The Mountaintop Insights, Inspiration and Perspective for Enlightened Marketers

May 13, 2010

Mountain Top update

Filed under: Customer Loyalty — Jeff @ 4:54 pm

First off, sorry for the huge delay in posting! Business has been crazy with lots of great things going on.

A couple new posts are coming to the mountaintop over the next week, including:

– A new Darwinian article on Social Dominance – How to build a brand with socially dominant traits

– An online demand generation case study based on a very recent and highly successful project for a mid size B2B client in the services sector

– A new behavioral series that will be going up at www.b2bbloggers.com as well.  This series will look at some advanced theories on online human behavior including: building positive obligation, the value of appreciation, and why CRM doesn’t benefit the customer.

Also have some upcoming articles being published through some very cool folks that are helping me build some awareness. Should be an exciting May and June!

Thanks for your patience and updates to the Mountain Top coming early next week.

Cheers!

Jeff – Sensei

April 14, 2010

Demand Generation and Social Media for B2B Enterprise

Filed under: Customer Experience,Demand Generation,Human Behavior,Social Experience Design,Social Media — Jeff @ 3:30 pm

I had an interesting conversation with one of my clients last night and it is one, not just myself, but every consultant and marketing executive has been thinking about since Social Media has become the craze. How do we get the leads?

And by leads, we are talking qualified expressions of interest in doing business with you leads.

What is the Role of Social Media in a Demand Generation Program?

The first part of the challenge is that we are looking at Social Media to deliver leads, and while this can happen, it is more likely that social media is an integrated part of an ongoing demand generation program working at the beginning of the cycle and supporting throughout.

The pivotal role of Social Media for Demand Generation is to attract and engage influencers, not decision-makers. To do this, you need to:

  • Research your target markets and understand their current needs and issues
  • Create an editorial schedule that accomplishes two things:
    • Discusses the issues/needs
    • Discusses the solutions to those issues and needs
  • Do it without shamelessly promoting yourself. It’s not about you.
  • The rest of the best practices around Social Media engagement apply

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How do we Integrate Social Media into Demand Generation?

Integration requires an understanding of the Demand Generation process and the decision-making process of the influencer community you are targeting. Some critical things to remember:

  1. Align the Demand Generation process with the decision-making process
  2. Ensure your content is available in many forms (pod casts, pdfs, videos, webinars, presentations, etc.) to appeal to many personal preferences for acquiring knowledge
  3. Create a “Swiss cheese” type model of engagement allowing them to pop in and out of the process or different media options anytime, anywhere while staying within an overall demand generation framework.
  4. This is a marathon not a sprint. Think long term, but plan by quarter. A huge mistake is to think that these people are ready to buy based on your quarterly financial schedule. The Social Media component allows continual engagement so that when they are ready (6, 9, or 18 months down the road) you are still engaged and top of mind.

The Social Media Take-away for Influencers

The net result of the social media component within demand generation should be to build rapport, confidence and comfort in your audience. Comfort that allows them to begin to take further steps within the Demand Generation process. This will often lead them to commitment for additional steps such as attending events or webinars, signing up for newsletters, or booking  1on1 calls or meetings with your experts or Account Executives.

Emotional Stages of Commitment

Finally, your Demand Generation program should be walking them through 4 key areas of emotional commitment, each stage built by a combination of marketing tactics and personal interactions with your people.

  • Rapport – Your ability to quickly engage in a meaningful way that meets their immediate needs
  • Confidence – Increasing credibility through timely, relevant, valuable content and dialogue. Prove you know what you are talking about.
  • Comfort – Increasing seriousness in commitment to not just the process, but the relationship
  • Trust – You become a confidante and information, insights, and perspective become freely shared

Done right, Social Media becomes a lynch pin in not just ongoing intellectual engagement but also to gauge audience receptivity to your brand and their emotional attachment to your people.

This is where the rubber meets the road on developing long term, meaningful relationships that turn into customers.

Agree? Disagree? Think I’m a lunatic?

Let me know. I love the discussions and look forward to the journey of discovery with you!

Cheers!

Jeff – Sensei

April 5, 2010

Nice Guys Finish First – Natural Selection in Social Media

Filed under: Customer Experience,Customer Loyalty,Human Behavior,Social Experience Design,Social Media — Jeff @ 2:49 pm

Oh the irony.

For centuries, the bad business guy has perceivably won every encounter. He has manipulated and lied and under delivered and gotten away with it every time because we were all kept in the dark. With marketing on their side, we were lured into the spider’s web only to be caught in contracts, given poor service and saddled with products that didnt meet expectations. This was the natural way of things. We were prey, they were predators.

The good guy suffered, sometimes achieved great things, sometimes not. He suffered, not by his own hand, but because we had no trust anymore – a shared fate resulting from the bad guy’s destruction of consumer faith. And really, don’t all companies look and sound the same? Not anymore. Social Media has finally given the nice guys a way to prove themselves; a way to show through listening and action that they are indeed different and worthy like my beloved Starbucks.

I look at it as karmic revenge. Social Media has given nice guys the ultimate tool to win the hearts and minds of customers. It is an evolutionary cycle in the making between companies that only take and companies that give and take equally.

How would Darwin have seen it?

I think that the best example I could find was how Darwin looked at the selection of favourable traits over injurious traits. In new environments such as Social Media, old corporate traits like greed and not listening would be considered injurious; a factor that leads invariably to extinction. Whereas a trait such as listening and reacting (in a reasonable amount of time) is a favourable trait in Social Media; a factor that contributes to dominance in nature and the expansion of the species, or the brand as the case may be.

Is it possible to evolve or take on these favourable traits? Of course, but not many companies today can do it easily, if at all. To those nice guy companies though, Social Media has ushered in the dawning of a new era in business – an era where nice guys finish first.

How big does the apple have to be?

Now all we have to do as customers is wake up and get over our own self-limiting behaviour of being in abusive relationships to realize that there are nice guys out there who want to earn our business and not take advantage of us at every step. A company that will love us and hold us figuratively close.

What is the business equivalent of spooning anyway?

Ferociously,

Jeff – Sensei

March 28, 2010

Is Our Greatest Enemy in Social Media Time?

Filed under: Customer Loyalty — Jeff @ 8:44 am

As human beings, we are ruled by time. In every aspect of life, we seem to struggle against it to try and gain an advantage of some kind. For me this has been top of mind of late.

I started to think how time was affecting me (and my B2B clients) of late…

  1. Planning and Prep – The time necessary to properly plan Social Media programs is deceiving. This is due in large part to two factors.
    1. Doing it properly versus just jumping in. Developing a strategy that is aligned with the brand experience and integrated with other marketing/sales programs takes a lot of work. It is well beyond just making a Twitter or FaceBook account.
    2. Finding the right people. This goes well beyond all the smoke and mirrors of having a so called “Social Media expert”. Finding the right people to be involved including strategist, management, content writers, analysts, and researchers, not to mention third parties like partners and content contributors is very time consuming.
  2. Commitment – In my mind, this is the one that almost everyone has underestimated. Because of the nature of Social Media relationships, the medium demands much more time than one way communication channels. The difference is traditional communications (the ones we are all used to) work on a “burst” type model. You prep, send and watch results, much like chess – you have time to think about your next move. Social Media on the other hand, is constant and dynamic which means it is very difficult to automate around and needs constant human intervention of all kinds. In Social Media you have to think on your feet and that is very different and difficult for large enterprise.
  3. The Great Unknown – Social Media really is an unknown to almost every large enterprise and that means risk.
    1. Executive and management make decisions slower to try and understand what they are getting into; certainly the lawyers want to make sure the enterprise is not exposed.
    2. We are learning as we go. Contrary to what the self proclaimed gurus say, this is a complex medium that is continuing to evolve rapidly. The unknown factor means that large enterprise should be using a cautious, risk managed approach; one that grows organically and is constantly adapted to fit social and community need.

For me personally, time hasn’t been kind. I am admittedly struggling to find balance on 5 crtiical areas of my business and personal life.

  • My family and being a Dad to three small children.
  • My business and my clients (and demand for services is increasing, not decreasing)
  • My book (and with a publishing deal pending, the demand on that is going to increase significantly)
  • My blog (unfortunately lower in the totem pole than i would like)
  • My personal life (making time to work out and look after me)

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What I am finding is that balance is being created naturally as I re-align my priorities and adapt my work habits to accommodate positive change.

  • I am using the blog to support the book and my clients which increases the priority of the blog and enables me to accomplish 3 goals through one channel.
  • I have begun to doing very active things with my kids incorporating exercise into almost everything. This has worked so well on many fronts as the kids love being active with me and I get even more time with them.
  • I am really being fussy about the projects I take on and have leveraged a couple great people to help on current projects. End result is a time gain for me without affecting the results to my clients.

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As I work with clients, I am working with them to help find natural balance to make time our ally instead of an enemy. Maybe time isn’t an enemy after all – maybe it was my perspective that was flawed…

March 13, 2010

Is Your Brand Naturally Predisposed for Success in Social Media?

Filed under: Customer Experience,Social Experience Design,Social Media — Jeff @ 8:49 am

I was in Starbucks this morning (Venti Americano – just milk) and it struck me. As I looked at the environment inside I couldn’t help but see the digital version of this cafe within a twitter or Facebook like setting.

What struck me is how the staff really make the difference here. The staff at this particular location are highly interactive with the customers and this creates a far friendlier atmosphere. The customers got to know each other and the tables come together easily resulting in broad and wonderful discussions with people of all sorts. Their attitude is infectious and it is the same in their Social Media presence.

What Makes Starbucks Naturally Successful?

In my mind, Starbucks has the winning formula for success in Social Media, but they had it before Social Media became hot. They have a social brand. And it isn’t just the cafe setting and the friendly staff. Here are some other social traits they have going for them.

  • Alignment and tremendous real involvement with the Green Movement
  • A social approach to customer service enabling them to connect with almost any customer in an emotional way
  • Affordable quality in all of their products making them huge with GenXers in particular
  • An internal culture that is naturally social and this comes out in how well they are able to connect with the community they are in the customers they serve.

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So I started following Starbucks on Twitter and it is absolutely fascinating. They have taken what they do so well in their cafe and have very successfully reproduced it on Twitter. Here you have a number of staff tasked with making every single person that comes into the Twitter channel feel good.

So now, I’m going to start looking at other brands that I believe are Naturally Social and see how they are doing in Social Media environments. Is there a set of best practices for example that can be learned from these great companies?

If you know of any that are exemplary of Naturally Social Brands, then please let me know.

Cheers!

Jeff – Sensei

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