The Social Media Professor

Voice of the B2B Customers' Customers

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In the early 1990's, companies started to listen more systematically to the “voice of the customer” (VOC)* after the quality movement made it clear that companies had room for improvement in this regard. Companies could more precisely identify how to provide the most value by dissecting the customers' voice so that they could hierarchically structure and prioritize their needs. Many companies learned from this exercise and customers benefited.

However, VOC also missed the boat in one major way. The voice of the customer approach assumes that the customer is talking to you. But what if the customer is either unwilling or unable to articulate anything? This is the “silence of the customer” which could be equally if not more important than what customers actually say such as when “96% of customers who are unhappy don't complain.”

Thinking about it, in a B2B context this could also mean that social media listening efforts could be misdirected if listening is limited only to direct customers. Instead of trying to listen to direct customers when they may not have anything to say, companies could be better off holding their ears close to the ground where the customers of the customers interact instead. Why? Well, imagine if we could hear customers' customers concerns. Wouldn't that put us in a better position to also predict what our customers' needs are, articulated or not?

* Abbie Griffin & John R. Hauser (1993), “The Voice of the Customer,” Marketing Science, Vol. 12, No. 1, Winter 1993.

Good Domain Parenting

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When speaking about social media, I often draw laughter when I say that I find it incredible that there are still parents out there who name their babies without first checking if the matching domain name is available. What they don't know is that I am only half-joking when I make that statement. Perhaps “incredible” is an exaggeration but I do maintain that you could do your child a great favor if you think ahead in this regard. I registered our two kids' domains when they were about 5-6 years old and was lucky myself to find them still being available. Yes, it is possible that .com as a top level domain will be more or less irrelevant when the time comes for them to “brand” themselves online as technology changes. Still, the expense of about $10 a year pales in comparison to all other investments parents make in their kids future and the rewards could be significant.

Case in point. In today's class when I said the above, one of my students came up and said that that was exactly what his dad did when he was born! His name “Zachary Campbell” is a common one as well but thanks to his dad's foresightedness, he now outranks others with the same name, even some semicelebrities.

B2B Social Media in Silicon Valley

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Santana Row, San Jose

Took the Southwest shuttle from Orange County to San Jose in Silicon Valley today and met with some marketing executives at a major B2B company. It was educational for me to hear first-hand accounts from marketers about their struggles selling social media initiatives to non-marketing executives. Without strong companywide support, the social media efforts undertaken, however well-intentioned, may not even get a fair shot at being successful as they tend to be understaffed and underfunded. Even the projects that do get some traction on social media can suffer from not get the recognition they deserve due to a general lack of appreciation of the power of social media. Continuing to provide some good examples could perhaps convince them over time. However, it would clearly be ideal should they have the very senior management's blessing. A great way of demonstrating such support would be if the CEO would jump on board and started tweeting or blogging, wouldn't it?

What Social Media Can Do

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In my first social media marketing classes today, students were asked to identify various uses of social media, preferably with a business use case in mind. If you cannot read my handwriting… here comes some of the prominent uses of social media:

  • Communication/Conversations
  • Connection/Network
  • Humanization/Personalization
  • Marketing Research/Opportunity Identification
  • Brand presence/Awareness creation
  • Reminders about ones existence
  • Employee relations and employer branding
  • Collaboration
  • Communities
  • News

Social media is quite multifaceted in other words! Not bad, huh? So, are you leveraging most of these uses or are you limiting yourself?

3 Keys to Social Success

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There are many guidelines out there when it comes to how one can achieve success through the use of social media. To me, three core perspectives stand out as being particularly critical.

  1. Long term perspective. Without the patience to develop long-term relationships and networks, one is likely to fail. To strive for short-terms results may not be wrong per se but it cannot come at the expense of long-term customer satisfaction.
  2. Generous approach. Give more than you take and you will be offered plenty in return. This is related to the long-term perspective as well and the generosity is also about proactive sharing, offering ideas, connections, and resources to those in your network you believe would benefit from them without them asking for them.
  3. Human appearance. Trying to sound corporate, professional, or intellectual can on social media come across as being snobby and standoffish and is thus also less likely to engender any interest in interactions by other parties. A more casual, informal, and sometimes humorous communication style is a much more effective way to get other people to open up and be willing to develop better relationships with you. In the end, it may very well be seen as being unprofessional to be too professional!

What do you think? Other factors you think should be a top priority as you find your approach on social media?

Selling Social Media to CEO Laggards

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Social Media Campfire recently asked me to share some tips on how the value of social media can be effectively communicated to CEOs and other decision makers who are genuinely skeptical towards the business value of social media. It turned out to be a very interesting evening also for me as the Social Media  Campfire participants had plenty of insights to share on this topic as well based on their extensive experiences trying to get the message across. Based on our discussion, one thing that I think is noteworthy, is the one of overcoming the pride factor of CEOs who have been truly skeptical.

Social Media Campfire

Now we are dealing with True Laggards

Given that social media no longer can be considered a new phenomenon, one thing to recognize is that executives who are still holding out by refusing to adopt any social media tools for business purposes represent a shrinking group of executives that could only be classified as true laggards in the adoption process. One implication of this is that for them to change their minds, it is going to take a considerable amount of persuasion as many of them likely have expressed deep skepticism toward social media now for a number of years. Thus, they would have to swallow some pride in order to make such an adjustment and for some, this may not come easily.

One way of dealing with this concern is to give them something to take pride in at the same time as they start adopting social media. For example, one can acknowledge that some of the critiques of social media that many skeptics have expressed could have been at least partially warranted. Security issues of an employee sharing too much information have hurt some companies. Others have indeed suffered from employees wasting too much time on social media without much return on their investment to show for it, at least not in the short term. Customers already suffering from information overload not wanting to connect with suppliers on an ever-increasing number of social media platforms. Etc. This way, executives may be better able to start a more nuanced discussion today regarding how social media potentially could add value to their business and in what ways they should act in order to avoid the traps.

A big thanks to all participants at the Social Media Campfire and to the hosts Kathi Kruse, Marieke Hensel, and Chris Voss plus the beautiful locale at Coworking Fullerton / Branding Personality and for more about our discussion, please also check out the recap by Kathi Kruse!

Confessions of a Pure Play Publisher

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Michael Stelzner is the CEO & Founder of Social Media Examiner, currently Technorati's #1 Small Business Blog and #4 blog in the general Business category. In the following video interview, I ask Michael Stelzner to share the “secrets” behind the extremely successful launch of his blog. He also shares these experiences in more detail in his book “Launch: How to Quickly Propel Your Business Beyond the Competition,” and please also refer to an interview transcript below.

The Elevation Principle

Stelzner structures his ideas around the so-called Elevation Principle which he describes as follows:

“If you think of your business as a rocket ship and the fuel for your rocket is content. In the elevation principle, I talk about a formula which is great content + other people – marketing messages = growth.”

Content

Stelzner: “The content is made up of two different kinds of fuel. You've got primary fuel and nucleur fuel. Primary fuel has got about a 72 hour shelf life so you need to produce new content regularly of things like how-to articles, case studies, and interviews. Nucleur fuel, harder to create, you do it when you're starting your business or when you have key moments in your business, when you need to really attract a lot of attention. These are things like reports based on surveys or contests.”

Other People

Stelzner: “The other people component has to do with looking outside of your company and tapping the knowledge of experts, people that have written books, people that are experts inside of corporations, and bringing the knowledge that's in their minds to your audience doing a couple of things. First of all, providing great knowledge to your audience but at the same time building potential relationships that can help bring more people to you.”

No Marketing Messages

Stelzner: “The last thing is: no marketing messages. Nobody likes to be sold. So the idea is put those in storage and stop selling, stop putting advertising all around your content. Then your content can be received as a true gift instead of as some sort of a lure that's designed to draw people in. Most businesses haven't quite figured this out, it's a new model but it makes sense because people are tuning out, they don't trust businesses anymore because they are just being marketed to constantly.

So if you can figure out how to use other channels to market, just don't taint your content with marketing messages, save it for a back channel like email. Then you can draw people to you and bring them back, they'll receive it for what it truly should be, which is a gift. If businesses start experimenting with it, they'll begin to see that it is something that really works. They'll get over this ‘why isn't anyone reading my content?' and they'll actually begin having raving fans that want to share that content.”

Michael Stelzner
Michael Stelzner

You Can Join a Crowded Marketplace

I asked Michael to elaborate on “the Internet Paralysis,” the notion that many entrepreneurial initiatives get thwarted when a quick Internet search reveals that someone else already is doing the same thing. This is his response:

“Look, I launched Social Media Examiner in 2009, well into the craze of social media, with no social media experience, and Social Media Examiner is the number 1 Small Business Blog in the world. So, if I can do it, anybody can really do it. There is this ‘oh, it's already been done, I'm not going to do it mentality' but the fact is, there are so many people right now that are involved in social media, yet I was able to do it. I'm the perfect proof that a nobody from nowhere can actually do something quite dramatic.”

A Second Season for Journalists

Stelzner continues: “I believe that content is going to become the magic way to attract people and I know there's a lot of journalists that are out of work. It's great news for writers. Businesses who don't know how to write can reach out for these writers and also they can train up people in their organization that know how to write, how to create that kind of content that is commercial-free.”

Ignore Metcalfe's Law

Metcalfe's Law holds that the value of a network increases exponentially with the number of members in a network and this speaks to the benefits of being a first mover quickly gaining a large market share. Michael Stelzner ignored this law as there were already strong, entrenched players in the social media sector such as Mashable. This is how he describes his situation:

Stelzner: “I don't think that's such a big deal because if you think about it, people are always going to be interested in solving specific problems and even though I'm a big blog, it doesn't mean that everybody gets all their social media knowledge from my blog. It's a big world. What you need to do is figure out what it is that your audience is interested in, whether you're a real estate agent, or someone who makes cooking products. The fact is, any business could do well with this but the idea of being the biggest in the world maybe is a little bit of a stretch. But you could get people to rethink the way that they look at you and really become very loyal to your brand, which is what everybody really wants.”

Coopetition is the name of the game

Michael Stelzner had not yet mentioned the word competitor so I asked him about whether he ever thought of other companies as such. Here he goes:

“I don't think of anyone as competition, I think of coopetition. Cooperate even if you are a competitor, I have always had that model. When I was ‘The King of White Papers', I went to every single person that was high profile in that industry and I gave them my platform. I gave them exposure, I helped them. What happens is when the tide rises, all the ships rise. I believe that if you give gifts to people, whether they be competitors or not, it's gonna help you and it's gonna help really in a major way bring people to you.”

How Students Can Be Prepared

Michael Stelzner continued with the following recommendations for how students can be better prepared for the workplace:

“I think students need to figure out how to build the relationships and they need to figure out how to design content. If they can figure out how to create great, great content, and they can advise businesses on how to actually establish relationships with the experts, they'll become invaluable. They could be just one or the other. They could just create content or they can work on relationships. It's just business development in a new form if you think about it.”

A Pure Play Publisher

I concluded the interview by asking Michael Stelzner to share how he manages his time as interest in him has grown with the success of Social Media Examiner:

“Actually, what is great about me is that I tell everybody I'm not a consultant, I'm a publisher. I have friends who do that stuff so I just point those opportunities to those friends and I'm a pure play publisher. Social Media Examiner is my magazine and it's great when they come in, I'm able to send those leads out to my friends, and they love me even more so it's a total win-win!”

Brian Solis virtually at Chapman University

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Recently, Brian Solis, Principal Analyst at the Altimeter Group, took the time to share some of his insightful perspectives with my Internet/Social Media Marketing class via a Skype conversation. Please check out the video and/or read the interview excerpts further below.

From Social Commerce to Syndicated Commerce

Brian Solis suggests that the meaning of social commerce depends on your vantage point and will be different based on whether you are focusing on information or monetization:

“Information commerce is priceless and that's what makes social media so valuable. The more conversations, the more potential you have for influence, the more positive experiences you can promote, the better the influence aids in awareness, consideration, pre- and post-commerce.”

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Seth Godin says Keep Firing Your Customers

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I had the honor of participating in Mitch Jackson’s Spreecast with Seth Godin (segment beginning at 28:45). I took the opportunity to ask if he still supports his earlier claim from Permission Marketing that companies should fire 70% of their customers or if he has revised that notion as technology has evolved to perhaps enable more customers to be served in a cost-effective manner.

Niklas Myhr, Experience Director
Niklas Myhr, Experience Director

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The Social Media Professor

Orange County, California
United States

Also at NiklasMyhr.com

Contact

Please email me at niklas [at] thesocialmediaprofessor.com if you have any questions.