MarketingMuses

Groundswell: A Guidebook for the Social Media Journey

“A social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations.” – Definition of the Groundswell

Groundswell is, without a doubt, the best single book I am aware of for understanding the power of social technologies and learning how to use that power effectively.  It is full of data that supports its premise, and is a detailed guidebook that shows you how to successfully navigate the best path to reach your desired social media destination. 

There are several powerful tools described in the book.  The first is the Social Technographics profile, which is similar to demographics and psychographics but focuses on social technology behaviors.  The tool allows you to understand how social technologies are being adopted by a group of people, which, in turn, allows you to build an appropriate social strategy for that group (e.g., your customers). 

First, it segments seven levels of social technology use as shown below.

 

Second, it provides two simple Web-based tools: a consumer profile tool and a B2B profile tool.  The tools allow you to view the profile of your target group versus a benchmark reference group.  For example, the following profile shows the behavior of U.S. small-business owners relative to the behavior of [a representative sample of] all U.S. adults.

  

The profile of your target group is used in the first of a 4-step social media planning process called POST—an acronym for people, objectives, strategy and technology.  Answering these questions, in this order, is the best way to formulate a social media plan. 

People: What are your customers ready for?  This is determined from the social technographics profile.

Objectives: What are your goals?  Following are the five primary objectives that companies successfully pursue in the groundswell, and how they relate to business functions.

  

Strategy: How do you want relationships with your customers to change?  By answering this question, not only can you plan for the desired changes, but you can also figure out how to measure them once the strategy is underway.

Technology: What applications should you build?  After having decided on the people, objectives, and strategy, you can move on to select the appropriate social technologies—blogs, wikis, social networks, etc.

Social technology is a powerful tool with the potential to help marketing perform more effectively.  Unfortunately, many marketers are, “going about their strategy backward.  They start by thinking about technology.”  In Groundswell, Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff have given marketers a guidebook to avoid the pitfalls and chart a course to social media success.  Read it, absorb it, and use it.

A Recipe for a Winning Webinar

Here are the essential elements of a webinar that outperforms the norm, with case study results from a recent one that followed the recipe.

 

1. Address a Hot Topic - The more relevant and timely the topic, the higher the attendance and level of interest will be for the webinar.
2. Partner with a Respected Third Party - Partnering with an analyst group, professional organization, or respected publication can improve the quantity and quality of attendees in a couple of ways.  First, co-sponsorship with an independent, respected third party implies that the webinar is more balanced and less biased than one sponsored by your company alone.  Second, the third-party will usually publicize the webinar to their membership or readership, which can significantly increase your reach, registration and attendance.
3. Use a Third Party Moderator - A third-party partner can usually provide an analyst, editor or other unbiased expert to moderate the webinar.  This adds greater credibility than you or someone from your company moderating the webinar.
4. Have a Customer Present a Case Study - Similar to partnering with a respected third party, a real customer reviewing a real process, decision and result is much more credible and interesting than you doing it yourself. 
5. Try and Limit Your Involvement to Answering Questions - Answering a question is much more powerful and effective than making a statement.  First, you know the audience, especially the person asking the question, is interested in what you have to say.  Second, people listen more closely to answers than statements.  Have the person most knowledgeable about the webinar subject answer the questions, and stay on topic.  This is not the time to try and broadcast your marketing message.  Just answer the questions clearly and concisely.
6. Follow Up with Next Step Options - A few days after the webinar, contact attendees with options for them to learn more and take the next step.  Make sure that there are options for each phase of the buyer education and decision process: awareness, discovery and validation.

 

A Webinar Case Study and the Results

Symyx Technologies recently conducted the most successful webinar in its history: one that significantly exceeded average webinar metrics and produced an exceptional return-on-investment.

Symyx partnered with the American Chemical Society to present a webinar on the electronic laboratory notebook (ELN), a fast-growing software technology that is moving from early adoption to mainstream acceptance.  The webinar was promoted by Symyx through direct marketing, its website, and its social media channels, and by ACS to its 160,000 members.  Rick Mullin, a senior editor at Chemical & Engineering News (an ACS publication) moderated the case study presentation by Gabriel Weatherhead, Ph.D., Lead Systems Engineer at Millennium: The Takeda Oncology Company.  Gabriel described the process Millennium used to select an enterprise ELN for chemistry and biology disciplines.  A Symyx Vice President of Product Management and Strategy was available to answer questions after the presentation by Gabriel.

ACS co-sponsors and conducts webinars with companies every couple of weeks.  Based on its metrics for these events, the Symyx webinar generated 3 times more registrations and attendees than the average, and it generated 145 questions.  Also, the co-sponsored webinar generated 10 times more registrations and attendees than webinars publicized and conducted by Symyx alone.  The average cost of attendee acquisition was about $20, well below the average cost per inquiry from other demand generation activities. 

Attendees were contacted after the presentation and directed to an ELN microsite where they can access a pdf copy of the Millennium case study, as well as other ELN marketing assets that allow respondents to learn more and take the next step in the buyer education and decision process.  
Symyx, in turn, can nurture and track prospects going forward, and eventually provide sales with a well-developed profile of a well-qualified prospective buyer: the definition of a sales opportunity. 

Use Social Media to Cross the Chasm and Nurture Prospects

The hallmarks of a buyer in the awareness phase are research and education. – Digital Body Language: Deciphering Customer Intentions in an Online World

A study conducted by Atrium Research in 2008 showed that despite a decade of market exposure 47% of prospective users knew “very little” to “nothing” about electronic laboratory notebooks (ELN).  Although ELN began to cross the chasm from early adoption to mainstream acceptance in 2009 and 2010, there was still a need to provide a general ELN introduction to nearly half of the $1.3B total available market.

Videos are best for punching through the noise—the awareness problem. – Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies

Just remember that (if you succeed), you’re about to enter into a conversation with people who read the Web address at the end of the video. You need to be ready to convert all of that interest into action and consideration. – Groundswell

A microsite allows those who view the video to learn more about an ELN by attending webinars and reading thought-leadership articles. And when ready, they can take the next step to the discovery phase, where they begin exploration of potential solutions through customer case studies.

Marketing in a Global Village

David Meerman Scott practices what he preaches. He used his blog, WebInkNow, to develop content for his book, ‘The New Rules of Marketing & PR.’

The book’s thesis is that the Web offers companies and organizations of all sizes the ability to get, “…the right message to the right people at the right time.” Its main strategic point is that marketers should focus on buyers and their problems (rather than hyping products and services), and think like a publisher by, “…delivering content when and where it is needed and, in the process, branding you and your organization as a leader.”

To me, the book’s greatest value is its in-depth examination of new media tactics and channels, such as blogs, podcasts, videos, search engines, online media rooms, and more. The book is structured like a blog, and divided into three sections: 1) How the Web Has Changed the Rules of Marketing and PR, 2) Web-Based Communications to Reach Buyers Directly, and 3) Action Plan for Harnessing the Power of the New Rules.

If you are just dipping your toes into new media marketing, read the whole book. While information in some sections is redundant, it will be worth your time. If you are already involved in new media marketing, dive right into section three’s action plan, where information is cross-referenced (like a blog) to earlier sections in case you want to dig deeper into any specific subject.

Give Your Products and Services a Hand

Apple® uses hands in iPhone™ promotional videos to show compact size, portability and easy operation. Hands not only help demonstrate a product’s use and value, but also draw the viewer into a video or pictorial (i.e., the hands are perceived as those of the viewer). And hands can help visualize and humanize the abstract attributes of software or a service. These three promotional pieces show how I used hands to make products and services more realistic, humane and compelling.

On the left, a new power meter, for remote applications, is shown at actual size on a brochure to illustrate its unique hand-held form factor. This repeatedly enticed viewers to push buttons on the keypad image.

In the middle, a hand is used to draw the viewer into a depiction of how simple and easy it is to learn and use menu-driven customer relationship management (CRM) software.

On the right, hands are used as a brand identity element to convey the caring and nurturing qualities of an organization that helps people rehabilitate from acquired brain injuries.

It's All Wrong!

Early in my consulting career, I wrote a message platform for a new product targeting the emerging wireless telecommunications market. When the product design engineer and I met to review the platform, I asked him, “Overall, how does it look?” And he replied, “It’s all wrong!”

I was stunned that I had totally misunderstood the product’s features, capabilities and benefits, and prepared myself for a long, difficult meeting. I asked him what the main problem was, and he said that I showed the upper frequency range as 4.2 GHz, when it was actually 2.4 GHz. After correcting what I viewed as a simple typo, I asked, “What else?” And he replied, “That’s all.”

Stunned again, I responded, “But you said it’s all wrong, and now you’re telling me a typo is the only problem.” At this point he fixed his gaze directly on me and replied firmly, “If someone buys this to operate above 2.4 GHz, it won’t work. If such important, fundamental information is wrong, everything is wrong.”

Credibility is an essential element of all business communications, but the margin of error is much smaller in technology marketing.

B2B technology marketing often targets those who design and build products or IT infrastructure. If even a small element of their work is wrong, the product or network will not work properly, and may not work at all. This is the mindset of many designers, developers, and engineers when they read marketing information. If any part of your message is wrong, no matter how small, it makes everything else suspect. And if something really important is wrong, many readers will reject everything you say.

The KISS Principle Illustrated

Keep It Short and Simple.

If you doubt that technical information can be short and simple, stop by your local bookstore or visit Google Book Search and look at David Macaulay’s, 'The NEW Way Things Work.' It was written for anyone old enough to read well, and especially designed for those who find technology intimidating. It not only provides comprehensive descriptions of the way hundreds of machines and devices work, but also gives explanations of the scientific principles behind each. The book makes liberal, effective use of graphic diagrams, and describes most of the machines and devices in 200 to 300 words on 1 or 2 pages.

Bombast and Techno-Babble

Here’s a profile from the website of a company that distributes computing and communications equipment for military and defense applications (the name has been withheld to protect the guilty).

“(The company) was founded in 1989. Over the years since then, we've experienced a tremendous level of growth — both in the number of our customers and in our ability to serve them. We've become an industry leader as a result of an intense focus on unparalleled customer service, continuing education and advanced technology, in addition to offering a diverse menu of products to entrepreneurial representatives. (The company) offers a unique delivery model of innovative, high-quality, value-added services that enable organizations to attain sustainable competitive advantage. Leveraging our managerial and technological talent, strategic partnerships with major vendors, and a rich and diverse client base, (The company) is fast becoming a key player in the market.”

This profile is an extreme example of a problem I too often find in online and offline technology marketing information: verbiage and jargon. David Meerman Scott refers to this problem as ‘gobbledygook.’ He states that, “The worst gobbledygook offenders seem to be business-to-business technology companies. For some reason, marketing people at technology companies have a particularly tough time explaining how products solve customer problems.” For more on this subject, including a list of the most overused jargon, read DMS’s Gobbledygook Manifesto.