Coco, Encino Man and I (why do I not get a cool alter-ego, BTW!) hosted a roundtable discussion here in the Twin Cities a few weeks ago about how to make social media work for B2B, and the good news is the 15 folks who joined us were largely ready to roll up their sleeves and get going. We had folks from financial services, defense industries, high-tech, and higher education represented, and we let them take the conversation where they wanted to.
One of the big issues, however, was, “Where do I focus?” I think this related to a broader reality that is dawning on people looking to use social media for business: The out-of-pocket costs of social media programs are often low but the cost in time (whether your own or an agency’s) is not insignificant.
It’s really just arithmetic. Real relationships take time, and we used to work with a few reporters and editors at trade publications at 100,000-circ. or more, or business outlets that went even higher. We may not have exactly been building trusted relationships with those huge swaths of readers but we were at least efficiently making an impression.
Today, those traditional media opportunities are diminishing, and we’re reaching out to individuals via social media who themselves rarely connect with more than 1,000 other people, often far less. After all, we’re not chasing after celebrity tweeters here. So instead of a dozen top media contacts, we have a hundred (or hundreds) of current or potential advocates. This at a time when resources are scarce and everyone feels overworked.
So what to do?
Start by realizing it’s not about you. I don’t mean that the goal of your social media program shouldn’t be about delivering a benefit to your company. Rather, I mean that people are engaged online whether you’re there or not, talking, learning, creating. Good or fresh ideas are spread, while tired, empty or uninspiring ones are not. Most of those conversations will carry on just fine, thank you very much, with or without your participation. That means you have an opportunity to add your or your company’s valuable perspective to those conversations but you don’t need to drive them. In many cases, you shouldn’t – this is group participation and the loudest voices don’t win.
Then, given you’re not going to do most of the talking, make it easer for your advocates to carry your message. Every study I ever read about B2B purchase decision-makers puts word-of-mouth at the top of trusted sources of information. (For example, IDC’s study, “How US SMBs Gather Information About Technology,” from March, and Forrester’s, “The Social Technographics of Business Buyers,” Feb. 20 – subscription required, sorry.) So, the best thing you can do is make it easy for your supporters to share their positive brand experience with their peers and colleagues. Do you have a YouTube channel so your videos are more shareable? Do you have slide decks on SlideShare so your presentations are more shareable? Is it easy to subscribe and link to content and blogs? Is your online newsroom designed only for professional media or for anyone who wants to talk about you, online or offline?
Understand that one of the neatest things about social media – especially blogs and Twitter – is that it’s not one-to-many, but it spreads from one to a few to scores of people, according to the influence that each person wields. If you have a great story or compelling new information, it can spread as effectively as ever. Moreover, it can make the jump from social to mainstream. In other words, it’s not about not online vs. offline, but about “inline.” There’s a reason why YouTube is often cited as the media’s favorite online source. All these channels work great together.
Yes, tools like Radian6 and CoTweet will get ever more sophisticated and make it easier to help us focus. In the meantime, let the network be the network, let your advocates do your thing. Just take good care of them.