I’m proud to be a Spartan! My college experience was unforgettable and propelled me to pursue my dreams of working in the Marketing & Communication profession. My Alma Mater Michigan State University, ran this nice feature to help promote my book The Most Powerful Brand on Earth: How to Transform Teams, Empower Employees, Integrate Partners and Mobilize Customers to Beat the Competition in Digital and Social Media.
Read the full post: Alumna Leads IBM’s Internet and Social Business Marketing
CMO of Branderati and author of Think Like Zuck, EKaterina Walter explores the emerging employee advocacy movement in this post: Want to find brand ambassadors? Start with your employees where she cites my point of view that “in social media people – not brands – are the channel.” For more on the importance of building trust & credibility, how to support your employees to engage and drive brand advocacy, and how not to treat social media as just another channel, reference: The Most Powerful Brand on Earth
Greg Gerik @ggerik of 3M moderates a panel of pioneering brand marketers at the 3M Think Tank. Kevin Hunt (General Mills), Susan Emerick (IBM) and Mason Nelder (Verizon) openly discuss core challenges companies face when embracing digital & social.
Mason Nelder @MasonNelder cites “Closing the leadership knowledge gap” as a huge challenge and how “It’s on us to communicate and educate” and help drive change. “We’re in a big incubator – fail fast, fail often — but learn from it and find incremental gains. … We must keep the voice of the customer at every point of the product lifecycle.”
Kevin Hunt @kevin_hunt explains the talent gap. “There aren’t enough rubber bands and sticks of gum”, currently staff is stretched really thin and lack of funding is a challenge. There’s an expectation that people will where many hats. In the future, it’ll be a luxury that we’ll be able to have staff who are more well rounded, demonstrating higher levels of aptitude to support your company’s needs. “There are scores of new leaders on the horizon, soon a new landscape will be upon us.”
What is Nirvana? Susan Emerick @sfemerick shares that “social must become integrated into the way we work, a part of every aspect of the work we do, and gone are the days of silo’s. Soon, it will be integrated into Sales, Customer Service, HR, in addition to Marketing & Communications. …. We have a vast opportunity to expose the expertise of employees through Employee Advocacy.”
Seated left to right: Kevin Hunt, Susan Emerick, Mason Nelder and Greg Gerik
Touring the 3M Innovation Center was an amazing immersive experience. The space, set up with interactive demo stations, chronicled thousands of product discoveries, advancements and featured how each makes life better. Burgeoning with stories about the work passionate 3M employees do, all just waiting to be told.
A huge Thank You to Greg Gerik @ggerik of 3M and his team for organizing and hosting such a great event. I was honored to be included.
Employee Advocacy is getting a lot of hype lately. So what’s the secret to empowering social employees to be engaged in social media to benefit your brand? Here’s a short video from today’s 3M Think TANK, hosted by Greg Gerik where following Brian Solis, I present a few concepts from our new book The Most Powerful Brand on Earth: How to Transform Teams, Empower Employees, Integrate Partners, and Mobilize Customers to Beat the Competition in Digital and Social Media
3M ThinkTANK, September 26, 2013 – Susan Emerick
For the full roadmap on how to mobilize expert employees to advocate for your brand, check out the book on Amazon 
In a world where information continues to explode, people still trust people. In fact, research from Edelman and Nielsen continue to show that people are more likely to trust information from an organization’s employee or from someone they perceive to be like themselves, than from an organization’s official communicators, web site or sponsored content.
If your content marketing plans do not include some level of empowering employees to publish in social media, you may be missing a huge opportunity to build trust with your audience.
This post Two Surprising Keys to Build Trust and Drive Sales Through Social Media by my co-author Chris Boudreaux, ran today on Social Media Today and will help you understand how to build trust and drive sales in Social Media.
Today I chatted with BlogTalkRadio’s Kathy Klotz-Guest @kathyklotzguest about the employee advocacy strategy my team has been leading at IBM. We discuss how to contend with the need for content, how it’s not just about technology, and how to balance marketing as both art and science.
With many years of careful strategic planning and implementation, IBM now has more internal employee bloggers/champions than any company around. If you’re interesting in how IBM has been able to scale relationships by being open, decentralizing content creation and trusting (and empowering) passionate employees to carry the torch, you’ll want to take a listen: The Social Enterprise: Lessons on Content, Internal Advocacy and the Human Element
I recently shared my thoughts on how marketing professionals are generally ill-prepared for leveraging the opportunities available for using data and analytics tools to gain deeper insights into customer behaviors and market trends. Here’s an excerpt from that discussion where I explain how B2B marketing leaders need to move beyond simply consuming data to using data in real-time and applying predictive analytics to better align the insights that are obtained with the strategic initiatives the organization is focused on. You can read further details in IBM’s Global CMO Study
Participating along with me on this panel were B2B marketing experts David Meerman Scott and Mark Wilson @Avaya. Thanks to veteran journalist Ellis Booker for moderating our discussion. View our Google Hangout discussion in full: Top B2B Marketing Trends 2013
This post is especially important for agency partners who are striving to build and maintain business with a client. It’s written from my vantage point as the “client”, and summarizes my thoughts on ways to successfully end a client relationship, obviously a list of “what not to do”. Certainly each should be avoided if you intend to retain a client’s business.
Reflecting on 2012, I have a lot to be thankful for and proud of. However an experience I had during this year (unfortunately it wasn’t a good one) prompted this post. I wanted to be sure to capture these points because it’s my belief that from difficult situations, lessons can be learned if you’re willing to be open to debriefing, discussing and sharing to avoid repeating them in the future.
A bit of perspective, I spent several years in the beginning of my career on the agency side of the business. I’d like to think that having done so makes me a more reasonable client, one who knows and appreciates the in’s and out’s of agency operations and one who knows it’s critical for clients to provide clear direction. I always strive to be clear with requirements, limitations and overall direction throughout each initiative. I’m also deeply committed to delivering successful programs and believe that strong partnerships are key to that success.
How to end a client relationship:
* Clients hire agencies on a “work for hire” contract or retainer basis. Clients document requirements & relationship terms of delivery in scope of requirements documents as well as base agreement which stipulate terms of the contract – work for hire.
I’d be interesting in knowing what you think and if you have other thoughts on this topic, please post your comments.
As you begin planning your social strategy, it’s important to do so with a focus on customer relevance.
You should learn how your target audience is currently using social media, how they’re engaging, what their general preferences are and where they’re participating most often. Looking at a combination of these factors will help you ascertain the value of one given venue versus another, and help ensure your engagement plan is on track with an eye towards maximizing potential. The best way to get started is to develop an ongoing social listening practice that informs your overall social outreach plans. Doing so will ensure that you are targeting your audience with precision.
Social engagement planning with your target audience top of mind
For each social outreach effort, you must determine who you are trying to reach. Historically, this has been done through market segmentation, but the rise of digital media requires us to think differently about the people we wish to engage and how best to connect with them. You should define your target audience sets and then consider:
Who are you really trying to reach?
How will you identify & locate these target audience(s)?
What are their demographics?
Where do they most often participate online?
What are their issues & ambitions?
How do you describe their current relationship to your organization?
Are they positive, negative or neutral toward your brand?
What are their shared pain points and interests?
Once you have these answers, work to define the value your brand provides to the target audience and build a team of Subject Matter Experts who can engage with the audience and share their domain expertise and contextually relevant content. The more targeted and specific you are up-front about your target audience, the easier it will be to create an integrated digital and social outreach plan they will respond to.
Social media can play an integral role in your brand’s overall marketing plan, but like any other tactic or channel, it should not be approached independently.
Rather, social should be incorporated into your larger digital strategy and connected to other properties where and when relevant. When planning to leverage a social presence it’s important to understand what role you expect it to play in supporting your overall business and marketing goals. This will not only help you frame your approach, it will also help put in place measures to monitor performance, progress, and success.
Social media is not just another venue used to push out content; rather, social gives you the ability to connect your target audience with with members of your brand team and other individuals who have a stake in your brand’s message. It’s about helping you develop long-term relationships.
How will you ensure that your social marketing engagement is on target to support your brands marketing priorities?
A lot of B2B social media marketers struggle with how to sustain the social engagement of their Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) with the target audience. I’ve done a good amount of work in this area and have built an approach I call social ecosystem mapping. In this post I’ll share the inputs required for building a social map. I’ll also provide you some tips on how to organize your social coverage model, selecting the best suited SMEs for engagement and how to support them with content.
Taking the time to build a social map will position your SMEs not only to represent their expertise but also to express brand/product value in the exchange. Ultimately SMEs will be well supported to sustain social engagement long term with the target audience as brand evangelists.
Social ecosystem mapping
Here’s an outline of the steps to build an informed engagement plan based on social research and marketing priorities
Prerequisites:
1. Prioritize the idea/message for which you want to be known based on your business priorities and marketing objectives
2. Monitor the dialogue by conducting social monitoring research based on the key topics of contextual relevance
3. Analyze research findings and use the insights to inform your engagement plan and set priorities
Now you’re ready to build a map of the social ecosystem based on these insights.
By topic map out:
1. Communities and top domains for targeting
2. Influencers/Authors that are considered leading authorities in the dialogue
3. Select the best suited internal SMEs for engagement. You will want to choose those that are well positioned to provide sought after expertise and can provide business value in the exchange. (There will likely be multiple SMEs, try to map them to support the outreach based on their ability to support the progression stages mentioned in #6 below)
4. Determine the SMEs enablement requirements based on an assessment of their social readiness and develop support
5. Evaluate content requirements; determine the assets required to support SMEs in their ongoing dialogue.
6. Select assets. It’s best to map the assets out by the progression path of the dialogue. For example classify assets based on consideration stages: Awareness, Consideration, Interest, Evaluation, Final Selection, Sale and Post Sale
7. Prepare assets for digital distribution, optimizing content for search, content tagging etc.
8. Determine an editorial calendar. Timing and cadence. This will need to be built based on your content develop process.
With this social ecosystem mapping complete, you are now ready to provide it as guidance to your team of SMEs. I have found SMEs to welcome this kind of engagement guidance. It helps them to focus their time and effort in social where they will provide the most value. It also ensures that their outreach is aligned to your brands business priorities and marketing objectives. Supporting them with content at each stage ensures that they are on brand/on message. If they follow the map, they will be well positioned for effective long term engagement that will drive business outcomes.
9. Activate SMEs to establish & build relationships in targeted communities, top domains and with key influencers.
Relationship building on-line takes time. With this map SMEs will focus their efforts on nurturing the most important, high value relationships in the target segments. Ultimately, if influencers receive value from your SMEs they will become advocates & foster advocacy on behalf your brand sharing with their followers & extended networks.
10. Ongoing monitoring and measurement is imperative to ensure that you stay abreast of changes in the social ecosystem. Providing you an understanding of what’s working or not working in the engagement model. Be prepared to take action based on what the measurements are telling you. Make necessary adjustments. Measure if these adjustments have a positive or negative impact. Social ecosystems are dynamic so you will want to be fine tuning your engagement model on a regular basis.
Developing the Social Influence Plan
The foundation of a successful social media marketing engagement strategy is dependent on recruiting the right subject matter experts (SMEs) and each individual’s commitment to participate in sustained on-line engagement for the long term to achieve the program objectives. When building relationships, online or off, each of us is inherently different and therefore our participation is unique. While there are various techniques that lend themselves effectively to building social influence, there isn’t a guide book or manual that works for everyone.
Committed SMEs tend to be early adopters that experiment to find what works for them. However, not every one is an early adopter, and even those who are would benefit from enablement support. This is why I’m currently piloting a “Social Eminence Program”, to help SMEs utilize their time more efficiently where it will drive desired outcomes.
Start by gathering input
Realizing that not every approach will work for every person, I’m starting by taking the time to get to know the SMEs through a thorough assessment of their digital footprint, eco-system of connections and researching how they currently communicate in social. By evaluating these activities and those of similar personalities within the same area of expertise, plus utilizing insights from social research, you can help SMEs set priorities.
Building on-line relationships takes time and effort
Build a social influence roadmap
With this baseline of understanding, you’re on your way to providing recommendations and tips on the best approaches to reach key influencers, engage more effectively and build stronger relationships. Provide SME’s social intelligence to help them focus their engagement where relevant conversations are happening, in venues of most important, and which key mavens they should connect and nurture relationships with.
Recommendations should be designed to help them prioritize and evolve current behaviors, approaches and tools that they’re using. Doing so will assist them in achieving the ultimate goal of building influence over time.
A solid social media marketing strategy focuses employee interactions on concrete outcomes that enhance their social presence, project their expertise, stimulate innovation, and deliver business value.
To ensure that employees are focusing their interactions where they will drive business outcomes, it is important to provide them enablement support. Be sure that workforce enablement is a key part of your social media marketing strategy.
One of the first priorities of your enablement plan should include is providing market place segmentation. Gathering intelligence from monitoring on-line conversations will provide you an understanding of where your target audience participates in on-line dialogues most often, in which venues and with whom. Packaging this social intelligence into an easy to understand market segmentation road map will allow your employees to spend their valuable time and effort developing and nurturing relationships in the social ecosystem aligned to your brands objectives.
Such a road map will also allow them to begin making connections with opinion shapers, decision makers and “mavens” on topics of interest. It will help them prioritize, sub-segment and customize their communications more effectively. They will have a clearer view of where the competitors are connected or absent.
Armed with this understanding, they will be empowered to build strong relationships and become a powerful channel for sharing their expertise in the market. They will be valuable catalysts to introduce the target audience to new connections, for example to key advocates of your brand.
While social intelligence plays a critical role in developing an effective B2B social marketing strategy, many marketers make the mistake of instead rushing to deploy tactics and experiment with new tools first.
Don’t make the mistake of overlooking the importance of gathering social intelligence before you develop your social marketing strategy.
The foundation of a social marketing strategy begins with social research. It’s imperative to understand the social eco-system relative to topics important to your business priorities, the on-line behaviors of your target audience, and your brand’s current or relative position and opportunities within it.
Slow and steady wins the race.
The first step to building your social marketing strategy should be taking the time to gather as much social intelligence as possible and harnessing insights from it to build an informed engagement and tactical execution plan. I refer to this first step as “Listen and Learn” of formulating a data-driven strategy and consider it to be foundational to informed strategic decision making. Some questions that may help you frame what you seek to learn would be:
• Where are conversations happening?
• In which venues and domains?
• Who’s leading the conversations?
• Have are these individuals earned a stature of authority on the topic?
• Who’s following and contributing to the dialogue?
• How often are they discussing key topics?
• What is the natural language used?
• Is your brand mentioned? If so, by who? Your customers? Your competitors?
• Are you or your employees a representative voice within these conversations on behalf of your brand?
• What is the sentiment around your brand mentions?
The second step is to create Understanding, this is accomplished through mining and analyzing on-line conversations from social listening and monitoring and primary and secondary research. Building a baseline of understanding from patterns such as topical themes, keywords and phrases that are most used, trends over time, as well as prominent and/or influential people and their connectivity across the social web eco-system. Using insights from analysis allows you to develop informed data-driven strategies, establish new or refine existing goals, identify publics, and determine the need to develop unique strategies for key groups. In this phase, practitioners frequently analyze and evaluate:
• Target Publics (audience segments) to obtain information on decision makers, these could be a mix of current customers, prospective customers, and influencers.
• Market segmentation is the process of dividing a group of potential consumers into different clusters based on characteristics. What a company is then left with are sets of consumers that should respond similarly to marketing strategies.
• Determine if additional social listening and monitoring, and primary or secondary research is necessary to better understand audiences, trends, by conducting additional market analysis, to further examine opinion, behaviors, and attitudes.
Harness the findings, then use them to inform your social marketing strategy and the best mix of tactics is considered the third phase and is focussed on planning. Using the understanding of the natural language expressed in social dialogue, attributes, behaviors and buying patterns of target audience ascertained from the previous learn and understand phases, identify the specific target audience(s) that must be reached to achieve the goal and objectives of the plan. Each target audience will have specific messaging, strategies, channel and communications preferences that must be considered and applied to the tactics developed. You may develop primary messages or secondary messages for each audience. Also, this is a good time to set benchmarks. Then use them for measuring relative change over time as you implement and evaluate the effectiveness of your tactical execution plan.
Finally, evaluate the tactical execution to determine content performance in terms of the content types and the channels in which the content was distributed, will determine which channels reached the target audience more effectively and once reached which content forms attained higher engagement and re-sharing. This is also the time to focus on evaluating the effectiveness of the execution and engagement led by influencers, employees, and brand advocates who were equipped to share information across all channels. Which of them is performing most effectively? Which is accomplishing the goals aligned to the strategy? Are any under performing? If so, what remediation plan needs to be instituted?
It is important to determine a cadence for harvesting insights, conducting analysis and reporting results. Providing a summary of and clearly articulating performance is key to helping stakeholders understand results. This is also your opportunity to gain their confidence and support to continue optimizing your data-driven strategies. Here’s an example of KPIs that you may construct to demonstrate program performance:
