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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PeopleMap: A Real Tool for Sales Enablement?

October 5, 2009 — Laura Ramos

It’s no secret: I am not a fan of the emerging class of “Sales 2.0″ tools that let reps follow online visitors or peer into their browsing habits. In a prior post, I admitted that I did not see how chasing anonymous Web traffic helps reps manage assigned accounts or follow up on well-qualified leads delivered by marketing. I believe marketing should strive to put sales out of the business of cold calling.  So I am quick to dismiss these tools in my research and advice.

Until last week when I discovered a new software application that helps reps do what they need to do: build and mine relationships with prospects. Kevin D’Souza, long-time colleague and friend from my Stratify days (where I worked prior to joining the analyst ranks), introduced me to 7 Degrees, a very small tech firm where he’s handling sales and business development today. 7 Degrees is the team behind PeopleMaps — a tools that lets you leverage personal and professional networks to let you see how you connect with other people, especially those inside of companies (see the screenshot where I used PeopleMaps to see how I am connected to Gord Hotchkiss, co-founder of Enquiro, a search engine marketing agency, and author of a new book about the BuyerSphere — a topic for a future blog post. Not surprisingly, most roads to Gord lead through SEMPO,  the search engine marketing professional organization that he chairs).

Elana is ex-analyst/mentor and Dave is colleague from Forrester

Elana is ex-analyst/mentor and Dave is colleague from Forrester

The tool, which takes 10 minutes at most to install, runs in a browser, uses an intuitive Java/Javascript-based UI, imports connections from applications like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Outlook (contacts), and maps out the social graph between people you know and people with professional, public profiles that you may want to know. It combines data from the networking tools you use daily with commercially available data licensed from companies like D&B/Hoovers, Thomson Reuters, and ZoomInfo. (Which specific data sources is information that 7 Degrees doesn’t explicitly share on its Web site yet, but should. I will chalk this slip up to an early-stage-firm oversight that I hope they correct soon.) So nothing I am showing in the picture above is private or gained through non-publicly available means.

Why does this tool appeal to me as a B2B marketer?  Because it helps sales folks make first contact AFTER the lead management process delivers a qualified prospect to their SFA inbox. It helps salespeople prioritize which hot leads to pursue. It helps mine relationships that can make warm introductions to prospective buyers. Combining PeopleMaps with lead management information culled from an Eloqua, Marketo, Silverpop, or any of the other vendor’s I’ve mentioned in my market overview gets sales closer to that fabled “360 degree view” of the client. 

Marketing lead management gives sales the qualification information — demographics, contact history, interaction insights, and buyer behavior cues — and PeopleMaps then shows sales how they connect to the prospect through a social graph of personal contacts and relationships. Sales isn’t making cold calls; their building off of existing relationships to form new ones.  And isn’t that what sales does best?

Check out PeopleMaps for yourself and let me know what you think.  I would also be interested in hearing from you about similar tools you have seen or experienced. For example, I think technologies from companies like LinkedIn and ZoomInfo show who is who and that connections exist, while PeopleMaps shows how these connections occur.

Bottomline: If marketing wants to enable sales and leverage technology to do so, then providing tools that help sales foster relationships, and continue the dialog marketing starts, will be key to achieving a real closed-loop process between marketing teams (who develop the market) and sales (who sell to it.)

Note: In light of recent FCC rulings, I am disclosing that Kevin did pay for lunch last week.  Not that it really should matter , but that’s my disclosure of a “material connection” to Kevin and 7 Degrees.

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Tapping Social Networking Sites To Energize B2B Buyers

June 23, 2009 — Laura Ramos

On June 17, Forrester published my latest research on how business buyers use social networking sites to inform purchase decisions, the role these sites will play in future buying processes, and three key ways for B2B marketers to tap into open, social network value.  Just under half (45%) of buyers we surveyed early this year said they use discussion forums, online communities or social networking sites when evaluating products and services they want to buy at work — which much less than peers and colleagues, a source to which 84% of respondents turn when making purchase decisions.  This is not all that surprising. We find this result crops up consistently in our research over time — business and IT folks rely on word of mouth and advice from friends and associates when buying, so customer references and testimonial become crucial parts of any well executed marketing plan. 

More interesting are two key insights coming from this research: discussion forums and online communities are poised to become the online supplement for colleague interaction and the decision to join in community activity depends mostly on the quality of the participants — the discussion relevance, demonstrated experience, and shared thought-leadership.  The figure here shows the data.

June 2009 “B2B Marketers: Tap Into Social Networking Sites To Energize Community Marketing

June 2009 “B2B Marketers: Tap Into Social Networking Sites To Energize Community Marketing

 This represents and interesting challenge to B2B marketers who seem anxious to rush to put up a company-sponsored community site as a way of tapping into this emerging social activity. But sponsoring a gated, private community without understanding your company’s objectives in doing so and your audience’s willingness to participate leads to false starts, wasted time, and fruitless effort. Instead, B2B marketers interested in building community destinations should start by joining into existing conversations — and seeing if you can get some of your key customers to do so with you — before investing in a fully moderated, gated community. What do I mean by “join the conversation?” Namely:

1. Participate as a community peer. Use resources or social listening tools to listen into what buyers say about your firm and products. Join the conversation to hear about hidden pain points, discover innovative ideas, and share valuable experiences. Offer exclusive insight, talk openly about shared community issues, and address problems forthrightly to establish your credibility.

2. Energize customers to help tell your story. Give enthusiastic customers new ways to engage with each other and gain accolades from peers by using interactive content like videos, podcasts, and blogs to trigger the chatter, allowing users add to or rate the content, and giving them widgets and wikis to help share their stories.

3. Nurture loyal customers by supporting their success. Use open social sites to foster connections between your best customers by complementing techie forums with online social networking tools, creating a fan base on social sites like LinkedIn that feature customer advocates, extending physical events with an online social component, and encouraging participation with appropriate awards — like sneak peeks and exclusive chat access to top execs — for those who demonstrate a propensity to drive community activity higher.

In the B2B space, I believe private, gated community sites will trump public, open social networking for delivering business value over time because quality discussion and demonstrated expertise matter more to business buyers than the size or breadth of the community. Open social networking sites in the business world will remain just that — social places to keep tabs on friends and associates. Buyers interested in uncovering tips and tricks of the trade will seek out gated communities that feature social networking features like profile pages, friending, and question-and-answer but that focus on topics that make their businesses run better. Business buyers join communities to solve problems, follow industry trends, and get advice, so I expect participation on registration-controlled community sites to replace open public social networking activity during the next few years.

I know there are a lot of community-building advocates out there now. Let me know if you disagree with my position and why — looking forward to hearing from you.

PS:  I was on hiatus during July, so I’m backfilling my posts for June and July at this time.  Don’t be alarmed if you feel like you’ve missed something — it’s just me filling in some blanks.  Thanks for reading.

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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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Customer Reference Programs: Time To Embrace Social Media/Web 2.0

May 27, 2009 — Laura Ramos

Customer reference management has moved from the sidelines to the mainstream of corporate marketing activity. This is good news for the dozens of customer reference management professionals who attended the February Customer Reference Forum in Berkeley, CA and participated in the 2009 survey. Why? Because authentic customer references help sales close business and marketing persuade analysts, press, and investors that corporate positioning and product claims are legitimate.

Yet, with dedicated budgets, headcount, and ties to business goals, now is not the time for customer reference managers to rest on their laurels. Customer reference management can play a vital, new role in executing a community-centered, socially-savvy communication strategy — one based on emerging Web 2.0 tools that blends online/offline experiences. This was the theme of the keynote presentation I  gave at the conference, revisited again in research published today on Forrester’s site, which you can access.

In the survey of customer reference professionals, jointly conducted by Forrester, the Customer Reference Forum, and Point of Reference, we found that — while meeting expectations and goals today — customer reference professionals need to tune up their Web 2.0 skills and take a more active role in setting social strategy because technology customers are a socially active group. Unfortunately, as you can see in the figure, B2B customer reference managers aren’t thinking along social lines today.

Less than 1/2 of respondents use social approaches in programs

Less than 1/2 of respondents use social approaches in programs

Customers want to engage in peer communities that help them successfully implement technology, produce new business capabilities, and gain competitive advantage. Getting customers to reference out of goodwill gets difficult without something to offer them in return. Combine the two, and watch private, gated business communities grow.

To get started on this path, I suggest customer reference managers take three key steps to socially-enable their programs:

  • Step 1: Create more opportunity for customers to engage socially. B2B marketers must encourage reference customers to interact with prospects and each other, share stories, and talk about the facts — like problem details, numbers, and specific steps they took to solve their issues. Social applications like wikis, ratings, and widgets give customers more ways to share ideas, content, and information in a structured, controlled manner without the overhead of formal publication and approval processes.
  • Step 2: Help references testify in virtual venues. To take advantage of emerging social business behavior, customer reference professionals and marketers need to move beyond the group setting and let references engage outside the boundaries of the formal program. Less than 30% of respondents let references build profile pages, guest blog, rate community-contributed content, or author wikis, activities that permit customers to strut their stuff in the online, virtual world and create broader connections.
  • Step 3: Use metrics that focus on engagement, not just activity. For creating new leads or enlisting participants, social tools earned accolades from less than 10% of respondents and make the social media effort seem hardly worth the effort. To capture the real value of social media in customer reference programs, customer reference managers should focus on how social touchpoints increase the quality (not quantity) of customer-to-prospect interactions, bump up participation intensity, and amplify topic discussions by prospects and references alike.

Check out the report and let me know what you think of my analysis and advice.  Are you engaged in customer reference management? Is social a part of your plans? Is this an area of research I should continue to pursue in 2009? Looking forward to the dialogue.

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Using B2B Social Technographics To Set Marketing Strategy

February 27, 2009 — Laura Ramos

Earlier this week Jeremiah Owyang and I presented our recommendations on social media strategy to a client who had hired us to conduct research like the “Social Technographics of Business Buyers” report. For the sake of argument, let’s say that the results were similar enough that using the Forrester syndicated data as an example would have led us to the same conclusions.  As a reminder from my previous post, 91% of IT and business buyers exhibit Spectator (i.e. reading blogs, read forums, watch video) and 58% exhibit Critic (i.e. post ratings or reviews, comment on a blog, contribute to online forums) behavior – making these categories of social behavior the most common.

Because Spectator and Critic behaviors were also common among this client’s target audience, we recommended that the client pursue some very specific objectives in their social media plans.  In short we said they should use social media to:

1) Listen to what these socially active buyers are talking about. This means investing in the means (which this client already had) to monitor online “buzz” about topics of interest to these buyers. Sound hard?  Not really, it can be as simple as setting up searches on Google’s advanced search page. For the blogosphere, it means using one of the blog-specific search engines like Technorati, Google Blog Search, Blogpulse, etc. Or setting up a TweetDeck page to monitor several topics, or using Twittersearch.

2) Talk with them. Reach out and participate in discussions, comment on blogs, publish content/reports, syndicate podcasts or videos online.  Do this on sites and destinations that are NOT associated with your brand or company, as well as your own.  As Jeremiah puts it, “you have to fish where the fish are.”

3) Provide new opportunities to interact with and support each other. This is where you get to show how you can add value.  Use listening and talking activity to direct interested parties to your site and to content that they can read, rate , and comment on. Now you have the start of an engage online audience.

We specifically told them to demonstrate they can achive these objectives in ways that measurably change their interactions and relationships with buyers BEFORE pursuing a more advanced community-building strategy.

At the conclusion of this presentation, the listeners asked two very interesting questions that gave me pause. They wanted to know, “In light of the findings, should we continue to pursue our community strategy?” and “Can we use communities to support and talk with our customers?” These questions made me wonder if they had heard a word we had said!

Let me go back to first principles — first principles in the POST methodology to be specific — to explain my frustration.  POST says “understand your audience first and learn whether or not they are engaged in social activity.” Ok, the results show clearly that technology buyers are a socially active crowd. But most are Spectators which means they aren’t talking, voting, or creating content. You have to figure out indirectly — by studying what they search for, click on, read, and down load –which topics interest them the most.  You must also talk with them to test you findings and see if you can get them to read and follow you.  Then you should try this with another audience or topic, and then another. 

Jumping directly to the conclusion that “communities” — and investing in community platforms, community software applications, social business software, whatever — is putting the T before the P in POST.  This is backwards and doomed to fail.

While the Social Technographics of business buyers is high, this finding does not mean that any and every social approach will send them flocking to your corporate Web site or community pages. Marketers who use social media successfully concentrate on P = people/audience and O = objectives/outcomes first. Almost exclusively.  The choice of technology, tactic, or tool becomes a distant second. 

A word of advice to CMOS: if your marketing department comes to you and says “we need to build a community”, ask them “For whom?” and “How will this community impact our business in measurable ways during this economy?”  These P and O questions will get them to focus on the right things, not just the technology.

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The Social Technographics Of B2B Buyers

February 23, 2009 — Laura Ramos

Last Friday (Feb. 20, 2009), Forrester published a new report that Oliver Young and I authored about how business buyers participate socially — in general and on the job — called “The Social Technographics of Business Buyers“.  Today, Forrester marketing put out a press release on this research announcing it to the world.

Social Technographics is the term coined at Forrester to describe how we benchmark consumers by their level of participation in Social Computing behaviors.  We describe the model as a ladder consisting of six increasing levels of a participation in social technologies. Participation at one level may or may not overlap with participation at other levels, and consumers may move up and down the ladder over time or for different purposes.

How Technology Buyers Engage in Social Media

How Technology Buyers Engage in Social Media

Social Technographics models the propensity of buyers to engage in social activity.  Josh Bernoff talks about the Social Technographics of consumers often on the Groundswell blog. There is a tool published in the upper right corner of the main blog page that you can use to explore how social behavior changes with age, gender, or country of origin.

So why the press release?  Because this is the first research available that profiles the social behavior of business buyers.  Specifically, IT and business decision makers involved in technology purchase decision making. Sure, the research is fairly specific.  If you are buying industrial equipment, office furniture, employee health plans, 401K investment options, or a myriad of other business-related acquisitions, then this data is not exactly what you need.  But if you sell any type of IT hardware, software, services, or telecom/networking products, you’ll want to take a look at the data and/or the report.

Why should B2B marketers care about this? For three main reasons:

1) Social Technographics helps you set social media strategy. Social media is a broad term, but generally refers to new interactive marketing tactics used to engage with prospect, and communities of customers and prospects, and draw value from social interaction. To set a social media strategy that is successful, Forrester developed an acronym to help marketers focus on the important part of the strategy first: POST.  POST stands for “People”, “Objectives”, ”Strategy” and ”Tactics/Tools”.  Social Technographics helps B2B marketers who sell technology products and services get a handle on the P=People part of the POST methodology.

2) Social media has a place in the marketing mix. Knowing how buyers participate in social activity while working — and which behaviors are more common — helps you understand how to blend social media into your 2009 marketing plans. It also helps you to align which of the primary business objectives for social media — listening, talking, energizing, supporting, spreading, or embracing — will best engage (and entice) buyers at different levels of the Social Technographics ladder. It will also tell you whether or not you can rule out a particular behavior as relevant to your intended audience and how to go about using social media to change the nature of the relationship your firm has with these buyers.

3) Social Technographics describes business behavior. This research makes it definitively clear — people engage socially when on the job. They behave socially for a lot of reasons, but informing or making purchase decisions is one of the main ones. There are many attributes to this data worth exploring: we looked at age, tenure, gender, geography/country, business role, function, specific type of technology purchased, and role played in the decision making process. Looking at the data from any of these perspectives can help B2B marketers understand with whom, how, how often, and where to engage buyers socially to achieve the best results — engagement and greater dialogue.

I am hoping you will take a closer look and let us know what you think.  Oliver and I are very excited about this research and look forward to sharing more insights — in blogs, additional research, and ongoing conversation — with you.  Here are the slides from the exclusive February 12 preview webinar we presented a couple of weeks ago:

The Social Technographics® Of Business Buyers
View more presentations from oliveryng. (tags: social media)

If you would like to download these slides, please visit our Web site where you can find the Powerpoint or MP3 version of the presentation.

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How Do Business Buyers Engage Socially?

February 11, 2009 — Laura Ramos

Forrester analysts Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li published our business best seller, Groundswell, last year. The book captured marketer, community manager, social strategist, executive and enthusiast attention alike. Long on B2C examples, however, readers sometimes wondered “how much of this applies to B2B marketing?” and “how much does social participation carry over into the working world?”  I’m happy to say “quite a bit” to both questions.

Tomorrow, my colleague Oliver Young and I will present a preview of upcoming research on how business decision makers participate in social activity. Here’s what I had to say about it on Forrester’s Interactive Marketing blog:

How Do B2B Buyers Participate Socially? – February 11, 2009

My colleague Josh Bernoff lit the social computing world on fire last year when Forrester published Groundswell, which Josh co-authored with Charlene Li, now heading up Altimeter Group. Groundswell introduces marketers, community managers, and social enthusiasts to Social Technographics – a method for describing describe a population according to its participation in social activity. You can interact with our online tool on the Groundswell site to learn more about how this profiling works.

B2B marketers see this and ask, “Does this behavior translate into the working world?” Interactive marketers want to know how truly engaged business buyers are in social activity to gauge how much time, effort, and commitment they need to put in emerging social media versus other, more traditional marketing tactics. We analysts at Forrester can help by drawing analogies using our knowledge of consumer behavior, but we didn’t have the data to profile exactly how business buyers participate socially.

Until now.

Tomorrow (Feb 12 at 11:30 am ET), Oliver Young and I will preview the results of Forrester research into the social participaton of B2B buyers — folks involved in technology decision making at firms with 100 employees or more, in 5 major geographic regions, and across 7 major industry groups. The Webinar will touch on the results from over 1200 survey responses showing B2B buyers lead active social lives and a good portion — but not all — of this behavior happens while on the job.

If you’d like to learn more, register here.  Feel free to pass this offer along to your friends and colleagues too. It’s free and open to non-Forrester clients. Space is limited however.

Watch this space, and my blog for B2B marketers, for more on this as we unveil the accompanying research report and start talking more about how marketers can use this information to inform their social media strategy and marketing mix.

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Personally, I hope you can join us…this is the start of a lot of great research and insight that will help B2B marketers ride the wave of the social media groundswell.

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