B2B Buzz Marketing with Paul Dunay

B2B buzz marketing with Paul Dunay. I finally got my calendar sync’d up with Paul for this podcast interview. Paul is an award winning B2B marketing expert. He is Global Managing Director of Services and Social Marketing for Avaya, a global leader in enterprise communications, and co-author of Facebook Marketing for Dummies (Wiley 2009).

A B2B Marketing Story

I asked Paul to describe Avaya’s social media strategy.  His response is this story…In 2009 budgets were tight across the board. Many brands experimented with social media. Actually, Avaya got the social media bug in 2009. They started diving into social media with many tactics but they were not well orchestrated under a cohesive strategy. They had launched social profiles in Facebook, Twitter, a company blog, wikis  and even launched internal social communication on Yammer. Paul was asked by the global CMO to advise and recommend a global social media strategy for Avaya. Even though Paul already had a full time job in a line of business role, he accepted the challenge of developing the social media strategy for Avaya. Now, Paul is a very smart guy. But, he knew he’d need help. So, he asked the early adopters of social media at Avaya to meet once a week to develop the strategy.

Mission Driven Social Media
Paul and his colleagues at Avaya defined the mission of all their social marketing to be: Powerful, Authentic, Personal Interaction. They defined several business objectives including demonstrating thought leadership, building brand awareness, increasing demand, and producing sales leads. Since Avaya had already started executing many tactics on the social web, they decided to consolidate their strategy across four platforms: The Avaya corporate blog, a customer forum, a few Twitter profiles and the Avaya Facebook Fan page.  The Avaya blog is the corporate voice. The forum is self help for customers. Avaya Twitter is short bursts of information as well as listening and monitoring what’s being said about their brand and competitors. In the Avaya Facebook fan page they cover events, company news, share photos, start discussions and enjoy interaction with their community.

Invite People to Your Facebook Fan Page
One objection I often hear from B2B marketers is they think their customers don’t have time or interest in Facebook. Paul asks “have you invited them to join your Facebook fan page?” He suggests you email people through Facebook to invite them to join your Facebook fan page. Paul shares my enthusiasm for Facebook because it has every form of media including video, audio, blog, photos, polls and many add-on applications. All of these functions are available from a Facebook fan page (for free). Paul suggests that the Facebook fan page is the communication innovation of the century.

In December 2007 during a keynote speech I gave, I predicted that Facebook was going to explode and become the most popular social network. I was right. BTW, I’ve made many predictions in the past that didn’t pan out. But, this one did.

Integrating Offline and Online
I asked Paul how Avaya integrates offline marketing with online marketing. He gave me a recent example. Avaya attended an industry conference where they organized an event around thought leadership. Customers were invited to attend and express their view of the future of the industry and related communication technologies.  They asked customers for their thoughts about the future of communications technology, and how they see it evolving in the coming years. Their responses were captured on video and still photos.  Immediately after the event the Avaya team wrote down four key take-aways from that event. They wrote a white paper about the trends they heard and anointed that paper the premium content from the event. They uploaded pictures, six videos, wrote four blog posts, and created content for the website, all stemming from this one customer event. They also did a webinar as a follow up. In the end, they leveraged a single event into more than one dozen pieces of content. The content that was created at the event had been multi purposed and shared with people that participated in the event and anyone who otherwise had interest in the content. Ultimately all the free content was used to drive people to download a premium content asset for a lead conversion.

The 4 Cs of B2B Marketing
Paul doesn’t believe the 4 Ps apply to directly B2B. So, he blogged about the four C’s of B2B marketing:  Content creation to attract people. Connect with people who consume your content.  Communicate on an ongoing basis. Conversion – nurture the leads with many touches to create conversions. Some people think that 4 Cs are a deep dive on the “promotion” P in the 4 Ps . I suggest that we’re all using the contemporary etiquette of the social web to create a conversion. When our content is good, and we connect with people in authentic ways, we earn the right to create conversions.

Facebook Marketing for Dummies
Paul co-authored Facebook Marketing for Dummies with his college buddy, Richard Krueger. When Paul was approached by Wiley to write Facebook Marketing for dummies he knew it would be a daunting task on top of his full time job at Avaya, so he asked Richard to help him write the book. I’ve read the book and enjoyed it very much. It’s filled with many useful tips for businesses who want to use Facebook to connect, engage and market their business using the wildly popular and free Facebook social network. Their next book is Facebook Advertising for Dummies. Paul shares my enthusiasm for the ability Facebook gives marketers to conduct highly targeted advertising based on many demographics attributes.

This podcast recording ran close to 30 minutes which is 10 minutes longer than most of my podcasts. We had so much to cover. I hope you’ll listen to the podcast where you’ll hear parts of the interview not summarized in this blog post. I invite you to post your comments on your own B2B marketing stories in the comments below.

You can connect with Paul Dunay at his blog or on Facebook or on Twitter.

Social Media Marketing in Large Enterprises

This is the year of engagement. When I blogged my predictions for the new decade, one of the points I made is that marketers will seek to engage their target customers more interactively. While I still believe that in this decade the phrase social media will fade away, at this time it’s still here and it’s hotter than it’s ever been.

Brands of all sizes are using social media to listen and to engage. Those brands that find ways to engage people authentically and in interesting ways are finding ways to monetize the engagement. And, isn’t that what all the critics have been waiting for?

Want proof that some of the biggest and most established brands have adopted social media with measurable success?

Marcy Shinder -American Express Open
Social media is an excellent customer listening tool and an up and coming customer acquisition tool.

Eduardo Conrado – Motorola
Uses social media pre and post trade shows to engage with customers. Also to integrate existing offline communities with online communities for year-long engagement with customer segments.

John Kennedy – IBM
Uses social media to gain new insights into customers. Gain a better understanding of how IBM is involved in these conversations.

Mark Wilson – Sybase
Having an authentic voice through customers and available product managers for organic growth. Customers are now advocates. Reaching the LongTail of their brand. People are now collaborators. More, faster innovation. More organic and empowering.

Tom Haas – Siemens
New private online community called 3-1-2-1. A social network to engage government customers on topics such as renewable energy.

Jeff  Hayzlett – Kodak
Uses social media for “pretty much everything.” Naming products through Twitter. Employ a Chief Listener looking for customer feedback and new product opportunities.

Michael Mendenhall – HP
Social media is an operational strategy. Used in three ways: Customer Service,  R&D, Marketing Communications. The amplication of word of mouth.

Paul Dunay – Avaya
Like it or not, Twitter is working. It has implications on product development and how Avaya supports existing products. Feedback through Twitter on existing products is very valuable. They’ve even measured some sales that have come from Twitter.

Do you have a testimonial about social media marketing in your business or organization? Please share it in the comments below.

Bernie Borges
@berniebay

SEO Becoming SMO

I argue that SEO is becoming social media optimization (SMO). We devote a lot of attention to details to gain high rankings in search engines. Of course, this process is known as organic search engine optimization. But, when people search on a keyword in a search engine are all the search results limited to web pages? No!

A new organic SMO strategy is all about being found on the web by people who want your products or services. It’s great to be found by people doing a Google search. But, I don’t want to limit relevant traffic to my website only to those doing a Google search. I also want people to visit my website who are engaged in online conversations on the social web and visit it simply because of a referral by someone or a link from interesting content on the social web.

When I study my website analytics over the past 30 days I see the top referral source is Google organic, followed by a recent link building blog post on Hubspot and referrals from Twitter and Facebook.

How do I work at organic SEO? I still focus on relevant content and all the SEO basics pertaining to search engine friendly website architecture and organic link building strategies. These SEO fundamentals help get Google rankings which are still very important and very desirable.

But, as evidenced above Google is not the only valid referral source of traffic to my website.

When I find good content on the web I share it with others. On average for every 10 links to good content that I share, 9 of them are links to interesting articles from social media industry experts such as Hubspot, Lee Odden, Andy Beal, Paul Dunay and Chris Brogan among others. About 1 out of 10 links that I share are to my own blog posts because I sincerely believe that I provide interesting content too. I can say this with humility based on comments received from people on the social web.

The point I’m making is that organic optimization on the web is not limited to being found in search engines. Marketers who focus all their attention to being found in Google are potentially limiting their traffic.

This is more true in some industries than others. But, in most industries you’ll find people having online conversations, sharing links to content and generally engaged in communities on the social web. If your organic web strategy includes being engaged and found by these communities then it qualifies as a social media optimization (SMO) strategy.

So what’s your organic web strategy?