SVESMC Brings Bay Area Social Media Execs Together

March 30, 2011 — Laura Ramos

Like you, I get hundreds of invitations to join LinkedIn Groups.  As a B2B marketer interested in industry services marketing and the implications of social media on an integrated marketing mix, I find very few of these groups to include true peers. Instead, these groups appear full of consultants wanting to make connections and peddle their services to larger organizations. It’s hard to find true affinity in LinkedIn groups and more rare to find one that functions as a true community.

The exception I have found is the Silicon Valley Executive Social Media Council (SVESMC). 

Ted Sapountzis, VP of Social Media Audience Marketing at SAP, introduced me to this group after we met for lunch in December of last year.  Ted and I met previously when we spoke on a Global Social CRM panel moderated by Esteban Kolsky in September at Cisco’s TelePresence Suites in Santa Clara. Social networking maven and meet-up extraordinaire, Tanya Kanzaveli, found me and extended the invitation. (I agreed to speak on the panel to experience Telepresence first-hand, if truth be told.)  

I am very glad Ted introduced me to SVESMC. This group works for me is because it starts with personal connections and then leads to the online world, not the other way around. As an example of another personal connection, Gurmeet Dhaliwal, VP of Internet Marketing at CA, who also spoke on that same panel is a member of SVESMC as well.  (Do you start to see how this networking thing works….?)

SVESMC’s mission is to help members create the most effective, extraordinary social media programs possible. It is a private community for social media leaders at predominantly high-tech, large companies. Through the Council, members share insights, ideas, and best practices in a peer-to-peer environment. Members hold conversations under strict confidentiality, allowing for open and candid discussions. There are no vendors, no sales pitches, and no outside “experts” — just honest advice and dialogue.  I like that.

Last week, SAP hosted the first summit for this council. Natascha Thomson wrote a great blog post summarizing the event. For me, the highlight was Ted’s talk about how SAP developed a marketing “dashboard” for measuring the impact of social activity around developer/user events in a business-meaningful manner (note: nothing confidential exposed here). If you’d like to know more, apply to Natascha to join the group (natascha.thomson@sap.com).  The group is closed — so you have to hunt for it on LinkedIn — and it takes the confidentiality promise very seriously. 

If you join, I hope to see you at an upcoming dinner, summit, or meet-up sometime soon.  Or to connect virtually through the group site on LinkedIn. Virtual or in-person, if you are responsible for social media strategy or execution at your firm – and want to connect with others who share the same enthusiasm and concerns around this new communication medium – this group is for you.

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Tackling Content Management with BtoB Magazine

March 17, 2011 — Laura Ramos

Last month, BtoB Magazine asked me to speak on a panel as part of its NetMarketing Breakfast Series at the Hotel Nikko in San Francisco on February 16. BtoB’s NetMarketing Breakfast events explore how b-to-b marketers use the Internet to communicate with customers and prospects. Together with Kevin Cox from SAP and Pam Didner from Intel, I shared a short presentation showing some examples of effective online marketing campaigns that we executed here at Xerox. 

My presentation examined two case studies: Xerox’s Real Business Live and Xerox Global Services’s Thought Leadership campaigns — both of which feature an integrated array of online, broadcast, and conventional marketing approaches and tactics.  You can download a copy of the presentation from BtoB Magazine’s site if you are interested in seeing more.

As a follow up to this panel, the writers at BtoB asked me to comment on the following question:

“How are you managing content for marketing?”

You can see from my response, that I answered the question quite literally while Pam and Mark Wilson, VP Corporate Marketing at Sybase — who I know from my analyst days and have admired his work on provocation marketing, provided more high-level advice.

Looking at the topic of content management best practices more broadly, I would echo Pam’s advice that “content is king, but creative is queen”. It’s not enough to have interesting content, but you have to present that content in a way that engages the audience and compels them to interact with you. I think good storytelling is key to making content compelling and relevant. As are proper grammar, clear writing, and the ability to write copy that reflects your customer’s concerns, not yours.

Central to any B2B marketer’s narrative should be your clients and the stories they tell about how you helped them to solve difficult problems or to make their business operate more effectively or efficiently.  So marketers, worry more about developing, presenting, and syndicating your content than “managing” it.  Because getting buyers and customers to talk about you is what gets others to notice.

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Summit on Customer Engagement 2011, Day Two

March 2, 2011 — Laura Ramos

What is “customer engagement”, exactly? I don’t think the term is one most business people would recognize as a common marketing function like PR, Marcom, field marketing, or product marketing. The best definition I’ve heard here at the Summit on Customer Engagement is:

“Customer Engagement includes the role, responsibilities, and activities around all the non-revenue value a company/organization receives from its clients and buyers.”

The concept continues to expand beyond customer reference management to include advisory councils, communities (non-developer), events (in particular virtual), and testimonial (written, digital, video, and in person.) You could argue other points, but this list encompasses about 90% of the content shared during this conference.

More generally, marketing should be all about customer engagement. The definition reminds us that: 1) Marketing’s job is to scale the opportunities our firms have too engage with prospects and customers and 2) it’s a two-way street and customers should benefit as much (if not more) than our companies do when customers engage with us.

My view today on customer engagement focused on how Xerox Services uses video to engage our customers.  The examples I shared in my presentation — available here on Slideshare – are by no means ground-breaking or completely innovative.  But the examples demonstrate how Xerox uses video to create a persistent, engaging experience centered on our customers and about how we serve them best.  Key take-aways about the connection between video and customer engagement are:

1) B2B marketers underuse video. In earlier studies I did at Forrester, just under 50% of B2B marketers said that they used online video in their marketing mix - a percentage far less than email and search marketing, but also trailing behind emerging tactics like social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn), Twitter and other Web 2.0 tools.

2) Of those who use it, 1 in 5 say video is effective in building awareness and about 1 in 10 say it works for generating demand.  Wow, that’s terrible — but why?

3) Because about 2/3 of those surveyed said they use video to demonstrate products or (worse) they don’t use it at all.

4) This is a shame because B2B marketers need to be reminded that we sell to other people, not just businesses. And, like us, those people are influenced by experiences that engage their needs, desires and emotions.  And video is one of the best ways to create that kind of experience.

5) New digital cameras, smart phones, and YouTube make video production MUCH LESS expensive than it was just 10 years ago. Production quality matters, but you can get creative on a small budget.

Luckily for me, Xerox Services marketing is overcoming these hurdles and using video to tell our customer stories. We do this by:

Most importantly, with the need to rebrand the company around our ACS acquisition, Xerox Corporate built an interactive environment called “Real Business Live” that includes both customer-centric and full production (affinity advertising that tells a customer story in a co-branded fashion) video to take interactions beyond building the “awareness” that Xerox offers more than copiers and printers to exploration of what those capabilities mean to the clients who partner with us for those services.  Of all the examples share, this one created the most interest.

This brings me back to my first point, engaging prospects and customers today needs to go beyond the purchase process. Regardless of the medium (which is video in this post today), centering on the customer, telling their story, and making sure the story presented is authentic and specific is what makes marketing more engaging.

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Live From the Summit On Customer Engagement, 2011 Edition

March 1, 2011 — Laura Ramos

This is my third time attending Bill Lee’s annual summit for customer reference professionals.  This event expanded beyond reference programs to include a variety of ways to engage with customers and help drive business. You can follow the Tweet Stream at #2011SCE for live reactions. This post describes the value I see this event deliver to the B2B marketing community that worries about what customers say on their company’s behalf.

Setting aside popular social media definitions for a second, this group truly embodies a cohesive, thriving community. Looking around, I recognize a many attendees from prior events. The key theme, using customer engagement to expand the value delivered to customers, remains current and persistent. Bill recalls a conversation with CIO of Cardinal, Patty Morrison, that defines why customers, particularly those in the C-suite, care about how they engage with vendors.  Unlike the common belief that customers references are difficult to acquire and maintain, Patty said that she wants to engage. But, in return, she wants value from that engagement.  As marketers, we achieve this by helping customers like Patty to:

1) Improve how you (as a vendor) deliver service to me (as a client).

2) Measure my participation and report on the value this activity delivers to your firm.

3) Engage me in developing best practices together.

4) Make it easy for me to partner with you and drive business together.

5) Give me new, simple, or different ways to engage in marketing with you.

6) Present new opportunities for me to engage with my peers.

Companies represented in this room, including Saleforce.com, Hitachi Data Systems, Infor, Citrix, Cisco, HP, Microsoft, SAP, Siemens, Intel, and many more, do this — with varying degrees of success — through formal reference programs, social media, online community destinations, events, advisory boards, user groups, customer media (case studies, videos, testimonials, etc.), and knowledge centers. This last approach is interesting because it begins to cross the line between customer engagement and customer support/service.

Why does an event like this attract over 180 participants, and about a dozen sponsors, during these times? By speaking to the key issues that business executives worry about.  Need proof? The IBM Global Survey of 1500 CEOs showed that “reinventing the customer relationship” is one of the top 3 issues concerning top executives.  CEOs know that social media gives buyers more control over the message and dialogue, and company leaders need more advocates to help spread the good word in burgeoning social channels where buyers turn.  CEOs also see great value when their teams involve customers in product development, marketing, and support functions to spur new levels of innovation and to get better intelligence on what the market wants and needs.

Here are the highlights of best practices shared today:

Tom Wong, VP of Customer Mojo, at Salesforce.com shared how the Dreamforce team created an app that engaged over 14K attendees and helped them to network by “matchmaking” their interests with other conference participants.

Asim Zaheer, VP WW Corporate and Product Marketing for Hitachi Data Systems showed how Hitachi blends new social channels, social monitoring, and virtual events into the myriad of traditional customer engagement programs they support. He summarized with advice that reference programs should focus on finding value for customers in participating, simplifying your messages, providing more flexibility for customers to participate in different ways, and moving the sales process along.

Surprise!  Bill collared me to join Leif Pedersen (VP Marketing, Siemens Industry Automation) and Salim Ali (Global VP, Marketing, SAP) on a panel discussion on what customer reference managers should do to become more engagement focused.

Jeanette Gibson, Director of Social Media Marketing at Cisco, shared the enormously rich set of social activities that Cisco uses to engage their customers around user events (physical and virtual), communities, and integrated media/PR.  Cisco enjoys a social-savvy audience, social corporate culture, and a few key executives who are social natives.

Karen Newman, Marketing Director, Global Customer Advocacy, Siemens shared real-life, tactical, practical experience around managing a reference program at a 500K employee company with over $100B in revenue. Challenges with getting sales and executives to support reference/engagement programs was the hot topic.

There’s more to come tomorrow, so I hope you will join in the conversation. #2011SCE

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