Mar 29, 2010
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PRE ORDERSArchive for the ‘socialnetworking’ Category
As excited as you may be with cross-publishing Facebook apps, Seesmic, Ping.fm, Posterous, TweetDeck, TubeMogul, Blip.TV, FriendFeed and the latest, Google Buzz — which automatically move what we say from one social media network to another — until these tools become as good at listening as they are at talking, they also bring with them a degree of risk that warrants acknowledgment.When I demo all these services in my Social Media Boot Camp, people get excited. Their first reaction is that they’ll be able to leverage these tools to syndicate their messages everywhere. After the eyes glaze over with just how many places there are to communicate on the social web, at first blush these tools appear to be a magic bullet for social media engagement.
The problem is, these tools are made for talking. And that’s just what they do. As just like that Nancy Sinatra song, if you’re not careful, one of these days these tools are going to walk all over you.
Some, like Seesmic and TweetDeck, are starting to include some degree of listening. But for the most part, these tools make it easy to talk, or perhaps I should say scream, for the highest mountain through as many canyons as possible.
Syndication tools will continue to improve, but as it stands, there’s no one tool that allows you to syndicate what you say and get everything you need to hear back, without significant blind spots. In fact, I’ve often thought they can may actually work against you by serving as social media ear plugs, or creating duplicate post feedback, as we FriendFeed and Twitter App our way into our very own echo chambers.
If you rely on these services to display your content on multiple social media networks automatically, it is much more likely you’ll forget to actually log into Linkedin or Facebook in a reasonable amount of time to see if you get questions that deserve a reply. If you have, and don’t respond, you’re using social media as a publishing platform, instead of building stronger relationships with people and organizations.
As long as you remember to listen, these tools do offer new efficiencies. But remember, you can’t have conversations if you don’t listen to what people have to say. And as it stands now, social media syndication tools need to learn to listen as well as they talk.
View CommentsFeb 08, 2010
It will probably come as no surprise that the pre-dominant activity on SlideShare, according to the company’s CEO Rashmi Sinha, who I spoke with recently about the launch of their new branded channels, is B2B lead generation.B2B sales cycles exceed those of B2C, because the former requires someone be walked through a process, learn best practices and see relevant case studies to arrive at a purchasing decision. And currently, PowerPoint presentations are the popular media used in business to get that done.
Google Adwords and online display ads may bring the horse to water, but before a B2B customer drinks, they need a more comprehensive understanding than ads can provide, and presentations solve that problem.
But just what kinds of presentations work best at actually generating leads on SlideShare?
That’s one of the questions I asked Rashmi, in a conversation that also touched on the shortcomings of user-ratings, making sharing beneficial to community members and encouraging high quality business conversations by discouraging anonymity, which is available as a special episode of my “On the Record…Online” podcast.
But if you’re looking to generate leads on the SlideShare, and you want to know how to do it, here’s a cheat sheet directly from SlideShare CEO Rashmi Sinha:
1. Get Personal — SlideShare may be a business-to-business social network, but the service’s real strength is its ability to promote business with personality. To see how this works in practice, check out SlideShare’s homepage on any given day and see what types of presentations rank high. You’ll find dryer, text-heavy presentations — though packed with useful information — are much less popular than those with a strong dose of personality and individual flair.
2. Visual Essays Work Best — In the real world, when you use PowerPoint as a visual aid, you are able to to narrate your presentation. But on SlideShare, your deck has to speak for itself. Using imagery to add visual punch works to communicate more information with fewer words. It’s more attractive to viewers because it requires less effort to look at pictures than it does to read.
3. Serve an Underserved Audience – Most of the content on SlideShare is tech-oriented. So if this is your addressable audience, you’re prospecting in the most competitive of SlideShare’s markets. If, on the other hand, you’re visual essay is about some type of subject-matter that’s less prevalent, you may be appealing to much a smaller audience, but there’s also much less competition, so the probability of converting members into leads is higher.
4. Presentations as Media – On SlideShare, your presentation is media. And good media is different from a good presentation. While good presentations include all the ins and outs at the expense of requiring more time and attention, effective media typically promises quick gains for a small time investment. A SlideShare presentation that works as a lead generation tool, is less about driving actual purchasing decisions than it is about sparking someone’s curiosity. Lead generation is about opening doors, not than closing them.
Rashmi says SlideShare is fixing the broken “white paper download paradigm,” one of the more common ways B2B marketers generate sale leads online. The problem, she says, is that in the white paper download model you have to forfeit your contact information before you know whether or not the content is any good. By introducing a social layer of comments, embeds, favorites and downloads within an active B2B community, SlideShare lets members use a social filter to more efficiently identify what might be compelling content for them.
Are you using SlideShare to generate leads? is there anything I’ve missed that can add to this post?
Feb 02, 2010
While there has been a great deal of recognition and discussion among social media enthusiasts about the use of social networks to engage consumers, in the world of B2B marketing, high profile case studies have been fewer and farer in between.But after a discussion with Mark Yolton, the senior vice president of the SAP Community Network, a B2B social networking site nearly 2,000,000 members strong and growing monthly at the rate of roughly 30,000 new members spanning 200 countries worldwide, I’m convinced that social networking just may be the killer app for B2B marketing online, and here are 4 reasons why.
1. Faster, Better, Cheaper
According to Yolton, “If it can make our customers more successful than our competitor’s customers, then our competitor’s customers are going to come to us. Or our customers our going to buy more, upgrade faster, extend their capabilities and so forth.” And that’s precisely what the SAP Community Network does.2. On-Demand Subject Matter Expertise
By providing stakeholders with free access to subject matter experts, the SAP Community Network helps its customers implement its solutions and resolve issues faster, decreasing time to market. “Our hope is that if they can reduce some of the burden of day-to-day operations, adopt best practices and overcome challenges faster, they’re going to have to budget left over to buy more stuff,” says Mark Yolton.3. Self-Serve Professional Development
Customers can use the SAP social network to increase their knowledge within their organization at a very low cost. These savings extend to SAP as well, because customers share knowledge directly with other customers, reducing the demand on SAP’s salesforce to educate the marketplace. The scale of the SAP B2B social network is also beneficial, since it’s sheer size increases the possibility that there will be customers within the same industry to share best practices.4. Reputation Management Opportunity
For SAP’s customers, many of who are system integrators, participating in the B2B social network allows them to procure sales leads and actively build their reputations to attract new business opportunities. The social network has become a primary channel for customers and partners to demonstrate their expertise within a focused community, and in so doing, attract qualified leads.Want More?
To listen to an in depth, one-on-one interview with Mark Yolton of SAP on the benefits of B2B social networking, visit “On the Record…Online” and download the audio transcript, or subscribe to the podcast via RSS or Twitter.The SAP community network has been recognized by the Altimeter Group and SiteIQ as exemplary of effective online social networking for business gain. And Mark Yolton does an outstanding job articulating the benefits that SAP and its stakeholders reap from their branded B2B social networking environment.By the way, I am currently researching B2B social media engagement for a book I am writing with Paul Gillin to be published by Wiley later this year. Paul has published a draft outline of our book on his blog. If you have any tips you’d like us to consider, please let us know.
Expect more B2B focused coverage here and @OnTheRecord in the coming weeks and months.
