[Editor's note: This is a guest post by Chrissy Scivicque.]

Speaker: Dave Bulger, Partner and Director of Insight, Strategy and Planning for EMA

From the program:

Aligning your objective to your prospects’ buying cycles

Enhancing online customer interaction and loyalty

Our speaker is a behavioral scientist thrown out of academia and now in marketing, talking about how to accelerate the behavior changes to get people to do what you want.

It’s Not a Sales Cycle

• Target Market
• Needs Assessment
• Research
• Solution Selection
• Decision

Every company has its own cycle. In B2B, you’re not talking to one person; it’s a whole group of people.

It’s not about what you’re selling. It’s about what THEY ARE BUYING.

People are creatures of habit. Once you identify the habit, you can change it.

AwarenessàLead genàEngagementàNurturingàPoint of Sale

Though some go straight from the top to the bottom of the funnel, 90% of people of who buy do so post-engagement and this happens online.

Build your integrating marketing mix appropriately to help people buy. Optimize their trip through the funnel.

Create systems to continually re-engage and re-nurture. People can re-engage themselves and nurture each other via social media.

Goal Theory

If I set up a series of intermediate goals, I’m far more likely to get what I want.

Marketer: Just do the next thing. You don’t have to buy now, just go one step further.

Make sure your goals are SMART – specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-based

Be patient, take baby steps.

Transtheoretical Model

Identifies the process of behavior change:

• Precontemplation – not thinking about making a change
• Contemplation – thinking about making a change sometime in the future
• Preparation – getting ready to make a change
• Action – making a change (trying the product)
• Maintenance – engrain the change to build loyalty and avoid relapse

Self-Efficacy—you want to find someone who is going to be your champion. You have to understand how likely they are to put themselves on the line for your product.

Health Belief Model

It’s not enough to be educated. You have to be properly educated and your motivations have to outweigh your barriers to take action.

Identify individual motivations and barriers and tailor your message to address them.

Perceived Susceptibility–How likely is it for me to have the problem that you say I’m having?

Perceived Severity—What is the cost of the problem?

Cues to Action—Listening. Watch what people are doing and change what you say as dynamically as possible to stay in front of them.

Theory of Reasoned Action/Planned Behavior

Understand the behavioral intention, attitudes for and against and subjective norm.

Subjective Norm: People are unlikely to take a recommended action if people they respect don’t do the same thing.

Volitional Control: Am I talking to the right person?  The right people are not always the ones talking most about your stuff.

Lead Generation

• Learners—the vast majority of lead generation engaging with brand for the first time
• Shoppers –the targets getting ready to make a purchase looking for the best solution. Respond best to case studies.
• Buyers—the smallest portion. They want your best and final offer.
• Customers—current users

This lines up with the Stages of Change (above).

Intellectual, emotional and then visceral processes are involved in decision-making.

Practice / Case Study with PGI

PGI –global, virtual meeting company is shifting to target more small and mid-size companies.

Objective: Set up processes for the relationship. (Focus on return on relationship; it’s about the lifetime value of the customer)

Look at the individual as a person and understand where they are in the cycle. It involves a lot of data coordination. Ultimately, you want to predict which marketing touches can be removed and get people where they need to be faster.

PGI developed an algorithm to determine which position an individual fell into (learner, shopper, or buyer) and calculated who to nurture.

Final Thoughts:

Most prospects are not ready to buy. Treat them with patience. It’s about engagement and nurturing. This could be done exclusively through Twitter and Facebook.

Don’t sell, instead help prospects buy. Match messages to their consideration process, not your sales cycle.

Lastly, be nimble. Things change frequently, you have to change your marketing plans with them.

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[Editor's note: This is a guest post by Chrissy Scivicque.]

Panel Members:

Bryan Simkins, Marketing Specialist at FedEx
Jennie Ecclestone, Assistant Manager of Southeast Region Communications for General Motors
Kristine Dobson, Vice President of Business Development for EmailDirect, Inc.
Lisa Calhoun, President of Write2Market

From the program:

Identifying the best practices in social media and social commerce strategies in order to generate leads, promote customer loyalty and obtain customer feedback

Q: Who has tried to use social media for sales and how has it worked out?

Example from the audience: Ilona from Social Strategy shared her successful efforts with increasing attendance for the Lift Summit. Attendance has doubled over last year.

@jeneccestone Last year, the company realized that people didn’t understand their products and how things had changed; the company was being scrutinized and had little money. Jennie shared an example of a connection made via social media that led to three GMC sales. However, the main goal is not sales when they engage in social media but it has led to sales.

@SamDecker The one-to-one aspect of social media is unique. For example, he didn’t realize his sales team was trying to engage with Dominos but Dominos found their taste test video (on Bazaarvoice) and reached out to them. This led to an offline meeting and a contract was closed a few months later.

Social media tends to get people more engaged than voicemail or email. Response from business partners is faster and has a different context, more relational.

@emaildirect They use social media platforms to teach best practices of email marketing and have become an authority in the industry. They utilize Twitter to push short tips and search for people talking about email marketing. Then, they engage with them via DM. This generates a couple of leads a day that have been “fairly easy” to convert into sales. If you want to use social media to generate leads you have to be doing it daily otherwise it’s not going to work for you. It’s a time investment, an hour or two a day spent talking to people.

Q: Share some best practices for Facebook

@SamDecker Share something that people would find interesting. The difference is context. Facebook has a different context than Twitter or other communication methods. Bazaarvoice sends out educational things, not sales oriented. They share studies, whitepapers, and webinars and track it by looking at sources of sales. They find that for web leads, about 25% come from social channels.

@jeneccestone (GM) Dealerships using it for direct sales purposes have not been successful. GM uses it primarily to generate buzz about new products. It’s used more for making relationships and getting people interested and comfortable with the company so they’ll want to have a conversation and go to the dealership. It’s about building trust as individuals. They are seen as the “faces” of GM.

@emaildirect Facebook is the last of priorities for them. There hasn’t been as much success (as compared with Twitter).

Q: Mixing business and personal accounts in social media—good idea or not?

@emaildirect doesn’t coordinate. “I want freedom of expression in my private world and not have it affect anything in my professional world.”

@SamDecker has one persona. 25% personal updates. B2B is about relationships.

@jeneccestone is proud of her association with GM so she coordinates and about 75% of updates are personal so when she updates about business, people are more engaged and already connected with her personally. She thinks it gives people more energy to engage with them, brand pages have pictures of the people behind the accounts. Trouble happened in the company previously when people stopped believing that there were real people behind the company in their communities.

@emaildirect has minimal professional information on Facebook profile.

@jeneccestone is careful about how much business she puts on Facebook. It’s more personal than Twitter, which she uses more for work purposes. She doesn’t bother tracking Facebook links.

Q: Can you share a politician (or other person/brand) who has successfully used social media?

@emaildirect Meg Whitman (running for governor in California) is using social media well and integrates it well in her campaign. Others have had a hard time managing it. It’s a short period of time so the ones who do it well plan it in advance. President Obama was one of the first to recognize its power. Also, there needs to be staffing appropriately allocated for it.

@SamDecker The brands that do it well are coordinating and can see the behavior and change what they do based on that feedback.

@jeneccestone It’s all about the integration for whatever brand you’re representing. The successful ones aren’t afraid of making mistakes and when they do, they are quick to confront it.

Q: Favorite tool for tracking sales

@emaildirect isn’t shy about choosing her own product! Salesforce as well is a great tool.

@SamDecker Google Analytics and Salesforce. Looking at Spreadfast, it’s a campaign management tool that integrates with Analytics.

 Q: In a campaign to drive sales, should the majority of the campaign time be spent on creating content, responding to people or listening?

@emaildirect Focus on creating content. For example, the subject line plays a huge role in if people will open your message and if it’s seen at all. Take the time to develop quality content. That moves beyond sending promotions out on social media. Give something back to the people you’re talking to. You can’t do that in 5 minutes a day.

@SamDecker The biggest gap is the “how”. Do things that will resonate. How much time is dependent on how compelling what you put out there is. Dominos and Old Spice had no idea how big their campaigns would get. Later, after seeing that, they began spending more time (adding the Twitter response video campaign). If you see something is working you’ll gladly put the money and time into doing it more.

@jeneccestone If you focus on the content creation you won’t have to spend as much time reaching out to people. Ideally aim for 50% content creation, 15% reaction and the rest of the time listening so you know what works and what doesn’t. For GM, listening has been the biggest part. They want the feedback so they can adapt to fit what the consumer wants.

Q: How do you target your audience in social media?

@SamDecker Bazaarvoice’s sales team use LinkedIn extensively. It’s the best at targeting. They know that everyone in the industry will be there. If you’re targeting on Facebook you have to tread carefully because many people hold it sacred.

@emaildirect Make a connection. Don’t use the pre-populated email on LinkedIn when trying to connect. Personalize it. Don’t treat it like a TV ad that goes out to millions of users. Use the DM tool on Twitter. Start conversations.

@jeneccestone Avoid auto-tweets. It’s probably the worst business practice out there right now.

Q: What would be an average B2B sales conversion rate for social media? Is there a benchmark you can suggest?

@emaildirect doesn’t believe it’s out there. You can’t really do it. April 2009 was when Email Direct jumped into social media and they average a few leads a day and are able to close two or three of those. She pre-schedules several tweets a day for a month out then monitors it, responds and engages daily.

@SamDecker agrees that the data doesn’t exist to compare.

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[Editor's note: This is a guest post by social media specialist, Stacey Alexander.]

Panel Members:

Dennis Stoutenburgh, President and COO of ILD, Corp.
Leslie Darling, Vice President of East Coast Media for comScore, Inc.
Michael Thomas, Director of Social CRM Strategy of Social Strategy1
Mike Gelfond, Executive Vice President of Client Services for Mastermind

From the program:

Understanding the dynamic metric system used to measure ROI

Key elements of accurately assessing your online presence. How to go from baseline to growing your business.

You can’t prove what you can’t measure.

Mike Gelfond: Focus on business goals. Start with listening tools. The second step is getting out there.

Dennis Stoutenburgh: We mind social media and the web to pull in sentiment and categories that will help the entire business. ROI isn’t necessarily only sales lift and product marketing. It can be for competitive intel. Improve other parts of your company to improve social media. If you do not learn to engage the way people want to be engaged with, someone else will. One of the critical ways to get a benchmark is a social listening platform. It can target where people are commenting on your products and what they’re saying. How are you benchmarking against your competitors? Get your CFO involved in the front end to help you create the benchmarks. Make sure you have the tools to create the data. Define success.

Leslie Darling: On the custom research side, we dig a little deeper. You really need to understand what your objectives are for social media.

Michael Thomas: People are talking about you online. Key is making sense of the noise. How do we get into this? Answer to that is listening. Mobile, listening and the use of Twitter.

Where does listening come in?

Mike Gelfond: Two kinds of listening: human listening and technology that gets back to you. See what journalists and bloggers are saying. What do people think about your brand? What don’t they know about your brand?

Technology is out there to pick up what people are saying, in the phrases they’re saying it, positive/negative tones. What is the human factor?

Dennis Stoutenburgh: Two parts of it: human factor in defining search terms so you don’t get junk. Second, when you get this in, and you want to create actionable events, you need to have human interaction. You can segment these things further from just sentiment analysis. You can have the ability to drill into just the data you want. Without the human element, you’re getting a lot of data but it’s not useful.

Michael Thomas: Listening tools: It’s how people talk about your product. Put that data into certain lanes in which they flow. All those pieces are what people are looking at when they’re looking to buy your product. It has to have a human element or you’ll get a lot of false positives.

Fire hose to garden hose to straw.

Leslie Darling: We did a campaign with Chase. We looked at the overall impact of the campaign on driving credit card applications and lift in usage of cards. We were able to see through social media how people feel about the card. How do they feel about Chase? Did they gain any market share?

There are a lot of listening tools out there. Companies are struggling to figure out which one to choose.

Dennis Stoutenburgh: Who in your organization can actually use the software? We look at traditional media too to get a sense of sentiment. There are still things going on in traditional media that can help in social media strategies.

I need to show a quick return. What would you suggest to kick off a campaign?

Mike Gelfond: It all starts with listening and business objectives. It’s important to know who’s behind getting in the game. Who’s going to support it? What are the goals we want to set? ROI doesn’t just mean a sale. It’s something that’s defined. Is it a brand lift? We can get people talking about it. The other thing is expectation setting. It’s an organic framework that needs constant refinement and it needs support. Planning for your reaction. People are talking about your brand. Now what? You’re never going to get 100% positives about your brand. A risk management is important. You can show a win on any level as long as everyone is in agreement as to what a win is.

Dennis Stoutenburgh: Long term includes integration among the whole company.

We know people are having conversations. We know they’re talking about something. What is not discussed a lot is mobile. The social audience is a mobile audience. How does the mobile/social audience affect what you’re going to do?

Leslie Darling: Overall social media strategy may be a short term plan. Maybe it’s based on seasonality. Or maybe it’s a long term strategy. From that strategy standpoint, where do you want to go? What we’re definitely seeing is mobile is hot and not going anywhere. A lot of loyalty programs are quickly moving to mobile. One of the reasons is apps. The whole way we go about getting information now. It all ties into mobile going forward.

Dennis Stoutenburgh: Mobile is a complete opt-in element, but it’s solving easily measurable issues. Walgreens gets your cell number and will text you when your prescription is ready to solve the problem of people ordering and never picking up.

Mike Gelfond: The lines are blurring right now between social and mobile. QR codes and augmented reality. QR codes are taking the place of where computers can’t be. Augmented reality is where social and mobile really come together. It’s the movie “Matrix” coming to life, and it’s all GPS based.

Michael Thomas: Bacardi campaign that featured a shortcode that I engaged with instantaneously using my mobile. When I look at ads in magazine, I’m wondering what their return is.

What has come up in social media listening that weren’t on the table before?

Dennis Stoutenburgh: You’re going to find things when you begin this process that are going to create ROI that you don’t know about when you get started. The key to creating R is to control the I.

Michael Thomas: The key point is to know where you are today.

Where do you see listening tools going?

Leslie Darling: Having a syndicated report where you can take a look at very targeted audiences, where they go, what types of comments they are making. Not sure if we’ll get there, but that’s where we’d like to go. There’s no signs of stopping.

Just read Groundswell. Now what?

Mike Gelfond: What’s really key is that social and mobile are happening too fast. No one is an expert. You need to be a student of the game. Fail forward and fail quicker. Set proper expectations. Make sure everyone’s comfortable about moving forward.

Stacey Alexander is a communications professional with a passion for social media and a background in public relations. You can read more of her insights on news and information in social media and marketing 2.0 on her blog StaceyAlex.com.

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[Editor's note: This is a guest post by Chrissy Scivicque.]

Speaker: Erik Qualman, Global Vice President of Online Marketing for EF Education

From the program:

Leading social media and commerce expert and award-winning author updates audience with latest B2B social commerce trends

He’s got the t-shirt: #LiftSummit (already the coolest guy in the room)

Today is like a fire hose shooting at a teacup. It’s hard to keep up with the space so focus on the one or two things that you can do that make sense for your business.

YES! Updated version of his viral video!! More focus on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube….love the stat about social media overtaking porn. That’s a sign of something BIG. And there was even a mention of Mad Men.

(You can see it here: http://youtu.be/lFZ0z5Fm-Ng)

The video, though refreshed from last year, is already outdated. That’s how fast this stuff moves.

Video tips:

• Try to keep it to two minutes or less. Five is even too long.
• Music is inherently important. Look at similar videos and see what music is being used. Look for lots of views associated with specific soundtracks. YouTube has relationships with music labels. You can tell by popup that will allow you to click to purchase. This will keep it from being taken down for copyright.
• Always take the perspective of the viewer, not the company. Sales will come if it’s relevant.

Videos don’t sell anything. What sells is the conversations about the video. Ultimately, it’s engagement.

There’s not an easy solution. It takes a lot of work to develop these relationships. But you have a chance to win because no one wants to do the work. Paid search is an example. The win isn’t as big because everyone’s there.

Sprint commercial: The great one where a gal breaks up with a guy via text and email while sitting across from him in a diner.

This is the world we live in.

No matter what business you’re in, you can use social media to sell your business.

Example: How Tony Hawk Uses It

• Here’s a skateboard on a street, you find it you get it. (Twitter)
• Sharing that he’s going to a specific skate park – too many people show up! (Twitter)

Even the pope uses social media, including wikicath. Note: Become friend with the pope J

2009 – 9 of the top 20 most visited sites were social media

Even Google is running to try to catch up with social media (hence, Google Instant). They’re adjusting their algorithm to make it more real-time. Will that impact their revenue?

What is Socialnomics at a Practical Level?

Social commerce in action: Scan QR code of a product in store with your smart phone, it tells you reviews available and connects it to your friends and what they’re doing. This changes your experience as a consumer.

What constructs can you use in social media?

• Listen
• Interact
• React—adjust quickly, this is where many companies fail. If you’re going to get in the space, make sure you’re ready. There’s an expectation that you will engage.
• Sell

Your customer does the exact same thing. They react with reviews.

MacDonald’s: “Our head of social media is the customer.”

Social media is not a strategy it needs to be a part of your culture.

Examples of social media keeping companies in check:

• YouTube: United Breaks Guitars
• BP = Big Problem (YouTube – “the spilled coffee on the table” video)

It can be powerful FOR you or AGAINST you.

Uh oh. He’s talking Rick Rolling. I used to love this song but it’s been way too much now.

Oh, but it’s Bill O’Reilly’s infamous “DO IT LIVE” clip!! CLASSIC!

Who’s doing stuff well in the space?

• Este Lauder: Free facials and photo for social media profile pic
• Skittles: The website linked to other social sites (info = Wikipedia, photo = Flickr, etc.) Lots of press.
• Wine Library TV: Used video to increase sales from $4 mil to $50 million. “Videos themselves don’t sell anything.” It’s the second layer, the engagement. Increase our rate of failure in social media because that’s how we learn. Fall forward, fast and better. (First episode is shared, it’s not very compelling. Then episode 500 follows. Gary is quite different. The real Gary comes out. Loud and obnoxious.)
• Travel Zoo: Trying to get subscribers, they used A/B testing to figure out the right copy for click through.

Side note: We often try to do socially unacceptable things when socially online. 

• SafeNet: $1 million in sales due to LinkedIn group alone.
• Vocus: $500K in sales through content on site and inbound marketing. Discovered that it’s more important for them to curate content than to produce original content. It had to be funneled together.
• Old Spice: YES! This guy just kills me. “Swan dive into the best night of your life.” Best example yet. How quickly can you react? 50 million views on YouTube for the Twitter responses from the Old Spice guy.

Passion and common sense is what you need for social media success.

And now, let’s go eat lunch.

@equalman rocks it again. He definitely stepped it up even from last year.

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[Editor's note: This is a guest post by social media specialist, Stacey Alexander.]

Panel members: 

Jeff Cohen (Moderator), Managing Editor of SocialMediaB2B.com
Robert Ball, CEO and Co-founder of Office Arrow, LLC
Mike Lewis, Chairman and Co-founder of Office Arrow, LLC
Eric Bradlow, Co-Director of Wharton Interactive Media Initiative
Steve Ennen, Managing Director of Wharton Interactive Media Initiative

From the program:

Exploring the effect of flash sales sites like Groupon, Living Social, Woot (recently acquired byamazon) and, for B2B, OfficeArrow

How B2B can join the rapidly growing online trend of social shopping

How companies are utilizing new sales techniques and outlets

Groupon revenue of $500 million, recently been valued at over $1billion, fastest growing company ever

How does this relate to B2B?

Overview: Group buying and daily deals

Mike Lewis: Email daily deals. Some require interaction where you tell others about the deal so you can get a lower price. Something you’re interested in, you want to buy it and you get it at a really great price.

Office Arrow: How social shopping is different in B2B space

Robert Ball: Large company procures, small company just buys office equipment. Does social shopping even apply to businesses? Ex. Green ink. Toner.

Different form of lead generation. Way of getting skin in the game. They purchase a coupon for a discount at your store or your site.

Software world, monthly recurring service world, cloud computing world. 90% discount to get someone to buy for the first time.

Go to Market strategy?

Robert Ball: Deal of the day as well as community drive traffic to the site. Publish a lot of content set up to be searched and found. Can opt out of deal of the day.

People want to know how to do things, connect with somebody like them, and save some money.

Eric Bradlow: It’s not about what the customers are saying; it’s about what the right customers are saying.

How do deal of the day offers relate to traditional and digital advertising?

Steve Ennen: What’s the value to the user? Bring something valuable: deal itself, help you do your job better, etc. How do you bring value on long standing basis? Curated content. Maybe surrounds deal of the day.

Business Model – How economics of deal of the day work

Eric Bradlow: Denny’s had a day where they designated that anybody who came in got a free grand slam breakfast ($5.95 value). They gave away over a million. How could they afford to do this? The cost for Denny’s is less than the cost to the customer. Not everybody orders grand slams. They make most of their money on coffee and juice. How many have never been to Denny’s? Let’s say 30%. Now they’ve created lead generation. Now people are talking about Denny’s. How many GRPs worth of free advertising did they get? How many people will become loyal customers? Denny’s made $25 million on this campaign. Always remember marginal costs and viral aspects. They had people try their product instead of just seeing an ad about it.

Robert Ball: Gap Groupon deal: Today only $25 for $50 off at Gap. 440,000 sold that day. Groupon had an $11 million day – split with Gap. Article said Gap stands to lose $5 million today, which was misleading. Key is marginal cost. You don’t want to do this on your own site, because you’re trashing the pricing on your own site. People will think you’re doing daily deals yourself and will wait until the product they want is marked down.

Mike Lewis: Tremendous lead generation/customer acquisition tool. This is just the tip of the iceberg.

Geo-location data:

Steve Ennen: Everybody is moving to social commerce, but it is about the data. Challenge is how do you take that data and integrate it into the organization? People are recognizing the value of the data. What should we collect? Who has ownership? What happens with that information when we get back?

Real-time measurement:

Steve Ennen: Manufacturing doesn’t work in real-time. Challenge is how to build an organization that is responsive. That has right buy-in across all silos. These tools and this environment are not just a province of the marketing department. Have the mentality and educate your company to be responsive.

Deal of the Day sites:

Robert Ball: We drive traffic to our site, but the deal of the day is very much about the company offering the deal. A lot of people won’t buy things without first checking to see if there’s a discount or coupon for it, whether it’s a haircut or a toy.

What about the receiving end of the B2B sale? How do you evaluate the sale?

Mike Lewis: The majority of the people when presented with the opportunity to put deals on Groupon is “How have other people done it?” Most of these work to the benefit of the service provider.

Robert Ball: There are calculators of how you make money using services like Groupon. It’s not 100% accurate, but it’s interesting.

Eric Bradlow: Number one problem is companies don’t think about the purchase behavior of customers. All of these business models are based on repeat-purchase behavior. Because you are more engaged in the process (chose to buy the coupon, chose to go to the store, etc.) you’re more likely to come back for further purchases. You never make money on the first sale; it’s the following sales.

How to avoid commoditization

Eric Bradlow: When you do a Groupon, there’s a spike. There’s also a post-promotion dip. Worse thing that can happen is they were going to Gap anyway, you give them the coupon, they buy more this month but don’t buy next month because you’ve given them a discount.

You must confuse consumers. Never give routine discounts, or people will stock pile.

There’s only one way to know consumer’s willingness to pay: testing. Run A/B experiments. You can learn about willingness to pay, background color, font size, etc. Test, test, test.

Stacey Alexander is a communications professional with a passion for social media and a background in public relations. You can read more of her insights on news and information in social media and marketing 2.0 on her blog StaceyAlex.com.

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[Editor's note: This is a guest post by Chrissy Scivicque.]

Speaker: Sam Decker, Chief Marketing Officer for Bazaarvoice

From the program:

What being social means for users in businesses with irreverent views.

Decker starts off by sharing that he’s got a bit of pressure, coming from a family of public speakers. He’s been taught to start with a story, not an insult. But here he goes with the insult anyway: B2B marketers over-complicate things, including interaction with customers.

Fair assessment, I’d say.

He’s here to “simplify the essence of social media.”

And here’s the story:

It’s “Bring your kids to work day” at Bazaarvoice and his 8 year old son visits. He ends up at CEO’s office and (insert adorable pic of Kyle Decker) and he’s the new co-CEO of Bazaarvoice.

So here’s the presentation of “What is Social Networking?” By Kyle Decker (8 year old co-CEO)

• People you meet will help you with job and meeting new friends. Other people’s stuff is sometimes hidden…. you solve the problem with Social Media.

Not bad for an 8 year old. I know 30 year olds you couldn’t put it so succinctly.

Why do we participate in Social Networks? Connections.

It’s a tool, a medium for people to connect to people. And B2B marketing is the most relationship-oriented marketing there is. A few stats about how people are using social media:

• 88% of biz technology pros use social media for decision-making
• Research shows that peers, colleagues and word-of-mouth impact purchase decisions and this is what occurs in social media.
• “Get answers to business problems” is the most popular reason people participate in social activity for work purposes.

We’re on this journey together and it’s changing our roles. Our job is to facilitate participation and this will transform our business strategy.

Social media is a reflection of word of mouth. We can use it to react to the market and get data to influence what we’re doing.

Our roles in facilitating this change in marketing and in our organizations:

1. Host
2. Prospector  
3. Parent 

Reputation Economy blurs the lines between Publishers, People, Manufactures, and Retailers.

1. 1.       Host Role

Mistakes: collecting fans and followers like bottle caps and lazy content.

The “Participation Chain”

As marketers, we try to squeeze money from every customer. Imagine you try to squeeze participation. How does that pay off?

Participation turns into engagement, involves ego and voice. And increases the likelihood of loyalty and talking about you offline.

Engagement level continues to go up as they create more content, which attracts more people. Those people become customers and are more likely to convert and contribute. The cycle just continues. It pays off and is a virtuous cycle.

Example: Urban Outfitters

Collected reviews and encouraged people to upload photos to Flickr. They connected the two together and highlighted top participants. Results:

• 139% increase in reviews per day
• 239% increase in photos submitted per week.

Example: Intuit  

Reviews on Turbo Tax can be connected to social media profiles, Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn. The likelihood of seeing a review from someone you know is high. 

2. Prospector Role

This is all about ROI. A prospector is going for gold.

The Social Media people are operating separately in organizations, away from PR. It needs to get closer to driving results.

Start and continue with the things that have solid metrics.

• Soft: “Fans” and comments
• Solid: Visits, conversion and average dollar value

What can you do?

• Syndicate user-generated content to portals
• Sponsored stories on media sites
• Syndicate content and share profiles with social networks
• Integrate Word of Mouth copy in campaigns
• Have your brand or product “discovered” through search
• Reports, analytics & alters from voice of customer

Bring the voice of the customer to the front.

OfficeDepot (Example): 197% increase in performance, review-based terms highlighted

3.  Parent Role

“Be the conversation”

You are looking after the development of your children. You’re looking to help them grow. What customers are saying has a lot to do with who you are as a company.

Social Commerce Rock Star Model

Facilitate participation vs. How you use the content and the data

Karaoke Star: You’re not really going anywhere, keep your day job. But you’re getting out there…

One Hit Wonder: You’re using the data, you’ve figured out you’ve got something and you’re milking it.

Garage Band: You’re facilitating a lot of participation but not really using it to change the business

Rock Star: Balancing using the data and trying something new, connecting it all together and making it core to your marketing strategy.

Further examples:

• Domino’s stock price up 50% after big promotion to confront criticisms.
• The Land of Nod modified their product and sent free replacements to reviewers who had mentioned negative details. Comments on Twitter and product reviews escalated and they turned negative influencers into positive ones.

Decker wraps up with a great family pic and story again about his son, this time visiting Santa. He wants some volcano, hot wheels, slime, Godzilla thingie (I want one!). So Santa delivers and he’s a happy camper. However, poor Sam Decker can’t assemble the thing. Had he checked the Amazon reviews first, he would have seen the negative reviews. What were people saying? “If you want your child to cry, buy this toy.”

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