Born to B2B Social

November 18, 2010 By 2 Comments

Welcome to social media marketing

It doesn’t matter if you’re churning out great content for your B2B blog. If no one is reading you, you’re going nowhere. No prospects. No leads. No nothing at all.

Lead Generation

Pay-per-click has traditionally been one way of getting visitors to your website and still has a role to play. If not, Google wouldn’t still be pushing so-called “sponsored links”.

It maybe beneficial though, that as the owner of a small-medium business, to also consider using social media channels to win some traffic and generate really meaningful leads. That’s not because pay-per-click doesn’t work. It’s just that with all those chunky costs you’ve got, pay-per-click isn’t always cheap. And anyway, given the lengthy B2B purchase cycle, social media lead generation might actually be a more effective path to go down.

Word of (Digital) Mouth

Just as we listen to our friends when they recommend or refer us to a business, the same goes for social media connections on sites like Twitter or Facebook.

Even the big guns are witnessing the power of social. For example, this week, Martin Clarke, who runs Mail Online (British newspaper The Daily Mail’s website), revealed that 10 percent of the site’s UK traffic is generated by referrals from Facebook.

According to Clarke, who was speaking at the Society of Editors annual conference, only Google delivers more traffic to their site!

A number of our clients are also witnessing similar figures. At a meeting today, I was going over some stats with a client that revealed Facebook sends them over one third of their traffic – second only to Google.

Make Social Work for You in Your Area

Forget dreaming of business from Chicago, Oslo or Cannes, as a small business with local knowledge and local contacts, you should also be using social media to target local people – especially if you own a bricks and mortar store. But even in the B2B space there’s plenty of room to connect on social channels with other local businesses.

In a country like Sweden, were we don’t really have many people (approx 9 million), B2Bs have taken advantage of the Twitter hashtag #svpt to connect with other B2Bs, generating a local dialogue of sorts.
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B2B? Get Out of Facebook

October 1, 2010 By 11 Comments

I‘ve resisted starting a Facebook Page for Jontus Media for a good while now. Don’t get me wrong. Pages are great for some of our clients and I can see that they generate a lot of value and are worth sticking with.

The one thing that I notice though, is that the clients that seem to do best with Facebook are either non-profit, educational organizations, or those that purely focus on building a large community. Not B2B businesses looking to make a sale.

Nothing Actionable

The Wall is great for micro-blogging, status updates and getting quick messages out to your community. It’s also a useful channel to quickly respond to questions, post links to your video and audio content marketing. And in short, Pages often successfully drive traffic to online hubs where you’ve got more actionable landing pages in place.

If you’re a B2B organization looking to really kick start your online marketing and communications, I’m not convinced Facebook Pages are right for you. Many people that I talk to seem to want to jump on the Facebook Page bandwagon without actually figuring out what end result they aiming at.

“Everyone else is on Facebook,” is something I seem to hear on a regular basis. But investing in yet another channel that needs commitment, nurturing, and regular participation might not be the right thing for your business.

Things to Think About

Customer Service & Crisis Management
For me, Twitter is easier to work with if you’re looking for a channel to monitor and respond to customer questions and complaints.

Applications like HootSuite and TweetDeck make it really easy to track real-time mentions of your business. Whilst some might suggest that Facebook is a great place to respond to customers because there’s more space on a Wall than Twitter’s 140 characters, Twitter is great for a quick fire response. You can include a link to a FAQ or post on your B2B blog or a YouTube video from your CEO responding to the crisis.

I also think what does it for me is that a lot of Twitter usage is on mobile devices. Yes, I know Facebook works on mobiles too but getting your instant response out on Twitter via your mobile or PC is much more likely to be heard by other stakeholders like journalists who wouldn’t necessarily be following your Facebook Page.
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Is Your Social Media Strategy Unique?

July 26, 2010 By 22 Comments

So you read up on social media strategy until you’re blue in the face. Then off you sail and create a Twitter profile, a Facebook Page, a blog, a YouTube channel, a flavour-of-the-month profile. Then provide “unique content”, “meaningful resources”, ebooks, webinars and whitepapers.

You then promote the hell out whatever meaningful content you’ve put (hatched?) together across all your networks with countless tweets, comments and “helpful” retweets by the tribe you’ve been working hard to amass over the last three months.

You then sit back, breathe momentarily, and then hope like hell it yields results.

Haven’t we seen it all before?

Trouble is I’m personally getting a bit jaded by the same old social media strategy that seems to be populating the communication channels right now. Everywhere I look businesses – guided by social media gurus or not – are walking down the same path. Everyone seems to be using the same kind of approach and the only difference seems to be the shade of wallpaper on their Twitter background or the design of their blog. Sure, a few people try the odd trick of bombarding you with DMs or continually retweeting old stuff, but on any given day I see about 90 percent of businesses using the same social media strategy. And as a potential customer I’m bored.

That’s why the Old Spice campaign, which is practically now a social media marketing legend, was so refreshing. [Read more...]

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Why We’re On Facebook

July 1, 2010 By 24 Comments

My company have been lucky enough to run a Facebook campaign for Internationella Engelska Gymnasiet this academic year. As I’ve written before it’s really been a key part of helping them achieve their goals.

It’s also been a great lesson for me.

Internationella Engelska Gymnasiet Södermalm | FacebookThe brief was to build a community through social media (Yes, we ran a blog, a Twitter account AND a Formspring.me account too) and get students from the company’s junior high schools to opt to study at their senior high school.

Schools in Sweden are funded by the income generated by each student. Effectively, the local authorities give schools a certain amount of money per student to cover their running costs. It is not possible to charge fees in Sweden.

The blog helped improve the school increase web traffic, generate more traffic from Google search and performed very well for the keywords we targeted. But it was Facebook that did the most to build community.

Facebook Rules!

Talking to the management team at Internationella Engelska Gymnasiet they were surprised Facebook was such a success. Especially as the school didn’t even allow access to the site on campus, initially continuing to block sites that they perceived as time-wasters at the start of term. [Read more...]

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What Do People Want Online?

June 15, 2010 By 4 Comments

If you’re setting out to develop your online marketing and communications strategy you should ask yourself an important question: What do people want online?

what do people want onlineThere’s no point filling a website, blog or twitter account with endless sparkly online content unless you actually know what your audience is looking for.

Understanding Consumer’s Motives for Being Online

One of the most significant reasons for web-usage is that people get online because they want to accomplish something. They are goal-orientated in the sense that they want:

  • information
  • help
  • ideas
  • inspiration
  • examples
  • entertainment

and so on.
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Is Formspring.me on Your Radar?

May 5, 2010 By 1 Comment

Check out my podcast on Formspring.me and Business Users

Are you on Formspring.me yet? Have you even heard of it?

I admit that I hadn’t until I listened to this week’s brilliant Twist Image podcast with Mitch Joel and Gary Vaynerchuk.

Within a day of installing it on a client’s site however I realised how massive this particular social media service could be. The “Ask us anything” invitation is a brilliant call-to-action, designed to engage.

Getting Users to Interact

I installed the Formspring’s widget on a client’s website to see what response we’d get. They’re a school who moved to social media marketing this academic marketing after they approached me to help them recruit new students.

Facebook, blogging and Twitter have really helped in building a community. But just one day of Formspring.me resulted in 15 questions that told me a lot about the concerns of 16-year old prospective senior high school students.

Internationella Engelska Gymnasiet formspring.me

Are you using Formspring.me?


Unlike a forum, this is easy to use and you can connect it to your Twitter or Facebook account to pipe out the questions to other channels. Students (customers?) can ask whatever they want.

Sure, I can see that some people will abuse the service and perhaps ask inappropriate questions and be vulgar and obnoxious because they can hide under the veil of anonymity. But this is also an incredibly useful way to get instant feedback on what your community is thinking.
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