This document discusses using social marketing to reach IT buyers. It begins with an agenda for the discussion and then provides tips and best practices for social media engagement. These include focusing engagement where influencers are active, listening to customers, responding to issues, and scaling by empowering advocates. Potential costs and benefits of social media engagement are estimated. The discussion then shifts to an overview of Spiceworks as a social platform for IT professionals and how vendors can create pages to engage this targeted audience. Examples are given of successful vendor engagement on Spiceworks through participation in discussions and promotions.

1. Ask the Experts: Using Social Marketing to Reach the IT Buyer ($244B annual spend) Reginald Herde Director of Marketing, Spiceworks regh@spiceworks.com @SpiceWired Jeremiah Owyang Partner, Altimeter Group jeremiah@altimetergroup.com @jowyang #SocialITMarketing

3. Social Spheres of Influence

4. Community Management

6. Individuals trust each other most 4

7. Experts and Technical Experts Within Company Trusted 5

8. Image by messersmith used with Attribution as directed by Creative Commons http://www.messersmith.name/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/pickhandle_barracuda_PA290259.jpg Fish Where The Fish Are © 2011 Altimeter Group

9. Framework: Rings of Influence 7

10. Traditionally, the brand is most represented, yet has limited influence 8

11. The corporate press release does not influence customers 9

12. Employees have increased influence with customers 10

13. Intel employees blog give customers an “inside look” 11 “Blogs@intel offer an ‘inside look’ at Intel’s operations and provides opportunities for you to exchange ideas directly with our employees.”

14. Customer voices are typically most trusted 12

15. 13 Cisco has created a Collaboration Community for customers to interact and support each other

16. 14 100 SAP Mentors mostly work for partners or customers of SAP – they are trusted experts

17. Top Contributors from Intel and a community leaderboard from Oracle award status and prestige 15

18. 16

19. Prospects are influenced by other rings 17

20. Intel Advisors Reaches Life and Workstyle Discussions 18

21. Image used with Attribution as directed by Creative Commonshttp://www.nutwork.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/community.jpg Community Engagement © 2011 Altimeter Group

22. First, listen to what customers are saying Analyze where they are What are the top conversations Understand the trends and who the influencers are Community Best Practices 20

23. Engage in conversation Start by joining conversations that are already happening by adding value: Answering existing questions Pointing to existing answered threads Segment by priority and develop a way to triage product critical information Establish a workflow so your community managers can quickly respond Community Best Practices 21

24. Social media triage 22 Take reasonable action to fix issue and let customer know action taken Negative Positive Yes Yes No Assess the message Evaluate the purpose Do you want to respond? Does customer need/deserve more info? Unhappy Customer? No Response Yes Are the facts correct? Gently correct the facts Yes No No No Can you add value? DedicatedComplainer? Are the facts correct? Yes Yes No No Yes Respond in kind & share Thank the person Comedian Want-to-Be? Explain what is being done to correct the issue. Is the problem being fixed? Yes No Yes This framework was built using the USAF Blog Triage. (Added this attribution post webinar) Let post stand and monitor.

25. Know when to let the crowd to take over Scale is an issue, as the customers (hopefully) outnumber staff Remember you don't have to respond to all questions Reward the crowd through recognition and access to new information as they assist others Use leaderboards to track influencers and dub them advocates Community Best Practices 23

26. Estimated Costs (Sample) Note: These are sample figures. Altimeter can work with clients to make more accurate estimations. 24

27. Estimated Benefits (Sample) 25 Note: These are sample figures. Altimeter can work with clients to make more accurate estimations.

28. 26 THANK YOU Jeremiah Owyang jeremiah@altimetergroup.com web-strategist.com/blog Twitter: jowyang With assistance from Andrew Jones, Researcher

29. Ask the Experts: Using Social Marketing to Reach the IT Buyer Reginald Herde Director of Marketing regh@spiceworks.com @SpiceWired

30. Wait a second… First, tell me what Spiceworks is.

31. IT, circa 2006 “What information do I need and where do I find it?” “Which tools do I use?” “What do I have?” “Is it all working?”“How do I fix it?” “What products should I buy?” “Where can I find anexpert to help me?”

32. A Problem Solved: Spiceworks Vendors Purchasing Free IT Apps Commerce Manage People Online Media, Newsletters, Sponsorships & Vendor Pages RFQs Discussions Manage Networks Advice IT IT IT IT IT IT IT IT IT IT IT IT IT IT IT IT IT IT IT Community

34. 1,150 new companies

35. 12,000 printers added

37. 45M employees

38. 858k companies

39. $244B in IT budget1,400,000 IT Professionals In 196 Countries

40. IT Purchasing Trends in 2011 IT budgets Increasing by 8% 2/3 plan to purchase new, upgrade or renew hosted IT services. Concern over cloud solutions being new/unproven dropped significantly http://bit.ly/fxhC6N

41. Users and Vendors Brought Together Vendor Plug-ins & Integrated Features Vendor Pages + Dashboard IT Spiceworks Mobile IT Purchase Lists & RFQs IT IT IT IT IT IT IT IT IT IT IT IT IT IT IT IT IT IT IT IT IT IT Innovations for Users Innovations for Vendors IT Community Social Feeds SpiceCorps & Spiceworks University

42. Vendor Pages: The ‘Hub’ of User Engagement

43. Followers Become a ‘Followership’ Track/boost Follower growth Highlight posts Peek at the competition Follower profiles say a lot

45. Built up Following and increase customer satisfaction based on constant engagement

46. Allow participation from partner network too

47. Increased awareness and Followers through participation and giveaways

48. More Followers here than on Facebook

50. Thank you for your time. regh@spiceworks.com @SpiceWired