Not So Simple Definition of Social Market Leadership

As we have gone around the country speaking on Enterprise Social Strategy, we have struck upon a simple concept that seems to resonate with senior executives; social market leadership.

On the surface, it seems simple:

• Thought Leadership – Stepping into the vacancy in the market
• Market Offense – demonstrating market leadership via social media
• Brand Defense – protecting brand reputation on social media
• Associations – creating the forum for market best practices
• Social Influence – building relationships with key market influencers
• Social Marketing – influencing the market’s requirements for competitive products

However, ask we dig deeper, we realize that how you measure or even how you define what you measure is critical. We have been asking industry leaders “Who is the Social Market Leader in Your Industry?”. We get a lot of “We are…” then after we ask them “how do you know?”, we get “What do you mean?”. Then when we explain what social market leadership means to us, we get “We’re not sure…”

Our definition of Social Market Leadership… defining the thought leader in the social market with influence over public social networks like Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, etc, as well as, industry communities, groups, forums, blogs hosted by vendors, associations, publications, enthusiasts, etc. In some industries, we do an audit and find over 100 unique platforms excluding the blogs.

How do you define thought leadership? Are you sharing your information with others? It isn’t what you say, it is what other say about you. How frequently do they interact with your information? Do they react positively? Do they tell everyone about what you say?

How do you define influence? Do you have credibility and reach? it isn’t about reaching everyone n the market. It would be nice, but for most businesses, that isn’t realistic. The brand icons already have a well established brand reach and they are considered a market “brand name” that define a standard. For the rest of the companies, there is a trade off between reaching everyone and reaching the right market cost effectively. Influencers are really about prioritization. Do the influencers have the “mojo”? Do they have the reach AND credibility? Can we hit the top 10% of the market and get them to evangelize on our behalf.

Market Leadership is not just Branding – There are algorithmic formulas out there that try to measure brand strength over social media. But, I think true long term social market leadership is really about creating a better customer experience through better engagement and interaction. With the transparancy that social media provides, companies are more and more realizing that architecting a better, holistic experience is critical to leveraging and maintaining brand equity and market share. If your social market share doesn’t represent your market share, might that be an indication of a problem in the market. If they don’t feel the same way about your company as you advertise, does that negate your market investment? Does your cost of customer acquisition go up because you don’t have brand evangelists and satisfied customers?

How do you measure Social Market Leadership? I think that this is the reason most organizations are struggling. There are simple measures from: simple Facebook fans, twitter followers, retweets, etc. To a little more sophisticated; social mention frequency benchmarking, sentiment scoring, number of influencer relationships, online community membership. To more complicated; taxonomy ownership, multi-criteria customer satisfaction, reputation management dashboarding, social lead scoring, share of customer voice, sentiment analysis benchmarking.

For those really pushing the limits of unstructured data analytics – the tools are rapidly moving towards ability to build a comparable, multi-dimensional dashboard to measure market perception differences between public social networks, online community members, and customer satisfaction surveying. Social media give such a dimensionality into buyer behavior, we think that we are only seeing the tip of the iceberg in terms of behavior analysis leveraging structured data analysis to build deeper analysis of unstructured social interactions.

No so simple an answer, but potentially worth a market.

Corporate Social Media Roadmap

One of my contacts on Twitter posted a reply back that “Social Media is a Fad”. I have been thinking about that for the last couple of days. There is a tremendous amount of momentum around leveraging social media for business. This isn’t the first time that I have heard this in the last several months, but I guess perception is reality.

So, to that end, I have outlined a social media roadmap for those who are trying to “figure out” if the hype will lead to something real. I have been around enough to have seen this conversation a few times; websites, ecommerce, web applications, and now social media. This simple roadmap is targeted to those who want to do something, but are having a hard time presenting a business case, especially in this economy.

Social Media “Crawl”

• Make sure your team has a complete profile on Linkedin –It would be nice if they were on Plaxo, Facebook, Twitter, etc.; but make sure that the profiles are complete and up-to-date; including past roles. For a lot of potential buyers, awareness of your company comes through an employee’s profile. Make sure they have a good impression.
• Make sure that everyone has the same basic description– For the company, links to the various pages on the website (including one to careers). Also, make sure there is consistency in the company name (ie. Abbreviations, LLC on the end, Website name, etc)
• Create a social media policy for employees– There is a fine line between personal and private. Social media can blur that line, especially on Facebook with pictures. Make sure that policy also includes connections to partners, vendors, customers, and other employees. I am not recommending that you curtail their ability to interact with online relationships, but make sure there is protection for the company.

Social Media “Walk”

• Inventory Corporate Online Relationship Networks – You will be amazed at who your team is connected and no one else knew it. “I needed someone who could do this” or “We need an introduction to X”.
• Identify who or which companies are missing – a key to successful networking is getting outside your own network. A lot of times it is the 3rd degree relationships that can produce the greatest opportunities.
• Run a networking program for employees – Sales people and Executives generally know how to network, but the vast majority of employees don’t. But, they represent the vast majority or potential introductions as they had lives and experiences prior to joining the company.
• Build an Online Relationship Campaign– This isn’t going out and collecting 25,000 random twitter followers, but building online relationships (across multiple social media sites) with the key influencers, bloggers, buyers, vendors, and participants in your industry. If the saying is “Sell where the customer is…” ; you need to start a program of connecting to them online.
• Start an enterprise blog on your website– designate a team approach to creating an online thought leadership center for your company. Tie your blog updates to your social media participation. I update my Linkedin, Twitter, & Facebook every time I create a new post. It provides content and value for your connections; at the same time, creates a call to action for your website.
• Cross Pollinate Your Traditional Marketing Database with your Social Media Contacts– I add all of the new contacts that I meet into my Linkedin and other social media accounts. Social CRM is becoming the new “hot” thing as companies are trying to manage the multiple (potential) customer communication channels.
• Multi-Channel Marketing now Includes Social Media– I have been integrating my social media contacts into an email campaign list that I send my weekly blog digest. I have gotten a tremendous boost to my blog traffic by integrating email, social media, and traditional networking. A multi-channel, integrated approach allows you to reach the potential customer where and how they want to communicate. Especially with our busy schedule and email overload, don’t assume because they did not repsond that they are not interested. They may not have really “seen” the message.
• Be Respectful– don’t SPAM your social contacts with random messages. Make sure that what you send them provides value to your network. They may not want to buy, but they will respect your attempt at providing value to the relationship and credentialing your thought leadership.

Social Media “Run”

• Building your own online community into your corporate website – Use social media components to create a more compelling interaction on your website. Also, this provides great search engine optimization, thought leadership, differentiation, lead qualification, customer experience management, etc.
• Build public, semi-private, and private group areas in your community– Provide value without a login through public groups, but encourage them to sign up (membership) to see a lot more. The private group areas are then used to continue the sales pursuit and provide individualized customer support.
• Integrate your community with your marketing and sales activities– By integrating your online community, you provide a call-to-action for your outbound sales and marketing efforts. Also, this allows you to leverage your corporate website more effectively during the transition from marketing awareness and interest to sales process and lead management.
• Integrate your community with Social Networking sites– Google, Facebook, and Linkedin all have member APIs that allow someone to use their membership in third-party communities. This removes one major obstacle for people to participate; the dreaded sign-up.
• Integrate your community with your Enterprise Systems– Integrating your existing content and data with your online community is important because it allows you to leverage the investment in your existing CRM, ECM, etc. systems more effectively.
• Leverage Web Analytics and Lead Scoring –An online community provides a trememdous amount of interaction data that can be measured, scored, and utlized for lead qualification.

Social Media “Sprint”

• Integrate your business processes with your online community – Customizing the interactions of the community for your business processes; customer experience management, sales support, Call-center, project delivery, supply chain, partner management, etc. This means that different audiences interact within the community, but have personalized experiences based upon their roles and goals. I serve up a different forecasting dashboard in the Product Management Group versus the Sales Group.
• Reimagining your Information Architecture– Some of the leading organizations are rethinking the traditional ideas around organizational Intellectual Property. They are begining to build flexible information architectures whereby the “community” is really the presentation layer for their corporate systems. They build interfaces as “application mashups”. Your access to information and applications is based upon just-in-time rights management. If I am working on a project, I get invited to the project group that has all of the project history, notes, documents, and applications that I need to interact with the project team. This also then is extended outside the organization to partners and customers. The enterprise is no longer a “castle” with a moat and a drawbridge, but a modern city with buildings, doors, locks, security systems, etc. This allows for more effecient business scalability.

At the end of the day, I don’t see social media as a fad. I think the hype factor will dimish along with the effectiveness some of the early adopters have been able to drive, but I see online social interaction as the next logical step in the evolution of the web and business.

Online Community Lead Identification Part 3 – Corporate Community

Michael Thomas, CRMA President, and I created a generic community lead identification activities list as a continuation of  our series on leveraging corporate online communities for lead generation. This list is the baseline set of community activities that can be used to build a lead scoring system within a corporate community. It is unrealistic to assume that you will automatically be able to filter browsers from shoppers with this model, but the goal is to build a scoring foundation from which you can add company-specific indicators to identify interest.

This post will not address the actual mechanism of lead scoring in this post, but rather discuss the actual activities within a community that you could score to for lead identification.

The Top 10 Corporate Online Community Activities for Lead Identification

1. Frequency of Tags from All Activities – the ability to aggregate all the tags from the pages viewed and assign scores based upon the frequency of tags = greater number of tags from content “hits” which indicates interest.
2. Joined Groups – weighted score based upon # of groups with specific groups scored differently
3. Content Posts – weighted score based upon frequency and which group posted
4. Connections – weighted score based role of connection; employees (ie product manager higher than customer service, finance, etc) versus other customers
5. Referrals – invite a friend submittals; higher score if same domain as referrer
6. Profile Completeness
7. # of connections – shows community activity and interest
8. Visits per month – shows community activity and interest
9. Time on site in last visit
10. Forwards content to friend / email address

Your goal in leveraging these activities within a community is to identify interest beyond the cursory. You are looking to leverage implicit behaviors beyond the stated, explicit information the user provides in their profile. Market research has long identified that people will say one thing when asked directly, but will do something different when observed. “Yes, I would pay $10 for this”, but then never pick up the item when observed.

The goal of a lead identification system is to separate browsers from shoppers. The best systems eliminate false positives and false negatives. A false positive is a unqualified lead that sales has to follow up on, but in reality has no chance of closing. A false negative is a missed sales opportunity because the buyer was never approached and went somewhere else to satisfy their needs. You never knew they were really looking until it was too late.

The purpose of embedding a corporate online community into your corporate website is to create more interactions on the site. Marketers are always looking to convert a higher percentage of the web visitors that come to your website.  If you can engage more, keep them coming back, and help them qualify themselves; then your website has been significantly enhanced with an online community. Now, if you can do that and leverage the interactions and user generated content to drive better search optimization, even better.

Part 1 – https://rosenhaft.wordpress.com/2009/05/27/online-community-lead-scoring-part-1/

Part 2 – https://rosenhaft.wordpress.com/2009/06/01/community-lead-identification-part-2-linkedin-example/

Online Community Lead Identification – Part 2 Linkedin Example

As a continuation of the the post on online community lead identification https://rosenhaft.wordpress.com/2009/05/27/online-community-lead-scoring-part-1/  that Michael Thomas, CRMA President & CRM guru for social media plattform provider www.neighborhoodamerica.com, we decided to build a case example around an online community lead identification example that people could relate.

The question we asked of ourselves was “How could you identify in Linkedin that someone was looking for a job without their explicit use of key words like; available, looking, seeking, etc” A lot of recruiters are using Linkedin for passive candidate identification. In short, if you could use behaviors in Linkedin to identify the difference in passive candidates between those who were quietly looking versus those who were not, you could potentially save a recruiter a great deal of wasted activities & cut down on the unnecessary contacts. If you could build a lead scoring system that aggregated the activities so as to identify the “interest” of the candidate, you could leverage those behaviors to identify potential “leads”.

Identified Behaviors for Recruiting Lead Identification in Linkedin

1. Updated Recommendations in last 30 days – Higher score for greater number

2. Frequency of Use – Patterns of use change dramatically

3. Changed Last Position Description or put end date on last job

4. Changed Profile Description

5. Changed Email Address

6. Added a large number of new connection invites

7. Accessed the jobs listing page

8. joined a group(s) – more points for larger numbers

9. Began to post questions or answers in groups

10. Other Employees at the same company score high on activities

None of these in isolation represent that a person is now seeking a position, but taken in aggregate begin to show a pattern of behavior that could be scored. Part 3 will outline our thoughts as to a corporate community & how to perform sales lead idenitifcation leveraging social media tools in an corporate online community.

Updated with Part 3: https://rosenhaft.wordpress.com/2009/06/08/online-community-lead-identification-part-3-corporate-community/

Online Community Lead Identification – Part 1

A few weeks ago, Michael Thomas ( President of the CRMA & CRM guru at the social media platform company,  www.neighborhoodamerica.com )and I were collaborating on a topic that is of great interest to a lot of Sales and Marketers…

How do you create actionable information from an online community? This is relavent as more companies are integrating online communities into the corporate websites. The challenge that I am hearing repeatedly is “how do you identify leads in your community so that you can get them into your CRM system to begin the sales pursuit?”

In short, how would use the interactions within a community to identify interest that you could then qualify through activity scoring? There are several fine lines that are involved…

1. Difference between servicing a potential buyer and turing off someone who is just “looking”

2. Online communities are supposed to be educational and not for hard sales

Both are valid concerns and I think can be addressed. Online communities, if done correctly, are not about the hard sell, but about creating a thought leadership and evangelism center for your company. Potential buyers know that when they visit your website, you are providing the information to assist them in buying. Potential buyers also do not want the hard sell. Online communities can provide the education AND the engagement if done correctly. We all want to please our customers and have them appreciative of our service. I think it largely is based upon expectations. We all appreciate when Amazon provides a recommendation that we like. We all wish the recommendation engines were smarter.

If you host a branded community on your website, there is a different expectation versus an unbranded, open industry community. Most of us are willing provide our contact information in exchange for whitepaper or webinar access. A vendor provides access to their community with the understanding that, if you look interested, they will approach you to guage interest, but won’t harrass you. If they could do a better job of determining when you were interested and serving up content to assisy you in making a better buying decision, would you mind?

The next several posts will outline the basics of online community lead scoring. I will also outline a community example that we are all familiar with: Linkedin.

I will also ask Michael to weigh-in from his blog: www.crm2.blogspot.com

Part 2 – https://rosenhaft.wordpress.com/2009/06/01/community-lead-identification-part-2-linkedin-example/

Part 3 – https://rosenhaft.wordpress.com/2009/06/08/online-community-lead-identification-part-3-corporate-community/