Author Archives: Lindsay Renwick
For years, a truism among social media marketers is that B2B is a soft medium, better suited to raising awareness, thought leadership and passive relationship building than to pursuing hard sales objectives. We argued increased length of B2B sales cycles and difficulty of tracking customers from one platform to another as main reasons for not attempting full-scale CRM activities.
While those are both valid, one of the main reasons we steered clear was the sheer amount of work it would take to identify, track and funnel leads to sales in the absence of a comprehensive social CRM tool. Advising clients to build a custom database and assign community management resources to enter, tag and monitor individual leads by hand never seemed like a winning proposition.
And so, we stuck to strategies that made the most sense, to get the most bang for a client’s buck. And while establishing thought leadership by producing best-in-class content undeniably works, it’s got two things going against it, from an internal perspective. First, producing high-quality content on a regular basis takes a lot of work; second, it eats into time when employees could be pursing shorter-term wins through more familiar channels. Plus, we were always faced with the same measurement issues. If we can’t adequately connect follows, likes and mentions to the bottom line, how can we expect to convince skeptical managers and salespeople to participate in a program that seems like more work for questionable return?
Which is why I nearly jumped out of my skin with excitement back in March when I read that Salesforce.com was acquiring Radian6. Could we be on the verge of discovering the B2B social Holy Grail? Read More
Let me begin with a confession. Last year, when I first discovered that I would be working on a Business-to-Business account, I wasn’t thrilled. I think many of us in the fast-paced digital agency world would react the same way.
You can understand my predicament, though. I was harboring the number one misconception about B2B marketing: IT’S BORING.
After a year in the field, I am here to tell you that it’s just not true. To prove it, here are just a few of the top reasons why I’m more than happy to work in B2B.
The Relationships are Varied and Exciting
Corporate-agency relations are every bit as relationship-driven as with consumer-facing clients. When you’re dealing with multinationals, you can be interacting on a daily basis with people from all over the world, developing strategies that map global brand values to local business conditions. If you’re a social person who thrives on collaboration, diversity and complexity, B2B can be addictive.
Google’s highly anticipated foray into social media networking, Google+, debuted to the broader public last week as invitations began leaking out to those participating in its limited trial. Given the high-profile failure of Google Wave, and last year’s rumors of declining innovation after of a rash of executive defections to Facebook, we felt justified in greeting Google’s entry into game with some misgivings. After a week of exploring the network’s landmark features and mercifully simple interface design, we are pleased to report that there is quite a lot Google has done right. That said, it may not be enough to kill the elephant network in the room. It may be most interesting to watch them continue to compete toe-to-toe and find a way to co-exist.
With the web full of hyperbole like “Facebook-killer!” and “game-changer!” we thought there might be room for a reasoned look at the network’s features, benefits and the opportunities they present for private users and brands.
*Because we’ll be referencing Google+ features throughout the post, feel free to reference our friendly Glossary of Features at the end.
In the Beginning…
It’s still in the invite-only beta phase of rollout, and users are coming online in a steady stream. Google hasn’t released usage stats yet, but a list has already surfaced of the top 100 Google+ users by followers, with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg topping the chart at nearly 45,000 followers at the time of this writing. If we make the thoroughly unscientific assumption that half the population of Google+ has Mark in their “Following” Circle, then Facebook can probably rest easy for the time being.
Lindsay Renwick | Critical Mass Toronto
Flickr announced a new suite of features last week, including a larger photo display size, navigation upgrades and a slightly altered look and feel. In the immediate aftermath of the announcement, user reaction was fairly predictable. Some jumped to the beta version weeks ago by clicking the jaunty “Take me to the future!” invitation and never looked back. Some users avoided the change until the last minute and then seemed both shocked and upset once there was no turning back.
Looking at comments on message boards and on Twitter, it’s fair to say that this upgrade has been a success for Flickr, with encouraging comments outweighing the negativity. User experience experts worldwide must be applauding the fact that one of the world’s largest photo hosting sites has finally added a simple “< previous | next >” link adjacent to the image display, a feature that was conspicuously (and obnoxiously) absent from the previous version. The site is now considerably lighter too – according to CNET, Flickr will double upload speeds.
So why are people getting riled up and how should Flickr respond? Read More
Lindsay Renwick | Critical Mass Toronto
With Quit Facebook Day nearly a month behind us, I think it’s fairly safe to conclude that the 400 million-strong social network will likely live to see the end of the summer. Some users are still grumbling, but very few of them are actually leaving.
Oh Facebook, what happened to us? We used to be so happy together.
Something changed this year, of that there can be no doubt. Something besides the shifting privacy policies that angered the public and politicians alike. As Facebook’s users moved more of our daily communication onto the platform, our attitudes seemed to change toward it. It was no longer cool and new. It became simply a part of our lives, an expected convenience and a service provider, like the phone company.
Does anyone remember back in 2007, when the little juggernaut that could was still on the cutting edge? Entire cities vied to add the largest number of users in the shortest time. I clearly recall the brief, shining moment when Canada was Facebook’s fastest growing market. How we congratulated ourselves, how we supported the brand and gave our friends and families the ultimatum – join now, or forever lose access to my vacation pictures.
I suppose nothing lasts forever, and social media properties have tended in the past to have the lifespan of fruitflies. It makes sense that with the public’s ardor cooled and after weathering a few controversies, pundits should be anticipating Facebook’s pending demise.
Remember when the mythical issue of high-schooler flight was going to take Facebook down? Fickle youth, disenchanted by friend requests from their grandparents, were slated to disappear in droves and take their cred and the network’s raison d’être with them. Look at MySpace, we were urged, if you want to see what happens to a social network that loses touch with the kids.
Well, MySpace only ever really had the kids, so naturally when most of their 43 million-strong base flocked elsewhere it had little choice but to become “the abandoned amusement park of the internet.” Not so Facebook, whose multigenerational user base skews to the Head of Household segment so beloved by advertisers, and whose massive volume of users can easily handle shifts in the tens of thousands without significantly destabilizing the system.
Also, when the kids fled MySpace, guess where they went? Between September 2008 and September 2009, MySpace’s social network share dropped by 55% while Facebook’s grew by 194%*.
Lindsay Renwick | Critical Mass Toronto
The good folks at Facebook caused quite a flap last week when they announced a major change to the custom Landing Tabs feature on Facebook Pages. The upshot was that Pages would have required a minimum of 10,000 fans or an existing relationship with a Facebook advertising representative in order to qualify for a custom tab.
Mere days later, the policy has been rescinded due to the overwhelming outcry. Claiming that the change would stack the deck against companies trying to use Facebook to deftly and inexpensively build a social following, marketers, developers and small businesses persuaded the world’s largest social network to reconsider. The furore is dying down, but it remains a sobering reminder to businesses and to the agencies who recommend and maintain Facebook Pages for their clients, that carefully-crafted plans can come tumbling down at the flick of a digital switch.
Would it really have been that bad?
With the potential crisis averted, let’s explore the question of whether this would have been as huge a disaster as predicted.
At no point did Facebook threaten the wholesale removal of brand pages from the network. Brands would have been permitted to maintain their Wall feeds as usual which means that the social activity the Pages feature was designed to host and foster was never under threat. Brands with active and engaged community managers would have been free to continue building their followings by posting links to their Wall pages, generating discussions and hosting contests.
What would have been limited are the static Landing Tabs, which provide good SEO, allow a quick hit of brand messaging, and provide ongoing work for developers. While brands that can afford the investment have engaging and interactive Landing Tabs, smaller businesses tend to use them as a one-stop spam page that users bounce from nearly immediately.
This is about engagement, not spam. Read More
