious illness and provided insights that helped doctors treat another girl thousands of miles away. Watch this video to hear Dr. Jeffrey Burns of Boston Children’s Hospital share a remarkable story that features the powerful combination of collaboration, and knowledge sharing in action. It will not only touch your heart, but it will demonstrate the promise of social business — for all of us.

Michelle Killebrew is passionate about marketing, especially innovative online marketing strategies that deliver a superior brand experience — from initial acquisition through to loyal customer — and increase growth and profitability. She currently leads the go-to-market strategy for IBM Social Business, where her team focuses on messaging and solutions that define social business and demonstrate how organizations can embrace this next information revolution in the workforce.

Previously, Michelle headed up the worldwide go-to-market and revenue-bearing demand generation campaign strategy for IBM’s new Smarter Commerce initiative, where her team was responsible for marketing B2B/commerce and enterprise marketing management solutions to meet the needs of the empowered customer. Michelle has more than 14 years of high-tech marketing and holds a B.S. in Economics from Santa Clara University.

Why Doesn’t Social Influence Shopping More?

Published on ClickZ December 5, 2013

Shopping is a social activity. As marketers, we know this instinctively. It's human nature. But measuring the real impact of social on sales is a different story. Social is continuing to grow in importance as a form of digital communication. But what do the latest numbers from the IBM 2013 Holiday Benchmark report say about Thanksgiving and Black Friday retail sales?

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Image source: socialnewsdaily.com

For one thing, on average, they show that holiday shoppers referred from Pinterest on Black Friday spent 77 percent more per order than shoppers referred from Facebook. Facebook average order value was $52.30 versus Pinterest average order value, which was $92.51. However, Facebook referrals converted sales at nearly four times the rate of Pinterest. It's interesting to see these kinds of comparisons, but what do the numbers actually contribute to the bottom lines of retailers?

The fact is, while consumer-generated content (like ratings and reviews) directly impacts retail results, but in many cases, social continues to have a minor direct impact on shopping. Now to me, this all makes perfect sense, but it's somewhat surprising to hear just how small that impact seems to be. According to a recent interview with Jay Henderson, strategy director at IBM Smarter Commerce on Mashable, just one percent of Black Friday sales are attributable to social media. One percent! That said, it would be naïve to think that your social efforts don't have any influence on sales.

Why is that? Let's take a look at the facts:

• Dorie Clark demonstrates in Forbes that only 15 percent of CMOs can quantify the impact of social media. 
• Ben Harper explains how to quantify social media ROI, and proves that it's not very easy. 
• According to a recent study by ExactTarget, quality beats quantity when it comes to measuring social media effectiveness. 

So what's really going on when it comes to understanding the impact of social on retail? To understand, I think we have to spend some time thinking about how we actually recommend products to our friends, colleagues and family members. 

Take my experience, for instance. I was getting my nails done before the Thanksgiving holiday, and another woman's significant other was in the waiting area talking to one of his buddies on the phone. They were going on and on about fishing (he had a lot of time to kill). This guy was really excited about some pre-Black Friday deals he saw on Amazon.com for an amazing fishing reel. He and his friend were making plans to meet up and fish, but he kept coming back to this deal.

"Oh man, I really want that reel," he'd say again and again. He left and got a coffee and came back, and took a call with another friend, and the same thing happened. "We're going fishing, weather should be nice, high tide is at 10:30 am-and man, I found this reel that I've had my eye on, and Amazon has it at a great price right now."

Now this guy is passionate. He's had two personal conversations, and I can imagine he's shared the same info with his social networks. But has he included a direct link to the product in any of those conversations? With tracking codes? How would the retailer know that it was a social referral? And even if he had, would his friends buy directly based on his Facebook post, or would they wait to see if he bought it? Or would they do a search on their own to see if they could beat the price?

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Image source: www.mediabistro.com

We all do this-every day. We email each other pictures of products we want, but we don't include links. We see something on Pinterest while browsing on our phones, and remember to buy it later once we get online at home-with no direct connection between our activities. We get together over the holidays and talk about shoes, gadgets, or vacations we've seen on Facebook, and go out and buy them without those posts ever getting the credit.

And so, we can definitively say that social media had a positive impact on shopping revenue this year. But at this point in time, we just can't say exactly how much. However, as technology and our marketing measurement systems improve, I'm sure that we'll be able to see just how powerful the influence of social is on shopping. After all, it's about measuring human nature-and soon, there will be an app for that.

Using Social Media for B2B Lead Generation: Webtrends and IBM

Published on Nov 13, 2013

Michelle Killibrew, Program Director, Strategy & Solutions, Social Business, IBM and John Lee, Manager, Brand & Social Marketing, Webtrends discuss some highlights from their session on B2B lead generation through social media.

Only 15% of CMOs say they can quantify social ROI. That's even with 90% of brands saying they measure social engagement. But B2B social isn't a mystery - and new metrics/tactics show why. Attend this session to discover:

How IBM had integrated and applied Smarter Marketing best practices into the design of the Rethink Business Campaign, and how IBM Digital Analytics and Digital Data Exchange (DDX) are architected into the lead flow strategy.

How Social Media is integral to the campaign - woven into every customer touch point.
Specific lead gen best practices for Twitter, FB, LinkedIn and SlideShare, and how and when to use each one.

Paid vs. organic social tactics. B2B social lead gen requires a delicate balance of performance vs. organic marketing. How/when to use each and why.
Integration with the B2B marketing machine. Social lead gen requires tight integration with marketing automation, analytics and email marketing. How/when to tie each and why.

Stay tuned for more from SES Chicago 2013!

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Demand Generation + Social + Mobile = BFFs

Published on ClickZ October 2, 2013. 

We all know that the increase of digital media consumption has changed how we approach demand generation. These days, people respond to your outbound campaigns on their cell phones, or they find your campaigns through a friend or colleague’s tweet.

As outbound marketers and demand generation professionals, it’s up to us to figure out how to take advantage of this change in behavior. To do that, we need to completely rethink the customer experience.

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IBM Rethink Campaign: optimized for mobile

I’d like to demonstrate an example of this by walking through some of the ways social and mobile were successfully integrated into a recent campaign I helped develop at IBM. I’ll point out some specific considerations we made throughout the process—as well as some lessons we learned—that might be helpful to you as you create your own approach.

We started by asking ourselves three questions for this outbound/inbound digital campaign microsite, and as we answered each one, we developed new ways to engage our customers.

1. What Did This Audience Really Want?

Thinking about our diverse audiences as well as the variety of solutions that make up the overarching value proposition, we decided to custom-tailor the content to each specific role. In other words, we put our clients’ perspectives first, rather than our view of the broader market.

Of course, we recognized that we had to demonstrate excellence through execution. Marketers are one of our eleven audience roles, so we realized we’d have to provide a seamless user experience while demonstrating the marketing technology represented in our portfolio. Part of this process included the inclusion of social sharing links at every interaction point.

2. How Could We Craft the User Experience in Context to Impress Our Audience?

Our customers are busy business professionals, so we need to provide them with facts they can use right away. We took interesting statistics, incorporated them into a visual treatment that we called a mini-infographic and made sure each one was immensely shareable.

Factoids can be fun to share over social, so we made it easy: with a single click, a visitor could send each one via Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook – all pre-populated with the factoid, hashtags, and a web analytics-tagged URL to bring people back to the website.

We included an image of the mini-infographic because we knew that visuals increase interaction on Facebook and LinkedIn. Taking a dynamic approach to the user interaction and web design was one of our key decisions. We decided on an HTML 5 parallax-designed website in that was visually engaging—one that focused on showing, not telling, through videos, webinars, interactivity, and of course, social sharing. The site had to be optimized for mobile, so we considered the mobile format when approaching the site design. We kept the buttons large and used pre-populated social links would improve social engagement on mobile devices.

3. What Would Continually Keep Our Audience Engaged?

We built the site experience around relevant, focused content that could be a great resource for our customers. We knew that during most B2B solution investigations, buyers and influencers need multiple interactions and validation points to make a decision. Our goal was to speed up some of those exchanges by providing a variety of quality resources for the visitor to engage with. At every interaction, the visitor was able to share these resources via social.

The social links were presented on the success page of the webinar, e-book or report, so the visitor could share that specific asset with their peers. The links embedded in the pre-populated posts directed the visitor directly back to that asset—no need to hunt for it on the microsite. Our approach to social engagement for the content was to make access for the inbound social visitor as easy as possible.

IBM Rethink Campaign: post-conversion social sharing

Do You Make It Easy to Engage?

As you start to create your next campaign, consider how the user experience informs what’s valuable to your target audience. Making it easy for your visitors to engage in social is key to that experience. There are many people out there who are still just getting started with social media—and of course, we’re all pressed for time—so if you can make it easy to share your content, more people will be more inclined to do so.

The benefits are clear: Most of the visitors that you successfully engage on your site are networked and connected to many more visitors who share a similar profile and are therefore part of your target audience. If you set up your site well, develop valuable messages and content, and enable social effectively, you won’t have to go looking for new customers—they’ll come looking for you.

Want to hear more? Join my session at SES Chicago on Wednesday November 6th from 2:00-3:00 pm, as we rethink B2B marketing and explore social as a lead-gen machine.