by on September 6, 2011 in Conference, Social Media, Social Media Marketing

Lesson from B2B Social Media by David Thomas at Social Fresh in Charlotte NC

Lessons From B2B Social Media by David B Thomas, Radian6

Many times B2B social media has unique challenges and long sales cycles. When we focus on social for B2B, we learn that there are some differences, small and big, that we can all learn from.

B2B Social Media is Important! There are longer sales cycles and more influencers in the process. The sale will be higher dollar and there will be a higher value to the relationship.

  • Importance of the Social Graph – Data that search engines serve up to you will be determined by people that you are connected to in social media. 
  • Reach is Still Important
  • Content Rules – Important to share information that is useful, timely and relevant to your influencers. 
  • Emotional Aspects of Purchase Decisions – Social Media helps you form an emotional attachments to your possible customers.
  • Everybody Loves a Good Story – Engage people with interesting content.
  • The Bs and Cs are all People – Everybody want to be informed, entertained, engaged, etc.

Take Aways

  1. Have Social Media Guidelines in place for your employees. 
  2. Guidelines need to be clear and concise.
  3. Include Do’s as well as Don’ts. Show them examples of “good” engagement.
  4. Give real world examples of how to engage. 
  5. If you need some guidelines go to www.socialmediagoverance.com

Tie Social Media to your Business Objectives

  1. Social Media is a set of tools, not a strategy unto itself.
  2. Tie your efforts to existing bottom-line business objectives.
  3. Decide how you will measure success.

Use What You Have

  1. Develop a content mindset.
  2. Create a content calendar.

Give Your People the Tools

  1. People are talking about your company whether you are there or not.
  2. Customers are sharing their needs, their hopes, their dreams
  3. Prospects are asking questions about you.
  4. You don’t need focus groups anymore. Just use social media

David’s word of advice….. “Listen, Discover, Measure and Engage”!

Nice Job David! Really enjoyed it!

 

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by on September 6, 2011 in Conference, Social Media

Authentic Social Engagement Through Empowered Employees by Vanessa Sain-Dieguez at Social Fresh in Charlotte, NC

BRAND LESSONS: Hilton Worldwide, Authentic Social Engagement Through Empowered Employees by Vanessa Sain-Dieguez, Hilton Worldwide

Learn how Hilton Worldwide is empowering employee advocates to engage in social media and create authentic one to one relationships with potential and existing guests alike through its twitter handle Hilton Suggests. Vanessa will discuss how this program came to be and the success they have seen from authentic engagement.

Vanessa Sain-Dieguez works for Hilton and is their Social Media guru. Hilton trains its employees to use social media to take care of their customers. Recommends a “how-to” guides for organizations to use for their employees for social media. Hilton did a comprehensive study on using social media with their guests and one of the interesting notes is that customers don’t just expect businesses to “listen”, but they expect them to “act”. 

Hilton has empowered their employees to advocate their services to their guests with their extensive market knowledge online. They aren’t afraid to jump into a conversation. Most people are fine with it. They are obviously doing a good job of using advanced search and having keyword trackers set-up. Very impressive!

Definitely an eye opening presentation by Vanessa. Really showed a lot of ways to be part of the conversation in other areas besides hotels. A lot of examples of how Hilton recommends restaurants. No doubt people that were helped through social media will stay at Hilton brand hotels in the future.  

 Considering doing a Social Engagement program?

  1. Get your attorney involved! 
  2. Recruit the right people.
  3. Training is very important. Know the tools and use best practices. Ongoing trainings. New trends. 
  4. Motivation – How to keep your employees motivated? Know your employees and what motivates them.
  5. Daily Management
Vanessa Sain-Dieguez  did a wonderful job for the presentation. Really eye opening presentation. 

 

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by on September 6, 2011 in Conference, Email Marketing, Social Media

Advanced Email + Social Integration by Christopher S. Penn at Social Fresh in Charlotte, NC

Christopher Penn is starting things off on Advanced Email + Social Integration. Social Media isn’t in a vacuum by itself. You need to integrate Social Media with everything else you are doing. Size of your audience matters.

There’s 6 things to do in Social Media.

1. Liking – People need to like you or your business to succeed in business.
2. Reciprocity
3) Social Proof
4) Consistency
5) Authority – Be the authority in your industry or network.
6) Scarcity

Christopher Penn communicates with people on a daily basis by sending people to a landing page with the option of joining more social networks and signing up for his newsletter.

When you are sending out email newsletters show consistency by re-inforcing the email went out by social channels.

Improve your social connections by giving things away. If people “do” what you want them to “do” REWARD them.

Facebook’s API is very possible. Make it very easy for people to sign-up for things and you get wonderful and accurate date straight from their Facebook profile. Makes it very easy for user to sign-up as well. You will need to do some coding, but if you have that available it’s a great idea.

Quick Case Study

Christopher wrote a book and it was going to be sold on Amazon. They have a algorythm the ranks books based on social activity. He connected with his influencial followers (using Klout score) when his book was released. Because of the social activity his book jumped up to #7 on Amazon’s list in marketing.

Christopher moved into talking about the new Multi-Funnel that Google Analytics uses. (I wrote on this a few week back. See http://www.klikmarketing.com/2011/08/26/multi-channel-funnels-in-google-analytics/)

Good and informative information! Reminder I lived blog so there could be a few spelling mistakes.

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