So today is the last day of Social Media Week London, and what a hectic week it’s been. Between us, the Catalysis gang has attended more than twenty events. We’ve found the vast majority to be useful and informative and better organised than last year (well done Chinwag team). From the chit chat in the office it seems some of the highlights have been the The Socialympics – Social Media & London 2012 event featuring GB Olympic Long Jumper Chris Tomlinson as a guest speaker and the Make Video Rock session that gave tips and tricks on creating engaging video that generates tons of traffic.
And of course there was the Making B2B Social Media a Success event that Catalysis hosted yesterday. Many of the programmes we run for our clients are B2B and we continually get frustrated by the lack of social media events and forums that focus on B2B – most of the talk around social media best practice assumes you’re targeting a consumer audience. So rather than continuing to moan, we thought we should do something about it by organising a SMWL session where our clients could share their B2B insights. Tariq Ahmed, Global Social Media Lead for CA Technologies and Matt Kennedy, EMEA Online Marketing Manager for Polycom, joined Lauren Bishop to wax lyrical on the topic.
Here are some of the key discussion points:
The importance of culture change to successfully embrace social media. This is true for both global corporations and for smaller companies too. Many businesses that operate in the B2B field are still pretty dismissive of social media, viewing it as a source of entertainment and something that young people do. They haven’t yet grasped that social media can, and should, be used to target and engage with their business customers. CA Technologies’ Tariq mentioned that just two years ago employees at CA Technologies were unable to access YouTube from their work PCs. Today the organisation is at the forefront of social media, but getting there has taken a huge cultural shift.
The challenge of creating valuable content. How can social media practitioners work out which content to distribute? Polycom’s Matt Kennedy talked us through the smart model he’s put in place to deal with this. Polycom’s content distribution strategy is based on analysis of trends, the audiences, and where they are in their buying cycle. As you can see from his slide below, Polycom has a range of assets/messages it can push according to where the prospect is in their decision-making process.
Evangelist Apathy. So you’ve identified your brand advocates and key influencers, how can you encourage them to share your content and amplify your message? Both Tariq and Matt pointed to the importance of employees – ultimately these are a company’s best evangelists. Businesses must empower them to use social media. While there is an element of risk (and a scary lack of control for big organisations), this can be alleviated through education, training and clear social media policies. External evangelists can be encouraged to spread positive messages through all sorts of means depending on who they are – reward programmes based on incentives such as free training work well for channel partners or customers. And for industry influencers (analysts, bloggers, journalists etc) simply taking the time to engage in personal conversations on their social media channels (their blog for example) can have a powerful effect.
We’ll be posting a few more blogs based on what we’ve learnt at SMWL so keep checking in for more insights.