There’s a number of different methods you can use when developing your social media strategy. One that we’re fond of at Enquiro is Forrester Research’s POST method. POST stands for People, Objectives, Strategy, and Technology. One of the benefits of this method is how it keeps the user, rather than the technology, at the centre of your strategy.

The first step in developing a social media strategy is to know who you need to reach – the People part of the POST method. And this is where Buyersphere insights, from Enquiro’s research on how business buys from business in the online marketplace, can be really useful. Remember that in B2B sales, you actually need to reach two very different types of people: people who use your products and services (the “doers”) and people who decide whether to purchase your products and services (the “buyers”). This can give you two different target audiences who you need to reach with your social media strategy. They can have differing demographics, visit different social networks, and have differing levels of participation online.

The doer will be interested in information on the latest news about your industry and best practices that they can use in their own work. If they aren’t using your product yet, they will be looking for more information about your services. If you are using social media as a customer support channel for past purchasers, it is the doer you are talking to.

The buyer is looking to ensure that you are a trustworthy vendor. They need to know that buying your product isn’t a financial risk to their organization. Reputation management will be important in successfully reaching this persona. This speaks to the need to listen to what people are saying about your brand online. And while you can’t control what people say about your business, you can demonstrate that you respond to your customers’ concerns. If you have a high risk product (very expensive or if you an unestablished brand in the marketplace), showcasing your company as a thought leader in the industry can be persuasive for the buyer.

Knowing that there are two different personas also means that you will develop different objectives and follow different strategies for each group. The reason why and how you engage a doer will be different than why and how you engage a buyer. A doer, for example, is more likely to become an evangelizer of your product than a buyer is. And only once you figure out who you are trying to reach and why you want to engage them can you then ask “Do I need to be on Facebook?”. If you know your target audience and your objectives, then you will be able to decide what technology and platforms will best help your social media strategy to succeed.

Twitterfeed – Twitterfeed integrates with your blog so that every time you publish a new blog post, your Twitter feed is updated automatically.

Tweetmeme – For finding new memes and top tweets on Twitter. Sort options include subject, media types (news, images or video), and period of time.

We Follow – A director of Twitter users if you are looking to find people to follow, sorted by topic of interest. Also a place to add yourself if you are hoping to gain users yourself.

Twellow – another director of Twitter users, plus Twellowhood, for finding people in a specific geographic location.

Bit.ly – A URL shortener with click-through information.

MyTweeple – Trying to decide whether to follow someone? Use this tool to check out a persons user stats, latest tweets, and to penalize spammers.

Hootsuite – A nice application for scheduling tweets for later dates. Also can track stats.

TweetDeck – A favorite of ours in the office. Everyone around me uses TweetDeck to display their tweets in customizable columns which can be sorted by groups and type of message (i.e. DMs, mentions). For desktop and iPhone.

Readtwit – Readtwit is a way to filter your Twitter feed so that redirects (such as URL shorteners) are resolved and you get an RSS feed of your content.

What the Trend – This site explains why certain topics are trending.

Do you have any other favorites?

-          Procrasdonate – Have you been wasting time surfing around the internet aimlessly? Need an incentive to be more productive online? Procrasdonate is an application that tracks when you are spending time online on time wasters rather than working – and if you spend too much time surfing or on Facebook, you have to make a donation. It gives you a reason to be more productive and if you are not, you are still supporting a worthy cause.

-          Nabuur – Nabuur is a site that allows for online volunteerism in your area of expertise. If you are an accountant, a lawyer, a marketer, or have some other specialized field of experience, Nabuur will match your talents with local communities in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

-          Blog Action Day – Blog Action Day is a day in October where bloggers around the world write about one specific topic. In 2009, over 13,000 bloggers participated by writing about climate change. It’s a great way to bring visibility to critical issues by harnessing the crowd.

-          No Impact Man – This site arose out of the No Impact Experiment, where a journalist and his family tried to live without making any impact on the environment (no trash, carbon emissions, etc.) – while living in New York City. He has since launched No Impact Man, which allows anyone to tell stories about how they try to impact environmental change – no matter how big or how small – to inspire others.

-          Relay for Life – one of my favourites. Relay for life is a virtual walk-a-thon for cancer research. It takes place in Second Life. People raise money and walk their avatars in an online environment in the same way that is normally done in an offline one.

-          Avaaz – Avaaz.org tackles a wide range of social issues. This community has a bottoms-up approach when it comes to deciding just what issues to focus on. Members of the site get to vote on what they believe are the most critical issues, which is how they decide what to take action on.

Social location sharing is not the only location-based tool gaining attention. MyTown and other location-based, augmented reality games based on location are taking off. MyTown has been particularly successful – particularly in terms of user engagement. The average MyTown user in the U.S. spends 60 minutes per day using the app.

If you are a business looking at ways to incorporate geosocial networking into your social media mix, here are a few things to consider:

-          Know which social location network is the most important for you to target given your geographical location. For example, in Vancouver, Foursquare is the most popular location-sharing application while Gowalla is king in Austin, where it was created.

-          Claim and / or tag your business on social location sharing sites. Once you have this in place you can reward repeat visitors with various promotions.

-          Offer coupons or discounts to visitors who check in to your location and Tweet / announce their presence publicly – this will help spread your brand name.

People tend to be very enthusiastic about the subject of music. CBC Radio 3 is fortunate as they have a substantial base of online users currently using their web properties. The wiki is meant to harness their knowledge and enthusiasm. This provides an established base which will allow their project to succeed. There were some key takeaways from the session that you may want to consider if you are an organization considering accepting online contributions from the public – whether it be comments, forums, or wikis.

Key Takeaways

-          How can you introduce radically different technologies within an organization? Within your organization, you need to innovate at the edges, where there is less impact on your organization if things go wrong. As an organizational entity, CBC Radio 3 exists at the margins of the CBC as a whole. It is often referred to as the ‘Area 51’ of the CBC as it tries out new technologies and tries to reach new audiences. It is a place where it is okay to fail. The project was also developed in Vancouver, out of the way of the main Toronto headquarters of CBC – so physically on the fringes on the organization as well.

-          Minimize editorial risks in order to reduce liability.

-          The key benefit to crowdsourcing the creation of content is to minimize financial costs. With 700 people cut from the CBC last year and continual budget cuts, the only way for CBC Radio 3 to generate a mass of new content is to involve the public.

Lessons Learned: Creating Content

-          Balance openness with editorial checks.

-          Get a mass of contributors.

-          Use an existing base of power users.

Lessons Learned: Corporate Culture

-          Can your culture support the idea? Some organizations would not be willing to open up and host content that hasn’t gone through stringent guidelines or review. This type of approach to content generation would not work in a heavily top-down organization.

As a news organization, the CBC has learned that the softer the area of news, the more open the site can be. This is where the community can police itself. Once you move to hard news, where politics and other controversial issues come into play, openness to audience contributions is much harder to accomplish. There are some cases where the CBC will publish stories and keep the comments turned off as they know the quality of discussion will deteriorate – there are some topics that will be better for public contributions than others. As controversy increases, so does your organization’s liability and risk.

If you are interested in getting an idea of what the conference is about, a number of sessions from previous years have been recorded and are available online. One of my favorites from last year is Dan Schick’s presentation on the topic “Social Media in Large Organizations”. In his presentation, he notes that you need to get organizational wide buy-in when starting with social media. And a great way of doing this is to gain input from a wide range of people as you create the policies and guidelines that will govern your organization’s social media use. It’s the process of creating those policies that is important. As you get input from key stakeholders, you build trust about how social media is going to be incorporated into an organization. As he notes, “trust is the key to opportunity”. You can view Dan’s presentation on Social Media in Large Organizations on Youtube or visit the Northern Voice wiki.

Yesterday, Google also rolled out something that they first mentioned back in Octrober and that is Google Social Search.  The reasoning behind this?  Well Google understands that people on the web today make social connections and publish web content in many different ways, such as with blogs, status updates and tweets. This has translated into a “public social web of content” that has special relevance to each person. Unfortunately, that information isn’t always very easy to find in one simple place.  This is where Google Social Search comes in.

Google Social Search:  What is It?

According to Google, Google Social Search helps you find more relevant public content from your broader social circle.  Social Search takes personalized search results to a new level.  Basically Google finds relevant “public” content from your friends and contacts and highlights it for you at the bottom of your search results.  Google has illustrated an example here.  Google states that “All the information that appears as part of Google Social Search is published publicly on the web – you can find it without Social Search if you really want to.”  So what Google is saying as they have done the legwork for you and compiled this data to make it easier for you to find.  The goal is to make your results more relevant.  This really is another level of personalization.

So how does Google do this?  Well Google builds  social profile or social circle based on things such as who you are following on Twitter or on FriendFeed.  In addition, Google uses information they collect from Gmail to include your chat buddies and contacts in your friends, family and coworkers froups.  Of course for Google Social Search to work, you need to be signed into your personal Google account.  Google Social Search also factors in websites that you may be subscribing to via GoogleReader if you in fact use this service as a feed reader.

What kind of content will you see with Google Social Search?

Expect to see information that can be accessed via your interaction with Google services as well as social network information from places such as Twitter.  As Google mentions the types of content that you can expect to see includes:

• Websites, blogs, public profiles, and other content linked from your friends’ Google profiles
• Web content, such as status updates, tweets, and reviews, from social services that your friends have listed in their Google profiles
• Images posted publicly from your social circle on Picasa Web and from websites linked from their Google profiles
• Relevant articles from your Google Reader subscriptions

Overall, I’m not sure how successful this will be for Google.  I mean this is only beneficial to users who have a personal Google account.  I’m not sure if everyone is ok with the fact that Google is reminding users about how much data they have collected about them based on theironline social experiences.  You can see a list of your social circle connections at google.com/s2/search/social.  Will this contribute to information overload for users, or will it in fact do just the opposite?  Regardless Google is getting social and is working to help you manage your online social activity.

More on Google Social Search

I find it really interesting. The “pointless babble” is just random stuff that people shout out in the course of their daily life. An SEO expert might provide heaps of useful insight, flagging up useful links and helping their Twitter community with stucks and problems. Yet they may also shout out that their cat was just sick over their best handmade organic Afghan rug. Babble ? Or an opportunity for creating social connection. Random Joe might reply “huh that sucks, my cat did that yesterday too”. Following that, they might find they have a lot in common and another online human touch point is created. It all depends if you find people interesting and quirky, or if you’re just looking to “take” from the Twitter/social media experience. If the Internet is 80% crap and 20% remarkable insight and amazing global/local/micro connectivity, do we dismiss it automatically? No, so why all the venting about Twitter? Because it’s new and people haven’t figured out what to do with it yet. But we all know that one man’s garbage is another man’s gold. Or, one man’s babble is another man’s (social) opportunity.

Social media is very much a give-and-take environment, like karma. Give, share, help, and (hope to) receive. “In Twitter we trust”.

Maybe the “takers” aren’t very well suited to social; they just want to get stuff of value to them, or they plainly just don’t get it ? Ever tried explaining social to someone? It’s hard. “Yes, you have to offer something of value and you need to connect to, or build a community. Yes, you have to invest time and effort in it. No, there is no immediate return”. It’s a hard sell to the uninitiated laggard.

Twitter: glass half full, or glass half empty?

As I write this there’s an automated countdown clock in another browser window counting down the days, hours, minutes and seconds until millions of people will flood the internet in search of the perfect Facebook username.

On June 12th at 12:01 a.m.  EDT Facebook will go crazy. Everyone who was previously assigned a user name made up of random numbers (id=123456789) will be able to obtain a username similar to what LinkedIn offers. (Official announcement here)

I can now shed my previous Facebook identity (120400011) become facebook.com/chris.davies, or if that’s not available perhaps w.chris.davies to match my LinkedIn account.

They’re limiting the potential for name-squatting by preventing pages made after May 31st and profiles after June 9th from signing up for a username, so if you’re not already on Facebook, I wouldn’t spend a lot of time worrying about it. All users who joined Facebook after the cut-off will be ableto claim usernames on, June 28. In the mean time I’ve already had questions from several clients about how they should handle this.

Best Practices:

1. Make a reasonable effort to get a good vanity URL for your pages and/or your profile. It won’t be the end of the world if you don’t lock down facebook.com/firstname-lastname. Don’t stay up all night, but if you happen to be up at 12:01 a.m., you might want to flip on your computer.
2. Your best choice is your proper name as you usually use it, with no spaces. I’m going to shoot for www.facebook.com/chrisdavies. Remember, you want to keep it short, memorable and easy to communicate, like a verbal business card.
3. For brands, go for the most commonly used form of your name. For Enquiro, that means using facebook.com/enquiro, and not the full name of our company, Enquiro Search Solutions. Don’t worry if someone’s squatted on your brand.
4. You can prevent your registered trademarks from being registered as usernames. You can do that by filling out this form.
5. Update your other social networking profiles to reflect your new-found vanity URL.

Resources:

Usernames for Facebook Pages

Username Eligibility FAQ

Info for Intellectual Property Rights Holders

The key to effective social marketing is to actively participate in communities that are relevant to your product or service. B2B marketers should engage the vertical social networks, forums and blogs that surround their industries.  Here are some benefits that can be gained from participating in these networks and communities.

·    Gain visibility with customers and business partners
·    Develop new sales prospects
·    Research companies and individuals you want to do business with
·    Research competitors
·    Generate sales leads
·    Recruit employees or consultants
·    Raise investment capital
·    Gain feedback from customers and colleagues
·    Ask advice and gain knowledge
·    Establish yourself as an authority in your area
·    Manage your brand and company reputation

To quickly find out about relevant blogs in your industry perform a search in Technorati or Google Blog Search, or look in this business blogs directory http://www.iblogbusiness.com/. Another good idea would be to set up several Google Alerts for your company, competitors, and relevant industry keywords; this will allow you to track industry news and blogs.  

With that, here is a list and summary of a few of the top social networking sites that can be leveraged by business to business marketers.

LinkedIn   – http://www.linkedin.com/ 

LinkedIn is by far the most popular social networking site targeted to business users with more than 9 million registered users in more than 130 industries.  Of those registered members nearly half a million are C-suite level executives. When you sign up for LinkedIn, you create a profile that summarizes your professional accomplishments.  Customers, former colleagues, and partners can find you by searching for your name and profile details. You can invite trusted contacts to join LinkedIn and connect to you, thus expanding your network.LinkedIn allows the user to find potential clients, industry experts, and service providers that come recommended.  Users can also find and post job opportunities. LinkedIn Answers allows you to post industry specific questions to your network and to the full LinkedIn network. LinkedIn Experts is a new site that began testing in December that connects industry experts to users and then sets up hour long telephone consultations for a fee. LinkedIn is free to join, but also offers paid accounts which provide more advanced tools for finding contacts in the network.

Ryze – http://www.ryze.com

Ryze has a similar model to LinkedIn, but may encourage more social interaction on a broader range of topics beyond business. Ryze claims to have more than 450,000 members in 200 different countries, with over 1000 external organizations hosting sub networks on the site.  Members get a free networking home page where they post information about themselves, their career, and an optional picture.  Ryze also offers the opportunity to join special networks related to their industry, interests or location.  Ryze also offers a paid account which offers more search functionality.

ITtoolbox – http://www.ittoolbox.com

ITtoolbox is an online community of professionals targeted to the information technology industry.  ITtoolbox prides itself at being an open community geared towards sharing knowledge and practical information about the rapidly changing IT world.  The website has several tools designed to accomplish this task.  ITToolbox maintains Knowledge Bases which allow members to interact with each other based upon topics of interest.  Members can use Blogs, Wikis and question and answer Groups as tools to interact with the knowledge base.  ITtoolbox also has a Professional Network that allows professionals to maintain their own homepages and interact with each other in a similar fashion to LinkedIn and Ryze.  ITtoolbox also offers targeted advertising opportunities for businesses based upon a contextual matching engine.

Plaxo  – http://www.plaxo.com

Plaxo is an online address book site that allows for automatic updating of your contact information.  Users and their contacts store their information on Plaxo’s servers.  When a contact edits their information, the changes are automatically updated in the address books of those who selected the account changer option. Since the contact information is stored in a central location users can access it remotely from anywhere. Plaxo can integrate with most of the major address books (Outlook, etc.), and can also operate as an online version.

InnerSell – http://www.innersell.com

InnerSell is an online lead exchange network where sales professionals and businesses can exchange qualified leads. The network is based upon the premise that sales professionals often discover leads for products and services that they cannot fulfill.  By passing on the lead to a qualified vendor the original sales person can help out their customer and strengthen their relationship.  Sales people can earn finders fees on leads that they provide only when the lead turns into a sale. Vendors can set the finders fee amount and only the two vendors can see the details of the sales lead.

Go BIG Network – http://www.gobignetwork.com

The Go BIG Network is a social networking site for small business startup companies. The network connects small businesses, investors, job seekers, and service providers.  Like other social networking sites Go BIG Network allows members to maintain a free profile, and search out other contacts. Go BIG Groups allow users to join a network setup to discuss particular topics of interest. The Requests function is a classified ads section which allows members to post requests to the community like “looking for funding”.  Users have to pay fees when they post a request or when they wish to contact members they don’t currently have a relationship with.

Ecademy – http://www.ecademy.com

Ecademy is subscription based social networking site focusing on business. It has a two tiered membership structure with a basic option (free) and a full service subscription option. When a new user signs up they get full access to the network for a two or four week trial period. Full users get to create a profile, join clubs, create their own clubs and participate fully in weblog discussions. These blogs are registered with Google and many subscribers profiles show up in Google searches. Basic subscribers have limited discussion, limited search privileges, and limited visibility for Google searches. Ecademy has over 100,000 users throughout the world, with a large concentration in the UK.

Spoke – http://www.spoke.com

Spoke is a business to business online directory of contact information. The directory is formatted to provide information about individuals at all levels of a company and show the relationships between them. Sales professionals and marketers can then identify prospects, research companies, and contact the right people in an account. Spoke’s directory has information on 35 million people at more than 900,000 companies. Members can access the database for free as long as they provide and validate their own contact information. Users can access the database for a fee if they don’t wish to validate ($50 per month or $500 per year).

These are but a few of the social network communities that B2B marketers should consider when trying to promote their business and solution offering in the online space.