Rethink Social Media War Room Strategy

Published on ClickZ on March 19, 2014.

As a former email marketer, I love a good subject line, and just today I saw one that got me thinking: "Time to rethink social media 'war rooms.'" The email was for a short video interview, but it was the subject line that sparked my thoughts. This is a topic that we have discussed internally quite a bit, because we believe that social communication is about people-centric engagement and not about war with or through media. It is certainly not about command or control of social conversations. So I'd like to spark some thoughts for you around how you approach your dashboarding and interaction.

By thinking strategically through engagement beyond just listening, we looked to the types of dashboard information that can help provide deeper insight and meaning around people's intent and our success in delivering to that want or need. We dug into our own tool bag and utilized a number of the key solutions we have that provide detailed analytics into real-time conversations and listening, sentiment, behavior, and even psycholinguistics.

To begin our journey, we have brought a large physical "center" to key events. It's made up of multiple large touchscreen monitors that allow attendees to interact with the data that is being captured live about the specific event. The engagement is both physical and specific and carries out to the socialverse.

Response to this type of visualization of people-centric engagement has been overwhelming. I believe it's because we're getting beyond the basics of social media and are really looking holistically at how people are engaging by examining a series of powerful analytics. Analytics that can help us serve people better. Analytics that can help us create real, valuable insight for the business. Analytics that can help impact the bottom line. We are bringing to life this insight with powerful visualizations that people can make sense of and react to-drill into for deeper understanding.

So what are some of the things that you should think through as you approach the creation of a center of engagement for your brand?

• Social listening - for customer service, sentiment, product innovation, trends
• Web analytics - to understand behavior, ensure customer experience, measure interaction and revenue
• Real-time benchmark data - so you know how you are performing against your peer competitors
• Cognitive analytics - for powerful personality profiling that will help to better serve customers based on their personality traits to improve conversion rate, acquisition rate, revenue, and profit
• Business intelligence - for deep comprehension and analysis of how the above translates into bottom-line business results, and insight into trends over time
• All including visualizations to help drive rapid insight and action from your engagement response team

At the end of the day, to think strategically you need to put your prospects',  customers' and peoples' needs front and center. You need to listen and watch to the cues they are giving you. The tools to do this are changing rapidly. But please remember that your intent should not be to wage war with media or to command social, it should be to engage with people. After all:

  "Social media and technology are not agents of change. They are just tools. We the connected people are the agents of change."

                 - Stuart J Ellman, President of 92Y at Social Good Summit 2012

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.

Get To Know: IBM Social Business Global Marketing Program Director

Published on Marketing Land on February 24, 2014.

Michelle Killebrew leads the go-to-market strategy for IBM Social Business. Her team focuses on messaging, solutions, and value content to shape the new definition of what defines a social business, and how organizations can embrace this next information revolution in the workforce.

“I am 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,” says Killebrew.

Read more > 

Social Data: Inside Out

Published on ClickZ on February 19, 2014.

There have been a number of pieces lately on social data and how predictive analytics can make certain different assumptions. Some of the recent examples in the press are around Facebook and the forecasting of dating couples becoming a couple or when someone will get married based on their friends' marriage dates (timely for Valentine's Day), or earlier in the season around Twitter and flu outbreaks. In my mind this is some interesting behavioral data that can help the average person wrap their heads around some of the big data processes that we in this space professionally understand can be mined in varied and vast ways. The other thing that these stories are conveying to the general public is that the data mined from their social activity is indeed public domain, but that's a story for another day...

Today, I'd like to talk about the power of harnessing social data inside an organization and the amazing competitive benefits from doing just that.

Image source: Gigya's Blog

I think it's safe to say that we all recognize that there is a major evolutionary shift happening today - in the way that is transforming how we do just about anything. Gartner calls this the "nexus of forces." These are universal game-changers - data explosion, social media, proliferation of channels and devices, and shifting consumer demographics - that the chief marketing officer (CMO) is worried about.

And how we work is certainly under these same transformative pressures. There are efficiencies to be gained by applying social communication technologies and collaboration styles inside the organization that can lead to:

• Improved productivity
• Enhanced employee engagement
• Foster collaboration
• Faster and broader knowledge sharing

...and that's just by facilitating easier and more efficient and transparent ways of communicating and reducing our dependence on traditional email.

But the truly exciting part of this from an evolutionary perspective is to be able to apply the data science that we are hearing in B2C use-cases and turn that inside the business and understand the breadth and wealth of information that we create that could facilitate breakthroughs in both process and output. As organizations roll out collaboration and social platforms inside the company, the amount of internal user generated content is exploding just as much as it is everywhere else. These "digital footprints" can be a treasure trove of information to help preserve the competitive edge of the organization - in an age where speed and innovation are the keys to success.

Applying analytics to internal data provide the ability to:

• Expedite expertise location and introductions for employees working on similar projects around the world
• Crowdsource innovation based on conversations happening on internal social channels
• Understand employee sentiment, and identify internal influencers
• Identify talent and top leadership qualities 
• Understand if an employee is a good fit for a team prior to their on-boarding

The world is becoming both larger and smaller because of the abundance of data at our fingertips. We are able to form human relationships across the globe because of common interests that are shared on social platforms, both inside and outside of the organization. We are able to think through global strategies more quickly because of the cross-cultural input at early stages of development. By applying data strategies to internally created user generated content, we will be able to accelerate business processes that enable organizations to compete. The data is already there (and growing rapidly) and tools to leverage it are available and growing quickly. It will be interesting to see how quickly businesses look inward to start mining this data as the true competitive differentiator; I believe that sometime very soon, we will see that those that do will leapfrog forward and those that do not will be left behind.

I wonder when we'll be looking at our own internal data to plan for the impact of flu outbreaks within a company and how we can shift process or production to unaffected areas to compensate...

Thoughts on Disruption and Innovation

Published on ClickZ on January 22, 2014.

Recently I was fortunate enough to attend an amazing panel, "Time to Change -- Culture and Brand Disruption Leading to Innovation," held at PARC Forum. The panel was made up of some great Silicon Valley thought leaders (and friends and colleagues): Susan Etlinger of Altimeter Research, Bryan Kramer of PureMatter, Michela Stribling of IBM, and moderated by Todd Wilms of SAP, all of whom had great thoughts to offer for the topic at hand -- disruption and innovation.

It’s wonderful to know that armed with a smartphone and Twitter, I was part of the contingent in the room that was helping to share this great insight beyond the four walls of the event itself. Reading through my Twitter "notes" now, I’d like to take the opportunity to share with you all some of the highlights of the discussion.

Are we becoming disconnected because of tech?

Etlinger's reply was an immediate and emphatic, "NO!," with the explanation that it takes a while for us to understand the human impact of new technology. The example given was television -- when it was invented in the late 1920s it was used only to record the existing radio programs that were already being broadcast. It wasn’t until 30 years later that I Love Lucy really began to take advantage of the new medium in its fullest sense -- using the visual medium and multiple camera angles to communicate its comedic moments. The same is true of new technology.

Social has gone through the same application discovery. Kramer discussed the shift in "connection." Tech, especially social tech, has allowed us to focus not on demographics but on what he calls "personographics." It has allowed us to connect with people who share our common interests, regardless of where in the world we are.

Historically, innovation happens in 10 year chunks, allowing for people to understand the innovation and test for its best implementations. There is innovation around the application of the concept to find its best usage. Striblin also adds that there must be support from the top, saying that "[Companies] must talk the talk and walk the walk! Innovation and culture change starts at the top with executives." It is becoming more difficult for companies to whitewash innovation; they can’t say and not do. And for effective change, it must come from the top down.

Business disruption is not just disruption for disruption’s sake -- you need to rally around a business goal and then innovate with passion.

To add my perspective, this is absolutely true. We are at a juncture in time where social technology has been around in an advanced commercially available personal capacity for more than 10 years now. It is now time for us in the professional world to see how we can innovate and apply this to our daily business function. I see this as Social Business, and that organizations need executive charter to make this transformation a priority in strategy and process through every part of the organization -- infusing social communication principles into how we collaborate, engage, and create value.

The discussion continued: Innovation can happen at any and every level of the organization. And in order for a company to embrace that, people need to know that they have management support to fail. People will not put their ideas into action if they think that their jobs will be on the line. An example given was around social innovation in marketing -- what a great opportunity to engage more authentically with your prospects and clients, but it creates a huge disruption for the risk management team. And this is where I believe policy and governance strategy must evolve to keep up with both the innovation and disruption (as I’ve mentioned, here in the past). The panel agreed, social governance is key for social. The bottom line is: you need to train your people. Laws and tech are evolving so use common sense.

Brand ownership has changed. Wilms' favorite story is about brand ownership and the power of authenticity in apology for employee transgression.

Wilms elaborated on his favorite example of a brand that showed its human side during a social media event that was threatening its brand value. The scenario was that an employee, a deliveryman, of one of the major shipping companies had been caught on camera throwing packages, including TVs, over fences instead of properly delivering the packages. The company spokesperson, who was clearly nervous, made a sincere apology from the organization stating the embarrassment of the company, that the employee’s actions were not reflective of the company beliefs, that sometimes mistakes are made in hiring, and that the employee was being properly reprimanded and dismissed. Wilms emphasized that this was a truly authentic apology, and that the spokespersons’ (nervous) demeanor further approachability of the brand.

The moral of the story is that organizations need to take ownership of operational mistakes in social. Social has made human connection easier. People accept that brands are no longer a "thing" but now a collaboration of people, and that people are human -- and therefore fallible. Brands that can accept that they are fallible, and can respond to transgressions quickly and authentically, will be able to mitigate financial and sentiment risk.

Parting thought from Etlinger: "To be innovative, you need to get over the fear of being seen as 'stupid.'" Which in my mind is giving yourself permission to be curious, ask questions, and try new things. Don’t let your own fears stop you!

Many thanks to my fellow Twitter conversationalists for helping me archive this panel to share in this post! @cshasarrived, @CecileSF, @dlack2010, @ShawnDMyers, @motodot, @lisajoyrosner, @JanetJoz, @PegahKamal, @jaydiamond, @suzannahscully, @SVTechWire, @PARCinc

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.

The Power of the Basics: Building a Foundation for your Marketing Messages

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When I was a child, I decided that when I grew up I was going to be an architect.  I loved the beauty and artistry of buildings. I always noticed the details on every high-rise building. Not only that, but I reveled in the beauty of the physics. The fact that humans were able to conquer height was wonderful to me— think about the knowledge and insight it took to build the pyramids. Imagine what it was like to discover how flying buttresses are able to support cathedrals to soaring heights, and then picture the magic of adding expansive panes of glittering stained glass.

So you can imagine my despair during the first week of introduction to drawing for architects class, when the instructor made us focus on drawing a straight line by hand. This wasn’t just for an hour, or a day, but for weeks—including homework assignments.  And guess what? It’s not easy, not at all.

Now, it is not my intention to examine the reasons for changing  my educational and career direction (though I can say that all of the things that drew me to architecture also drew me to become a marketer, especially with the technical advances in measurement). Rather, I want to focus on how important it is to get the basics right in order to build a solid foundation for your endeavors—whether it’s a cathedral or a campaign.

Recently I accompanied Tami Cannizzaro (@tamicann) at a conference where she was speaking about a campaign that we had created with our team. I was surprised to see how interested the audience was in a single slide that showed a message map that Caroline Waterson and I had created for a previous digital campaign which we had created in wonderful collaboration with Bryan Kramer (@bryankramer) and Courtney Smith (@cshasarrived) of PureMatter.  It was an eye chart of a slide, since the information had been transferred from a spreadsheet that had quite a bit of detail.  But people couldn’t get enough of it.

The talk was focused on digital demand generation and optimization through the use of analytics, and applied insights learned from campaign iterations over time. So it was  somewhat shocking to hear people specifically request for the details of this message map.  It quickly dawned on me that there is an intense desire for many marketers to understand the basics. It’s wonderful to be able to demonstrate that we can apply the latest technology to our digital campaigns and optimize conversion paths, but many people just want to know where to start—and how to start well.

So, we as marketers all know that we need to understand our audience. But what does that mean exactly?  It means stopping to thoughtfully consider who your audience is, what keeps them up at night and how your product or service can help benefit them. It really boils down to three simple messaging points:

1. Pain – What your audience can’t do today

2. How – How we can help them  to solve the problem

3. Business Benefit – The end result

The spreadsheet that the group was asking for spelled these three messages out for each of the solutions that we were marketing and tied them up to the same three message points for the overarching theme for each of the solution sets. 

Some of the key concepts to remember when approaching these messaging statements are to be simple, concise and use action-oriented verbs. While working through this process, you may encounter one of the largest challenges we as marketers face is an audience that doesn’t recognize that they have a pain that can be solved. Maybe they’ve become accepting of a situation because “that’s how it always has been.” In this case, you have to be creative in painting a picture of a better solution: “wouldn’t it be better if?”

So, as you sit down to approach your next marketing campaign, be sure to master the basics.  Pay attention to who you’re talking to, what you’re saying, and how you’re saying it before focusing on what the flashy delivery might be.  The most powerful marketing messages are simple—they resonate with the intended audience. Once you’ve established that solid foundation, you can start to build campaigns that will capture the attention of your customers.

Get the messaging matrix spreadsheet. Click here.

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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Register for upcoming conferences: http://sesconference.com

Are You Ignoring Your Best Brand Advocates?

Published on ClickZ October 30, 2013

I joined a Twitter chat about the value of social this week and during the course of the conversation, was surprised to learn that for some people, the idea of enabling employee advocates was a novel concept. So many people recognize the power of social media for marketing and external evangelism, yet they neglect the power within their own organization!

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We all know that social technology enables human connections. But the thing is, there are no boundaries between consumers or employees, because most of us are both. Technology has also amplified the speed and reach of every type of communication. This evolution in how we share information and knowledge goes far beyond just social "media." It's a complete transformation in the way we interact. When businesses fail to take advantage of the valuable assets in their organization, they miss out on an excellent way to create both customer engagement and employee empowerment.

Social strategist Ted Rubin was featured recently in a great article by Cheryl Connor, in Forbes. He said, "When someone asks, ‘What is the ROI of Social?' I ask back...‘What's the ROI of Loyalty, what's the ROI of Trust?' In order to sell the concept, you've got to talk in a language they'll understand."

I'd take this a step further, to ask employers, "What's the ROI of employee engagement and effective communication with consumers?" When employees are empowered to make direct connections with the customers they serve, it fuels productivity and loyalty from within. In addition to having satisfied employees, an organization can create an internal army of brand ambassadors and influencers who can help promote the business.

So often in marketing conferences, we hear about an employee who has gone above and beyond for the sake of a customer. In this social and connected world we live in, this single experience can spread like wildfire, promoting the organization in an organic, authentic way. Giving your employees the power to speak out on behalf of your organization (with some guidelines in place) can only help broaden the voice of your brand voice and increase the level of visibility in the marketplace.

What does it take to develop a following of employee brand ambassadors? Start with these guiding principles:

• Make your organizational knowledge accessible to all employees through the use of social technology within the business.
• Empower employees to participate in social media on behalf of the brand. 
• Put clear, easy-to-follow guidelines in place and have a plan for dealing with potential mistakes. 
• Facilitate innovation by listening and encouraging feedback around processes, services and products. 

Over the next few years, it's going to become clear that businesses will need to give employees a social experience just like the ones they get in their personal lives. This will not only help businesses retain valuable employees, but it will also be a benefit to the bottom line--and a significant competitive advantage for those that do it right. It will improve employee engagement, productivity and innovation. It will help employees deliver exemplary customer experiences to consumers. It will allow organizations to rally their largest group of brand advocates: the employees themselves.

One thing is absolutely true in this new world of free-flowing information: everyone has a voice and the platform to use it. If you're not using it, someone else will.

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.