The Anatomy of Buzz: How to Create Word-of-Mouth Marketing - ReachForce Book Club
Friday, June 27th, 2008Lots of good stuff in this chapter. Examples and case studies are mostly B2C, but the concepts work well for B2B Marketing as well.
Emanuel Rosen defines BUZZ as “the sum of all comments about a certain product that are exchanged among people at any given time.” He goes on to list why buzz is powerful today – noise, skepticism, and connectivity.
- Noise – “Customers can hardly hear you.” Marketing and Advertising are everywhere. There’s no escaping it. We get it in the mail, we see banner ads online, when was the last time you searched Google and didn’t see a paid ad pop up? And let’s not forget all of the email spam we dread every day. As Marketers, we must figure out a way to stand out in the crowd if we want to be heard (or seen). This creates buzz.
- Skepticism – “Customers are skeptical.” This isn’t surprising. They have been bombarded by marketing and advertising everywhere they go, all promising to the best results. Who should they believe or trust? Rosen mentions a survey that illustrates this point - “37% of the public considers information from a software company ‘very or somewhat believable’.” Wow!
- Connectivity – Today people are easily connected. We all have access to new tools that enable us to better share information. As Marketers, wouldn’t we rather them talk about us to our face instead of behind our back? Create places and opportunities for people to speak out about your products or services. Be involved.
Rosen goes on to say “If you want to create buzz, you have to know who your customers are and how you are reaching them. Start by answering these questions:
- From whom do your customers typically learn about your product?
- What do people say when they recommend your product?
- How fast does information about your product spread as compared with competitors’ products?
- Who are the network hubs?
- Where does the information hit a roadblock?
- How many sources of information does a customer rely on and which ones are most important?
- What other kinds of information spread through the same networks?”
Not only will these questions help us create buzz, they’ll also be helpful as we are launching new products or services, introducing new features, and thinking about other social marketing strategies.
Generating buzz doesn’t just happen overnight. It takes planning, seeding and well thought out execution. A good seeding program can be the launching pad to huge success. Rosen listed four rules for building a successful seeding program, these are definitely worth sharing and talking about.
- “Look beyond the usual suspects. Identify social circles, industry segments, or academic disciplines in which people don’t talk about your product or service, and seed them.”
- “Put products in their hands.” Let your audience touch or experience firsthand what you are offering. If your solution isn’t one you can easily experience, offer a free demo or show real results via a proven customer success story.
- “Reduce the price barrier. Make the product free for seed recipients if you can, or at least offer a significant discount.”
- “Listen for silence. When you hear silence, the network is dead. Pay attention to dead networks and do further seeding to wake them up.”
Remember, the goal of seeding is to “plant the seed to stimulate discussion in multiple networks simultaneously.”
At ReachForce we are rolling out new SaaS tools that enable Sales and Marketing teams to better identify and target their market “sweet spots”. Here’s how we are trying to create some buzz around these new product offerings –
- We typically sell to Marketers but with these new SaaS tools Sales teams might be a better target audience so we are doing some test messaging via email programs to a custom role-based list of Sales decision makers.
- We are offering these people free trials of the real time analytics software. We started out offering the new tools bundled with ReachForce data services and decided that stand alone, the analytics tools added value and created a sense of wanting more (data services). So we now are offering the new tools free for a limited time. We are hoping this is going to create buzz for both the software and data services.
- We are also experimenting with some very targeted advertising programs. Hoping these are going to drive some awareness as well as generate some prospect engagement.
- We are tracking our buzz program by measuring how many people actually log in and try out the free software tools. So far so good and we’re just getting started!
With all of these things we are trying to create buzz that ultimately turns into measurable revenue.
Anyone else actively working on a B2B word-of-month campaign? If so, I’d love to hear all about it.
Sprout Widgets, Mashups and Other Great Content That Drives SEO - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #112
Thursday, June 26th, 2008One of the best ways to increase your SEO rankings is to attract inbound links to your blog or website.
Traditional link building efforts involve asking for links, link swapping, or link buying. This process is extremely time consuming and can get expensive if you are buying high quality links. Really, in this instance, is there any such thing as a quality link? After all, Google has made no secret that it is actively seeking ways to weed out this practice.
In contrast, you can save yourself a lot of time and money by leveraging social media to convince others to link to your content. The challenge is coming up with link-worthy material and then spreading the word via Twitter and other social media tools. Fortunately for those of us with little time and fewer resources, the process of building this content just got a lot easier. You no longer need to embark upon a lengthy research project or write a 10 page white paper. These days, successful link bait is taking the form of widgets or mashups or other forms of rich media content. The prerequisite is that the content should be helpful, clever, funny, or remarkable enough that others want to write about it or include it in their roundup of free tools.
The process of building a widget or mashup used to require Web development skills or enough budget to farm out the work. I’ve been reading about a number of free tools that allow just about anyone to create their own widgets but have not found the confidence to try them. Prodded by a “tweet” from one of the more influential Twitterati (did I really just write that?), I decided to check out, Sprout, an extremely cool and easy to use site to help you build widgets or other informational tools that can be embedded in your blog or web site. http://sproutbuilder.com/whataresprouts.
Sprout looks easy enough to use and I’m ready to check it out. Now, I just have to come up with the “killer app” for our blog readers. To get ideas, the first step will be to reach out to the community reading the BreakingPoint blog at www.breakingpointlabs.com and then do a bit of brainstorming.
Unleashing the Killer App - ReachForce Book Club
Friday, June 20th, 2008As I was reading this chapter, I kept thinking of online user communities. I don’t know if we are ready yet here at ReachForce, but I am intrigued by Metcalfe’s Law. “According to Metcalfe, the usefulness of a network equals the square of the number of users. Whatever you create becomes more valuable as more people use it. And the more valuable it it becomes, the more users it attracts.” This is obvious when you look at online social and networking communities like Facebook and LinkedIn. Facebook would have no value to me if none of my friends had profiles, but as more and more people join the value increases for each user, causing more users to join.
Being a marketer at a small company, I am curious how this law translates to B2B customer communities. The number of users for a B2B company community is limited by the number of customers. It cannot grow as organically as a community site like Facebook can. Should then small companies create user communities within a larger community? Have you had success starting a user community within Facebook or LinkedIn? Do you as a marketer belong to any online marketing communities?
Social Media Leading Questions
Thursday, June 19th, 2008Social Media is one of the hottest topics in B2B Marketing right now. I interviewed a variety of marketers at MarketingProfs B2B Forum. Check out this video to see what marketers from Marketo, HubSpot, Manticore, Enspire Learning and IDC have to say. See how they answered the following questions:
- Do you participate in social media both personally and professionally?
- How do you think social media is changing B2B PR strategies?
How would you answer those questions?
12 Ways to Turn 300 Webinar Attendees Into 3,000+ Part II - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #107
Thursday, June 19th, 2008In the first half of the B2B Lead blog series on 12 Ways to Turn 300 Webinar Attendees Into 3,000+, I shared 6 tips for getting the most out of your webinar. I recommended that you start by getting into the right mindset. It is important to realize that webinars are just another part of “the conversation” you are having with your customers and the community as a whole. Think about using them as a way to keep the relationship alive, build a community of followers, to spark group discussions or change the way people think about an issue.
In today’s post covering tips 7-12, I’m going way out on a limb to suggest some other cutting-edge practices that a new generation of B2B marketers are using.
7. Turn your webinar into a twebinar –a webinar and Twitter mash-up where conversations take place in real-time before, during and after the webinar, on Twitter. Twitter is a great way to spread the word before the day of the webinar, and an even better way to facilitate Q&A or capture suggestions during and afterward.
8. Don’t wait to reach out and engage with registered attendees. Contact those who registered early to offer more information and continue the conversation. Some ideas for this include sharing a white paper on a relevant topic, distributing event materials or research findings. Bulldog Solutions claims that this will enable you to engage with 10 % of the registrants before the webinar takes place.
9. Pick one core slide that is most intriguing or highlights your core content. Draft a few soundbites around the slide and excerpt the content for a Podcast. Embed the slide image and podcast in a press release or on your community site. Use this to market the archived or “on-demand” version of the webinar.
10. Don’t forget to promote your webinar series via all of the programs you are normally producing including: trade shows, press releases, PPC search engine ads, web pages including your home page, community, blog and customer support pages.
11. Continue the conversation on your blog by using it for Q&A. If your material is good, the Q&A segment can produce lots of great content. Take the conversation to your Community area to show prospects all of the materials they can find there. This will help you keep a loyal audience.
12. It’s officially the “Remix Era,” so take the materials you developed for the webinar, remix them and post where appropriate. Issue a press release with highlights embedded. Transcribe and post the content as a contributed article on Hub pages or Scribd. Syndicate the archived event on sites like On24.
I’m really interested to hear what you have found to be successful on the Webinar marketing front. Is a twebinar really effective? Do attendees really convert to blog readers? Can you effectively engage with registrants before they attend the Webinar? Chime in with your thoughts.
12 Ways to Turn 300 Webinar Attendees Into 3,000+ Part I - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #105
Thursday, June 12th, 2008A Roadmap for Webinars in a Web 2.0 World
This week’s Marketing Profs B2B Forum has been an enlightening experience. Not only have I picked up a few great social media ideas and techniques (thank you Erickson Barnett), but I’ve started to shift the way I think about the role of traditional Marketing techniques in our Web 2.0 world. In this case, I’m referring to Webinars–that old staple of lead generation for B2B Marketers.
So, as I prepared for my presentation on Webinars in a Web 2.0 world, I came up with a list of tips for producing and promoting webinars or really any form of educational content. Thought I’d share them with you in a 2 part post. Here are the first 6 tips. Feel free to chime in with any others that I missed.
- Start by getting into the right mindset to make the most of your webinar. It is important to realize that webinars are just another part of “the conversation” you are having with your customers and the community as a whole. So stop thinking about marketing them like an event. Think about using them as a way to keep the relationship alive, build a community of followers, to spark group discussions or change the way people think about an issue.
- Next, package the webinar to make promoting it more successful. You might consider breaking it into a series of webinars to be held every 6 weeks to keep your followers interested in what you have to say. Produce complimentary content such as white papers, assessments, tools, etc. that you can email to registrants.
- When you draft the promotional copy, remember to write for your target personae. Use simple, but compelling language. Drive home the WIIFM (What’s In It for Me) message. NOTE: You should also use the right words in your copy. Use Google Trends to see which terms your audience is using to search. For example: the word “webcast” is searched for far more often than the word “webinar.”
- Here’s another important tip for packaging your webinar. Post your slides prior to the day of the webinar so people will have a good idea of the content you will cover. Several years ago, I engaged in a survey with Webtorials to assess the effectiveness of podcasts vs. webinars and understand why – for my company—customers responded better to webinars. The key: the slides. Funny, how people love to hate PowerPoint, but when it came down to it, they really needed the slides for comprehension to assess whether they wanted to spend a precious 30 to 45 minutes listening in.
- Use social media to trigger viral distribution of your invitation. Identify a list influencers, reach out and ask them to help you spread the word about your webinar. Use Twitter to tap the influencers with a large following and “direct message” them. Post to Facebook groups interested in the topic. And, share with your LinkedIn network. After all, you are offering a service to these folks – the opportunity for free education on a topic of interest.
- Post your slides using slide sharing sites to get your content in front of people who are actively seeking content/education. If your slides are crafted well, you will trigger what the authors of Made to Stick call the “pain of knowledge gaps” which should entice the viewer to tune in to your webinar.
And, speaking of knowledge gaps, there’s more to come in the next post with 6 clever ways to get additional mileage out of the actual content you produce.
Learn From the 6 Cs of Social Influence Marketing - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #96
Monday, May 5th, 2008When I was in college (far too many years ago) we learned about the 4 P’s of Marketing. Of course, in just the last few years, we’ve seen a major shift in thinking about the 3rd P – promotion. We no longer accept the notion that 2% returns on direct mail or 0% responses from print advertising are smart Marketing. Instead, we are laser targeting our messages to audiences and using social marketing to build a following of like minded customers.
With increasing interest in the power of communities, we now have the 6 C’s of Social Influence Marketing thanks to Dave Friedman, president of the central region for Avenue A | Razorfish. In today’s post, I’ve shared some of Friedman’s very timely advice on making social marketing and communities work.
You see, I’ve had some very interesting discussions of late on how to design and “position” a community. It boils down to “can you really design and position a community or will the community itself determine what it becomes?” We’ve decided to let the BreakingPoint community define itself. Stay tuned for the big launch announcement and see how this works for us.
In the mean time, here is what Friedman has to say courtesy of Chief Marketer Report.
1.Content: Access to valuable tools and content is a key factor in a consumer’s decision to interact with a brand. Regardless of their goals, brands need to think about customizing bite-sized, portable content or experiences for their most prominent target segments—content that their “friends” would be proud to display, share, or support.
Sound familiar? This was the focus of The B2B Lead – snack size educational nuggets.
2.Customization: Users crave the ability to customize, post and share content. On social networks like MySpace or Facebook, users define themselves through their personalized profile pages and the elements that they choose to display. Marketers need to empower consumers to express themselves.
3.Community: The adage “build it and they will come” is not applicable here. To build community within social media campaigns, brands need to achieve several things: Give users a reason to interact with your brand frequently by providing unique content, value or engagement. Let your content travel by distributing it across widgets and other mechanisms beyond your Web site.
Get the rest of the 6 Cs Or, check out Joseph Jaffe’s version at www.jaffejuice.com.
Marketing WTF? - Call Me Crazy - Twitter Will Save Your A#$%@
Friday, April 25th, 2008While I’ve been deep in debate about Twitter as an effective B2B marketing or community building tool, one Twitter user just used it to save his life. According to CNN:
“Buck, a graduate student from the University of California-Berkeley, was in Mahalla, Egypt, covering an anti-government protest when he and his translator Mohammed Maree were arrested April 10. On his way to the police station, Buck took out his cell phone and sent a message to his friends and contacts using the micro-blogging site Twitter. The message only had one word. “Arrested.”
Within seconds, colleagues in the United States and his blogger-friends in Egypt — the same ones who had taught him the tool only a week earlier — were alerted he was being held. “
Amazing.
Marketing WTF? - Twitter Me Crazy
Monday, April 21st, 2008Anyone who thinks Twitter is a waste of time, just doesn’t know how to use it properly. Take a look at how Mahalo is using the product to build a following of tens of thousands.
According to Mahalo CEO, Jason Calcanis
“People have told me I’m crazy for wanting to give one of my friends on Twitter a Macbook Air if I become the #1 user (i’m essentially tied for #2 behind Obama). Well, based on the amount of traffic Twitter is sending to Mahalo.com I don’t think so. It’s not huge traffic, but as you can see in March Twitter sent over 10,000 people to Mahalo and this month we’re on track to have–wait for it–20,000 folks visit Mahalo from Twitter. In the past six months ~45,000 people have visited Mahalo from Twitter. If the 20,000 number is sustainable 250,000 folks will visit Mahalo from Twitter over the next year. Most of these folks are coming from my personal account (I’m think half). 250,000 visitors at .01 each is $2,500 in value. At .05 each (what StumbleUpon charges) it would cost $12,500. MacBook Air = $1,700.”
Wow, and I’m really a huge StumbleUpon fan. Call me crazy but I agree with Calcanis, “Twitter is going to be huge. Folks have no idea how huge right now.”
Integrating Social Media in B2B Marketing - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #86
Monday, April 7th, 2008There’s a lot buzz around social media moving into our world of B2B Marketing and how are we going to leverage it for our own agendas. Almost every day now I hear of a new social media platform or tool, a viral success story, or a frustrated Marketer trying to figure out how to make it ‘work’ for their business. Just today my friend, Jennifer Horton, a fellow B2B Marketer and a Best Practice consultant at Eloqua, also intrigued and inspired by this new social media world, forwarded me a GREAT blog post from Brian Solis I wanted to share with all of you.
Check it out, there are lots of good thoughts here.
http://www.briansolis.com/2007/06/future-of-communications-manifesto-for.html
