With all of the tools, case studies, and resources available the excuse to not implement a smart social media strategy that drives relationships, brand favor and revenue is walking down a mighty short plank. 

If you’ve heard yourself or your management say: 

“Social media only works with consumers…” 

“Those are B2C social media tactics…” 

“The B2B sales cycle is too complicated to implement social media…” 

“We can’t measure social media ROI…” 

It’s time to stop making excuses and start rolling up your sleeves to get down to work! Yes, it’s true… Your B2B customers are talking about you on Twitter, Facebook, in forums and in blog posts or comments. What’s also true is that your competition is right there listening and offering an option to solve their pain because you are not. What are you going to do about it? 

Not sure? Sometimes it’s as 5 simple tips sending you in the right direction. But if you’re the type of B2B marketer that needs in-depth information to feel comfortable, make the business case or to get started with social media here are some resources and case studies. 

Reading: 

• Social Media Marketing: Strategies for Engaging in Facebook, Twitter & Other Social Media – by Liana ‘Li’ Evans (Serengeti Communications’ Director of Social Media)
• Social Pollination: Escape the Hype of Social Media and Join the Companies Winning At It – by Monica L. O’Brien
• Flip the Funnel: How to Use Existing Customers to Gain New Ones – by Joseph Jaffe
• The New Rules of Marketing & PR – by David Meerman Scott
• Marketing to the Social Web: How Digital Customer Communities Build Your Business – by Larry Weber
• The New Influencers: A Marketer’s Guide to the New Social Media – by Paul Gillin
• Tactical Transparency: How Leaders Can Leverage Social Media to Maximize Value and Build their Brand – by Shel Holtz & John Havens
• Blogging for Business: Everything You Need to Know and Why You Should Care – by Shel Holtz and Ted Demopoulos
• The Corporate Blogging Book: Absolutely Everything You Need to Know to Get It Right – by Debbie Weil
• Personality Not Included: Why Companies Lose Their Authenticity And How Great Brands Get it Back – by Rohit Bhargava
• Measuring Public Relationships: The Data-Driven Communicator’s Guide to Success – by Katie D. Payne
• Social Media Metrics: How to Measure and Optimize Your Marketing Investment – by Jim Sterne

Case Studies: 

• IBM (Product Development)
• IBM (Communications)
• Equation Research
• Cisco Systems
• Business.com
• Boeing
• SAP  

If you still need help getting started consider doing an audience research analysis to uncovered how your target markets are using social media. Doing so will give you the insights you need to plan your social media strategy.  

[Photo: iStock]

Who doesn’t love “free”?

Social media is free, isn’t it? Well in the very basic sense, yes social media is free.  Participating in social media if you are a community member, 9 times out of 10, is at no cost to you from the perspective of joining and engaging.  The only time these social media communities charge a fee is if you are upgrading to some sort of premium or pro account.  Think about Flickr in this case, if you don’t want to be limited on your daily uploads or want the analytics, you have to upgrade to the professional account.

From the community participant’s end, this is wonderful!  I get to share and connect with people who have the same interests as me without having to pay a fee, who doesn’t like that concept?  That’s why social media communities have been around long before the term “social media” had ever been coined.

Companies stepping into the idea of marketing in these social media communities with the mistaken idea that marketing within social media communities is “free” are a lot of times sadly mistaken at the end of their campaign’s run.  They find it’s failed, or rather they are under the impression that their marketing attempt failed and they also find there’s a lot more involved than they ever realized.  At the end of the day it isn’t free.  There’s a whole lot of investment that needs to go on in both resources and technology.

It really makes me curious why companies think they can just put up a Twitter account or a Facebook fan page and think “this is going to work” immediately.  A “Field of Dreams” Social Media is not, unfortunately if you build it, most likely they won’t come.  Companies spend millions developing new logos, planning public relations (PR) Events, doing keyword research for SEO and PPC, why should the concepts around social media marketing be any different?  The “free” barrier to entry is a huge misnomer and misleads a lot of marketing departments down the wrong path.

So what should a company plan to invest in when looking at a social media strategy?  Well that really depends a lot on what the company hopes to establish in the medium.  Is it increased buzz or brand lift?  How about increased sales or traffic to the site?  Could you want people to sign up for your email list, blog RSS or coupon distribution?  Become part of your own community?  Different goals require different strategies in social media, and they all require different levels and types of resource investment.

Here’s a quick list to keep in mind of what you’ll be investing in when you decide that social media is the next medium your company should become actively involved in.

• Investing in Understanding:   “Where Are We Now” in the Whole Social Media Sphere
  Do people even know who you are?  Is there any buzz about you?  Do they know the products you sell or the services you offer?
• Invest in Finding Your Audience
  Where are the conversations happening?  Who’s doing the talking about you?
• Invest in the Approach
  How do I interact with the social media communities that are talking about me, my industry, products or services?  How do I add value to their lives and not just be another “noise channel”
• Goals & Measurement Need Investment
  Free tools verses Paid Tools?  Free buzz monitoring tools give you limited data, can your strategy work with that limited data, or do you need more robust information?  What about your analytics, are the free tools going to give you enough information to connect the dots of traffic to buzz & engagement to conversions?  Have you even taken the time to plan what goals will make you successful?
• Employees are as Social Media Investment in their own right
  You pay your employees a salary or an hourly wage to preform tasks for you.  If one of their tasks has to do with social media, that’s definitely an investment that isn’t free by any means.  However, it isn’t just their time engaging you should be planning for, it’s their time researching, setting goals, training, developing and ultimately fortifying relationships with your audience that you really need to plan for investing in.

With investment in research, strategy and measurement companies can see return, or at least if there isn’t a return they can figure out why.  The investment of time and resources from the onset is likely the biggest factor of whether a company is going to succeed or fail.  Don’t you want the money and time you’ve invested to grow your social media strategy into a success rather than just having spaghetti being thrown at the wall?

Scrabble Letters Photo Credit:  Flickr User WonderWebby

Tree & Coins Photo Credit:  Flickr User Pfala

While attending the eMetrics conference in the Washtington, DC area, Google’s Analytics Evangelist, Avinash Kaushik announced a whole slew of new features being applied to Google Analytics.  From my take on it from a social media perspective, this can help companies start to track some of their measurements they were doing manually for measurement in social media.

So what all did Avinash announce?

• Experimental API for Google Website Optimizer
• Unlimited unique user analysis (which also shows as trending)
  • Avinash emphasized it’s “True” unique user data
  • You also can do this by picking unique time frames, you don’t have to “add” all your data together like with other analytics packages
• Advanced Table Filtering – Avinash calls this “In Line Analysis
  • You can choose your segmentation values
• 2 New Behavior Types of Goal Tracking
  • Number of Pages View
  • Time
• Custom Variables
  • Setting up variables such as
    • Comments left on blog
    • Traffic coming in from specific types of sites (such as blogs)
  • You can track things at a visitor, session, page  (visit) level
• Free Mobile Application (Apps) Tracking
• Custom Alerts
  • You want to know about those people coming from blogs – you can be alerted now!
• Intelligence  – New Dashboard Additions
  • Automatic Alerts – these will appear automatically now when you log into GA and see your dashboard.  GA’s algorithm will look for anomalies in your data and alert you to them automatically

Avinash also went on to say that this new intelligence which is giving you a peek into the “unknowns” is only phase one of what Google’s planning to roll out.

So how does this help your social media strategy and measurement?  Well for starters as Avinash pointed out, you can now track comments in Google Analytics by setting up custom variables.  This is something currently you have to manually put into a spreadsheet to keep track of, now it can be easily integrated into your Google Analytics tracking.

The same could be said for monitoring how much traffic you are getting from blogs, or specific types of sites.  The custom alerts allow you to be notified and this could even help you discover unknown sites that are helping to disseminate your content.  There’s a lot between the custom alerts and custom variables that you can put into place to help you measure some of the things you are doing manually now, all within Google Analytics.

Then there’s the mobile app tracking.  To me, this is huge!  Before you’d have to guess someone was using a mobile app by the browser they come in on “iPhone” or “blackberry” being listed.  With this new announcement from Google Analytics, this can  help any company wanting to know how mobile applications are affecting the traffic to their sites.

If you’d like to read more about the specifics of each of these announcements, the Google Analytics blog has detailed information about how each of these new features work.  I highly suggest taking the time to read up on them and implement them into your own measurement strategy for social media.

While this isn’t the be-all end-all way of measuring for social media, these new features that Google is adding to Google Analytics can help take some of that manual counting and heavy lifting off of your plate, if implemented in the correct fashion.  One of the nice things about these new features is that as Avinash put it, you don’t need a “God” to code this stuff for you to have it work, its very easy to implement.

On an off note, wishing a speedy recovery to Avinash!  Hope that arm heals up fast!