Category Archives: Social Media

Social Referral

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Social media is an ad hoc referral system gone horribly right. Referrals are primarily a means to building business, brands and bucks. Ask my dentist (to whom I would gladly refer anybody). He is maniacal about soliciting his patients to make referrals, and he gets them.  He knows that patients move away or die (hopefully from old age and not botched dental surgery), so he is constantly refilling his demand chain for crowns, fillings and laser whitening. Referrals occur in every business, from your neighborhood dry cleaner to multinational technology companies. The larger the organization, the more it drifts from the quaint and personal sounding “referral” into the more Machiavellian sounding “buzz generation.”  Yet it is essentially the same thing. At either extreme we are asking, coaxing, bribing or begging people to talk to other people about our products, preferably in a positive manner. Which brings us to social media, … Continue reading →

B2B Buzzing

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One of the best lines I’ve recently stolen is that “the Internet is a gigantic copying machine,” to which I appended “with a share button.” Needless to note is that social networking is a driving force in consumer marketing.  Companies as diverse as Apple, Proctor and Gamble, and General Motors (gizmos, suds and duds) are active users of social media to create brands, promote products, and otherwise find cost effective means for memes.  Collectively consumer product companies are effective in targeting buyers, generating sharable content, and getting unpaid workers (you) to spread the word. B2B companies are borderline imbecilic on the process. Granted, the similarities between your average teenaged movie buff and all stakeholders in an earthmoving equipment purchase decision are about the same as the similarities between horses and horse fish.  With the exception of the single-decision-maker for a consumer product vs. group decision making for enterprises, the mechanics … Continue reading →

Social Service

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Facebook is your friend.  So is Google, just not a close friend that you share things with (aside from your GPS location if using an Android phone). Recently we performed a pro-bono experiment in association with a book launch.  Even though the author had a platform and a publicist who wrangled radio talking time, we deployed a little advertising using both Google and Facebook.  The results show why social media makes a difference, and how to move from static to dynamic in social environments. Over an 18 day period we pushed Google and Facebook ads which had the same creative layouts.  Viable keywords were selected with Google as were “interest” categories on Facebook.  For Google, the test was divided between taking clickers to a landing page on the author’s blog site or directly to Amazon.com after a few reader reviews had accumulated.  In Facebook all clickers were taken to a … Continue reading →

Social Smarts

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I love technology fads.  If I could just think of a way to profit from the inevitable failure of enterprises trying to implement them, I could retire … to my own private island. Social networking is more than a fad, though the surrounding hype makes it sound like one (with the possible exception of Twitter, a fad that I hope will fade fast).  Social networking serves a real purpose, namely uniting people who have common connections.  Facebook facilitates all types of unions from the common to the outrageous (if you can get jihadists to threaten you, then you know you have some power in the world).  The secret to social media systems is that they let people decide what common connections are important and that do not occur through nominal daily activities. Which is why most corporate social media experiments have been misguided wastes of your bonus check.  Corporate life … Continue reading →

Social Inequity

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Short is sweet. No, this is not another diatribe on compact market messages, though that lesson is well worth repeating.  Where sweet and short nicely collide is in the sales cycle.  The shorter the cycle, the sooner the revenue, the happier the stockholder and the fatter your bonus check. Marketers know that social media is becoming an intrinsic, if not superior, tool for finding and landing customers.  What has not been well quantified is the degree to which social media helps.  The folks over at the Software and Information Industry Association, where I am a perpetual CODiE judge, recently presented some data that indicates how and which social media may be helpful in shortening the sales cycle (click the graphic for one large enough to read). The blue bars represent sales closing in less than 90 days, and the gray bars sales lasting more than 90 days.  Where you see … Continue reading →

B2B Socially

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I’m hoping for antisocial media.  I can see how to make a buck off of that. Meanwhile, social media continues to gain dominance in marketing, and for good reason.  Humans, and even politicians, are social animals.  We commune for pleasure, profit and procreation (which pretty much describes a day in the life of Eliot Sprtizer).  Even the most sterile of pursuits requires some social aspect.  Every poor blogger, alone in his office, hammers out prose in order to asynchronously connect with other humans. Business-to-business (B2B) activities are thus social interactions.  Oracle commits social acts when it interacts with other enterprises, aside from the select few it eats.  Thus social media should be a component of B2B. The oddest aspect of B2B social media concerns who in the relationship needs to socialize and why.  The failure to think through these two questions have led to various B2B social media catastrophes including … Continue reading →