The One Critical Question in B2B Digital Marketing.

What’s the big question you should ask yourself first, as a smart B2B social media marketer?  It may seem simple, but it’s important to ask: who am I trying to reach with social media?  And why? Am I trying to engage them?  Compel them?  Inform them?

The answer will help dictate what you’re doing and how you’re doing it.  But it’s key to ask because there’s incredible flexibility build into the social media tools we today have in hand – but that flexibility and breadth also makes for a potentially significant waste of time and resources if you’re not being specific about who you’re reaching for, and what methods within a given channel provide the most profitable way to engage them

Facebook versus Twitter versus LinkedIn versus the other options at hand requires you to be very discriminating in terms of which you’re using.  That requires an in-depth understanding of what each of these channels can do, what tools they each offer, who uses them and to what end.  So due diligence is called for up front, and disciplined and committed follow-through and analytics to assess returns.

There’s no one way to utilize any of these channels. Your tactical choices will depend on your target, and how to want to engage them.  So be sure to ask that question, and think about it long and hard.  It’s the mainspring of success in online B2B marketing.

Humor, humanity and social media for business.

Here’s an good post at Mashable that restates a lot of accepted wisdom about how to approach your social media program if you’re in business, but there’s one topic they cover that isn’t touched on by very many pundits, and that’s the idea of letting a sense of humor, a lighter side, a shade of humanity, shine through in your SMM strategy.

If you’re canvassing a convention, making contacts and gathering relationships, you don’t put yourself out there as a kind of all-business automaton.  So the same humane element you bring to interpersonal business conduct can be expressed in your social media channels, too, within reasonable limits.

You may not want to post pix of the company karaoke Christmas party online.  Especially not if it was open bar.  But there are lots of other ways to put your culture and community on display:

• “Employee profiles” on blogs, e-letters, links in Facebook/Twitter posts. Whether they’re top performers or simply interesting folks, you can show the people side of your business off.
• Community service.  Is your company involved in its community?  Show it off.  Highlight individual’s efforts on behalf of charities or goodwill causes.  Let select causes use your channels as a way of drumming up awareness or support, even.
• Behind the scenes.  Raise the curtain a little and post a video, photoblog or other means of showing how hard your people work and how intently they service customer needs.  Or how they habitually order takeout Chinese for lunch each Thursday.
• Document customer relationships.  It’s halfway between testimonial and photo album, but show off a particularly good relationship, success story or other customer-focused instance as part of your social postings.
• Post your travels and recognitions. To conventions, industry meetings, to participation in professional groups or your last company outing — let followers and others know what you’ve done out of the office.

Inc. thinks about Social Media

“Social Media is a waste of time” as a headline is strictly clickbait, but the article recites some of the useful truths we’ve gone over previously about social media and how it can be made to work on behalf of your business.

The thing we’d always assert that doesn’t get covered in this article is that social media requires patience.  It’s not about immediate results, but about ongoing conversation, and having the willingness to engage with your audience in a persistent, valuable and long-term way.  It’s kind of like developing a prospect into a customer: you wouldn’t expect a sale on the first call, would you?

What’s your brand’s Trust Index?

What’s your brand’s Trust Index?  How does it measure up, in the minds of your prospects and existing customers, against your competition in terms of perceived trustworthiness?

It’s a trick question, because thus far there isn’t any such thing as an objective “Trust Index.”  Yes, there are plenty of polls and surveys out there to take the public’s temperature about who they trust, hour to hour, community by community, but there’s no objective scale for trust, for authenticity.  But they’re the things that matter most in terms of how an audience relates to a brand.

Not knowing how well-trusted your brand is can be dangerous.  And it can be a missed opportunity to improve your image — and bottom line!

Take a look at Toyota’s problems to see just how quickly and precipitously a brand’s stature can tumble in the market’s eye.  A lot of factors, most of them out of the brand’s control, figured in the decline, and many of them were unfair, to be honest — but they’re proof of just how fast mud can stick if you make a misstep.  Toyota may recover, to a large degree, in terms of sales, but there was a luster, a sheen of exceptionalism, that’s now gone forever.  Now they’re just another car company that makes the occasional bonehead mistake.

Would knowing how they were regarded in the mind of consumer have made a difference in all this?  Maybe.  They might have held themselves to a higher standard in how they handled the entire “unintended acceleration” affair — avoided some of its shrapnel.

For any marketer, including B2B marketers, understanding how you’re perceived in the mind of your audience is a good thing.  The news might be bad sometimes — but knowing it is half the solution.

It’s incredibly easy to find out what those perceptions are, too.  How? Well…ask.

Whether it’s a conversation across a conference table or in a purchasing office, or whether you’re using a more formal brand audit or a survey tool to get more qualified or quantified results, there direct and straightforward ways to get the lowdown on how your best customers regard you.  And if there’s an account or a market you just haven’t been able to crack, then doing this groundwork is even more valuable.

Even if you think you’ve got an excellent handle on their perceptions, the best advice you can give yourself is to never believe your own assumptions.  It can lead you down the wrong path — or even cause you to miss out on leveraging positive perceptions you might never have known existed, perceptions that could open new opportunities.

The color of B2B branding.

Color is one of the most powerful associative cues we experience – triggering memory, driving behaviors, informing actions.  Branding is about color, as much as it is shape or textual elements, certainly – think of McDonald’s iconic golden arches, Ferrari’s red, or brands that even use color in their name.  So your brand ought to manage its “color character,” even in the universe of B2B.  In fact, it’s probably even more important in any business category where there are a host of competitors, and a lot of visual static for the prospective customer to deal with!

That doesn’t just apply to picking colors for your logo, but thinking about color’s application on a lot of levels, with new considerations that influence your choices in ways we didn’t dream of a few decades ago.  Online brands are staking copyright claims around specific colors and usages; the Supreme Court set the precedent that brands like Owen Corning and Post-It can legally protect their hues.

Color management means thinking about the context of your category, your competition, your target audience and more. When BP and other firms tried “going green,” it was viewed as hypocrisy by a vocal segment of the audiences.  When a company decides it loves the color blue, it needs to be aware of competition like IBM, which makes that color a linchpin of its identity everywhere, right down to the blue brackets on its TV spots.

There are technical necessities to handling color online, where you’re sometimes at the mercy of monitor miscalibration or site designers who misapply your brand.  That’s why a brand standards guide has to rigorously lay out the rules for how your brand hues – or non-color versions of your brand – are applied, across every conceivable channel.  Those brand assets need to be managed closely, and you might even want to look into legally registering your colors to obtain exclusivity in your category.

Rest assured, even the biggest and smartest brands make mistakes with regard to consistency and execution of their own standards sometimes.  But that’s just one more indication that managing your color identity is critical to how you’re perceived, and to the reach and effectiveness of your branding.

If the ‘guerilla’ suit fits, wear it! Guerilla marketing for small businesses.

Mention guerilla marketing to a small business marketer, and some of them may still draw a blank.  They get direct marketing, buzz marketing, WOM marketing, online marketing, even social media marketing, but…guerilla?

Jay Conrad Levinson first popularized the term in 1984, with his book Guerilla Marketing; like all good consultants and seers, he’s made a good cottage industry out of it ever since.  Its essence?  Using nontraditional, low-cost or no-cost methods to get the word out about your business or service, whether through advertising, promotion, publicity, or any other channel.

I’ve lectured on guerilla marketing, and the key tenets of it I stress are the resources at hand – which is to say, nearly none.  And then I make a point of telling audiences how that’s their key advantage.  Guerilla marketing has to be smart, imaginative and agile; time, dollars and materil resources have to be guarded preciously and used shrewdly.  The result?  If you’re taking it seriously, you get good ideas, killer tactics, and a world of new connections.

Guerilla marketing works best for small businesses; large ones somehow end up appearing clumsy or disingenuous when they try guerilla tactics.  There’s also something homespun and authentic about guerilla marketing that flatters our love of the little guy, the striver who’s working hard to make good.  And since guerilla marketing is intended to drive profits, not just sales, it’s perfect for these kinds of businesses, who need to squeeze margin out of every nickel spent.

Here are a few of the key principles to keep in mind:

• Guerilla is about profits, not just sales.
• Guerilla is about relationships you build over a measured period, not just contacts or sales.
• It’s focused and specific – aimed at particular markets, audiences or opportunities.
• Guerilla plays well with others – it’s about cooperation with complimentary (or sometimes even competing) businesses to benefit all concerned.
• Guerilla is all tactics, not just a select one or two, working together.  Especially technology-based tactics.

So whether you’re commissioning street art or doing video projections, do everything you can to keep them disruptive, imaginative and engaging…and directed toward forging that connection.

Are you leveraging LinkedIn?

Jeff Weiner’s got a lot to be proud about…

Besides rocking the stubble-beard, he hit 100 million users back in March, connecting B2B people from all over the globe (generating some interesting cross-border commerce along the way) and there are a lot of good reasons why:

• It’s B2B, and strictly on-task in terms of design, UX and tooling; it’s obviously not a “social” social site, and hasn’t allowed that kind of message to creep in and dilute the brand.
• Its B2B connection tools are very well thought out, and intuitively easy to use.
• There’s game psyche at work here for all the Type A users — who wants to be a key influencer this week?  How big is my network?

So is your brand or company using LinkedIn assertively to grow its business?  There are obviously scads and scads of tips and hints on how to put it to work to recruit talent, network leads, publicize your wares or services…but like any social media marketing effort, it’s got to start with commitment.

But commitment to what? In our mind, it’s quality, not just quantity.  Yeah, it’s that old saw about social media marketing, but we’ll beat the drum for it here, too: on LinkedIn, it’s important just to aggregate a huge number of connections, but it’s how they perceive what you’re doing there.  It’s a community, first and foremost, and by contributing concretely to it, by not simply spamming up the channel but by offering honest-to-God constructive dialogue and resources, you’ll be better-regarded by that community.

That’s simple common sense in all manner of relationships, but especially in networking, prospecting or selling across a social network.  In the long run, that’ll be what earns you real traction and profit from participation.

StumbleUpon some new business?

Who knew?  According to traffic numbers in recent times — and you can’t argue with traffic numbers, can you? — Facebook is in the lead in terms of social media networks driving traffic to Web sites.  No wonder, with half-a-billion users worldwide.  But in second place?  StumbleUpon.  StumbleUpon?

It’s not a fluke — these are metrics that have held up for several years.  When you consider the network’s raison d’etre, it makes sense: StumbleUpon is about discovering and sharing third-party sites.  So despite the fact it has a relatively low 10 million users, it still outranks Twitter, LinkedIn and heftier competitors because its cornerstone focus is on promoting the sharing of sites.

The user who discovers your page via StumbleUpon is much more likely to be interested in your offerings, because they’ve arrived at your site through the recommendations of people in their own social network.

By submitting your pages to StumbleUpon and creating a profile there, you’re potentially opening yourself up to highly-qualified, or at least curious, traffic.  All the rules of social media marketing should apply here, in terms of congeniality and openness, etc.

The do’s and don’t, visualized!

Here, courtesy of this marketing blog, is the kind of infographic every social media marketer ought to print and post in their office or carry around in their wallet.  It’s a compelling reminder of the simple tips that, diligently followed, can make the difference between a good SMM campaign and a bad one.

The social Web — even on professionally-oriented channels like LinkedIn — is still a place where etiquette and consideration is appreciated.  Every rule your employees obey in real life (whatever that is anymore) should hold firm in how they traffic the social Web.

The social Web isn’t a monolith…it’s a net of clusters.

When marketers look at the social Web, they do so from altitude – not ground level.  So it’s natural for them to think about it in monolithic terms, because they’re accustomed to delivering monolithic results, right?  But in mining the social graph, that complexity of interlaced networks and sub-networks, they’re better off playing small ball, and looking at the small picture.

The social Web isn’t (obviously) made up of a single, unitary body of users, but it’s infinitely fragmented.  It’s personal, so those relationships are personal, and woe to the marketer who tries to trod on them too blatantly.  It’s actually comprised of clusters – separate micronetworks, individuals who may be grouped around a single anchor or strong influencer.  These clusters not only overlap a lot, but overlay each other: just think of the relationships in your own life on the social Web, and how those relationships are often interwoven with each other, or entirely separate.

These clusters can be big or small, linked strongly or weakly.  But there’s a commonality of some kind that brings them together, and that glue is the first critical element you’ve got to discern in order to succeed in reaching them — not just what it is, but how strong, how influential in their lives, how approachable?

To target users with really relevant messages, then, and drive response that’s more authentic and engaged with your brand than hitting the “Like” button, marketers need to dig down into this kind of data, and use the best available analytics to get at what some pundits call the Profile of Revealed Preferences, among other terms.  That involves not just their connections, but their preferences and behaviors, too — an aggregate picture of how they act, not just who they like acting with.