Strategy | The B2B Formula

Posts Tagged ‘Strategy’

May11

Sun-Tzu for Social Media

By: David Rosen

Though B2B social media communities tend to be friendly, it doesn’t mean the millennia old lessons from “The Art of War” don’t apply. Here are the top 10 strategies Sun-Tzu might offer at your next staff meeting:

10. “We are not fit to lead an army on the march unless we are familiar with the face of the country-its mountains and forests, its pitfalls and precipices, its marshes and swamps…We shall be unable to turn natural advantage to account unless we make use of local guides.” Though a B2B company may be new to the social media landscape, their customers, investors and employees aren’t. The tolerance for newbie mistakes is low. Get a guide to show you the terrain. Better yet, get a couple.

9. “A wise general makes a point of foraging on the enemy. One cartload of the enemy’s provisions is equivalent to twenty of one’s own.” If your competitor has spent a year attracting 3,000 highly targeted followers on Twitter, how long would it take you to find them? Two minutes? Five? How about the blogs that they consider most important — the ones they’ve done guest posts with and left comments on? While it probably took them months to identify the movers and shakers in the sector, it’ll take you all of one Google blog search to find them. You don’t want to be the follower, but if you are, there’s no reason to spend as much time and money as the leader getting into a strong position.

8. “If our forces are ten to the enemy’s one, to surround him; if five to one, to attack him; if twice as numerous, to divide our army into two.” This applies directly to your thought leadership-SEO strategies. Depending on how much quality content you can pump out, and how many executives you have to position online versus competitors, these are great guidelines to follow.

7. “There are three ways in which a ruler can bring misfortune on his army…[number 2] By attempting to govern an army in the same way he administers a kingdom, being ignorant of the conditions which obtain in an army. This causes restlessness in the solder’s minds.” Once a company has built up a community, it can be easy to start viewing it as an extension of the enterprise; almost as employees. That’s a mistake. Don’t them for granted and always remember that their loyalty is earned, not bought.

6. “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” Before stepping onto the social media battlefield, you have to survey your competitors. Where are they? What are they doing? What’s your own online profile? Do audits on yourself and them. It’s the only way to proceed with confidence.

5. “There are not more than five musical notes, yet the combinations of these five give rise to more melodies than can ever be heard.” Don’t feel overwhelmed by the hundreds of social media sites and tools. Between your blog, Twitter feed, Flickr and YouTube channels you’re set to play a beautiful social media symphony.

4. “Whoever is first in the field and awaits the coming of the enemy, will be fresh for the fight; whoever is second in the field and has to hasten to battle will arrive exhausted.” If you woke up tomorrow to Google Alerts for your competitor’s new blog, new Twitter feed, new YouTube channel and a handful of guest blogs, how long would it take your company to catch up? And once you did, how much farther down the road would they be? Don’t be the second mover.

3. “Do not repeat the tactics that which have gained you one victory, but let your methods be regulated by the infinite variety of circumstances.” Companies are designed to find an innovative technique and then doing it 1,000 times to enjoy economies of scale. The desire to routinize is strong. In social media, at least so far, innovation and variation are the only constants.

2. “There are roads which must not be followed, armies which must not be attacked, towns which must not be besieged, positions which must not be contested, commands of the sovreign which must not be obeyed.” There are a lot of ways to interpret this rule. Whatever situation popped into your mind after reading it is the right one for you.

1. “The natural formation of the country is the soldier’s best ally; but a power of estimating the adversary, of controlling the forces of vicory, and of shrewdly calculating difficulties, dangers and distances, constitutes the test of a great general.” Social media is a world unto its own. You must follow its own gravitational force, play by its rules. If you do, the rewards are great. Lots of research, lots of listening and lots of experimenting will take care of the unknowns.

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May5

Diversifying the Temporality of your Blog Posts

By: David Rosen

What percent of your blog posts are useful to readers for a day? A month? A year?

The answer matters a lot, and yet most people don’t think about it, much less make it a part of their blogging strategy.

It all comes down to the long tail value of your blog. Say you’ve written 10 great blog posts in a month. Seven of them are out of date within a day they’re published. The other three of them have a shelf life of a year. You get 1,000 visitors to your blog per month, half of them are daily readers, the other half find you through search.

In that first month, all 10 posts provide value to all 1,000 visitors. Now comes the bad news.

At the end of the second month, you have 20 blog posts out there on the web. But only six of them are useful to half your audience — the half that found you via search. The other 14 posts are coming up in their search results, but not providing useful information.

This is a bit of a generalization, but it shines a spotlight on the fact that your blog posts can work for you not just the day or week they’re written, but for years after. It costs just about nothing to keep old blog posts online. And yet if they stay useful over time, it’s the equivalent of publishing three, 10, or even 30 useful posts a day depending on how long you blog. That lowers the price of each blog post. And the longer a post remains valuable, the greater its ROI grows.

There’s a catch. It’s hard to write for the ages. Heck, there are only a few texts in the world that have survived thousands of years because they stayed relevant to people. (And here you thought the bible had nothing to teach about blogging!) Writing for long-term value means talking more about strategy, less about tactics. More about the big picture, less about day-to-day minutia. It takes more time, and that means more money.

So what’s the right mix? How should you best diversify the temporality of your blog posts? Here are some guidelines:

1. If your blog is new and you’re trying to generate traffic, start with long-life posts. The earlier you can write for the long-term, the more it will pay as time progresses.

2. If your blog has lots of traffic, but it’s all day-to-day content, start sprinkling in long tail pieces. I get it, resources are scarce. You’re doing everything you can to feed that hungry maw of your readers. So do a semi-big picture. A post that’s useful for a month, not a year. Then once a quarter, write something that’s valuable for a year. The more long-life posts you have, the more traffic you’ll get from search, the slower you’ll need to run on that minute-by-minute treadmill you’ve gotten yourself onto.

3. Don’t go all long tail. There are a lot of people who search for things that have just happened. That’s traffic you don’t want to give up. And if you’re a leader in your industry, you need to look on top of things anyway.

What do you think is the best temporal ratio for blog posts? Is there a better formula for B2B than B2C?

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May3

For B2B Social Media Virgins: Predicting ROI of Your First Time

By: David Rosen

You can never quite predict what the community’s response will be the very first time you engage in social media. Sure, you can ask other people. You can look at case studies. You can bring in an agency or hire a pro who’s done it before to guide you. But for all that, the first time is the first time. And yet, you can exert more control over the situation than you might think.

First, let’s be clear on the definition of ROI. I prefer the one that CEOs use: revenues and margins. Marketing objectives like “more awareness,” “higher opinion of our product/service” or “fewer people boycotting us” are objectives that put marketers on the path to dollars. With that in mind, social media metrics — like the number of clicks your blog posts get, the ratio of favorable/unfavorable comments, a jump in LinkedIn invites from prospects, total minutes customers spend reading your white papers — are clear measures of your progress on that path. In many ways, they’re the cleanest metrics B2B marketers have enjoyed. But don’t get so excited that you start to think they’re the goal. That’s the mistake PR people have often made counting articles and TV spots. No, it’s the dollars that matter.

Now let’s talk about how to predict the ROI of your FIRST social media effort.

First, you need a benchmark. Then, you’ll need an understanding of what strategies and tactics went into setting that mark. Ranked from most- to least-effective, here are your options:

1. Do a pilot project: Take a page from 14th century alchemists. If they’d never mixed two together chemicals before, they’d start out with a drop of each, not a bucket’s worth. If nothing blew up, they’d combine a little more, and then more again. Each time they’d look for reactions. And not just with their eyes. They’d listen for hissing or crackling. They’d sniff for changes in odor. They’d put prisms in front of the cocktail to look for changes in the color bands. They’d also wait. After all, a reaction could take hours or even days to appear. Social media pros should take the same approach.

Tell your audience it’s an experiment, which gives you permission to mess up and manages their expectations. If something’s working, do more of it and verify how the tactics can scale (i.e. for every three blog posts you get nine pickups, so for every six posts you should get 18, and so forth). If it doesn’t, drop it.

Agree with your team members at the beginning of the experiment that the numbers — not any one person’s ideas or beliefs — will guide the decision making process. That way subsequent steps are taken based on science, not politics. After the pilot, you’ll have your benchmark. You’ll know the amount of time and money it took to make the push, and the audience’s reaction. You subtract the two and see if, quantitatively, it was worth it. With those numbers in hand, you can try something on a larger scale, and know pretty accurately what the ROI will be. Remember, experience removes cost and heightens predictability, so pretty much everything in social media gets cheaper over time.

2. Use a competitor’s numbers: If a company that shares your space is using social media, it’s pretty easy to figure out their key metrics. Sites like Compete.com can tell you how many visitors per month come to their blog. You can also count the number and measure the tone of comments they’ve received over time. With Twitter, it’s even easier. You can easily see how many followers the company has, and there are lots of free analysis tools that will graph the competitor’s progress. Numbers of LinkedIn and Facebook group members, along with how many posts the company makes and responsiveness of the community are all measurable. With those figures in-hand, you’ve got a pretty good yard stick to compare yourself. Keep in mind, you have to have a good understanding of the strategies and tactics that are being deployed to achieve those numbers. That may take an experienced hand to reverse engineer it. And in many cases, the competitor will be using social media, but badly. If you see that they’re making mistakes, and you avoid them from the beginning, you should set a goal for how much above their benchmark you’ll go.

3. Community comparison: If none of your direct competitors are using social media, find a company that shares a similar audience. For example, if you’re an accounting firm trying to market to CFOs, the best comparison would be another firm. But if no company in that space is using social media, see if the industry trade group is using social media and use their numbers. Lacking that, nearly every industry has some passionate soul out there blogging and tweeting. You can use their metrics. It’s not the most accurate of yard sticks, but it’s a heck of a lot better than having no numbers at all.

Anyone else in the hivemind have ideas for how to carefully manage a B2B company’s first time in the social sphere?

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April13

No, Promoted Tweets Won’t Solve Your “Twitter Problem”

By: David Rosen

There’s a mountain of coverage today about Twitter’s launch of “Promoted Tweets,” their new advertising platform. Now, I’m a fan of online advertising — I count such companies among my clients. But if you’re a B2B CMO/head of PR who thinks Promoted Tweets is the answer to your company’s “Twitter Problem” then you’re about to learn a hard lesson.

Chances are, the reason your B2B company’s Twitter feed isn’t generating sales is because you’re ALREADY treating it like an advertising platform. In consumer social media, things like coupons and contests drive sales. But in B2B social media, you have to think of Twitter as the lure to your intellectual hook.

Really, the fishing metaphor works beautifully, so stay with me. When you go fishing you’ve got the lure, which is shiny and attracts the fish. Then you’ve got the bait, which the fish bites. Under that bait is the hook, which is how you drag the fish out of its world and into your own.

Twitter is the lure. It flashes out a titillating question or headline offering an intellectual treat. The customer comes toward it and sees the bait — your bit.ly link. It bites down on the bait, and finds the hook — a white paper, blog post, video — some bigger intellectual goody. At the end of that goody is a conversion pathway — the reeling in. That can be a phone number to call, an email address to make contact, a LinkedIn or Facebook group that they can join.

THAT’S an answer to your “Twitter problem.” Ok…now go see how that strategy, coupled with Promoted Tweets, can make your company a lot of money.

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April12

The Answer to the Toughest Question in B2B Social Media

By: David Rosen

The toughest strategic problem to solve in B2B Social Media is how to sell in an environment that hates sales pitches. After all, it’s hard to trust someone who has a sales motive, and social networks are built on trust.

The answer is to FIRST sell ideas that exemplify your products and services, then the goods themselves. Here are six ways:

Use a LinkedIn group to bring together experts and customers online in ways that would never happen offline
Initiate a debate on a highly specific industry issue. The more specific and technical the better, since it will turn up higher in search results.
Set up a wiki to crowdsource research that contributes to the industry. Initiating the effort alone establishes you as a thought leader.
Organize an industry-changing movement through a network like Ning
Trust is built on promises kept. So make your promises publicly, and never, ever break them.
Meet social networking contacts in person. People tend to under-trust those they’ve just met online, and over-trust those they’ve met offline.

These are the paths to thought leadership, and so to inbound consultative sales calls, inclusion in RFPs, the ability to charge premium prices, attract the best talent, and fill reservoirs of goodwill that can be tapped when something goes wrong. And if you’re in PR (to-date, not explicitly a sales function), and someone you’re speaking with says they want to buy your stuff? Hand the prospect over to a sales person, get your credit for the lead, and return to the social web for more.

I’ll get granular with each of these tactics in this week’s posts.

Think there’s a tougher question? Offer it in the comments and we’ll see if we can solve it.

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