From the trenches: B2b social media strategy

Social Media: Background
Social media revolves around conversations, community, connections and social networks.
Social media encourages contributions and feedback from the interest group. Social media compared to
other known forms of media (newspapers, TV, Business journals, etc) primarily differs on the
interactivity and engagement process. The fundamental difference in offline and social media branding
is that while former adopts more of a push strategy, the later is a pull strategy. User and internal
customer generated content is used to inform, listen and engage the various stakeholders. In the
traditional approach, the engagement is transactional, marketing objective is mostly to inform the user
and user participation in content creation and enhancement is minimal and comes at a significant cost.
Social media exploits the reach and richness of the medium to involve users at an early stage of content
creation, quality check and also distribution through +WOM, while ensuring lower transactional cost.
For startups and established firms, social media makes a lot of business sense because the social media
tools enable free and easy to manage. In this paper we present the collective experience Browne &
Mohan consultants had in defining the social media strategy, the roll out, impact assessment and do and
do n’t.
Building a B2B social brand: The Process Flow
The process for building a successful social brand requires certain steps to be followed
sequentially as shown in figure 1.
Online purpose: Target customer, Content Themes: People: followers,
Brand as geographies, Product, fans, influencers ,
complement, or communities of competition, leads, time of
replica or interest, industry evolution, engagement
experience. communities of customer pain
consumption areas, corporate RSS feeds, email
Shared positioning of best registrations or event
understanding of Own or join the practices attendance, likes,
social media communities of dislikes, comments,
amongst stake interest Content type: trackbacks, forwards,
holders: employees, informative, completed profiles,
marketing, sales, Platform selection referential, brand mentions,
etc comparative and sentiments.
offerings: Blogs
endorsement
Social media (external or internal Review & Act
Expectations source), tweets, Content Map
(Brand/revenue Video’s and
growth) presentations, etc User & Employee
engagement
Tools
Figure 1

Building a social brand broadly involves four stages: vision, target audiences & platform
selection, content & engagement model and finally metrics & review.
1. Visioning
Visioning fundamentally involves aligning all the stakeholders in an organization to the purpose
of social media presence and objectively defining the purpose of social media presence. Clarity of what
the social media is expected to be ensures the purpose, positioning and alignments are attained without
much confusions amongst the actors involved. A company may chose social media to complement its
physical media activities or just replicate the physical media content on the social media. A company can
also choose to offer social media as an experiential platform to engage and deepen the relationship with
its clients and employees. Brand as an extension is a practice where brands execute partial activeness
and commitment in the social media sphere supported by extended brand values with respect to online
user expectations. Brand as a comprehensive experience maximizes the return on user interactions with
clearly chalked out social media strategy, fruitful in-depth engagements, higher user and employee
empowerment. For a successful branding as a complement the organizations need to have a systematic
committed and long term basis bent towards social branding. The engagement dimensions must change
with respect to social media platform characteristics. An explicit understanding of the purpose of
presence in social media, whether it is for branding or revenue growth would help define the focus and
implementation of right activities.
Social media involvement rests on the core values the company wishes to reinforce in the social media
or at least appear to be doing so. The objectives for engaging in social media could be to highlight the
values of respect, responsibility (including CSR) or signal innovation, as highlighted in the Table below.
Table 1
Engagement Values at Company Level Explanation of the same
Transparency Authentic content and conversations
Protection Respecting consumer privacy
Respect Respect for consumers
views,opinions,suggestions
Responsibility Sense of ownership for the conversations,
content and participations
Utilization Adopt the best practices in social media
2. Target audience & platform selection
In the second stage, target audience and platform selection decisions including who the target
customers are, what geographies to target, what would be the communities of interest (that espouse
interest in what the company intends to focus on) and what are the actual communities of consumption
(those communes that drive demand).

Having identified the target customer segments and the communities, companies should define
the breadth of platforms they are likely to use, whether their social media engagement would be
restricted to Blogs, tweets, etc or cover the complete gamut of community sites, video and presentation
materials, social communities, etc. Most companies, given the investment and resource commitments
required, opt for Blogs (company & subject matter experts), professional communities on Facebook,
Linkedin, corporate presentations and video’s showcasing their organizational prowess and customer
case studies.
Table 2
Platforms Deployment
rd
Blogs Company Information, insider & 3 party branding, Employee Engagement & Interaction
Facebook No of users, youth connect, user experience sharing, product evaluation, user feedback,
rd
communities of interest, managed 3 party promos, drive traffic, User engagement for
new product, promotions, contests
Twitter Microblogging, status updates, celebrity branding, market announcements,
Announcements, updates, senior management interviews/opinions, community of
practice, CEO branding
Linkedin Hiring, professional networking, branding, information sharing
Youtube visual promotions, corporate video, expertise, customer experiences,
Flickr Sharing of Photos, Albums, reinforcing celebration.
Orkut Personal Networking, drive traffic, youth connect, user experience sharing
Once the platforms are selected, companies also need to focus on various tools they are likely to
use to engage, track and manage the social media. Companies need to plan PR and media management
tools (for assessment of opinion and views about the company or its products. Ex: Reputica) , tracking
tools (Converseon, Who's Talkin, Social Mention, Trackur, Viralheat, and Netbase Consumer Insights&
Who's Talkin, etc), and security tool (Fraud protection, security, and threat detection. Ex Filtrbox,
KnowEm).
3. Content & Engagement Models
Social media content strategy design is a very innate aspect to drive any social media engine.
The content connects and glues the members in a community. The content creation can be user
generated content (UGC) or company generated content. Content themes could be around product
(features, novelty, price & other advantages), competition (strategies, their product/service
comparison, marketing and other related strategies), customer pain areas (what are the key pain points,
what solutions are customers interested, how to solutionize the requirements, etc), industry evolution
(how is the market evolving, new designs, standards, regulation, etc), best practices or differentiated
process (what new practices is the company adopting, its value, etc), awards & press mentions as shown
in Table 3.

Table 3
Product, features, Company achievements, Competition, comparison,
announcements
Customer pain areas, how they can be addressed, Industry trends, what new technologies, service
what are customer expectations, solutions that and business models are likely to emerge, why
have failed to deliver, etc companies must prepare themselves for the future
We find four content types Informative, Comparative, Referential and Endorsement most
effective for b2b markets. The informative content type is “good-to-know” or “for-your awareness”
type of content typically presenting personal with respect to the product usage, benefits, or feature
positioning. Comparative content is more focusing on highlighting the differences between the process,
services and products, key user differentiators, etc. Referential content is posting from the company
side announcing the projects won, orders successfully completed, project highlights, etc. Endorsement
is content from the customers highlighting why they selected the company, what advantages they
benefited, etc. Table 4 lists the content types and highlights some examples.
Table 4
Content type example
Inform Have released to new virtual personal assistant (VPA) that offers takes all the pain
away from delegation and multitasking
comparative While EMC, IBM and other vendors may be offering “price advantages only:,
KREATIO stands out for value for money, high modularity, ease of deployment
Referential WCM roll out at IDG proves ....
Endorse We are happy to share the business advantages we got from deploying effipay
A key element of social media strategy is the level of involvement of users or employees in
content generation, community building, etc. Empowerment guides the level and ways an employee
can engage with the user. Some companies may prefer to exercise higher guided control involves
centralized control over messaging and information flow while limited guided control focuses on social
brand enhancement through increased user and employee participation, information exchange and
content co-creation.
Higher guided control follow a centralized engagement, content generation, follow ups and
messaging tightly controlled with low user/employee participation. The main focus is on brand
reinforcement and effective brand reputation management by cutting down the noise around a brand.
The noise attenuation is made possible by representing the employees as brand defenders. Some
companies pursue the mid position in the guided control spectrum have a partial company and
employee involvement. They are neither into compulsive positive brand reinforcement in the user
imagery nor an immature and weak social brand to engage with. The balanced guided control facilitates
in social brand evaluation and brand reinforcement accordant to the brand evaluation outputs received.

Higher Guided Control
Limited Guided Control
Guided Control Spectrum
Figure 2
User and employee involvement rests on the core values the company places on consistency in
content, community and communication strategies. Table 5 captures the core values at employee or a
user level.
Table 5
Engagement Values at Individual Level Explanation of the same
Adherence Adherence to social media policies and online
social media principles
Responsibility A sense of ownership for the conversations,
content and participations at individual level
Empathetic Behavior A good listener, addressing unmet customer needs
and wants.
Open mindedness Open to negative comments and criticism
4. Metrics, Review and Act
Continuous evaluation of social branding exercise is needed so as have timely implementation of the
needed change. while several measures could be used to measure the effectiveness of social media, we
find some of the measures such as return on participation, return on involvement, return on attention,
return on trust and return on conversation are rather cumbersome to capture and or at best some
estimates. Our experience indicates the measures should be easy to interpret, offer insights to all
actors involved in the organization. Table 4 presents the measures that can be easily captured and
measured to evaluate the effectiveness of social media spends.
Table 6
Measure Periodicity
No of followers, Fans, Influencers Weekly, Monthly, quarter-wise
Sales leads Monthly, quarter-wise
Engagement on the site Monthly, quarter-wise
RSS feeds Weeks, Monthly, quarter-wise
Email registrations or event interest Event related
Likes, dislikes, forwards Weekly, Monthly, quarter-wise
Brand mentions Weekly, Monthly, quarter-wise
Sentiments (positive or negative statements) Weekly, Monthly, quarter-wise

Recommendations
1) Define the very objective of social media engagement. The objective can be to influence the
prospects for a product purchase, increase the brand awareness or creating buzz. The content should
always be brand values centric.
2) Identify the preferred content forms by target audience. Content forms can be video, white papers,
blogs and podcasts. For a sales centric engagement the preferred content form is video due to the
marketing strength of viral video and prominent social networks. For an idea centric engagement the
preferred form is company blogs and white papers available onsite.
3) Customize content to community & social media platforms. It is very essential to understand user
characteristics, their preferences and ensure the content is appropriate to that platform. If targeting a
matured user identify the top industry issues, top bloggers, the thought leaders and the platforms used
by them and structure the content right.
4) Use insource/outsource resources. Using both internal and external resources would benefit the
company to portray neutrality and self-interest in tandem. Moreover, the content generation is de-
risked as not just the quality of original content matters, but also the quantity.
5) Engagement cycle should be active and involve multiple levels in the organization & its ecosystem.
Social media engagement is a continuous process Involve many people from your organization and
partners to benefit from scale. However, clearly define and control the content and its distribution.
Referential and endorsements from external sources matters online.
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