Groping Around in the Dark?

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Marketing Musings

“Social media is like teenage sex: everyone wants it, at first it’s a little disappointing, but it does get better with practice.”

So said Josh Graff, EMEA Director of Marketing Solutions at LinkedIn and a panellist at the first wave of results of The Social Media Benchmark—a new six-monthly study exploring how marketers are adapting to, investing in and getting value from social media. Produced by The Chartered Institute of Marketing and supported by Ipsos ASI and Bloomberg, the study’s aim is to create a definitive guide to the changing role and potential for social media in business. This blog is intended to provide you with a snapshot of the findings and observations from this first stage.

Although it’s more widely deployed as a marketing tactic in the United States, usage of social media in B2B is still finding its way to determining its rightful role in the marketing armory in other parts of the world.

This inaugural survey was conducted over a 4-week period amongt around 1,300 marketers spanning EMEA and Asia and embracing a range of job titles and industry sectors, plus a balance across national, multinational and global companies.

Engaging with customers on their terms, not yours, is (as the enlightened among us know!) a prerequisite for building genuine and sustainable relationships using social media. These are just some of the headlines from the survey.

  • Positive adoption overall, but too many B2B marketers still fail to embrace social media, apart from LinkedIn.
  • Lack of a social media company champion, many haven’t worked out which department it should sit in! This is compounded by a real skills deficit with just 6% claiming skills and competencies are at an appropriate level.
  • Underestimated reputational risk. There have been many examples recently of companies’ social media strategies backfiring spectacularly, but marketers seem to be unaware of the dangers.

Continue reading →

Weekly Roundup: 7/12/12

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Marketing Musings

Welcome to the Projectline Weekly Roundup. We know that the week can move pretty fast. Since Fridays sometimes offer a chance for a breather, we wanted to share links to some of the articles we liked this week. As always, we’d love to get your take, so feel free to leave a comment or chat us up on Twitter. Happy reading and have a great weekend!

Weekly Roundup

Content Strategy
How to Make B2B Content More Shareable—This is a good primer on increasing the ‘shareability’ of content and provides some useful tips on how to tailor promotion strategies for different social media platforms.

Customer Engagement
Seven Ways to Take Advantage of the Social Power of Your Customers—This post highlights the importance of inviting customers to share their experiences with their social networks. As the author describes, the first step is to make it easier for customers to go social by incorporating links and social media sharing buttons in all communications.

Social Media
Facebook is Building a Job Board?—According to the Wall Street Journal, Facebook is looking to create a board for all jobs posted by third parties. Are people already mixing their personal and business lives on Facebook? Are those photos really going to come back and haunt you? I’d be surprised if these feature comes to the public in the near future and LinkedIn is still the place to go for job hunters.

Facebook Groups, Know Who Read Your Post—Facebook rolled out a new feature for Facebook Groups that shows exactly who saw your post and at what time. Personally, I think this feature goes a bit too far against personal privacy and I’m guessing that Facebook will turn this feature into a Groups option rather than a mandatory feature.

Projectline Posts
Do Androids Dream of Electric Metrics?—David Dorrian wrote this great blog post about algorithms creating stories. There is a good debate going on in the comments section on whether a machine could create as compelling a story as a human writer. With clients always looking to reduce costs, using software to write customer stories, could be one way to do it. What do you think? Let us know with a comment on our blog.

Building Your Company’s Social Presence—This post offers several tips on how to jumpstart your company’s social media program. It’s the follow-up to Nick Martin’s post on how to optimize use of social media throughout the sales process.

Picture of the Week: 7/10/12

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Pic of the Week

Every weekday morning at 10:42 am, our team is invited to send in a picture of where they are, what they’re doing, or who they’re with. We post our favorite picture from each week and share its story here.

10:42 July 3, 2012 - Philly team meeting

In Philadelphia, last week was not just a time to celebrate the birth of our nation, but also the arrival of one of Projectline’s founders at our newest branch location. Anika braved the security lines, jet lag, and sweltering heat to meet up with our fantastic group based just outside the “City of Brotherly Love.”

Building Your Company’s Social Presence

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Marketing Musings

Building Your Company’s Social Presence
On this blog last month, I shared some of the take-aways from my presentation at the 2012 International Customer Reference Program Conference. The title of my talk at that event was: The Influence of Social Media on the Sales Process. I thought it would be helpful to follow up that post with a few additional tips.

If you’re building out a social presence and you don’t have the resources to take as thoughtful of an approach as I described in my previous post, here are a few best practices that will get you moving in the right direction:

Focus on building relationships, not just increasing followers
It’s not about the number of followers that you have. It’s about the number of the right kinds of followers you have. The content you create and the dialogue you drive dictates the breadth and composition of your follower base. Making your content speak to what your audience cares about and listening for opportunities to engage is a great way to nurture and grow your social presence over time.

Avoid defining social too narrowly
It’s a lot sexier to talk about Facebook and Twitter, but the fact is we have to consider our target audience’s online experience as an ecosystem. You can’t just nurture one aspect of the ecosystem and expect to influence sales in a significant way. Sure, you can lower cost through customer service and support with a siloed social strategy, but that approach is not likely to help you generate meaningful revenue.

Optimize for search AND social
Social media is becoming a bigger and bigger influencer of what ranks in search and 97 percent of B2B technology buyers use search engines to research purchases. It’s crucial to have search in mind when building out a social strategy.

I’m interested to hear what you think. Leave a comment here or find me on Twitter if you want to talk some more about how to build your company’s social presence.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Metrics?

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Marketing Musings

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.”

Stirring, poetic prose. Especially from a robot.

Science fiction gives us many examples, like this one from Blade Runner, of computers and artificial life forms expressing themselves in terms that humans would be proud of.

What about science fact? Well, we all know that Zooey Deschanel, Samuel L. Jackson, and John Malkovich are able to hold fruitful (or, in the last case, creepy) conversations with Siri, but they are a little one-sided, and there are doubts about how accurate the depictions are.

Narrative Science takes things a step further. As this recent article in Wired recounts, Narrative Science trains computers to write stories—and not just any stories, Kristian Hammond, one of the company’s founders, believes his computers are capable of writing a Pulitzer prize-winning story within five years.

I don’t want to re-tread too much of the Wired article, as you can read the article itself for details (and I recommend that you do!), but one section stood out to me:

As the computers get more accomplished and have access to more and more data, their limitations as storytellers will fall away. It might take a while, but eventually even a story like this one could be produced without, well, me. “Humans are unbelievably rich and complex, but they are machines,” Hammond says. “In 20 years, there will be no area in which Narrative Science doesn’t write stories.”

Now, I don’t know much at all about algorithms, but I do know how to recognize a metaphysical belief presented as fact when I see one—in this case, that human beings are “machines,” no more than the sum of their parts.

If that is the case, then yes, there is nothing that a human can do that can’t be replicated; with enough processing power, the correct parameters, and the right math to connect those parameters, a computer—or an android—can do anything we can do, and better. Our friend Roy from Blade Runner would be a Replican, not a Replican’t.

But the idea that human beings are no more than the sum of their parts is not a given. Philosophers have been wrestling for millennia over the question of whether humans are just the sum or more than the sum of their parts. The question is of supervenience—do the lower-level properties of a system determine its higher-level properties?

In this context, the question is “Does the storytelling capacity of human beings supervene on our neural pathways, our knowledge of the rules of composition, and the amount of data we have access to?”

Narrative Science is not alone in thinking that it does. Epagogix uses an algorithm to predict box office takings of proposed movies, crunching numbers on elements including the script and plot. If even creative pieces like film scripts can be coded into their component parts, then case study writers in particular had better watch out—as they are tasked more and more with dealing in data (hard metrics as opposed to soft benefits to the individual).

However, I would argue that there is more at work in a great script, case study, or any piece of writing that conveys a story—that they are more than the sum of their parts. There is something irreducible about them. When it comes to case studies, the key is that they are records of testimonials—one human being telling another human being about how a product, service, event, or solution impacted his or her life. Metrics, and other definable parts like quotes and proof points, will undoubtedly feature strongly in the story, and the text should adhere to the rules of composition and to brand and legal requirements. But a great case study will also have more than that: an intangible—the feel of a true human connection.

Computers might be trained to mimic that, but if we are more than the sum of our parts, they can’t actually experience it, and that will ultimately be apparent.

Or will it…? Was this blog post actually written by a computer?!

Let me know what you think, either in the comments or via twitter.