Image courtesy of http://www.adpulp.com/gamification_se/

There is a growing opinion in the digital marketing community that the construction of the social layer of the web is now complete, especially with the dominance of Facebook. The next phase will move from establishing social connections to the development of game dynamics that encourage long-term brand engagement and loyalty.

It’s certainly easy to see how game theory has already been applied in consumer marketing e.g. building-up points on FourSquare to get a free coffee at Starbucks. But, the big question is how will it work for B2B?

Well, it’s already happening on sites like LinkedIn, where users feel a sense of achievement if they have more connections than their peers, are recommended more and have a more complete profile. Users are driven by their need for status and influence and the fact that progressing to a new level is relatively straightforward e.g. adding specialities gives you and additional 5% on your profile completeness. The same applies to Twitter updates and followers.

I believe that we’ll see a number of game-based experiences on websites and mobile applications developed specifically to engage the business audience. Whilst they will initially be focused on training and education, over time they will motivate prospects and customers to provide levels of customer insight that would be impossible to obtain through traditional methods – it’s easier to get information from people if they get an immediate reward for doing it.

But, by creating game-based connections with our customers, we need to ensure we align their motivations with delivering real business value to your organisation. In this way, we’ll identify individuals and groups who are genuinely interested in our products and services and who will be long-term advocates.

Image courtesy of The PowerPoint Alchemist

Here’s a good example from Microsoft Office Labs. Ribbon Hero 2 teaches people to use the features of Microsoft Office (Excel, PowerPoint and Word) by playing a series of themed games. They can then compete against friends and colleagues while becoming proficient with the software and emerging as loyal users. Try it out here.

Image courtesy of IBM

And finally, IBM CityOne innov8 is a long-term play to promote Big Blue’s sustainability and consulting credentials around smart city planning. The core message is that IBM wants users to discover how business process management, collaborative technologies, and service oriented architecture enable companies and industries to adapt to new demands and build a sustainable advantage. Nancy Pearson, IBM vice president of SOA, BPM and WebSphere says “Serious games allow professionals to inherently comprehend system interactions, and accurately model the potential business outcomes that can result, in a way that no other medium can do.” You can find out more here.

So watch out for the gamification of your next B2B marketing campaign. If done right, your prospects may not even notice how their behaviour is being influenced. They’ll be too busy building their online status and scoring points.

When you want to build a group on LinkedIn, it’s only going to be a success if you build it around a common interest and purpose. An empty LinkedIn group can be a very lonely place…

So, the more focused and well-defined the group is, the higher the level of participation and engagement. Also, don’t get too disappointed if most people aren’t contributing. LinkedIn reckon that for every person that contributes on the site, nine will comment and interact, whilst 90 will just sit back and consume the content.

The new inPages Platform

We were also lucky to take a sneak peak at the brand new inPages Platform. Our Huddle saw it just ahead of its global launch in New York. So, a bit of a scoop for Banner.

So, what does inPages enable marketers to do?

Well, it does seem that LinkedIn has picked up on a well known fact – recommendations from personal acquaintances are the most trusted form of communication – and introduced a new tab on the company profile page called Products & Services. This areas of the site enables companies to feature information about their products, with onward links to their corporate sites.

LinkedIn Company Products and Services Page

But the clever bit here is that the new platform enables members to feature in their profiles the products and services they use and to recommend them. This gives recommendations a new level of credibility – because they’re directly linked to a person’s profile. Thereby overcoming the concerns that many companies actively “massage” product ratings and recommendations on other third party sites. I suspect that many tech marketers are already in a mad rush to get their products and services listed.

However, on reflection, this new platform does raise a number of interesting questions:

• Will companies need to update their social guidelines to encompass their employees recommending their own products or those from other companies?
• If your profile features a large number of products and services, does this just open you up as a target for sales guys? You’re clearly a person who influences the purchase and based on the number of products, you’ve clearly got the budget…
• Looking at the demo of the platform, there doesn’t seem to be the functionality to provide negative feedback. Surely these are often more important than positive recommendations?

I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on this topic. In the meantime, take a look at Henry’s presentation below.

So first of all, a big thank you to our speakers and workshop moderator for making the huddle such a success and presenting such compelling content — Ioanna Stagia (CNN International), Henry Clifford-Jones (LinkedIn Europe), Jackie Hewitt (Autodesk), Xabier Ormazabal (Salesforce.com) and Zoe Sands (Juniper).

There were a number of common strands to the day:

• the power of recommendation and referral
• building communities around a common interest
• avoiding me-too social strategies
• content is still king and measurement paramount

Over the next few days, I will be taking a look at each of the presentations, outlining some of the insights and advice that I took from them. Watch this space.

You can see some of the photos from the huddle below, and view the Twitter stream here.

More than Twitter

In the meantime, take a look at our brand-spanking-new white paper: More than Twitter – social media and the tech buyer. This white paper takes a look at a wide range of cur­rent research into B2B social media, it examines:

• Who’s using the various social media options
• What’s work­ing, what’s not
• What cus­tom­ers are using to inform their buy­ing decisions
• And what it all means for your marketing

You can view the white paper below or download it here.

It depends…

The answer (at least it seems this way to me) is self-evident: it depends. What I said, was this:

I think it all comes down to defining exactly what you want to achieve and executing the programme in a way that’s consistent with the brand.

There are situations (especially with smaller organisations) where a single account would be sufficient; you need a certain ‘critical mass’ to gain enough interesting content and wouldn’t necessarily want to dilute this.

 In medium and large enterprises, though, I can see it being beneficial to have multiple accounts for various reasons:

1. Localisation – Microsoft, for example, operates globally. The website is localised, so why not Twitter and Facebook pages?
2. The organisation has multiple business units. The Mac Business Unit at Microsoft is a good example of a division with a very well defined audience and, judging by the number of followers, a successful Twitter page.
3. Your organisation sell through the channel. For many organisations, channel partners are key. In this case, so is your communication with them.

Ultimately, as long as there is oversight, brand consistency and management of the message and information being distributed through social media channels, it shouldn’t hurt (and will often help) to divide up your audience. The more personal, the more tailored your communication is, the better.

But, there’s more.

You need more than just a Twitter account (or two)

How many accounts you’re going to need (and who’s going to maintain and use them) is just one of the many issues organisations embarking on a social media programme will face.

From LinkedIn to Facebook, Twitter to WordPress, Reddit to Technorati, there is a multitude of audiences and an entire spectrum of tools available to you. Do you know which are appropriate for your organisation?

Here are some ideas for getting started:

Make a plan. It sounds obvious, but think about which channels are appropriate to your business. Define your target audience, gain an understanding the social media landscape and then ascertain where (if at all) your customers live within it.

Define the critical success factors for your programme, and determine what sort of return is the organisation expecting from the time (and yes, money) that it will invest in the programme. Are you looking to drive a net sales increase, or are you banking some goodwill, generating leads or driving traffic to your web site? Or, all of the above?

Whatever the goals, each will need to be supported by people, time, technology, and above all, content.

Content is still king. No matter how well-crafted and integrated your programme is, you’ll get nothing out of it if your target audience doesn’t. (IT folks have a term for this: GIGO.) Useful, relevant content that your audience values is key — it’s about the customer wants, not necessarily about what you want to tell them, right? Support this with a content schedule that’s draws on talent across your organisation.

Empower your employees. Figure out who’s going to be responsible for the various components of the programme, train them and give them the authority to act.

Integrate and automate. Once you’ve indentified the appropriate channels and have a steady stream of killer content, tie them all together. RSS is your friend and you can use feeds to automatically distribute and notify about content from one channel to another. Use your content, where appropriate, to drive a lead-nurturing programme with a marketing automation platform (e.g. Eloqua) and you’ll really start to reap benefits that can be measured (as long as you track the source or the lead).

Finally, keep it simple. In larger organisations – which by their very nature have a clearly defined management structure (with multiple layers), areas of responsibility and a narrow division of labour, getting something as simple as a blog post approved can be a mission.

Huddle up

We’re hosting a Social Media Huddle on 2nd November at the Banner offices. In this information-packed afternoon, marketers will hear from senior technology marketers and vendors about how they’re using social media to drive provable success for their brands in 2010 and beyond.

We’d love you to join us.

Some further reading:

— B2B social media marketing map from Banner
— 5 tips for B2B Social Media Marketing on Econsultancy
— Creating content for “pancake people” by Michael Wrigley, MD at Banner
— 10 Essential Social Media Tools for B2B Marketers on Mashable
— 10 Emerging Social Platforms and How Businesses Can Use Them on Mashable

Watch this space

*UPDATE* Now available on Banner Insights: More than Twitter — Social media and the tech buyer

Coming soon on Banner Insights: More than Twitter — Social media and the tech buyer

While this view is almost certainly overstated (plenty of push marketing campaigns are still generating healthy responses) it has a point. There is a widespread desire on the part of customers for more human, less spun communications that add value to their decisions rather than muddying the waters.

The answer for many marketers is content. While it is being touted as the bright shiny new thing, there is of course nothing really new about content itself (white papers, for example, have been around for as long as the technologies they talk about). The new news is really in the shifting of content to the core of B2B marketing strategy and the explosion of distribution channels.

Creating compelling content

The key to developing an effective content marketing strategy is, as with all marketing, relevance. More than ever you need to step into your customers’ shoes. What are they struggling with? What do they need to know? How can you help them? (Note: help not sell.)

On top of this, why would your customers send your content on to their colleagues and fiends? What value are you adding? This brings me on to…

Content shouldn’t be passive or static or a one-off

Going back to the white paper, there is a danger that content is viewed as the Switzerland of marketing – neutral, disengaged, passive. The reality is quite different. While content does not assume the overt sales role of advertising or direct marketing, it should be anything but passive. Good content is a conversation. It engages the audience. It is part of a process (not simply the end of one).

It is critically important to take the long view of your content marketing programme – how does one piece of content lead to another? How and where are you inviting customer participation? What tools are you building in to help customers achieve their aims (and which will give your content a viral aspect)?

Think once, create many

As I mentioned above, there are now a wider variety of ways to deliver content. So when creating your content, don’t simply stop at the usual suspects (eg variations on a PDF document). Not everyone wants to read off screen.

So in addition to ebooks, create variations of the content as a podcast, presentation, video, an editable wiki, blog post, dead tree book, a newsletter, a webinar, an application or widget – and that’s just for starters. Of course, you don’t have to do the lot but by widening out the media you use you will widen the reach and increase the effectiveness of search.

And distribute everywhere

There are so many distribution options for content it’s staggering. For PDF-like material (docs and presentations) – check out Slideshare, Scribd, HubPages, Authorstream and Slideboom. For video there is, of course, YouTube (where you can create a branded channel quickly and easily) but also Vimeo, Dailymotion and a bunch of others. For podcasting, there are iTunes, Podcast Alley and many more. And for community there are LinkedIn, Biznik, Facebook or, if you want to create your own, Ning.

Then there’s promotion which can cover everything from traditional media through to rich online media housing your content and on to Twitter, blogs, RSS, Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon – the list goes on and on.

The trick, once again, is to take a holistic view of your entire programme. Although, importantly, to also relinquish control allowing your audiences to share and distribute your content too.

Isn’t all this just thought leadership in new clothes?

Well yes and no. Thought leadership is a legitimate and laudable aim of a content marketing programme. But it is not the only aim. The end result of pretty much any content marketing programme should be the perception that you are the go-to people to talk to. However, pure play thought leadership is not the only game in town.

If we have all learned anything in the last couple of years, it’s that community matters. Consumer generated content has already gained adoption in B2C. And B2B itself has a long history of round tables and testimonial case studies. What this means is that it is not always necessary to be the thought leader as long as you know the people who are and can get access to their heads and opinions.

5 approaches to try for starters

There are numerous approaches you can take to begin developing a content marketing programme. Here are 5 to get you going:

1. Grow your own expert – every business has a few experts (in B2B they tend to have more than a few). Find yours and use their brain(s) mercilessly. If they are articulate and presentable, use the rest of them too. Just make sure you remember this is about helping customers (not showing off).
2. Rent someone else’s expert – short on experts? Need greater impartiality? Speak to an analyst house to help you create high value content without it being tainted by the suspicion of spin.
3. Make a stand – what do you hate in the market? More importantly, what do your customers hate? Take a stand, rail against it, begin a movement.
4. Research – traditional or social research can arm you with invaluable content and an excuse to engage customers and prospects. Make it really good and it could get you on Radio 4.
5. Community of gurus – bring customers and partners together to create a thought leadership community. Run invitation-only summits and round tables. Create a home for them online. Hang a forum off it for everyone else to get involved. Poll for opinion and incorporate it into the discussions.

There are of course many, many other options.

I’ll leave you with a final round up:

• Content is an important tool for today’s B2B marketers
• It is fundamentally about helping customers achieve more
• You need to take a holistic view
• Think once, create many
• Distribute everywhere

With the next Demand Generation Summit just a couple of days away, one question to ask is once you’ve got the leads, then what?

For classic B2B sales this often ends up in a conversation around the hand-off process to sales and closed loop marketing. But just as important a question is: is your website playing its part?

Over on Conversion Rate Experts they have an excellent article of the worst offenders when it comes to killing a lead stone dead. These include:

• The ‘empty cart’ button positioned where you’d expect the ‘submit’ button
• The ‘too easy to click’ button (or hover state) where you have to have the precision of a ninja to select what you need
• Session expiries (I’m glad this one is on because it sends me postal)

It’s a great article and they are also looking for submissions for a hall of shame.

Image by Mugley on Flickr

From Flickr Creative Commons

There’s a comment that gets made about military strategy that goes something like: when the war starts the first thing to go out of the window is the plan.

While in marketing no one is generally in danger of dying (at least not in the kind I do), the principle is a pretty sound one. If, like me, you’ve sat in any number of planning and strategy sessions, you can quickly get the idea that the future is being mapped in front of your eyes. First this will happen, then that, then that… It’s quite seductive.

But, of course, the world doesn’t work that way. As soon as you do X, your competitors will simultaneously do Y and the whole damn market will do Z. At around this point, all that future-gazing slideware doesn’t look quite so certain anymore.

Of course, this is a problem the military had to overcome some time back (primarily in the wake of the carnage during World War I). The result was an approach that spent a long time determining the overall objectives (the ‘commander’s intent’) and which left precise tactics to officers in the field who were empowered to adapt to changing circumstances as long as they kept moving towards that overall intent.

The approach was then further refined (primarily by US Air Force Colonel John Boyd) to focus on the ability to make very fast, very adaptable decisions (within a ‘decision loop’) that would outmanoeuvre the opposition.

It’s a principle that, I believe, is critical for today’s marketers. You will never be in possession of perfect visibility. Events will never pan out exactly how you envisage them. That’s just life.

The key is to have a robust, defensible ‘commander’s intent’ and to look at strategy more from the perspective of if X then Y rather than first X then Y. And finally, to never be wedded to any one set of tactics – if traditional media isn’t working, shift to social media, if that isn’t working try face-to-face. Better still try multiple approaches in a low-cost way and let the fittest survive and thrive. In doing so, you can create a living strategy that can react and adapt to changing circumstances while they are changing and while there is time to make a difference in the market.

As it stands, a whole week in, I can kind of see the attraction of Twitter. Essentially, it allows me to get a quick thought out without writing a whole blog post. Of course there’s also the ability to stay in vicarious touch with other people — either those I know or those I’ve heard of. But really it’s a time thing.

It’s interesting to note that at one time putting your personal thoughts ‘out there’ meant creating a website (well, there was a bit of a period pre-internet but let’s skip past that one). Updating was a pain and not exactly conducive to a dynamic, real time experience.

More recently came blogging which made publishing the content of your head way, way easier. Everybody waded in, writing lots, updating regularly. Until life and work got in the way and the posts began appearing at more sedate intervals.

Now, with the imposition of the 140 character limit, dashing off a quick thought is, well, pretty quick. It’ll be interesting to see how this latest phenomenon affects the volume of blog posts. Will people increasingly take the quick and easy over the considered? We’ll see.

Of course, this makes me wonder about what comes next. Micro-tweeting with a 20 character limit? Emoticons only? Only time will tell.

After all, we all want to get to the right answer as soon as humanly possible (if not sooner). It also provides the satisfaction of actually doing (and be seen to be doing) something, anything – quick, unleash the marketing ninjas (if only there really were marketing ninjas).

The trouble is – this is kind of dumb.

It’s far better to spend quality time (as much as you can spare) really understanding what the problem is. The real problem, not just the one you think it is. The strange thing is when you do, quite often the real problem is quite different than the one you thought it was.

Your motto in this should be the Buddhist mantra:

Don’t just do something, sit there

Now let me pause for a moment to make one thing absolutely clear: I’m not saying we should all sit around inspecting our navels while the market goes whistling past. Speed is still of the essence. Fortune favours the agile. And analysis paralysis won’t get you anywhere.

But… if I had just just an hour to come up with a solution, I’d prefer to spend 40 minutes of it getting to the bottom of the real problem (and probably another 10 minutes redefining it) than to have a whole hour with a pad and a marker.

I love the quote by one of the newspaper guys, “We don’t expect to make any money.”

Also, check out the home user’s modem with the rubber cups to put the phone handset into – the first modem I ever used was almost identical to this.

Those were the days.

Source: NOTCOT