I’m in Boston for MarketingProfs B2B Forum, which promises to be one of the most valuable conferences of the year for B2B marketers interested in social media. I led a workshop this morning on social media policies (which Jeff Cohen from socialmediaB2B.com has already blogged), then headed off to my first session as an audience member, the “Case Study Swap Meet: Proven Success Stories Integrating Social Media into Overall Strategy.”
Perhaps the most important lesson is the fact that this session was standing room only. People are still very hungry for real world examples of social media integration and ROI.
The panel discussion, moderated by Christina “CK” Kerley of CKB2B, highlighted some valuable takeaways.
Ron Casalotti from Bloomberg discussed their Bloomberg BusinessWeek Business Exchange, which they describe as a way for readers to “access the most relevant content for you, filtered by like-minded business professionals.” They’ve found it to be a valuable way to connect with their readers, not only to get ideas for stories on topics their readers are most interested in, but also to gauge response to what they write. They created a “User Engagement Index” that tracks comments on articles, and set a goal of doubling it.
Ron’s Top Tip:
Don’t get caught up in the numbers. The point of social media is the value it brings. It’s better to have 200 active followers than a thousand passive ones.
Deirdre Walsh from National Instruments calls herself “the ultimate geek matchmaker.” NI’s global community brings together 140,000 engineers who share information, code and help answer one another’s questions. In fact, according to Deirdre, 50 percent of the questions asked in the forum are answered by community members, saving her staff time and effort.
NI’s strategy was to make it easy for users to find and share technical content, foster technical collaboration, reward and recognize their ambassadors (“make them rock stars”) and map each technology they use to the marketing funnel.
In addition to the time savings they’ve experienced through users helping one another, Deirdre has found ROI through increased Web traffic. Forty percent of their traffic comes from what she describes as “long tail search and user generated content.”
Deirdre’s Top Tip:
Integrate social media into your existing communications structure and “treat it like any other marcom function.”
Mike Travis from Equation Research crowdsourced a survey of people in their industry and used it to increase brand presence and position their business in the marketplace. They saw a 200 percent increase in Web traffic and a five-fold increase in leads generated, resulting in 400 new prospects opting in.
Mike’s Top Tip:
Be relevant. Get engaged in the community. Identify the communities that are most relevant to you and find a way to be relevant to them.
Kirsten Watson from Kinaxis offered some very tangible strategies based on their experience building their Supply Chain Expert Community. She advised us to “fish where the fish are.” They reach out to existing communities, participate in them and try to offer value, and then give people a reason to come to their community as well.
Kirsten’s team has an editorial calendar based on the top keywords they get from their search engine optimization analysis. They create a keyword-related white paper every month and use the content in nearly every way imaginable. The white paper becomes a series of blog posts. They interview the writer on video and post a talk about the topic on YouTube. The audio from the interview is turned into a podcast. They create a PowerPoint presentation on the topic and post it to SlideShare.
For anyone questioning whether or not they can create content for social media, the Kinaxis model should be inspiring. The results should inspire you as well. They’ve seen a 2.7x increase in Web traffic to kinaxis.com, a 3.2x increase in conversions, measured as leads, a 5.3x increase in community traffic and a 6x increase in membership, to a total of 2,300. And they’ve seen double-digit growth in paid subscriptions to their RapidResponse software-as-a-service product.
Kirsten’s Top Tip:
When creating and maintaining your social media program, always be thinking SEO.”
14 Comments
David - first of all, great job moderating the social media guidelines workshop this morning. It was a very important topic and one that I know a lot of companies are working on solving.
Also, thanks for attending and blogging about the Case Study Swap Session. I was happy to share the NI social media story with such an awesome audience.
Dave - Thanks for covering this case study presentation! I can certainly agree with the content strategy from the folks at Kinaxis. Finding creative ways to create, package and market Web content will increasingly become more important to all of us marketers who are focused on reaching out to customers through social media channels.
Kirsten's (nice name) top tip also reminds me that you can never pay enough attention to SEO. Time to ramp it up!
I agree that all social media need to be relationship driven and real. I think that it is the easiest form of marketing for possible customers to smell BS. Also I think if you don't do it right people in the social media world are ambivalent to it. They take it personally and become very upset so you could really offend a potential client or customer.
Great summary, Dave. The SEO tip; BE RELEVANT and join the community. All critical.
Hi people,
Well I am new here and really enjoyed reading the article, and have shared it with my friends.
Thanks for sharing this great piece of information.Do keep us update with some more updates.
Really Social media is going to be more popular among marketing proffesional.
I think that if you are making use of social media for marketing your web presence, you should provide original information, and be pertinent. It will result in better SEO for your own sites.
If you are keen on SEO and Impatient, you will get the best results for your marketing your web presence. Good luk to you
Idea behind your post is amazing…thanks for sharing your thoughts with us.. I would like to read more from you..
Thanks for the post, have been working on my SEO for a few months, but am trying to learn as much about socail media (who isn't). Will keep my eye out for more info.
Thank you for this useful information.I will share it with my friends.I have done bookmarked it.
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I agree. Social media are currently, and in the future, the new web. I have tried some with good success. What I cannot figure out correctly is Twitter. It never worked well for me but may be I am doing it wrong.
Someone mentioned a social medial workshop with David... anything like that in the near future?
Thanks
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