Tag: social intelligence

SocialMedia in the Underground World of B2B

I just returned from SXSW Interactive, it was my first experience attending this event and I was thrilled be a part of it. If you’ve heard from others that it has to be experienced to be understood, it’s true – I’ve never seen anything like it. There was an incredible vibe from the massive amount of high energy innovators who are all on a quest to lead the future of digital & social innovation. Representation ran the gamete from small start-ups to well established global brands leading the way and shaping this exciting period of our history.

I had the privilege to represent IBM Social Business leadership by participating in a panel: SocialMedia in the Underground World of B2B  #SMB2B  in which we discussed many of the pressing issues of implementing social media programs and leveraging social media as a competitive advantage from a leading B2B brand perspective.

Melissa Chanslor from Text 100 Moderated the panel. Participating along with me were marketing leaders Duane Schulz – Xerox, Jeanette Gibson – Cisco and Shanee Ben-Zur – NVIDIA.

Left to right: Melissa Chanslor, Shanee Ben-Zur, Jeanette Gibson, Duane Schultz and Susan Emerick – Photo courtesy of Text 100

Here’s a summary of key points I shared based on our IBM Social Business leadership initiatives:

– Conduct social listening research to better understand how and where your constituencies are participating in social and apply insights gathered from the research to your marketing planning process and tactical execution roadmap.

– Deploy subject matter experts (SMEs) to build relationships with key influencers and those that follow them based on your understanding of the social ecosystem. This approach will position limited, high value resources strategically to drive business outcomes.

– Support SMEs to build their personal as well as your brand’s reputation by implementing employee enablement programs that support high value thought leaders to engage in the right place, at the right time in a secure way. Set clear priorities for engagement.

– Help SMEs understand the many benefits of committing to sustaining engagement by sharing examples of other leaders like them who’ve successfully established a position of authority as a trusted topical thought leader.

You can listen to the panel on the podcast on demand to hear the honest dialogue and many great recommendations shared amongst the team. Thanks to you can also read a summary of the Twitter steam on Storify

 

Traits of Subject Matter Experts who are successfully sharing their knowledge and expertise through social networking

Over the last few years I’ve been working with colleagues across my company to provide them guidance on becoming more effective with sharing their domain knowledge through social networking and collaboration. Many Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) I’ve worked with often ask me “What characteristics are common amongst those that are the most effective and influential?”  The following is a collection of my observations as well as some suggestions from my work enabling the social workforce.

Be true to yourself

Always be true to yourself when you engage in social activities. When establishing a social presence it should be an expression of who you are and what you want to share with others about what you know. Consistently present yourself, using the same tone, in every interaction and communication. Know yourself and be authentic. Be Genuine. Be Real. Be yourself – only you can do that!

Putting yourself out there

I find that the SMEs who become known are those that are comfortable collaborating, commenting, and publishing in social environments in a sustained and highly engaged way. You should assess your comfort level with establishing a public persona. By nature, being active on social means you are putting yourself out in public. When doing so, being honest about who you are and what you know is critical. You need to be comfortable and have a willingness to share your name, your thoughts, opinions, and recommendations to help others who seek your domain expertise. Doing so will help build your character and establish credibility. As you think this through, know your limitations. If you are not comfortable with sharing your knowledge and expertise in such a public forum, you should recognize and respect that.

What are your goals? What do you want to accomplish?

Are you looking to monitor competitors, connect more closely with your customers, or to establish yourself as a prominent thought leader in a particular area? Think about your goals and what you want to accomplish before you get started. Establishing goals will help you to be true to yourself, know your limitations or obstacles as well as provide you context for which tools and venues you should consider as best fit to match your intentions.

Know your audience

Successful SMEs listen to their audience and are willing to leverage listening tools to gather social intelligence and identify the existing social graphs of those they most want to connect with. Consider enhancing your online professional network by:

–       Studying your target audiences wants and needs

–       What questions are they most commonly asking?

–       What issues/problems are they looking to solve?

–       Understand the knowledge sought – do you have something of value to offer? Knowing what is happening TODAY in product or technology vertical is critical

Gather social intelligence to better understand the social ecosystem

–       Pay attention to where they most often participating on-line

–       Which venues? Which communities? Which forums?

–       Who are they connected to?

–       Who are they influenced by?

–       Are you connected with them? If not, why not? Perhaps you should be

Know the rules for engagement

If you are sharing your professional knowledge about a brand or product, you should be sure that you understand the way that topic, brand or product should be represented.

– How should the technology, product or brand be referenced?

– Understand the messaging

– Understand the keywords and natural language your audience uses to discuss the topic, brand or product

– Understand what is OK or NOT OK to share

– What digital assets are available for you to share which would help you help your audience further understand?

Only the passionate survive!

Those that have deep subject matter expertise to share and are passionate believers that knowledge they possess is of interest and will benefit the community they intend to share it with, are the most successful at building a degree of influence. They are relationship builders at heart, who are comfortable with and find value in creating relationships digitally. Successful SMEs are on a quest to make connections and deepen relationships with those who are seeking and understanding of the topic that they are passionate about.

Commitment to sustained engagement

A key trait of successful SMEs is commitment. They strive to sustain engagement long term, while growing and evolving their participation over time to achieve personal and business objectives. They understand that it takes time to build credibility, trust and a degree of influence. They understand that it requires a long-term strategy.

Inquiring minds want to know

Curious by nature engaged SMEs don’t pretend to have all the answers. They know that ambiguity breads commentary and feedback. They often leave the last word to their audience. Doing so allows them to learn more about their audiences needs. It also provides them a way to be responsive to the topic/discussion in a more engaged and relevant way.

Karma

Successful SMEs understand the basic premise of cause and effect, what goes around comes around. They strive to serve the needs of others while receiving insights for themselves. They know that what they publish is permanent and can not be taken back. Remember, if you publish something inappropriate, embarrassing, or hurtful, there will be a record for years to come.

 

Do you have ideas to share on guiding and enabling SMEs? I’d love to hear them.


Keyword selection is critical to social research success

Selecting keywords for your social listening research is the most critical first step to harnessing relevant insights. In a world with a billion computers, four billion cell phones and a robust global Internet, there is an overwhelming amount of digital messages being posted online every day. Since most are likely not relevant to the brand or specific product you’re building a social marketing strategy for, it is important to determine keywords that are contextually aligned to the on-line conversation you’re interested in understanding.

So how do you get started?

Establishing predefined keywords allows you to narrow down the universe of all possible posts to only those that are relevant to the research objectives. Much like developing a screener to determine who you want to invite to a focus group, for example: “Small Business Entrepreneurs” that are “IT professionals” and are the “primary hardware purchase decision-makers” in the “U.S.”

Determine the criteria for inclusion in the listening sample set by defining the keywords that signal: Include this POST in data collection. If the keywords are too broad, then you will get “noise” (irrelevant posts) but if they are too narrow, then you miss relevant conversation and may draw erroneous conclusions.

Created in collaboration with IBM Market Insights, Social Insights Practice

Keyword Refinement Process

When conducting conversation mining, several “strings” are needed:

– A category string designed to pull in discussion relevant to power-type servers

– A branded string designed to pull in mentions of IBM within the larger discussion of power-type servers

– The category string is shaped into a Boolean keyword string*

– It is primarily composed of the most commonly occurring phrases in the product areas, the idea being that by zeroing in on the terminology that buyers actually use, we will best capture their online conversations

The branded string is primarily based on the IBM branded product names and terms

The original list is re-shaped into a Boolean keyword string*

Here’s an example of a topical hierarchy from a recent project I did for IBM Server & Technology Group, Power Systems brand:

Created in collaboration with IBM Market Insights, Social Insights Practice

 

The following recommendations will help you to get started selecting relevant keywords for social listening research:

  1. Review all of the brand, product specific messaging available to you
  2. Review messaging of key competitors
  3. Categorize keywords into a topical hierarchy
  4. Consider adding a qualifier, such as the Topic name (e.g., Unix, Server)
  5. Think of what other meanings the words you are using may have in the marketplace (e.g., storage, ensembles, power, service management)
  6. Be sure to clearly define what you would consider irrelevant, for example: Power Systems related to technology is relevant but Power Systems related to Power Tools or Power/Utility Systems is NOT relevant
  7. If you are including acronyms, be sure to define and qualify them
  8. Consider qualifying keywords by proximity mentioned to other relevant keywords, this helps to indicate topical relevance of the dialog
  9. Validate keywords through Google or other search engines to validate your selection and qualifiers
  10. Validate keywords through using Twitter search; Think of how Twitter may change words, in terms of abbreviations and slang (e.g., “service” may be “SVC,” “management” may be “mgmt”)

 

*Note: Boolean Keyword String – A set of keywords that employs Boolean logic to focus and return specific, relevant messages in search

 

Social Business Transformation

We’re on the cusp of a major shift in business transformation; the interest in companies wanting to adopt social business is on the rise. As businesses seek ways to best leverage social computing it’s imperative to consider traditional business model norms that will prevent progress for your brand.

IBM sees social business and the move to enable the mobile workforce as a key driver of business transformation, helping all aspects of an organization from marketing, human resources, sales and customer support and development,  leverage the power of social concepts in their business processes.

IBM’s social business strategy seeks to focus our interactions on concrete outcomes: enhancing our brands social presence, projecting employee expertise, driving innovation, and delivering business value.

Using agile methods, we’re learning to build informed engagement models based on robust social intelligence. Starting with key subject matter experts who have proven to be early adopters of social media and social technology, we’re devising repeatable methodologies to enable the workforce and exploring how to evolve them at scale. IBMers are empowered to collaborate and share their deep technical knowledge, passion for IBM products/solutions with each other, customers and prospects seeking their knowledge. Our employee enablement programs provide guidance on social computing policies, governance, education and training. Here are some examples:

Social Computing Curriculum:

  • – Certification-based training
  • – On-demand courses:  Fundamentals, Relationship building, Digital Citizenship

Social Enablement:

  • – Practical guidance and exercises to help employees define social profiles
  • – Set up social channels & develop social presence

Expertise Location System:

  • – Web application for finding IBM experts by skill or expertise
  • – Employees define their areas of expertise and choose types of activities they will perform

Ultimately, employees are becoming stewards of social computing best practices and effective brand ambassadors.  I’ll be sharing more about IBM Social Business transformation at WOMMA School of WOM on Monday, May 9th in Chicago along with Bill Chamberlin, Principal Research Analyst, Corporate Marketing & Communications, IBM  and  Chris Boudreaux, SVP of Management Consulting, Converseon.  We hope to meet you there.

You may also find IBM’s Social Business Jam results interesting.

TheAppGap: IBM Releases Social Jam 2011 Results

Targeted social media marketing engagement

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.

Increasing social proficiency to build influence

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

Increasing social proficiency drives influence
Social engagement progression path

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.

What role does social intelligence play in empowering a social workforce?

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.

Using Social Intelligence to Kick-Start Your Social Marketing Strategy

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: