Social Media, Employee Ambassadors, HostingCon, Cloud, Evangelists-William Toll

1. Energize and Incentivize Your Employee Brand
Ambassadors
Presenter: William Toll Marketing Consultant Twitter: @utollwi

2. William Toll Twitter/Skype: @utollwi
Marketing & Product Management Executive
•1999 ValueWeb (Now Hostway)
•2002 NTT/Verio
•2004 Affinity Internet (Now Hostway)
•2006 Intermedia.NET
•2008 NaviSite (Now a Time Warner Cable Company)
•2011 Yottaa
•2012 ProfitBricks

3. Commerce is a social construct

4. Alaskan Dude

5. anyjazz65

6. zoetnet

7. Khym54

8. Mehfuz Hossain

9. People Buy From People, Not Companies

10. Avrenim_acceber

11. KCODE

13. Billions of Minutes Monthly

14. Social Is Everywhere!
• German Internet users spend more time on
social networks and blogs than they do any
other online category of sites, a total of 12.7
billion minutes in May 2011. (Nielsen)
• UK Internet users visited 229.6 million pages
on Tubmlr #2, after Facebook 20.2 billion page
views. (Nielsen)
http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/social/

15. The B2B Buyer’s Journey Has
Changed
B2B Content
Marketing
B2B Socially
Influenced
Transactions
Social Media
(Online Media
Supporting Social
Interaction and
User Generated
Content)

16. B2B Buyers and Decision Makers:
Their Journey in in 2012

17. Today’s B2B Buyers Are…
• Empowered
– Content Marketing Is Educating
– Social Media Is Facilitating
– 80% research before engaging with a vendor
– 50% Expect a Response via Social Media
• More Skeptical
– Only 31% Trust Industry Analysts
– 29% Peers
– 8% Vendors http://www.contentmarketinginstitute.com/2011/02/cfo-
content/
Maritz Research
http://www.socialbusinessnews.com/customers-want-
responses-to-tweeted-complaints-but-what-about-solving-
real-problems/

18. 2012 B2B Prospects Journey
Product Product Product
Discovery Selection Referral
• Awareness • Content • Evangelism
• Search Consumption • Referrals
Results • Decision
Support

19. It’s Always About The People
Viewed 3,434 Times
# of Followers: 58
Top answer has 30 votes
http://www.quora.com/Which-is-the-best-
cloud-computing-platform-for-a-startup

20. The Benefits Are Clear For Organic Search Results
#1 Organic Result
Two Social IDs listed with result.

21. Google’s Socially Influenced Search
Results
Try it! List your social accounts
with your Google profile, then
search for a keyword in your
industry.

22. Cloud and Web Hosting Customers Talk
Participate or ignore. What
will work better for your
brand?

23. People Share With Their Business Network
Try It! Search LinkedIn “Status
Updates” See who is sharing
your posts, articles and press
releases with their business
network.

24. Why?
• 66% of those who have Tweeted about a bad
experience have never received a response
from the offending company?
Do you want your company to
be non-responsive?
Maritz Research http://www.socialbusinessnews.com/customers-want-responses-to-tweeted-
complaints-but-what-about-solving-real-problems/

25. Your Competition Is Doing It…

26. Example: Twitter and Media Influence
Media and Analysts recognize
active brands and employees.

27. Your Employees – A Great Brand Ambassador Team

28. Employees – Your Best Brand
Evangelists
Loyal, passionate employees bring a company as
much benefit as loyal passionate customers. –
They stay longer, work harder, have more
creativity.
They also bring more great employees - it’s a
continuous stream of benefits. Robert Markey co-author of
“The Ultimate Questions 2.0:
How Net Promoter Companies
Thrive in a Customer-Driven
World”

29. Service Providers and Brand Evangelists
Company Twitter Followers Twitter Followers Twitter Followers
Company Employee Employee
Amazon Web 17,722/955 Jeff Barr 12,475/9,687
Services Werner Vogels 34,873/6,068
Equnix 3,217/2,085 Sam Johnson 5,453/41,180
GoGrid 9,386/3,388 Michael Sheehan 7,713/28,179
Joyent 9,175/3,048 Jason Hoffman 4,009/11,868
Network Solutions 9,599/25,489 Shashi Bellamkonda 18,524/77,078
Rackspace 23,994/7,536 Robert Scoble 270,172/59,312
Telex 2,005/1,727 Joe Weinman 2,778/4,125
Virtustream 801/527 Ruven Cohen 28,385/16,057
Employee engagement and reach is greater than the
brand. These are great examples of Evangelists in the
cloud/hosting space.

30. Cloud and Web Hosting Vendors and Brand Evangelists
Company Twitter Employee on Twitter
Followers/Tweets Twitter Followers/Tweets
AlertLogic 825/1,388 Misha Govshteyn 909/1,173
CA_Cloud 2,238/1,468 Andi Mann 5,158/17,042
CloudStack 3,052/360 Joe Brockmeier 3,581/15,237
CloudScaling 2,307/707 Randy Bias 6,821/14,323
EMC @CloudEMC 2,102/755 Christopher Kusek 21,040/56,233
Eucalyptus 2,501/533 Marten Mickos 8,062/3,089
Juniper 17,792/3,080 Christopher Hoff 9,745/64,244
Mimecast 1,667/1,875 Justin Pirie 4,335/9,378
OnApp 897/1,539 Ditlev Bredahl 7,992/4,167
SuperNAP 354/98 Mark Thiele 2,255/19,108
Vmware Service 2,244/2,904 Joe Bgauley 3,174/15,149
Provider
Employee engagement and reach is greater than the
brand. These are great examples of Evangelists in the
cloud/hosting space.

31. Why? – Google Knows Your Network…And
Who Has Influence…
Google knows who and how I am connected. Google knows
who has influence.
http://www.google.com/s2/search/social

32. Why? – Revenue, Lower COCA, Churn and SEO
Your Web or
Cloud Hosting Site
Gets Traffic From
Social Signals
Increased Sales, Visitors Share
Higher Your Content,
Conversions, Promotions,
More Referrals Support Pages
Friends/
Followers: Click
Links and Share
more

33. Who is doing it well?
Web Hosting & Cloud Examples:

34. HostDime

35. HostDime

36. SoftLayer

37. Name.com

38. Dell’s Cloud Computing Efforts
38

39. HostDime and Name.Com
HostDime has 7 employees that have access to post on Twitter and
Facebook – from Marketing, Sales, Client Relations and
Management. @DanSilber and @vikkiorlando lead the efforts there.
Name.com has a Community Evangelist, Jared Ewy @namedotcom
He is working on a policy to get more employees involved. He says,
the key recommendation is to make sure they “be themselves and
converse”.
Name.com Example of success. They helped a customer get their
domain back from someone in the Ukraine. This was done via a
“Stolen Domain” effort using Social Media.

40. Social Media Employee Brand Ambassadors:
An Action plan:

41. Your Brand Ambassador Social
Media Plan
• Where are
they? • Be Human • Shares
Listen • What are Engage • Be Inspire • Referrals
they Responsive • Rewards
saying?

42. How To Implement: Listen
•Discover where your #B2B buyers are talking. What
social networks are they on?
Listen
•What are they saying? Reviews? Recommendations?
•How are they saying it? What words do they use?
•How connected is their community? How influential are
they?

43. How To Implement: Engage
•Your employees and customers are part of the
Engage community – encourage them to participate.
•Guide your employees.
•Participate in the conversations.
•Offer help, advice, service. Don’t sell!
•Be human. Be authentic, don’t mask your identity.
•Be transparent! We all make mistakes, own up to them.

44. How To Implement: Inspire
• Make it fun, make it social.
• Add sharing buttons
Inspire • Enable reviews, foster methods for
generating user generated content
• Surprise them!
• Create inspirational video content
• Create promotions and contests for
customers to join
• Be transparent – buyers love to see the
story from the inside
• Reward your employees that engage!
• Give them points, days off, recognition or
$$
• Never give up! Silence is defeat!
• Build trust and passion or your brand will
die.

45. A Role For All Employees
Urgency
Sentiment Channel Content
Influence Role
Product Marketing Customer
Care/Ops
Strategy Message Response

46. How to Get Started
• Listen – decide where and what voice will work
• Ask for volunteers – don’t force employees to participate
• Let them pick their networks – let employees decide where they will participate
• Guide them on a “public persona”- teach them the norms and boundaries
• Work-Life Balance Discussion – review the benefits, show examples
• SEO Keywords – share the words that matter, remind them to use them naturally
• Content Calendar – share the PR/Content calendar
• GaggleAMP – use a tool like GaggleAMP or HootSuite
• Reward them – Points? Recognition? Days off? Money?
• Rules – Publish a Social Media Policy that makes sense for your business.
• Disclosure – Make sure employees understand the law
• How to Ask For Help – Remind them how to reach out for help
• Crisis Plan – Have a plan for outages or when brand reputation is at risk

47. Tool Example GaggleAMP – A Great Service To Manage The Message
Pre-write the messages,
enable employees to share
all with a “gamification” and
analytics focus for ROI
tracking.

48. Social Media Policy Examples

49. Examples: Doing It Right
Listen
Tweet received In response to
content I shared with my social
network.
Inspire
Tweet received in response to a
Tweet about some direct mail I
received.
Engage
Tweet received in response to a
blog post I wrote with a question
on GaggleAMP’s roadmap.

50. Is your Web Hosting, Cloud or Vendor business
social?
What is working for your business?

51. Thank You
William Toll
Twitter/Skype: @utollwi
william@williamtoll.com