What makes a world class brand? Increasingly the answer is how social it is.
Our team at Weber Shandwick, along with Forbes Insights, recently surveyed 1,897 senior executives from major companies in 50 different countries. The resulting study – Socializing Your Brand: A Brand’s Guide to Sociability – notes that global executives attribute 52% of brand reputation to online sociability. Social brands are defined in the study as those that “get their communities of interest engaged and develop meaningful ties over shared passions or commonalities.”
Most of the best-known social brands cater to consumers, using social channels to build relationships with legions of fans and brand advocates to sell everything from soft drinks to shoes. But what about those brands that sell to other businesses? Is social important for them as well? In a recent article in BMA Buzz, I was asked to weigh in on how the study’s findings apply to brand sociability for B2B companies. Not surprisingly, the study identifies nine drivers of world class brand sociability and each has application in the B2B space.
For example, the first driver, “It’s not the medium — and it’s more than the message,” makes the point that it’s not just about having a social presence, but creating original content geared for clients, prospects and industry influencers. For many B2B brands, sharing quality content in the form of industry thought leadership has long been an essential component of a successful go-to-market strategy. Such thought leadership typically takes the form of white papers and public speeches, but world class B2B brands will think about all the different ways that thought leadership can be packaged — as videos, infographics, blog posts, presentation decks, podcasts, Q&As, image galleries, data visualizations or even mobile apps — and then shared and syndicated to multiple destinations on the social web, such as corporate and partner blogs, popular social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+ and content-sharing channels such as YouTube, Slideshare or Visual.ly.
In contrast to consumers, who typically go online seeking friends, diversion or entertainment, business users more often use social streams to gather important news, information and ideas that help them be more effective at their jobs. So for B2B brands, it’s not just about hammering home messages through social channels, but serving communities of interest with business information that is actionable and can support better decision-making.
Another driver is “Integrate or die.” Simply stated, successful use of social media is about making it part of daily operations, through social media policies, employee involvement and executive sponsorship and online participation. Most importantly, world class companies make social communications part of their overall brand strategy, with a consistent brand personality across multiple channels — yet overall, less than two-thirds of all companies in the survey (63%) do this. Successful B2B brands will approach social media as a Change Management exercise — an opportunity to think about how the organization can use social channels to complement so-called “traditional” marketing channels, such as direct mail and trade shows. B2B technology companies in particular have been proactive in this regard, adding online engagement to executive visibility at conferences and other industry events.
Each of the other drivers cited in the study, such as “Listen more than you talk,” “Think Global” and “Be Vigilant” has relevance to B2B brands. Although the B2B world has been more measured in its adoption of social media increasingly, key clients, prospects and influencers are on the social web evaluating products, reviewing thought leadership and discussing key technologies and industry players. B2B marketers and business leaders are realizing that having a well-defined social strategy is no longer a nice-to-have: it is now table stakes in a fast-moving game in which world class social brands will increasingly hold the best cards.