Tips, tools, and best practices for B2B marketers.
Three Factors to Consider Before you Jump on the Social Media Bandwagon
May 20, 2008 | Posted by: Lee
Thanks to Ann Handley over at MarketingProfs, we're getting the opportunity to not only speak at the upcoming B2B Forum in June about our B2B Social Media Strategy, but we've also got 2 articles appearing in MarketingProfs this month.
The first "Three Factors to Consider Before you Jump on the Social Media Bandwagon" was published today (Woot!!). I'd love your thought here or over at MarketingProfs.
Next article is about gauging the readiness of your company to jump on the social media bandwagon will appear in the next few weeks.
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Comments
May 21 2008 - 12:56 PM | by Neil Callanan
Great article. Congrats on the feature.
The steps help to take this very nebulous concept of social media at attach real actions and insights to it.
However IMO, your “next steps” of judging your organizations readiness to embark should be the first step. Why spend the time measuring whats going in your world without first confirming that your organization can handle the dive? and to that point as agencies don’t we owe it to ourselves and our clients to gauge this before spending time (and money) going down a path that will not lead to any action?
May 22 2008 - 08:37 AM | by Ann Handley
Lee—You are very welcome! Happy to have you as part of the site this week and *really* looking forward to your session in June.
May 22 2008 - 11:22 AM | by Lee
@Neil, by assessing the market, the competition, and the buyer first, we establish what makes sense from a business perspective. We help B2B marketers create a compelling argument for (or against) social media in terms of how it benefits the business.
If we started with the culture and let that drive whether to dive in or not, many companies would miss out on potentially powerful opportunities for their companies. Certainly this could be less costly and time consuming, but it wouldn’t be in the best interest of the client. It fact, I think it would short sided of us to stop there.
The company’s culture shouldn’t dictate the business strategy, especially with new channels such as social media. There’s a lot of misunderstanding out there that may be derailing initiatives that would be good for the business.
By identify what’s right for our clients’ business first, then analyzing their readiness to engage, we help them create a strategy that moves them forward, both internally and with their buyers.
May 22 2008 - 12:17 PM | by Neil
@Lee, perhaps my statement was misworded. I am not advocating not presenting ideas and strategies to clients. I think that continually evolving our strategies is key to success. That said it seems worthwhile to be sure a client can crawl before we ask them to walk into the social media landscape.
Compare their culture to a marketing budget. While running a $2 million dollar multichannel campaign might make strategic sense and the opportunity for success is there; if the client only has a 50k budget is our time better spent determining focusing on what we could do with their budget?
If from the start we can determine that an organization is not ready to put themselves out there in any way or that they have no intention of committing resources to do so either way, does it not make sense to refocus our energy and dollars elsewhere in their marketing world?
May 22 2008 - 02:51 PM | by Lee
@Neil, first I love that you’re diving in and really thinking about this. It’s always great to have other perspectives to help hone the strategy.
I agree that we need to match the activity to what the company can achieve, both in terms of costs and culture. We’ve never been the type of agency to recommend solutions a company can’t actually execute - our reputation is actually quite the opposite (likely because we have thoughtful people like you who really focus on what’s best for the client).
As far as whether “an organization is not ready to put themselves out there in any way or that they have no intention of committing resources to do so either way”, I’m making the assumption that since they’ve asked us to evaluate social media for them that there’s already some level of commitment to at least finding out what’s possible.
The beauty of social media is that you can “crawl” before you “walk”, and I agree that that’s where companies should start. There are low cost, low risk, fairly low resource intensive ways to start monitoring the conversation that don’t take huge cultural shifts.
The goal is to determine what the potential is (or isn’t), where companies should be diving in, and what’s a realistic starting place. The plan should help them engage today, but also help them lay out next steps.