New Research Details 2009 Forrester Groundswell Awards Winners

November 4, 2009 — Laura Ramos

In my last post, I talked about the 2009 Forrester Groundswell Awards winners. I would like to echo Josh Bernoff’s recent blog observation that anyone can do a successful social application, (and from my perspective) especially those in industries that sell primarily to other businesses. In research published earlier today, I explain how the winners and finalists — and the activities I follow at other top firms — show that more companies are taking steps to enter the social world. To keep create successful social discourse with customers that drives real business returns, B2B marketers should:

1) Pick an audience, listen to them, and then join the conversation. B2B marketers keen to get involved in this groundswell of social activity should start with a specific group of customers or target buyers in mind. Actively listen to this audience in the venues they visit. Interact by tracking which topics they discuss and how frequently they discuss them. Engage in active social listening, summarize your findings, and present your experiences to your marketing, support, and sales teams.

2) Make specific business outcomes the goal of social activity. Cut the social goal-setting process short by convening five, 2-hour executive meetings that tackle, in turn, audience profiles, business objectives, measures/outcomes, resources, and responsibilities. Share the outcomes of this discussion with the primary teams who need to implement the chosen objectives for the chosen audience.

3) Rationalize your public social presence with your Web site. Most B2B Web sites focus too much on the company and not enough on what buyers want. Put your Web site at the center of your social media plans. Inventory official and semi-official presences on public social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter and look at what you find when you put audience and objectives first. Chances are, it won’t be pretty.

4) Organize for social success. My former colleague, Jeremiah Owyang, recommends adopting a hub-and-spoke model for social organization, and I agree.  Hub-and-spoke supports a central, cross-functional group that facilitates resource-sharing and cross-team communications with those in distributed product groups, divisions, or geographies closer to strategy execution. It also gives business units flexibility while providing a central authority that enables your organization to act efficiently and to account for the impact of social activity.

Take a look at the winners, finalists, and other examples of social application excellence in the report and let me know what other examples you have seen that equal these accomplishments in innovation and business value.

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B2B Marketers: 2009 Forrester Groundswell Award Winners Offer Great Examples

October 27, 2009 — Laura Ramos

Moments ago, Josh Bernoff posted this year’s winners of the 2009 Forrester Groundswell awards on the Groundswell blog. If you scroll down to the middle of the post (be forewarned; it’s a long one) you will see the winners and finalists in the B2B category winners. The images are great to look at as well.

In my research, I see marketers approach social media with a mix of enthusiasm and skepticism. Most want to know which firms execute social pursuits well and what tangible outcomes occur. Take a look and I think you will agree that these winners show how B2B firms can lead the way in achieving real business results.

As social activity expands – and business people seek out peers online to exchange ideas and validate their purchase decisions – these award winners and finalists demonstrate 6 types of objectives B2B marketers can use to connect – and ultimately change their relationship – with customers. Briefly, here’s what those 6 objectives are and why our winners took home the prize:

1) Listen to what customers talk about.  Listening to prospects and buyers may seem boring, so B2B markers tend to overlook this objective as an important start to setting social strategy. Yet, researching and analyzing what customers talk about pays off in deeper insight that leads to measurable benefits. CDW teamed with Communispace to listen to customers who participate in its community and apply those lessons to their sales interactions. As a result CDW increased the average of their total customer purchase revenue by 17% when comparing June 2009 to June 2008.

2) Talk with your customers (not at them): Successful marketers turn online activity and content into rich conversations. Eloqua’s self-guided sales tool, called the Conversation, treats users to an interactive discussion that hones in on their most pressing marketing problems using a combination of tongue-in-cheek humor and straight talk. Between 18 and 20% of buyers who engaged with an integrated campaign featuring this tool became prospects for Eloqua’s solutions.

3) Energize your best customers to talk about you. In B2B, using social media to energize customers around user meetings and conferences is a great example of making social media produce results. Depite restrictions on travel due to the economy, Sonic Foundry boosted Unleash 2009 attendance by 15%, and created a healthy pipeline of opportunity riding in on the coattails of this event.

4) Help your customers support each other. Social tools will accelerate the transformation of support forums from simple question/answer tools to communities where business-minded individuals network, share best practices, and seek business-oriented advice. In EDR’s case, commonground — a communityfor environmental professionals – resulted in over 90% of its customers giving EDR’s service a big thumbs up.

5) Encourage your customers spread success. In B2B, community succeeds when participation gets customers in a market — or users within buying organizations — to help others to adopt a product or service. ComplianceOnline, which I have written about previously, demonstrates this very well by attracting 500,000 subscribers, allowing members to share/purchase each other’s services, and generating approximately 30% of MetricStream’s leads.

6) Embrace customer ideas and suggestions. Ask customers for their opinions and ideas, and you will likely be overwhelmed with a huge number of responses. This was a hard category to judge because most of the submissions seemed to prove this conventional wisdom. Archer Technologies stood apart because, in their entry, they talked about how 2400 members contributed 1529 ideas resulting in new mobile and continuity products. That’s how to use the social power of your customers to drive business.

Will you join me in congratulating our new, B2B Groundswell Award winners?  And thank all of those who participated, especially after I badgered — uh, “reminded” you to do so . . .

And let me know about other B2B examples you find winning in the groundswell; I’d love to hear — and share — more.

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B2B Marketers: Where Are Your Groundswell Award Submissions?

August 4, 2009 — Laura Ramos

At the end of May, we opened up nominations for the 2009 Forrester Groundswell awards.  Well, the contest closes SEPTEMBER 2 — that’s less than a month away — and so far we have just 4 (ONLY 4!?!) submissions in the B2B categories. C’mon folks, I know there are plenty of B2B marketers out there doing interesting things in social media. You now have less time to submit, so shake out of the summer doldrums and show us how you use social media to listen to, talk with, energize, and spread success among your customers and prospects.

Just to refresh your memories, this year the Forrester award committee divided the categories for the prototypical groundswell objectives (listening, talking, energizing, supporting, embracing) into business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B).

Specifically for B2B, we added a new category, “spreading,” to recognize social applications in which you promote ideas, products, or best practices to employees of a company, then get them to similarly promote their successes with others at that company or in their respective/broader industries — thus speeding adoption of your technologies or services through social channels and activities your customers engage in internally or through business partners.  Right now, we have 3 submissions in the Supporting category and 1 in Embracing.

That leaves a lot of room for more entries and more winners.

Share with other B2B marketers what you do to listen to customers and prospects tell you what they like and don’t like about your products or services.  How are you using social activity to talk with them via video, podcasts, integrated online media, and other social channels?  What are you doing to energize customers — and encourage them to join and participate in your events like IBM did with LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and a myriad of other social venues at their May 2009 IMPACT conference?

Big companies or small, if you sell highly-considered products with long sales cycle through direct or partner channels, it time to share your social media successes and nominate your campaign, online site, community, or marketing programs for a 2009 Groundswell award.

The submission form is here. And mark your calendars: the entry deadline is September 2, 2009.

(You can also check out the current award submissions on the Groundswell site; might give you some ideas about what other firms are doing.)

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New: Social Buyer Profiles and Groundswell Nomiations for B2B

May 29, 2009 — Laura Ramos

Social media continues to be a hot topic in 2009. If you have been following my posts on this subject, here are two developments that may interest you.

Try Out Forrester B2B Buyer Social Profile Tool

Social media give a voice to buyers who can now describe their experiences, accomplishments, and disappointments to a global audience. Earlier this year, Oliver Young and I published Forrester’s first research describing the social behavior of technology business buyers. We surveyed more than 1,200 business technology buyers and found that they exceed all previous benchmarks for social participation.

If you’d like to know how social media fits into the marketing mix based on how willing your target customers are to engage in social activity, can use the Social Technographics® profiles of B2B buyers tool. This tool can help decision-makers to design marketing programs that not only capitalize on emerging social behaviors but also fundamentally change the nature of the marketing relationship between B2B buyers and sellers. Try it out for yourself and let me know what you think.

Forrester’s Nominations for Groundswell Awards Are Now Open

For the third year in a row, Forrester will recognize the most effective social technology applications at the Forrester Groundswell Awards. Starting now, anyone is free to submit an entry and I’d like to encourage those of you using social media in your business marketing efforts to consider doing so.

The submission form is here. The entry deadline is September 2, 2009.

If you’re going to enter, please read the Forrester Groundswell Awards Rules before submitting your entry. You can submit each entry only once, and once submitted, you cannot modify it. Sorry, but that’s the rule.  I plan to blog and write about the most interesting ones, regardless of who wins. Although, judging from past winners, this year is bound to include many new and interesting examples.

This year the Forrester award committee divided the categories for the prototypical groundswell objectives (listening, talking, energizing, supporting, embracing) into business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B). Specifically for B2B, we added a new category, “spreading,” to recognize social applications in which you sell ideas or products to employees of a company, then get them to sell others at that company — thus speeding adoption of your technologies or service sthrough social channels and activities your customers engage in internally. Besides the objectives categories, we also include a category for pro-social applications (“social impact”) and applications within an enterprise (“managing”).

That’s 13 categories in total, so while we expect even more entries than the 150 we received last year, there are more ways to win this year. To learn more about the awards and how to submit your applications, please visit the Groundswell microsite.

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