The B2B Guide to Social Media

By Clare Third

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said that small businesses had been ‘banging down their door for the last two years’ for access to advertising on Twitter – and finally Twitter and American Express have teamed up and provided a solution which they claim is ‘a piece of cake’.

Twitter connected with American Express in March to offer its new self-service advertising program to small businesses. Initially, Twitter is extending the new program to 10,000 US based American Express card holding small businesses but is expected to eventually roll the service out more widely. American Express has also offered $100 credit to be used on Twitter advertising to the first 10,000 businesses that signed up.

So, small businesses are now getting a slightly louder voice on Twitter – but how does it work? And how is it different to the big business ‘brand pages’ already on Twitter?

Twitter’s new ‘promoted products’ come in two forms of product for small businesses on Twitter.

1. Promoted Accounts – Twitter evaluates the current followers of your small business, and then searches for people with similar interests. If a match is found, Twitter recommends you in the ‘Who to Follow’ section.

1. Promoted Tweets – Twitter constantly monitors your engagement, and automatically promotes your best tweets. Twitter puts your best tweets in front of more of the right people, at the right time. It’s even possible to specify where you want to be promoted geographically.

Now here’s the good bit. Small businesses only have to pay when

a) Somebody follows their account or

b) Engages with a promoted tweet.

Unlike a lot of ordinary advertising, small businesses would never have to pay for just appearing on somebody’s page. In other words, with Twitter’s new scheme, small businesses will only pay for performance.

Here’s a great video from Twitter on how small businesses can use the service.

It’s been over a month since the program’s launch – what are the reviews? Twitter CEO Dick Costolo says that based on tests, ‘small businesses are thrilled with results’, which is great news.

What are the pros?

1. Small businesses can get their messages in front of the right people.
2. Adverts can be geographically targeted.
3. No previous advertising experience required – the new service just uses small business’ tweets as their adverts.
4. Payment is manageable, with no monthly or minimum commitments.
5. Small businesses are promoted on the web and on mobile phones.

What are the cons?

1. The program is currently only available to US based American Express cardholders
2. When the service is rolled out more widely, there is the potential for abuse of the service by spammers linking advertised malware. Lets hope Twitter has preventative measures in place.

Ed Gilligan, American Express Vice Chairman calls the program ‘a big win for small businesses now that they have a new way of reaching customers in a timely authentic way’.

The big question is whether or not Twitter’s new self-service approach will revolutionise the way small businesses operate on Twitter, and the results they will get – presumably only time will tell.

If you are a US based small business and American Express member, it’s not too late to sign up – here is the link to get you on your way!

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By Jim Beckham (@jimbeckham)  

As the newest member of the team, I had been given the responsibility, and some would say privilege, of choosing the B2B Blog of the Week. However, being relatively new to pretty much everything we do here at TopLine, my initial endeavours at finding a suitable candidate were not very successful to say the least. What I really needed was a tool that compiled the best blogs on the web into categories and then would give me some indication of which ones were successful. Luckily my ever faithful “rule of the internet” came into play here as I soon found that something I had imagined had already been made by someone else. In this case, blogRank by Invesp.com.

Back in 2009, having been publishing their own blog regularly for three years already, Invesp, who apparently focus on “Conversion Rate Optimisation”, decided that they wanted to measure its success. However, they found that existing tools were not comprehensive enough in their ranking systems to satisfy their needs, as their website explains:

“we decided to examine different factors to measure each of these elements, such as how many people read a blog, how many people subscribe to the RSS feed, how many other blogs link to your blog and more. Our aim is to help readers find the best blogs possible in the area of their interest.”

Users can select from nine different categories, each with a number of subcategories contained within them, to bring up the top 100 relevant blogs. A rating is given to each blog, along with a direct link for ease of access. For example, we recently used this system to compare the top 100 blogs relating to small businesses. Ranking is updated daily, so if a new post suddenly draws a particular blog hundreds of followers, this will very quickly be reflected in the ranking system.

blogRank’s main competitor, Technorati, certainly has the edge over it in some aspects – specifically a more stylish interface, with a short synopsis and preview pictures for each blog on the ranking page – and as such is likely to be leading in this field for the foreseeable future. Yet I can’t help but feel a pang of affection for this little underdog tool which, if the difficulty I had in finding a link to it from the Invesp homepage is anything to go by, seems to have been left by the wayside to some extent, even perhaps by its creators.

But beneath its straightforward, no nonsense look lies a very powerful and complex tool that took over eight months to develop. The comprehensive system collects data on thousands of blogs, and categorises them based on over 20 different factors. Upon launch it had already looked at 20,000 blogs and sorted them into 50 different topics.

It is clear from blogRank’s website that it considers itself a superior tool compared to Technorati, for the following reasons:

“1) Technorati’s Authority ranking is not focused on listing the top 100 blogs in specific categories across the blogosphere.
2) Authority ranking relies solely on incoming links to a blog for its ranking. This is only one of the factors we use in ranking.
3) Most other ranking systems use only 8 or 9 factors to measure a blog’s success, while we use over 20.”

What I like most about blogRank is that it does not simply present the viewer with a single ranking table, but instead lets the results be sorted by a number of specific factors as well. This means that if you are looking for blogs that have the most unique monthly visitors, for example, you can rank them according to this regardless of their Alexa ranking or Google indexed pages.

So, despite this being a blog post about finding a blog to post about, I have a strong feeling that blogRank will be used here at TopLine in the future, especially because, despite the technical aspects behind it being quite complex, the front end of the product is so easy to use and straightforward. So, congratulations blogRank on being our B2B Blog of the Week!

In retrospect my earlier comment about blogRank not being highlighted on the main Invesp site doesn’t really matter. The majority of traffic I imagine will come from search engines, and in this respect the people behind the SEO probably couldn’t have been any more effective. Well, unless perhaps if they’d been led by Gordon Ramsey – “want to rank blogs? blogRank. DONE”.

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What is HTML 5?

HTML 5 essentially means that instead of having to worry about downloading flash plug-ins, you will be able to view videos and pictures on all media platforms from computers to mobile phones.

HTML or hypertext mark-up language is the code that determines how your website looks and functions. When it was first created in the early 1990s, HTML was fairly basic and uploaded multimedia content slowly. Macromedia’s Flash, however, came along in the mid-nineties and changed the way websites used animations, video and graphics.

Until now when companies have built websites they have had to rely on third parties like Flash or QuickTime if they want to include multimedia. HTML has never supported video natively so it isn’t surprising that HTML 5 is attracting a lot of attention.

Put simply, when you visit a website built using HTML 5, there will be a much smaller chance of you coming across a black hole in the middle of the page or getting those endless prompts to ‘download a plug-in’.

The biggest promise that HTML 5 brings with it is the potential for a cross platform experience: you will be able to load a website on a mobile device, a PC or a TV and it will look exactly the same and have the same functionality. As users of its products know only too well, Apple will not allow Flash to run on any of their iOS devices including the iPhone and iPad. The success of their products globally shows that companies cannot ignore the need to recode their websites in HTML 5.

Should you jump on the bandwagon?

Many big businesses have begun overhauling their websites and are not waiting for the HTML 5 specs to be finalised, using unofficial versions of the code. While HTML 5 will make it much easier for you to make your website more visually appealing, there is no need to rush.

For small companies, like us, it is worthwhile waiting for the HTML 5 standards to mature and for HTML 5 to be widely adopted. You do not have control over your client’s applications (browsers) and many of these still won’t be advanced enough to read HTML 5. If you adopt HTML 5 too early you could exclude some of your community from engagement.

The latest version of HTML can perform all kinds of dynamic tasks and visual tricks and promises plenty for the future, but for now it is best just to be aware of it and bide your time as its development progresses.

Natalie Price, Marketing, SilverDoor

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In the past, when we have built new websites for clients, part of the process has been to submit the new site’s URL to Google and other search engines so that they can index it and include it in search results as quickly as possible. It’s not that long ago when it could take several weeks before a site appeared within search result pages, a process that has speeded up thanks to links posted social media platforms.
As a social media junkie I’ve often wondered how quickly this could be done. Last week I had the chance to find out.
Revolution Public Relations recently agreed to merge with Cinnamon Communications to create a bigger business offering our clients a greater range of services. This brought a necessity of rebranding, and a major part of this exercise was the creation of a new website, giving me the opportunity to see how quickly the search engines would find the site simply by putting links to it on a few social media platforms. I was particularly interested to see how quickly a link on Google Plus would lead to the site being indexed by the search engine itself.

First things first, the finished site, www.the-flashbulb.com, went live for anyone to see on 28th April. The new business was to be officially launched two days later on Monday 30th, but I was keen to get on with my social media experiment!

On the same day that the website went live I amended the old Revolution PR Google Plus page, changing the name, logo and, more importantly the website’s URL on the profile. I also started Tweeting from a new Twitter account: @Ideas_Exposure, to start building up a following. Then I sat back and waited.
Nothing happened.

All over the weekend I was checking Google and searching for “Flashbulb PR and Marketing”.
Nothing.

Monday was the day of our big launch to the market and one of our priorities was the creation of a new “Flashbulb” profile page on LinkedIn and the altering all individual staff profiles on LinkedIn.

Monday afternoon came but still nothing was showing up on Google.

What had happened to Google Plus? I was sure that the main search engine would have found the website fairly quickly via its own social media platform. Meanwhile we were busy on Twitter @ideas_exposure and issued a news release regarding our merger, which quickly appeared on Features Exec later that afternoon.

Then the world’s favourite search engine threw up a search result that showed it had crawled LinkedIn and indexed our new profile page. I spotted this about nine hours after it had been created. Then later on Monday Microsoft’s Bing found our website and indexed it. I can’t be sure but suspected at the time that it had found its way there via LinkedIn.

The news story on FeaturesExec was also indexed and included in Google’s search results within 24 hours, highlighting the importance of getting news releases online and not just in the printed media.

Our Google Plus profile page started showing up in the Google search results on the Tuesday, it was another step in the right direction.

At about that time Google also found our Twitter feed and indexed it. This happened shortly after one of my co-directors had retweeted something from the company’s feed, which might tell us something about the importance of getting retweets.

About 72 hours after we announced the new business to the world, Google search results finally included pages from our website ñ it had taken five days.

Or had it?

A closer inspection Google’s cache showed that the search engine had actually crawled the site within 24 hours of it going live, i.e. on the Sunday morning. At that time the only link to the site had been on our new Google Plus profile page. It did however take a further four days before it was included in the search results.
I’m at a loss as to why it took so long for the pages to appear in search results, but am rather pleased that by posting on Google Plus I had confirmed what I had previously been telling people – that posting content on Google’s own social media platform is, in effect, placing it into the heart of the beast. It just took a while for it to appear!
So what have I learnt from my little experiment? A good deal about how frequently the search engines crawl the major social media platforms, underling how closely social media and search engine marketing have become entwined and the importance to businesses of integrating their website with a wider digital and social media strategy.

 
Andrew Barber (aka Paddy) has over twenty years experience of marketing and public relations in the commercial property sector, having started his career as an office and industrial surveyor. After twelve years he made the switch to a PR, media relations and marketing role and since 2001 has advised property investors, developers, surveyors and agents on corporate marketing, publicity and media strategies within the UK and European commercial property markets.
He established Revolution Public Relations with Kate Titchmarsh, as a specialist PR and media relations consultancy within the property sector and in 2012 merged the business with Cinnamon Communications to become Flashbulb.
Andrew contributes a regular blog for Property Weekís website regarding online search and social media and has lectured on Public Relations and the use of social media within PR at the University for the Creative Arts.
He can be followed on Twitter @PaddyTheDaddy.

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Are you new to social media? Not sure where to start, or why social media is so important? Here we’ve grabbed our 10 favourite and most useful posts to get you started.

1. What’s the point? The value of B2B Social Media Marketing

2. Planning part 1: Setting social media objectives

3. Ten questions you should ask when designing a b2b social media strategy (and how to answer them)

4. Organising social media management within the organisation

5. Why B2B social media campaigns fail

6. What is SaaS?

7. You heard it on Twitter first

8. How to Prove You’re a Social Media Amateur

9. Social Media In Demand Generation

10.467 Social media usage statistics

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by Hannah Stacey (@hanstacey)

 Do you love gambling? Or do you know someone who likes gambling? Maybe your cat is a poker enthusiast.  Perhaps you once unwittingly saw a picture of a slot machine.  Regardless, read on because this is probably the best post about gambling influencers that you’ll read this week, and you wouldn’t want to miss a trick.

1)    PokerPlayer Magazine – These guys’ Facebook page has interviews with people who are good at poker, articles about how to be good at poker and even news from their tour, where you can watch people being good at poker. All in all, if poker’s something you want to be good at, head to this page.

2)    The Poker Players’ Alliance – If it’s angry poker players you’re into then look no further than this Facebook page. Although it’s based in the US, this is a great resource for anyone interested in issues within the poker industry.  At the moment, they’re pretty hopping mad at congress. They even made t-shirts about it, that’s how angry they are.

3)    BettingExpert.com – I used to think travelling into the future was something that only Doctor Who and Doc Brown could do.  If you possess neither time travelling skills nor a medical license, and want the best predictions about what’s going to happen (in this case in the sporting world), head over to Betting Expert – it’s where all the tipster cool kids hang out.

4)    Woman Poker Player Magazine – This page has over 17,000 likes. Seventeen thousand. I didn’t even know that many women existed. Amongst articles about poker stars of the female persuasion, the magazine also posts handy links on all those topics that women love, like fashion, cooking tips and weight loss. Cute.

5)    GoldenBoysBet – New betting kids on the block GoldenBoys have come up with a pretty gosh darn splendid page that proffers a pleasing melange of news, views and their new competition, which gives punters the chance to live like a millionaire for a weekend. On top of this, their ‘millionaire’s newsfeed’ fills fans in on the debaucheries of the country’s rich and famous. Top notch.

6)    Bluff Magazine – Bluff Magazine might be ‘poker’s leading publication’, and their Facebook page might report on all the latest poker industry news. Or are they just pulling our leg?

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Updated 02/05/2012

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Mike Stiles

It seems like everyone wants to be famous these days.  People dream of being actors, actresses, singers, athletes, whatever will lift them above the masses and establish them as something special, something above and beyond the norm.  They want the public to love them so much they’ll follow their every move with rapt attention, seek out and purchase every product that’s theirs or that has their name attached to it, and read every word written about them.  They want to be dominant in hearts and minds.

Ben Lashes is a meme manager, an agent for Internet stars of the Internet.  He reps memes like Keyboard Cat, Nyan Cat and Scumbag Steve, as well as their creators.  His belief is that the people who create Internet phenomena are stunned by, and not accustomed to, the sudden fame that comes their way.  They don’t know how to represent themselves when dubious operations start using, without pay or permission, their content.  He says, “Anything you can’t do to Mickey Mouse, you shouldn’t be able to do to memes.”  But, whereas huge corporate entities like Disney develop content slowly and methodically, the digital content being generated by all the twisted minds out there gets created, posted and discovered in a flash…unencumbered.

George Takei had plenty of fame as “Star Trek’s” Sulu.  But his digital antics have taken his persona and fame into a current and relevant arena that goes far beyond appearances at the occasional Trek convention.  His funny photos and memes get crazy engagement levels, even beating out Rihanna, the most liked person on Facebook.  He has 1,624,780 likes on Facebook and 348,019 Twitter followers.  If a post gets 50,000 likes and 30,000 shares, that’s not an aberration, it’s par for the course.  Takei has extended his fame by reinventing himself as a social celebrity.

Why am I telling you B2B social marketers about these two fellows?  Because they can teach you how to turn your brand into a celebrity.  Many of the same traits and tactics that turn unknowns into celebrities seemingly overnight can be spun and applied to the social platforms to give your brand a taste of fame.  Here are just a few ways you can possibly make it happen.

1. Do something!  You have to do something if you want people to notice you.  It should stand out, be memorable, and get people talking about you.  You can take just about any famous person and trace their fame back to one specific product or moment that “launched” them to fame.  What’s yours going to be?

2. You have to come across as cool, because the opposite of cool is “lame.”  If the content you put out is safe, makes no waves, and isn’t attention getting, then it (and your brand by association), is lame.  You can’t be lame, then expect people to want to be identified with you.

3. Create a culture around your brand.  I’ll go ahead and give you the best example of this there is…Apple.  Apple isn’t just a line of products.  It’s a culture.  It’s a way of life.  Every experience associated with Apple, from their product design to their packaging to their Apple Stores to their Genius Bars, is one of many components that create a culture and aura around the brand.  Your corporate culture has to yield to a much hipper public culture.

4. Have you been struggling to get people to Like your Page on Facebook?  George Takei didn’t “struggle” to get his knockout numbers.  Keyboard Cat didn’t “struggle” to get the attention it got.  Cold hard truth: if people already adore you, getting Liked will be no problem at all.  You won’t be able to stop it.  If the public is reluctant to Like your brand, then the brand has problems that go well beyond what’s happening on its social streams.

5. Getting famous requires guts, risk, a willingness to fall flat on your face, a commitment to pleasing fans, and a burning hunger to leave your competition in the dust.  Sadly, none of these things are very common in or indicative of most corporate cultures.  Never experimenting, being too thin-skinned, not really caring if you get praise or applause from customers…these are all sure paths to total anonymity.

Do you want your brand to be a rock star?  Do you want to hear customers chanting your name?  Do you want to see them standing in line to get your product?  Then you’ve got to do what every show business dreamer has done, do whatever it takes along the way to make it, and don’t stop until you get there.

About the Author

 Mike Stiles is a content specialist, writer, blogger and producer with Vitrue, the leading social relationship management technology platform in the industry.

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Mike Stiles

Engagement is the key to the social media treasure chest.  While the early era of social network marketing was primarily about getting your social streams up and running and building up the numbers in your social communities, we have now entered the era of “the only good fan is an engaged fan.”

The foundation for engaging fans is, of course, good content.  For many brands (and agencies), this does not exactly come as good news.  For the most part, brands are about making, and then selling, their product.  The notion of having to entertain and amuse their customers is still relatively alien to most corporate cultures.  Consistently publishing non-sales-driven, relevant, desired content is the only path to getting a share, comment, a retweet, or Open Graph interaction.  It is the only way to show up organically in Facebook News Feeds, and give your brand at least some level of immunity from getting hidden or unliked.

But beyond content, there’s another element to engagement and deepening the relationships brands have with their fans.  It’s nothing new, it’s something we should have been practicing in our real-world businesses since the day we opened the doors.  It’s service.  Nothing will make customers more loyal to you, less likely to ever leave you and more likely to sing your praises to whoever will listen than hyper-attentive service.

The sad thing is, consumers have grown so accustomed to experiencing miserably poor service from businesses and institutions that the bar has actually been set pretty low.  Even basic customer service is enough to surprise and please a customer these days.  They want to have a good experience with you.  They want to be able to brag on you.  So make sure you’re providing the kind of service so that they can.

-Wow Them with a Surprise So Big They’ll Want to Tell Everyone

Troy Pound from South Carolina was the 1 millionth person to follow actor William Shatner on his Twitter stream.  Instead of nothing, a shout out, or an autographed photo, Troy and his wife were actually treated to dinner with Shatner himself.  If a star like Shatner has time to do that, what makes you so busy you can’t blow away one of your fans with a surprise once in awhile?

-Stun Them with How Fast You Can Respond

Most social marketing management tools today offer robust moderation and email alert components.  Automated “we got your message and a rep will be with you as soon as possible” emails just don’t cut it anymore.  If any of your fans have a question or problem, it should be treated as an emergency, because to them…it is.  When people are responded to quickly, they feel special and valued.  Otherwise, they just feel ignored.

-Make an Art Out of Turning Negatives to Positives

Forrester Research shows that 75% of those who posted a negative comment on Facebook fully expected a reply.  They want their negative experience to be turned into a positive one.  When brands do just that by responding and resolving quickly, not only is the fan that posted happy, others in the community see and are impacted by the positive resolution.

-Promote From Within the Community

Everyone in life likes to grow, achieve and advance.  The members of your social community are no different.  If you provide some path for them to advance to graduated status levels, with appropriate rewards and incentives along the way, they will be more invested, more engaged, and more proactive on your streams.  Identify and develop your “superfans.”

-Praise and Thank

“Thank you” is probably one of the most underused, impactful phrases in the English language.  With just two little words, you communicate that someone is valuable, that they are appreciated, that their contribution has been recognized, that you like and accept them, and that you would welcome more of whatever you’re thanking them for.  Unfortunately, people get very few pats on the back in their everyday lives.  When you notice and praise something a fan did or wrote to all the other fans in your community, you are giving them a supercharged shot in the arm of pride.  People return to where they are made to feel good.  If you make them feel good with praise, they will return to your social properties again and again.

Yes, content is the foundation.  But even if you have not yet found the right people and methodology for insuring a reliable flow of great and engaging content for your brand, you can still reap the rewards of social by publicly demonstrating on it a renewed commitment to service, and attention above and beyond what any of your fans might expect.  For that, there’s no time like the present.

About the Author

Mike Stiles is a content specialist, writer, blogger and producer with Vitrue, the leading social relationship management technology platform in the industry.

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Over the last few months Twitter has followed in the footsteps of Facebook and Google+ by introducing brand pages. This came with a promise to heighten the engagement between brands and followers, giving an extra opportunity for Twitter to be excelled into brands’ top consumer interaction platform and perhaps even enabling greater monetisation opportunities.

Twitter is a great way for brands to connect directly and instantly with their customers, however ensuring that dialogue with customers is effective, two-way and not merely a tool for ‘the hard sell’, is key for brands interaction.

Clearly one of the key objectives for any marketing activity is to increase sales; therefore any channel where there is customer interaction is an opportunity to sell. However, brands and customers both have different reasons for using Twitter. For customers, it is merely a way of chatting with friends and following celebrities, very rarely will they see Twitter as a purchasing tool. Subsequently brands need to overcome this by becoming part of the conversation, which cannot be done through overt sales positioning, instead they should look towards a more relevant engaged approach when using Twitter.

Engaging with Twitter fans to turn into sales

In order to monetise successfully brands need to ensure a flow of communication is opened with followers, sparking up relevant and meaningful conversation will reap rewards for brands who want to turn fans into sales. Engaging fans in conversation will encourage brand advocacy, meaning followers, in-turn, are more likely to recommend the brand to friends and family.

There is clear value for brands in utilising marketing tools such as celebrity endorsement via twitter, as long as you get the right celebrity fit for the brand. For example there would be no use Bentley paying Katie Price to endorse the brand on Twitter as this audience is totally disconnected from Bentley’s core customer base; however a name such as Stephen Fry may provide a more targeted approach for the brand.

But how do brands measure the monetisation of their twitter activity? Until now there has been a number of generic methods for testing how well a social media page or profile is performing; fan growth, engagement and number of interactions, retweets and @mentions, as well as even more advanced approaches which  have been created to include tracking click-throughs, but these are not particularly insightful.  The evaluation process for these methods, which takes into consideration engagement levels and numbers of posts and retweets, are lengthy ones and require many man hours to collate the information. They also do not lend themselves to the effective real-time environment that we have all grown to expect in the social media world and none of these methods can accurately monitor the impact social media campaigns and day-to-day outreach has on sales.

Now available are more sophisticated measurement tools, which successfully track each tweet or ‘follow’ to the point of sale, effectively monitoring the return in investment of every pound spent on  marketing campaign.

This leap in social media monitoring technology is great news for brands and agencies, who will no longer be wondering if their social media investment is providing good value for money. Instead, brands can build effective social media tracking into their performance marketing campaigns to not only monitor effectiveness, but also learn from successfully monetised conversation and campaigns.

Matt Bailey, Commercial Director, Performance Horizon Group

Matt Bailey is Commercial Director at Performance Horizon Group.  With over 10 years’ experience in the affiliates industry, Matt has held senior positions both network side and in agency. In 2009, Matt was also appointed Chair of the IAB Affiliate Council. In this position Matt was instrumental in shaping the UK affiliate landscape, tasked with developing best practice initiatives for the industry.

Since joining Performance Horizon Group in 2010, Matt has been influential in assisting the company’s rapid growth both in UK and US markets.

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