A packed house at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival came together for tips on how to use social media to further business-to-business marketing, with experts Jamie Grenney, vice president social media and online video at Salesforce; Jason Bartlett, vice president of global social marketing for Xerox; and Jeanette Gibson, senior director social and digital marketing at Cisco Systems, all moderated by Melissa Chanslor, director at Text100. This informative panel gave participants a lot to think about, but four themes seemed to predominate.
- The entire company has a role in social marketing. Gibson says every company needs to leverage the people who want to help customers connect with your business and give them the tools to do that. “The entire company has a role in social.” At Cisco — and all forward-thinking companies — all employees are expected to engage with customers. Bartlett says not to “underestimate your employees’ own social networks,” Facebook friends and Twitter followers.
By now you have probably heard of Twitter’s new video-sharing application called Vine. If not, here is a quick snapshot.
Users can record motion and sound clips from their iOS phones and upload the newly created video via the app to share on Twitter or the Vine environment itself. Each video can be tagged with keywords and hashtags, and users can like and comment your post, similar to other video-sharing sites.
What makes Vine different? It’s all about the length restriction. Each video is limited to six seconds in length and will loop continuously after it is published.
While the coverage of the Vine app lately has been largely negative, due to privacy bugs and controversial adult content, there are incredible opportunities out there for businesses willing to experiment with the app.
10 video ideas for B2B companies just getting started with Vine:
- Showcase the building and grounds of your company’s headquarters.
On Friday, I discussed the value of customer knowledge. But how do you put that knowledge to work? What role does community play?
Let’s move on to the issue of customer service, or literally serving the customer. That term covers a lot of terrain, so I’ll start with a few examples from my own experience. I’ve been having trouble with my phone line recently, so I decided to try and find out what the problem is. When my own attempts at troubleshooting failed, I called the Telekom hotline. I don’t even want to get started on the voice-activated menu, which made me want to tear my hair out. After the computer had finally come to terms with my accent, I got a real human being on the other end. The service representative identified the problem with some input from me (it seems my ancient Eumex 404 ISDN unit has given up the ghost) and suggested a solution. (read more…)
Customer satisfaction is an aim that every company — whether in the B2C or B2B business — has been pursuing for years. Or at least that’s what they all claim. Whether companies actually do what it takes to satisfy their customers is another question altogether. Back in my days at FileNet, we had customer satisfaction surveys conducted. Our variable salaries were partly linked to the index value, so it was in management’s own financial interest to make sure customers were happy.
The way I see it, customer satisfaction has become even more important in the age of social business, since social media channels have given customers much more power. In the past, complaints could often be swept under the carpet. But now it’s easy to make them public, so keeping customers happy is becoming more important than ever. In English, a term has emerged that goes beyond mere customer satisfaction. “Customer experience” is all about the consumer’s overall experience with a company and its products and services. (read more…)
There seems to be a perception that social media is better suited for business-to-consumer brands than business-to-business marketing. This view is supported by a lack of easily accessible social media success stories in the B2B space — on the Internet and at conferences. But it is a misconception.
Without a doubt, there are countless impressive B2C success stories, including the funny Bodyform video created in response to a disgruntled Facebook post and the successful Old Spice video campaign. But social media is also extensively and successfully in use for B2B marketing. We simply might not hear about it as much because the examples are not as entertaining.
B2B social media is best suited to generating awareness. To just pick a few examples, social media can help build thought leadership, increase the reach of events or strengthen your brand. Social media can also foster action and engagement. Used properly, social tools can help you leverage advocates and influencers to spread your message, generate content for you and even generate leads. (read more…)
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