Taking B2B Marketing to the “Next Level” in 2010

November 20, 2009 — Laura Ramos

Thanksgiving is next week, and it marks the start of the mad dash to the end of the year. As I look towards 2010, I see B2B marketers, in the tech industry and elsewhere, face increasing pressure to reach decision-makers, justify spending, and deliver high-quality leads to an increasingly dissatisfied sales organization. Compounding these demands is a lingering recession and increasing pressure from product commoditization, new business models, functional outsourcing, and a social groundswell where buyers turn to peers to validate purchase decisions.

To turn these changes to marketing’s advantage, 2010 will be the year where B2B marketers must expand their focus from the intake of the pipeline to a broader range of activities that flow across the entire customer life cycle. This requires fundamental changes in people, process, and technology to stem marketing’s slide into mere makeup and wardrobe responsibilities. Next year, socially savvy B2B marketers must:

1) Move out of the corporate ivory tower. Globalization, Social Computing, and buyer control make community marketing essential. Our interactions with buyers must become more inclusive as internal subject matter experts, engineers, and external voices will participate more often in the formerly exclusive realm of polished marketing communication. To adapt, we must adopt community management roles and evolve our companies’ communication style to become more open, transparent, and focused on relationship building — not just offer promotion.

2) Use communities to combine the best of user conferences and support forums. B2B buyers are a busy, overburdened crowd. If you want them to join your communities, you had better make it worth their while. Expect membership in business communities to be comparatively shorter-lived — and more episodic — than consumer counterparts. Marketers must accommodate this “sometimes active but mostly passive” pace by merging online events — like virtual trade shows run on software platforms from ON24 and Unisfair — with collaborative, conversational capabilities from social software firms like Communispace, HiveLive, Jive Software, and Lithium.

3) Use technology to enable digital selling with a personal feel. Prospect databases and lead management automation let marketers create personalized online experiences that replace traditional first and second sales calls. Customer-generated video, print on demand, and microsites that deliver one-to-one content replace four-color brochures as core marketing tools. Where will you be in this transition come 2010?

If you would like to hear about the 5 ways to take your business marketing efforts to the next level in 2010, check out my December 1 teleconference. During the presentation, I will take a closer look at the forces tech marketers must be able to overcome and why becoming customer centric, adopting integrated marketing, better managing demand, upgrading measurement, and embracing social is key to your ongoing success.

There is a charge for non-clients to attend, but if you reply to this post, I will put you in touch with the right folks can help you qualify for a reduced rate. (Yep, gotta talk to one of my salespeople.) Hope you will listen in or join the conversation on Twitter at #B2B2010. Happy Thanksgiving and see you December 1.

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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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More Live From Summit on Customer Engagement 2009

October 21, 2009 — Laura Ramos

The Summit on Customer Engagement continues Tuesday, October 21.  From yesterday’s session, here are my takeaways from the panel discussion where Jeff Tinker, SVP Wholesale Product and Market Strategy, Wells Fargo, Asim Zaheer, VP Global Product and Competitive Marketing, Hitachi Data Systems and John Pasquarette, VP of Product Marketing for Software, National Instruments talked about their current, direct experience with customer programs. Bill Lee moderated and took questions from the audience.

What do your customer programs look like and what are the best practices that you see work?

Wells Fargo started by focusing customer engagement programs at the B2B user level, but has shifted more dollars and attention on the decision maker level .  They have built online community destinations that successfully attract users (of small business banking products, for example), but now face the challenge of involving large business decision makers and creating deeper relationships with them online. Right now, customer engagement with decision makers happen offline.  To ensure maximum value for participants, they interview advisory board members before each meeting, synthesize what members want to hear from bank and each other, and facilitate this discussion.

Wells launched user community 2 years ago as a separate site with separate registration.  Flat growth in community membership resulted. Recently, they integrated the community into the main Wells Fargo portal to make the community more accessible.  The Wachovia acquisition, and increased interest in industry-specific topics, led to a doubling in their advisory board numbers. To meet this increased demand, Wells is looking at how to do customer advisory meetings virtually.

Jeff sees written case studies get less interest than in the past; current clients want to interact and ask questions of each other — whether about Wells products, how the merger is going, or a host of other topics.

National Instruments –  which John describes as “the Home Depot for engineers” – produces tools that engineers use to develop and test products. Like Wells, customer engagement with end users is going very well.  Unlike Wells, NI needs to help their salesforce, who are all degreed engineers, to have higher-valued, business-level discussion. NI sees community tools and technology as a way to help resolve this.

John says NI executives, marketing, product managers, etc. spend a lot of time with their key customers. For example, an NI team just spent 2 days onsite with Harris learning how Harris uses their tools to reduce cycle  and test time.  Adoption is critical – once engineers move onto the NI platform, they don’t move off. So references — and demonstrating a vibrant community of like-minded engineers to new prospects —  is key to getting them to become customers in the first place. Customer references and case studies help to build that community identity and following. 

Hitachi Data Systems sells storage solutions to large enterprises, deals topping hundreds of thousands of dollars on average. Asim is accelerating their customer engagement activities to learn about – and adapt to — what customers face in this changing economy. HDS customer advisory boards are high-touch, but now HDS needs to move this activity down stream and engage the midmarket. They are working with TechValidate to see how automation can help them to reach into the midmarket further.

So far, HDS has created about ½ a dozen communities on LinkedIn and is currently montioring how prospects and customers use this social network to share successes and horror stories on a community-by-community basis. Community members know HDS sponsors the LinkedIn groups, but HDS actsl simply as an observer and moderator; they do not actively “participate” on these community pages. Currently, the LinkedIn experiment is not connected to customer reference activity.  Beyond this, HDS hosts gated, online communities. Keys to success with these private communities are: 1) Give the participants something of value that they can’t get elsewhere, 2) keep participation volume high– get more than 2-3 folks talking, and 3) make the feedback mechanism direct to HDS short and uncomplicated. HDS finds good customer references actively come from this community.

What do you do about customers/prospects who complain or make disparaging comments in communities?

Jeff talked about how the principles of good customer support/relationship building applies in the online world just as well as the offline.  You have to talk to the people with complaints or gripes; you can’t ignore them.  Don’t defend, but don’t justify either.  Jeff says, “If we are wrong, we admit it. We respond within 24 hours.” At first Wells’ legal department put together 7 pages of guidelines about how to interact in the community – but the executive sponsor stepped in and said “I want simple terms and conditions; we don’t want to stifle dialog”.

John says NI welcomes disparaging comments. Many times a customer, not an NI employee, jumps in to respond.  NI has changed a policy – or said why they can’t – when the customers bring up issues on the community. We regularly survey our customers on satisfaction, which is the final scoreboard for this activity.  John said, “The community provides one avenue of input to our strategy and direction, but we don’t knee-jerk react to all of it.”

Asim advises “don’t get into arguments with them.” Listen, address the issue, admit mistakes when you make them, and let other customers chime in.

How do you concisely explain the ROI of this activity to your executives and board? Especially when putting forth a budget?

Asim explained that justification is not that big a problem at HDS because HDS executives on down all agree they need and want to talk to customers. Customers are HDS’s biggest asset and customer engagment programs help them grow this investment.  But they do look at both hard-dollar and soft-impacts. For example, when some customers had trouble traveling to executive briefing centers to spend time with HDS engineers and execs, HDS looked at the numbers and found they could afford to take the program on the road.  Visiting a dozen cities for in-depth customer meetings is not cheap, but HDS track deal flow and revenue impacted by these events and has seen a very positive impact.  So much so that they plan to expand the executive briefing center roadshow to more cities in 2010.

Jeff said that Wells definitely increased its level of investment and involvement in customer engagement in 2009. To demonstrate the payoff, they highlight the role customers play in the development of products and how much customer interaction help them reduce time to market for new products. Customers cut the guesswork out of the development process.

Following this panel, Bill Lee hosted a “fireside chat” with Dan Crain, former CTO, Brocade and Tim Thorsteinson, Harris Broadcasting, on the topic of “What do Decision Makers Want from the B2B Relationship?”

Bottomline: Decision makers want trustworthy relationships and relevant discussion about industry topics.  They don’t want to engage in customer programs that are product or transactional in focus.

Dan Crain has bought a lot of IT equipment in his career, and gets invited to customer programs all the time. If sales sponsors them, he’s not interested. If the program is run by product marketing or the technical people, he finds much more value.  The most attractive programs center on discussion around industry-level issues.

Regarding social activity
Dan: “Social media is not good for putting out managed information or messages about your company. It’s more about getting closer to customers.”  Communities are not a new thing: the techn industry has had bulletin boards and forums for a long time.  They are a great way for users to interact, although it is debateable whether the new host of social software tools really enhances this.  Microsoft is a great example of how to use forums to interact with users well. In contrast, Dell putting out coupon codes for refurbished equipment on Twitter is not about getting closer to customers. But listening to customer suggestions and request on Dell IdeaStorm is.

Tim said Harris has used social media to automate getting feedback on products or specific ideas.  He feels it social media is better used for automating a focus group than blasting out messages to the community on social channels.

Tim and Dan agree: Buyers who select a vendor to work with want that vendor to be successful. So executives and decision makers will take time to provide references or to participate in customer advisory.

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Live From Summit On Customer Engagement 2009

October 20, 2009 — Laura Ramos

Today and tomorrow the Customer Strategy Group is hosting its inaugural summit on customer engagement – an intimate, executive conference designed for B2B marketers who manage customer reference programs, advisory boards, and the emerging area of online communities.  I will speak later today to about 70 t0 80 marketers and sponsors about “Understanding the Value of Customer Engagement”

Business marketers know customers who give references, participate on advisory boards, and engage in online communities are more valuable than those who are bystanders. But how do you quantify this value and socialize it to the rest of the business – especially in a tight economy when all the focus is on revenue and pipeline?  This forum takes a close look at this question.  In my presentation, I will introduce a model for measuring customer engagement that includes four components: involvement, interaction, intimacy, and influence. Each component requires data collected from online and offline sources that — when done successfully — give marketers a more holistic appreciation of their customers’ actions while recognizing that value comes not just from transactions but also from actions customers take to influence others. I show how marketing messages become conversations, and dollars shift from media buying to customer understanding, when firms adopt engagement metrics to capture the value of customer relationships

Here are the highlights from the morning keynote sessions I attended:

1)       Sean Geehan, who helps B2B executives understand what it takes to drive revenue, growth, and shareholder value. In his work on customer engagement, he has shown that companies that target their customer programs at their “top 20%” customers outperform the market by several factors.  He profiles companies like Harris Corporation, HCL, and Oracle in his upcoming book to demonstrate this.   He sees firms that specifically target decision makers in customer engagement programs (versus end users or middle management) see retention rates of 90% (vs. 72%) and account growth of 12% (vs. 4%).  Most importantly their reference rates are 94% vs 28% — underlining the vital importance of creating customer engagement at the executive level, not simply among worker bees.  I think this has BIG implications for community development in B2B.

2)  Tim Thorsteinson, President, Broadcast Communications Division, Harris Corporation talked about the benefits of customers engagement in face of the seismic shift in the broadcasting market from conventional, US-based TV stations to cable, satellite, government, international and sports. His division sells video equipment in all these markets and 50% of their revenue now comes from products introduced in last 24 months. (They spend about $90M on R&D). Approximately 10% of customers generate 90% of revenue. His main point is that Harris could not have made this shift successfully without creating an executive advisory board – focused on this 10% — to draw insight from and validate their decisions. And these customers deliver value: EAB members drove 16% of Harris Broadcast revenue in 2009.

Observations: He enjoys fairly exclusive access to his dozen or so EAB members since Harris’ competitors don’t actively pursue customer advisory boards. He says face-to-face, intimate, offsite meetings with deep content – but that also feature a fun, inviting locations or activities — is very important to keeping these relationships strong.  No stand-ins allowed; members can’t send substitutes to the meetings. In between Harris uses quarterly conference calls and newsletters to stay in touch. Content includes technical issues, industry trends, but is not salesy.  He knows the EAB is successful because networking happens outside – and Tim believes this would continue without Harris’s sponsorship. EAB members talk about how to make their sector more attractive to Wall Street.  They also want a seat at the table with other industry leaders, where relevant dialog can happen, and where they can talk about the real business problems they face (not technology/ products.) 

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The Role of Social Media in Creating Customer Engagement

September 29, 2009 — Laura Ramos

Customer reference programs, advisory boards, and customer councils are vital activities in B2B marketing. But these activities risk sliding into second-class status among executives if marketers fixate too much on numbers and not enough on creating community involvement among these highly-engaged customers.

Are you interested in new ways to increase the value of customer programs in the eyes of your buyers and improve the status of these important programs with your management team? If so, I’d welcome you to participate in a new study (which closes this Friday!!)

Together with the Customer Strategy Group and ITSMA, I’m conducting a survey on Forrester’s behalf about customer engagement programs and the impact these programs have on your firm’s success. This survey asks questions about customer reference programs, advisory boards, customer councils, and online communities or social networks sponsored by your company or organization (things like private forums, customer groups, or fan pages on social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn).

We plan to share highlights from this research during the Fall 2009 Summit on Customer Engagement, October 20-21, 2009 in Boston, MA. I hope you will consider attending, especially if you are local to the area. After the conference, I plan to write Forrester research on this topic and blog about the results as well.

The survey should take you between 10 and 20 minutes to complete, depending how many activities you participate in for your firm. In total there are 65 questions, but you may not need to answer all of them. We will keep all responses confidential and report results in the aggregate only.

But remember: the survey CLOSES THIS FRIDAY, October 2, 2009.

So take a few minutes today to participate!  Or forward the link to someone you know who holds responsibility for one of these areas.

I look forward to seeing your responses or to hearing from you what you would like to discover, discuss, or learn about customer engagement programs and the role social media does, or could, play in building more vital, long-lasting relationships.  Drop me a comment if you feel strongly on these topics.  And, on behalf of CSg and ITSMA, thank you for sharing your experiences and helping us out.

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Why Customer Engagement Is Critical

September 21, 2009 — Laura Ramos

Making your customer reference program, advisory boards, customer councils, and communities relevant to C-level management means you need to speak their language and help them pursue their objectives. Not yours.

Taken individually, a reference or communities program may not show up on your firm’s executive radar. But as crucial aspects of “customer engagement,” these programs — and the intimate customer interactions they produce — are critical to senior management.

Recently I had the pleasure of joining Bill Lee, President of the Customer Strategy Group, Asim Zaheer, VP Product Marketing for Hitachi Data Systems, and Sean Geehan of the Geehan Group for a roundtable discussion on the role these programs play in engaging your current customers. You can find the interview and roundtable discussion on Blog Talk Radio. 

I think you’ll find the discussion lively as we talked about how to measure the effectiveness of engagement programs, how specific programs like references tie into broader corporate goals, why integrating with other marketing programs is critical, and tips on how to do so.  Prior to the recording, Bill sent me a few specific questions to answer. I jotted down my responses and — while the radio show took some interesting twists and turns as questions blended into discussion — I thought I would share my thoughts with you through this blog post.  Enjoy the questions and the answers I prepared:

Q. Forrester is taking a substantial interest in this area of marketing: customer engagement. Why so? Why now?

We are really excited about researching customer engagement for three reasons–

1) The Groundswell: We see a major shift of power in the vendor-buyer relationship from seller to the buyer. We see buyers turning to each other increasingly, and to social sources of information, to inform their business purchase decisions. Marketers need a way to not only tap into that activity and learn from it, but they also need a way of figuring out who are the new influencers, and ways to measure the value that comes from these social interactions. Engagement helps do that.

2) We think that business marketing – particularly in high technology — has gone astray. We marketers tend to worry more about marketing mix and execution than what happens to customers after the deal closes. But because studies show that it costs 1/6th to 1/10th as much to retain an existing customer than to acquire a new one, we think that this myopic focus on the front of the pipeline is upside down. Focusing on how to increase and strengthen customer engagement helps turn things around.

3) Classic marketing metrics don’t capture all the value of ongoing customer relationships. Sometimes customers who, relative to others, don’t buy a lot from you are incredibly valuable because of the way they influence others, advocate on behalf of your company, and support the broader customer community.  Looking at engagement helps to capture this value in a meaningful way.
Q. We’re seeing a major shift in the ability of customers to get information directly from each other – without going through vendors. Is this the most important development in this area to you? How is that going to impact B2B businesses?

Agreed, we see this same shift. We use the term Groundswell to refer to that shift and it’s as big a shift – if not bigger — as the one we saw with the early stages of the Internet.

Profound impact on B2B businesses, but not in the way we see today.  From a B2B marketing perspective, the majority of the activity around these social interactions today is still one-way.  Marketers experiment with social media but treat it like old media – another way to get their message out in front of an audience. The novelty of social activities – like Facebook fan pages, Linkedin groups, Twitter and YouTube – create a lot of interest here today, but marketers – and executives — are beginning to question the return on this activity.

We believe that the real impact of this shift in customer behavior will happen – not at the front of the marketing funnel, where it is concentrated today, BUT at the opposite end. Social activity will allow customers to band together into communities of interest to not only solve problems and find more creative ways to use products and services, but to provide direction and innovation to the firms who supply those products and services.  Smart marketers will work now to tap into this social behavior, engage customers’ participation, and encourage customers to advocate – openly and transparently – on their behalf to the community.

Q. How do you measure the success of your customer engagement efforts, with these new realities?

This is a problem most B2B marketers struggle with right now, and I can’t say that we’ve cracked the case.  To help, however, Forrester introduced a model for measuring engagement that we call “the Four I’s.” We see engagement defined as the deep connection a company creates with its customers that drives purchase decisions, interaction, and participation over time. It’s measured by the level of involvement, interaction, intimacy, and influence with the brand over time. 

Q. How will customer reference programs adapt to the new realities?

I think the scope of customer reference programs will increase from meeting tactical goals – like percentage of customer base that is referenceable – and service levels with sales TO providing direct and tangible value to the customers who choose to give references. Right now a lot of customer reference participation is driven by good will. I think customer reference programs need to give back more value than recognition and appreciation without sacrificing social currency — things like trust and credibility — that make for good references. This is where the social groundswell and community building come in.

While I don’t think customer reference managers will lead the charge into social media, they must participate because their perspective – “here are our most valuable customer advocates and what can we give back to them?” is so important to shifting the focus in marketing from campaigns and leads to ongoing customer relationships.

Q. What are your thoughts on the ability of firms to meaningfully engage with senior level decision making customers?

I think many firms over-estimate their ability to engage with and sell to the C-level suite. Just by putting marketing materials together that say we are going to be more engaged at the strategic level doesn’t make it a reality.

It reminds me of this quote I use to kick off the conversation I often have with Forrester clients about the value of  product positioning. It is part of Forrester lore and reportedly said by a frustrated CIO to a very large software vendor at that vendor’s customer summit.  He said:

“If you call yourself a ‘Strategic Business Partner’ one more time, I’m going to throw you out of your own building. You are not a strategic partner to my business just because your marketing department gave you slides that say you are. You are a vendor, selling us technology, and until you tell me exactly what business value you bring to my business, that’s all you’ll ever be to us.”

It’s a harsh statement, but I think it brings into sharp focus the problems that happen when marketing focuses too much on message, communication, and channel and loses touch with what customers really value – which is a problem-solving relationship that has commercial benefit to both parties.

Engaging with senior level decision makers takes time and skill to develop. You don’t send your sales rep straight in with a marriage proposal, you have to date – woo them with the equivalent of candlelight dinners.  In real terms, that means giving senior decision makers – and their influencers and information collectors – relevant, timely reasons to engage with you. It means useful, usable information and experiences that satisfy their needs, motivations or aspirations. And the degree to which you can foster this kind of relationship with customers on THEIR terms, not on yours, will mean the difference between success and failure at engaging at the senior level.

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ComplianceOnline Offers Preview Of Real B2B Community Potential

June 26, 2009 — Laura Ramos

In my last post, I steered B2B marketers away from building social destinations focused on their products and services by suggesting they participate in open, social networks before jumping on the community bandwagon. I do think there is a place for B2B communities, but these sites need to focus truly on the community first, not trying to sell a firm’s wares.  Case in point: ComplianceOnline.

ComplianceOnline Supports GRC Community

 

 

As a premier destination for content, training, and advisory services dedicated to regulatory compliance, IT governance, and corporate risk management, ComplianceOnline is a model online community that delivers two million visitors annually to MetricStream’s back door. B2B marketers can learn how to build a successful B2B community by following three key lessons: Gather the best content, encourage the community to vet and contribute to it, and give members equal opportunity to engage with potential buyers who visit.

What did MetricStream gain from the hard work and effort they put into buidling ComplianceOnline with partner Regalix? Measurable benefits including:

1) An ongoing source of leads. With more than 2 million unique visitors per year and 500,000 registered users, ComplianceOnline drives a huge volume of traffic that MetricStream’s corporate site would struggle to equal. Through strategically placed ads and links, intended to inform but not harangue, MetricStream gets approximately 30% of its quarterly leads from ComplianceOnline visitors.

2) Community-generated revenue. As a small firm, MetricStream simply could not afford to build a huge community site from scratch, and containing costs was a major issue. To offset the expense of building and maintaining ComplianceOnline, MetricStream takes a share of the proceeds from each engagement or sale that consultants close. This arrangement allowed MetricStream to build a catalog consisting of more than 25,000 catalog items of electronic products and 1,000 courses, creating what amounts to a mini university for GRC professionals. It also made ComplianceOnline profitable after the first six months and returned MetricStream’s total investment after the first year.

3) Differentiation that leads to new business opportunities. ComplianceOnline’s success helps MetricStream stand out in a market crowded with vendors. The thought leadership and unique differentiation this site creates helped MetricStream establish a partnership with NASDAQ where ComplianceOnline offers companies listed on the stock exchange specialized, white-label compliance training, alerts, and content to help them to better manage their compliance processes.

If you really want to create an online community serving the needs of your firm, take a further look at ComplianceOnline — and my research — to gain further insight into what it takes to achieve this level of success.  Above all , don’t think that investing in a social business technology platform is the end-all to establishing a vibrant community destination. Knowing your audience’s needs, enlisting an existing community of like-minded professionals in fulfilling them, and having specific business goals are more important than making the right technology platform decision.

Do you know of any other B2B community examples like ComplianceOnline that you would like to share?

PS: Yes, I’m still backfilling my posts after a long summer vacation. Stay tuned for more.

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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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