Notes from the Hive (Entries tagged as twitter)

I'm B2B So Social Media Isn't For Me

mardy@bumblebeellc.com (Mardy Sitzer) — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 06:45:30 -0700

Because I spend my days working with social media I sometimes forget that the rest of the world isn’t seeing what I see and so I am always brought back to reality when I hear “I’m B2B so social media isn’t for me.”

I believe that most people in business are aware of the value of social media to engage consumers but haven’t made the leap to understanding the value to business clients. I say ‘leap to understanding’ because as a B2B business (business-to-business) we think of our companies as a body of products or services as it relates to the value of another company. This is where the shift and leap occurs as social media brings B2B into P2P (People to People). Social media puts us in the right places to begin building relationships with the people at those companies that are either making the buying decision or influencing the purchasing process. These people are our consumers.

So, let’s take a quick look at how social media does in fact play a role in the B2B market.

Recently Mashable posted a great blog giving 5 examples of B2B companies that have had great success using social media. These companies range from aviation maintenance, equine dentistry, commercial paper supplier and a paint manufacturer and are successfully using platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Not the sexy stuff you are used to seeing in headline news is it? Your business doesn’t have to have sex appeal to have social media success. You also don’t have to go for hundreds of thousands of friends, followers and fans to be successful – you just have to get the attention of the eyeballs of those that matter.

This is where strategy becomes important in gaining some traction and success using social media to generate leads and grow your business. Not sales and marketing strategy but engagement strategy.

A client of ours who is in the B2B service industry has been experiencing success getting in-person appointments with key decision makers by first connecting and engaging on Twitter, as well as using video creatively to break down the barriers and getting him invitations into accounts where in the past they never had success. Their activity on Facebook and Twitter as well as video blogging helps to keep their web site at first or second place in Google searches, which in turn generates leads.

Still not convinced?

Recent Hubspot studies support companies that use Twitter have greater success with their blogs, and companies that blog regularly have better results with search engines and those that use video do even better. The power of Linkedin is often times under rated by companies and underused.

There is no silver bullet and no single activity or platform that will bring instant success. It takes time and effort, and like any other form of communications and marketing, the quality of your message and your presence will be the final kiss of glory or death. These are tools – and in the right hands are quite powerful. The better you understand each platform, the better you are at using them, the better you know the audience, the better your chance of engaging with them to earn their attention and their trust, which increases your rate of success.

So get out there and blog, vlog, tweet, post, comment, friend, follow, like, digg, and link and we’ll see you at the top.

Where Web Site Visitors Come From

mardy@bumblebeellc.com (Mardy Sitzer) — Sun, 03 May 2009 10:01:30 -0700

It is Sunday afternoon and pouring rain. I can’t go out to play so I am catching up with work while co-mingling my attention and efforts with home projects. One of the items on my to-do list was to check out our website traffic statistics, and so off I went to the admin panel to begin digging into our reports. In order for these reports to be relevant I also pulled up my history files for recent activities such as blog posts on our site, Linked-In updates, Tweets on Twitter, article submissions to ezinearticles.com as well as comments posted on other’s blogs and now, embarrassed as I am to admit it, Facebook entries. Yes, I have only started on Facebook and I will address that in a future blog.

Why pull up this information? It should all be relevant to the traffic spikes on our site. I look at the posts, updates and entries to learn what was interesting, and well, what was boring. Allow me to share some breadcrumb facts.

Breadcrumbs? Yes, hopefully you read my entry on getting a life on line. What all this activity is meant to do is to leave a breadcrumb trail back to you. Your activity on the internet leaves breadcrumbs for the search engines to follow you home and leaves breadcrumbs for people interested in you and what you do.

Some things I found interesting on our most recent report.

• Linked-in drives more traffic to our site than any of the other social sites, with Twitter coming in second.
• Length of stay and pages viewed is higher from Twitter followers than from Linked-in.
• The third site driving in traffic with meaningful visit time and pages viewed is ezinearticles.com where I post some of our blog articles.
• The highest traffic is direct traffic and with the percentage of new visitors being higher than returning, I can assume that our drip marketing and networking efforts are having an impact. I can also assume that there is little reason for our clients to return to our site – something we need to work on.
• Breadcrumb results were interesting as I am now able to tell what posts drive the most interest and my communication efforts can now be refined and targeted toward those topics and keywords.
• We have great organic volume as well, however not as impressive for length of stay and pages viewed so we need to take a look at what general searchers are not getting form us when they search. In all fairness to us, many of the searches that take away from having impressive statistics is the number of searches for bumblebees and hives rather than web design and marketing.
• Maximizing the advantage we have from designing and maintaining so many websites is that our name appears – a tiny link at the bottom of those pages – and this drives more traffic to our site than any other medium. It is safe to assume that if someone visits a website that they like and are in the market for a new site, they would explore the company that designed and developed the site that they are on. Yes, this is an unfair advantage but not necessarily one that you can’t explore. Look toward your vendors, clients and partners for linking options.

Hopefully this offers some insight as to why we have been preaching to get out there and get going with activities on the internet. Social networking should be a key component to your marketing efforts. The goal is to build a network, make new connections, sources and nurture prospects. The exposure for your firm comes along for the ride and therefore you are brand building in the process. Now it is not ‘miracle grow’ but it is Miracle Marketing.

There is valuable feedback to be gained from these endeavors. Understand that these activities are geared toward prospecting and brand building, and it is not for selling. Warning: You will not experience instant gratification or instant success, but you just might deliver on the promise for a bright future.

Social Media Predictions for 2009

mardy@bumblebeellc.com (Mardy Sitzer) — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 12:16:02 -0700

As this year comes to a painful end we prepare for the battle toward success in 2009. Where do we invest our time and our challenged resources? What do we focus on to move our companies and brand into the buyer’s mind’s eye for sustaining and growing our companies? How do I create a ‘strategy’ for success in this market? Where is this market going?

There are so many questions to ask this year with less information to actually predict and project. One thing is for certain, 2009 will stand witness to mass mergers and closings, especially in small to medium sized companies. This, you can bank on. If you have cash and are in good credit standing, you will be in a position to buy out your competitors if that is a smart move, or you can just raid their customer base, picking and choosing which customers you want to serve.

Besides buying your way to the top, there needs to be a strategy for your own organization to grow and serve customers. Is social media for you? The answer to that question is that it has been ready, but are you? There has been such a rush around social networking and media that for many, it has been too overwhelming to understand, let alone begin to implement into our business marketing efforts. You may remember a book that came out years ago by John Naisbitt called “High Tech High Touch”. If not, it is still available and what he had to say so many years ago, long before facebook and twitter came into our world, is proving to once again be true. The bottom line to the findings in this book is that the more techy we get the more we long for the human touch. With the rush to massive on-line marketing through internet media and social networks, there was at first a kind of special connection only to quickly become diluted as the numbers became so massive that statistical measuring became a fruitless endeavor, and needless to say, the ‘relationship’ aspect got lost in the volume.

2009 will be about relevancy and meaning – and meaningful connections. The warm hand that touches you in the cold techy world is the one that will be heard. Customer Service will continue to rule as the number one factor that creates fans, blowing away content as KING. So it is not going to be how much you say and to how many people you say it, it is going to be what you say and to whom, and how quickly you respond after you’ve struck a nerve.

If you want to learn more about the predictions, there are innovative frontrunners in this industry that have shared their knowledge and views as well as their predictions. It is well worth reading. We are providing you a link to the article and the pdf which you can download here, courtesy of Peter Kim.

Or view the article online here: http://www.beingpeterkim.com/2008/12/social-media-2009.html

Is It Time To Tweet? A Journey into Social Network Marketing, Pt. 2

() — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 09:36:47 -0700

One of the latest tools on the social networking scene, Twitter is also one of the most controversial. It’s a micro-blog, which means it’s a very specific type of blog network. You can only post entries 140 characters in length, essentially the same maximum size of a text message sent through you cell phone, which comes very much into play in the perks (or detriments) of Twitter. These short entries are affectionately referred to as “Tweets”. You set up your Twitter profile, much like any other social networking site. From there rather than friends or contacts you follow other Twitters and in return you have fellow Twitters following you, something like a subscription to a blog.

Sounds simple enough, so why the controversy? Well at first glance it looks like nothing more than a tool to constantly annoy your friends, family and colleagues with multiple times a day. I fell in line with the detractors for quite some time as well, until I did some more research and gave Twitter a real chance. It’s customizable enough so that you can pick how you receive your Tweets, not just overall, but specifically from user to user. You can log onto the Twitter site to read your Tweets or you can have them sent to your cell phone, in return you can send out your tweets via cell phone. A great perk for many bloggers reviewing films, going to concerts, panel discussions, etc. Your audience gets instant play by play reviews, remarks sent either to their Twitter or to their cell phone, it’s their choice. I like to keep track of the news at all times, so I have CNN’s Tweets sent directly to my phone, meanwhile I also follow some pretty tedious Twitters that feel the need to express every thought in their head. I have those Tweets sent to my Twitter page to read at my leisure so I’m not stuck on my cell phone reading these text messages all day.

Now the real question, is it useful and marketable in the workplace? When I was a skeptic I was very much saying no, no way, no how. It’s nothing but a narcissistic tool for people with too much time and ego.
I was wrong, dead wrong. While not for everybody, depending on your business and your audience Twitter is an extremely useful tool, more useful than any other social networking tool out there when used correctly. Twitter was considered a massive asset to the Obama campaign this past election. Just take a look at some Twitter pages, a massive amount of users are STILL following the Obama campaign almost a month after the election. Perhaps you run a bar, club or any other business involved in the nightlife, right there at your disposal is a tool to get your drink specials, list of performers, cost of entry at the door, etc. right into your audiences hands everyday, right into their cell phones. Perhaps you run a car service or delivery service, your employees can update your client base on traffic and weather that may affect the time of travel right there on the road with their cell phones. These types of situations make Twitter extremely useful to you and your audience without being overly time consuming like running a full FaceBook page or Technorati blog, just a minute here and there.

Beyond those circumstances even the big corporate guys are finding great ways to use Twitter. It’s a great utility for reputation, quality control and even when necessary, damage control. Zappos, the online shoe giant has a Twitter, even then it’s not just any Twitter. It’s updated personally by the CEO multiple times a day! Questions, comments and complaints can be directly sent to him through Twitter and he also uses it as a personal micro-blog. This combination is a great way to build a sense of informal community, it builds brand loyalty and it builds trust. All things that many find to be unattainable in today’s corporate climate. Another example of corporate success through Twitter is ComCast, a cable company with fairly negative image in the press. The ComCast Cares Twitter is run by the Director of Digital Care personally. The ultimate form of customer care, he directly replies to all Tweets involved in troubleshooting and other assorted tech problems for ComCast customers. You have a problem with one of your ComCast services? Just hop on Twitter and you’re talking to the Director of Digital Care immediately. If he can’t help you he sends you in the right direction, no talking to machines on the phone, no irritating wait times, no horrible elevator music while you’re stuck waiting. Nothing but instant results that once again build community, loyalty and trust for the consumer.

Twitter is still the new guy on the scene though, so keep that in mind. Much of your audience may not have found it yet. Mention it in your blog, in an email, get the word out and mention the perks of receiving your information in a quick, easy informal way. Get in on the ground floor and build your audience within Twitter. So is it time to Tweet? Take a look and see if it’s the right solution for your business!