In many respects, B2B actually has an advantage in social media. Most our their business is centered around longer term relationships between suppliers and consultants and clients, and there are so needs for information sharing along and around the sales and customer cultivation cycle that simply don’t exist in B2C situations.

Let’s look at three ways that B2B social media stands out.

Content

One distinct characteristic of B2B businesses is that our work centers around helping people do their jobs better somehow. It’s less about lifestyle and personal interests, and more about how the business ecosystem improves.

Content marketing and the ease of information sharing give B2B companies a massive opportunity to do more than just promote stuff. By creating useful, helpful and informational content, we can increase the knowledge and expertise of the people we’re hoping to do business with. Through the knowledge we share, we can demonstrate that we’re qualified to help you with more than just a product, but with a bigger picture business goal. And by empowering individuals with information, we can help them become more educated, informed customers.

The very nature of social technologies supports sharing, distributing, and creating content more easily and faster than ever. Think of it as a content-driven resume for a business, and a demonstrated investment in your customers’ needs even before they work with you.

We want to work with people who are the experts in what they do, not just what they sell.

Networks

In the world of B2B, our professional network is everything. Because our business is about business, the potential of who we know and who they know is an important part of the equation.

Before something like LinkedIn, the breadth and intricacy of our network was a bit invisible to us. In order to know who our contacts knew, we had to ask, and usually with a specific need in mind. Now, we can simply search. Investigate. Research. Social media’s very searchable nature helps you find the quality and relevance among your connections.

With social technologies, the depth of our networks is exponentially multiplied, too. If B2B endeavors overall are about doing better business, social media gives us the power to listen carefully, find the people that are discussing the topics we care about, develop layered connections across several networks, and interact with even small, niche communities right on their own turf.

Relationships start with a connection, so the better our individual connections, the stronger the eventual web.

Impact Points

We all know that that Almighty Relationship dictates so much of B2B success. So much of any success, really, but we focus especially heavily on it when we’re doing business with another business.

The purchase cycle is B2B sales is a great deal longer, and often the pricetag is quite a bit higher, which means the risk-per-decision factor is that much greater. As a result, it’s even more important that we have a sense of established trust and reliability with those we do business with, and that we have a certain expectation for what we’ll get out of the relationship.

The longevity of those relationships, too, depend on our cultivating and nurturing them well over time. Because the decision timeline is so much longer, we spend more time in between sales than we do closing deals. That means that in-between time had better be valuable to those customers.

Interactions through social networks can provide the personal touch to business relationships that we’ve often found on the golf course, or over drinks or dinner. It’s business development, but rather than all touch points being live and in person, some of them are geographically independent, and happening online.

These interactions, as they always have, bridge the gaps between purchases and continue contact around and between the sales. But now we’re not limited to just the phone or meetings, we have Twitter or community forums or blog comments. We aren’t limited to brochures and trade publication articles but we have blogs, YouTube, Flickr, LinkedIn Groups, and all manner of social channels through which to tell our business story.

The Bottom Line

As simple as it sounds, all business transactions happen between human beings even when the company writes the check. Someone has to choose a product or a service provider, and that someone is always a person that thinks and makes judgment calls based on both facts and feelings.

When we’re the one deciding or recommending, we want to be equipped with the knowledge, context, information and framework of a relationship that makes use feel like that transaction is low risk, high reward, and rooted in a sound business framework. And we want to get to know and trust the people we’re buying from or selling to.

There’s nothing about social networks that can’t help all of those elements. Have a look at resources like Social Media B2B for some discussions and examples that explain why these two can work so very well together.

The phone changed our business once. Email did it, too. So did those crazy website things. We’ve found that better connections and more information can help us build our business, whatever package they come in. Social media is the new package, but the ideas are as old as business – to business – itself.

Are you a B2B company using social media successfully? Are you still struggling with making the case? What is it about B2B that feels so different or has us so skeptical? Talk with us in the comments.

Advertisements always try to tell a story.  Perhaps the story is something as simple as how a mom solved a household cleaning problem with a new product, or perhaps it’s more involved – like the stories Levi’s shares with their new campaign. Whatever the case, the power of a good story can’t be denied.

Storytelling is the big picture stuff. It’s the fuel that drives your advertising campaigns, the content that’s included on your website or in your collateral, and the foundation of what your executives share when they talk about your organization.  It’s the stuff that sucks us in, makes us want to learn more, and urges us to share with others.

Engagement is focused on the micro level. It’s the follow-up to the story that was shared, including absorbing and responding to the reactions.  It’s the action of connecting with someone that was affected by your story in one way or another and the potential beginnings of a relationship with that person. Engagement can often unearth new stories, which then starts the cycle all over again.

Teresa’s first point in her recent post brings up a great point regarding engagement and storytelling. “Listen and absorb what people are saying about your brand, products, services, and your general market.”

Listening is the first step for both storytelling and engagement, and these two activities greatly support each other.

The stories are the opportunities, and the engagement is the follow-up.

Gavin Heaton recently posted a presentation he delivered about storytelling for social media, and one of his closing points really struck a chord: “It’s about creating the coincidences that lead to an emotional connection. Something that you can share with the players in your personal playground.”

To continue Gavin’s analogy, it’s like shooting hoops with a partner that always gives you the ball back to try again. Storytelling and engagement combine to form a cycle that never really ends.

Do you have stories to share about companies that pair storytelling with engagement well? Share them in the comments!

In this new series for the month of April, we’re going to look at how we’ve built and structured our team in hopes that, by using our experiences as our own case study of sorts, you’ll get a few ideas of your own for the role that community can play in your business, or how your existing roles can evolve a bit inside the world of social media.

Today, we’ll talk about why we’re doing this whole community thing in the first place.

Community Mindset

We actually built our community team before we started adding more “traditional” marketing roles to our team. In many ways, community and marketing really go hand in hand for us, so we started building the team based on what we needed to do to support our customers and community, and represent our company and brand to the outside world.

To us, our community is comprised of:

• Radian6 customers
• Our prospective customers, who are businesses and agencies learning to integrate social media
• The larger social media community

Everything we do is about delivering a platform that helps companies and agencies listen and measure their social media efforts, and engage with their customers. So our vested interest is in helping them tackle those topics for business, and understand how Radian6 can help when appropriate.

Our community and our customers are the lifeblood of our business, so our company is built with that in mind. And our community team is really the day-to-day reflection of the mindset that all of our folks really embrace, from sales to development to our technical support and executive team.

As a group, our community team represents a number of things: some customer support, a bit of sales stewardship, content creation and subject matter expertise, promotion and support of our brand and platform, and bridging between our internal teams, external community, and all the pieces in between.

Our Purpose

We’ll get a little more in depth later this month about how our team is actually structured and what our roles and responsibilities are. But generally speaking, our team is built to deliver these things on an ongoing basis:

• Listening and monitoring on behalf of our own brand, and developing protocol around that
• Listening and monitoring for larger industry discussions in key areas of interest, like social media, social CRM, content marketing, etc
• Engaging with our community online for all of the above conversations, which for us is mostly via blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn, and our own site.
• Measuring the impact of our efforts
• Helping our internal teams with social media subject matter expertise when needed
• Shepherding external publicity efforts for our company and products,  like strategic public relations initiatives and contributing content to other sites and publications
• Creating content that helps educate our teams and our customers on key social media topics as they impact business
• Representing Radian6 in person at industry events, as speakers, sponsors, participants, or all of the above
• Supporting our prospect relationships, customer accounts, and partner relationships

Goals

Our goals are actually rather simple and straightforward. And yes, we have some measurable factors set against many of these for our own internal purposes, and you should do the same. More broadly speaking, though, a few of our goals are to:

• Build a purposeful, engaged audience around relevant content that illustrates business benefits of social media monitoring, engagement, and measurement
• Actively engage discussions of Radian6 around the social web to provide presence, accessibility, and awareness for our brand
• Participate thoughtfully in related industry discussions and events, both online and in person,  in order to contribute our expertise and invest in our larger community
• Act as a resource for internal teams for social media subject matter expertise
• Establish a Radian6 user community online to support active customers and their ongoing needs
• Develop our own benchmarks for community impact metrics, accountability, and engagement protocols & guidelines
• Gather and steward active feedback from our communities to continually drive development of Radian6 capabilities

There are more and some additional layers to the above, but overall, it’s about supporting our users, stewarding our brand, and participating in the online discussions that represent the interest of both our company and our customers.

This Year

As 2010 continues to roll by, we’ve got some key initiatives going on around our community efforts as well. They’re all built on the needs of our communities, both internal and external, and we’re excited to take them on. Just a few examples to get you brain turning:

• We’re going to build both an internal community portal for sharing knowledge and resources among our teams, and and external community to help support the needs of our customers to connect with us and one another.
• Our team is refining and building our own “listening grid”, our method for integrating listening and engagement into our own business workflow, and helping our customers outline models for doing the same.
• We’re working with our training team to develop social media-specific curriculum to help deepen knowledge for all of our community members, including our own teams
• We’re building programs like our Higher Ed and charitable initiatives to give back to communities and sectors that we think can benefit from access to Radian6, and the knowledge of our teams
• Continually building and tweaking our arsenal of content to address the needs and interests of our customers and prospects, and help them continue to understand the larger social media landscape as it relates to business applications.

And much like your business, our goals and objectives are flexible as we adapt to the needs of the market, and the goals of our company overall. It’s our job to adapt our role and function within the company to support the bigger organization goals.

What Else?

In the next post a week from today, we’ll talk specifically about the people that make up the community team, and how we’ve allocated roles and responsibilities. In subsequent weeks, we’ll chat a bit about our process, workflow, and operations among the team (including a realistic look at some of the challenges), and then finally a bit about how we assess and measure the impact of our efforts overall.

We’re structured differently than lots of companies, but perhaps there are some ideas you can take away for your own business. What can we help you understand about a community-driven model like ours? Please sound off in the comments!

With all that being said, here are some metrics to consider for tracking the performance of your Website, blog, and educational content.

1. Views

One of the most fundamental starting points for measuring the performance of your content is looking at how many views or hits it receives. The pages that are viewed or landed on most often on your Website can give you clues into what people are searching for and what information they find valuable. On the other hand, tracking views can also tell you what pages are under-performing. For example, if your Product Details page is receiving few hits, you can infer that the content on that page needs tweaking or that people are having a hard time finding it. There’s a good chance you’ll also see a theme in what people want to read on your blog (if you have one) based on which posts get the most hits. Views are simple things, but they’re a foundational starting point for measurement.

2. Comments/Feedback

Comments are a great way to track response to your content, and they offer you insight into what your community is interested in learning more about, what questions they have, and where they believe you, as an organization, can and do fill in the knowledge gaps. If you find that a specific topic you’ve blogged about gets a significant number of questions in the comments, those questions can directly impact future content you produce surrounding that topic, and tell you what’s missing in the greater industry picture. Search for the title of your blog posts, brand name, or blog post topics to see if the conversation has traveled away from your homebase. And, of course, pay attention to and even ask for direct contact and feedback — that’s the most telling sign of whether your content is hitting home or missing the mark.

3.Clicks/Downloads

If you’re producing downloadable content, you need to be tracking clicks and downloads, it’s that simple. On-click event coding is easy to insert in the links to those ebooks and whitepapers you’re offering your community, and should be done for every piece of downloadable content you publish. While this metric doesn’t stand solidly on its own, it’s a great supplemental piece to help you hone in on trends in your community’s informational needs and participation with you, and will also tell you if people find the resources you’re providing valuable enough to download.

4. Length of Visits

The length of time someone spends (or doesn’t spend) with your content can be a strong indicator of your content’s success or shortcomings. Is your content answering as many questions as possible for visitors about your products, services, or industry? Are visitors clicking through to other pages around your site, or are they stopping by and then leaving quickly? The more information your content provides clearly and concisely, the more people will understand what your company is about and be able relate it to their needs. That understanding can be identified as an actual visit, instead of a bounce; clicks through to other pieces of your Website can also add to the time someone spends on it and identify their interest in your service or product.

5. Registrations/Subscriptions

As mentioned in our post giving you 10 key awareness metrics to track, subscriptions are a sign people are interested in what your organization has to say, and they’re paying attention to it. Subscriptions are also a sign that people find value in the content you’re producing to a degree that they want to receive it regularly. Subscriptions, as well as repeat event registrations and sign-ups, are a sign that people not only value your company but they also find value in your content.

6. Shares

If your content is hitting home with your community, there’s a good chance individuals are sharing it with their colleagues, teams, and networks. For instance, say you received a great email newsletter today from a vendor that you know a decent portion of your Twitter network would benefit from seeing. When you share that newsletter –via the “Share This on Twitter” button at the bottom of it — that share is logged, and it tells the vendor they’ve said something you find valuable to share with others. By watching that newsletter get passed around, the vendor can identify the types of people who see value in its content and tie those insights back to goals and objectives for future content initiatives.

7. Inbound Links

Inbound links are a direct indicator that people are reading and thinking about your content and either find value in it or find something contentious about it that makes them want to fight back. Not only do inbound links keep you consistently aware of who is talking about you, but they also give you additional context to round out future content and provide you with clearly defined profiles of the people and organizations that are paying attention to you.

8. Unique and Repeat Visits

Tracking unique and repeat visits can tell you: a) whether the efforts you’ve put forth in your various marketing initiatives are having a positive impact (i.e., driving traffic to your Website), and b) whether your content is valuable enough to bring people back for more. The value piece of this puzzle is relative to what you’re trying to achieve. Do you want to establish your organization and the people within it as thought leaders by providing useful educational resources? Then watch to see if you receive repeat visits from people on your blog and resource pages, and if the number of repeat visitors is increasing over time.

9. Clarity of Your Message

This one might seem a little far out, but bear with me. If your content is truly effective, people will be able to talk about your brand message, identity, and unique values with clarity and consistency, without your needing to speak up. How do you track that? By listening to what people are saying about your brand name. Yes, this is more of a qualitative metric, but it’s an important one to keep your eye on. Place the conversations others are having about you up against your own brand messaging and goals to see just how clear your message is when it’s being stewarded by others. If you’ve hit the nail on the head, your community is delivering your message as clearly as you are.

10. Conversions

While conversions are definitely a strong sales metric, they can also tell you how well or poorly your content channels are performing. If you’re Website is conveying clear messaging and is well constructed, visitors will be able to march right through your sitemap to get all the information they need and head straight to the purchasing or the contact section of your site to begin the sales process. Along with your Website, the additional content you create — email newsletter, Web events, instructional videos, etc. — should account for a chunk of your sales conversions.

You might think that these content metrics look mighty similar to engagement metrics, and you’d be right in thinking that. The truth is that engagement is strongly tied to content; the more people find value in what you’re saying — on your Website, in your resource content, during your Web events — the more they will choose to interact with you.

One of the most important things to remember is that the more your community talks with you, the more insight you can glean from them to directly impact your future content initiatives. Paying attention to how they interact with you now and how their interactive behavior changes over time will help you adjust smoothly to continually provide information and content they’re looking for and remain on their radar.

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Update to the Brian Solis Webinar: The date for this Webinar has been changed to Friday, April 2nd, at 10am PST/1pm EST. If you’ve already registered for this event, please change the date in your calendar. If not, you can register right here.

I met Teresa on Twitter several months ago (yep, Twitter), and was immediately connected to her wit, humor, and love for music. Then a little digging led me to her blog and her outstanding, thoughtful writing, and we struck up plenty of conversations from that point forward.

Teresa comes to us with a solid background in marketing, communications, writing, and project management, but the last year has seen her throwing herself headfirst into social media to learn everything she can learn. She has a keen grasp of the industry, the intersection of social media and business, and the importance of community in the growth of an organization. Plus, she’s got a tenacious, positive attitude that is always refreshing.

As our content marketing manager, Teresa will be putting all of those skills to work and helping us continue to deliver great content on the Radian6 blog, valuable web events, informational and helpful stuff all over the Radian6 website, and more. We’re more that certain to keep her busy, and you’re sure to see her out there in the community learning about how the content we build can help integrate better social media monitoring, measurement, and engagement into your business. Read her thoughts on her move to Radian6 here.

I couldn’t be more thrilled to have Teresa on the team. Please connect with her on Twitter and say hello, and join us in welcoming her to Radian6!

But…how? What does that mean?

Your communication strategy for your business to date has probably included elements of public relations and media relations, advertising, direct response marketing, and more traditional marketing vehicles like collateral development, online presence/website, etc. All of those still have their place, and they typically lead with the brand and your desired messages.

But social media is characterized in part by creating and sharing content that helps educate, inform, or entertain your customers and prospects online. By contrast, this content leads with the helpful or fun parts that can contribute something of value to your audience, and the brand and “messages” are present in the background, if at all. The goal is not an overt brand impression, but a touchpoint of shared interest between the business and the customer they serve.

So, here are 10 ways to create or share helpful content in social media that you might try as you’re getting started this year.

1. Start a Delicious.com account, and bookmark interesting or informative articles and case studies for your industry. Share that link at the bottom of your outgoing email signature, or feature it on your website.

2. Link liberally to blogs and articles other than your own in your posts, to give your readers lots of other great resources to visit (and don’t worry that they’re going to defect to the competition if you do that. If your product or service is great, they’ll be back).

3. Use your Twitter account to share one of your posts or promotional pieces once for every 10 times you share someone else’s. Tweet videos, blog posts, articles, or news stories that highlight trends or progressive work in your broader industry. Yep, that includes sharing stories that don’t talk about you at all.

4. Write an e-book every quarter for your customers, answering some of their pressing business questions (and letting your logo on the page be the only promotion of your company in the document). For example, if you’re an accounting firm, write an ebook to help a small business set up their books at the beginning of the year.

5. Create a video interview series at the trade shows and conferences you attend. Do two-minute interviews with experts in your field, all answering some of the burning questions your customers have about their personal or professional needs.

6. Use your Facebook page to share the spotlight with the people that pay your bills. If you’re a household goods company, ask your customers to share their top tips for getting organized after the holiday season. If you’re a bakery, let your patrons upload photos of their beautiful (or disastrous!) holiday desserts.

7. Get a BlogTalkRadio account, and do a weekly or monthly podcast showcasing case studies from your customers about how they successfully solved a business problem, and all the learnings they had along the way. (Hint: don’t turn it into an infomercial for your product or service. Let them tell the story their way.) Make the archive easy to find, and share it in your newsletter regularly.

8. If you’re a B2B company that blogs, put together a post, e-book, or video series teaching your business customers how to set up and start their own blog, and help them find some others in the industry to check out, too.

9. If your team members speak at industry events or seminars, put the presentations on a company Slideshare page, and offer them for download. Be sure and use your other communication tools – including email, print collateral, and social networks – to let people know what’s there.

10. Do you do live events for your customers, like golf outings? Do you sponsor and participate in local charity events? Take lots of pictures, and put them on a corporate Flickr page (under Creative Commons license if you can) or your Facebook page. Feature them in your collateral and communications, and link to the images. Be sure to tag people in the pictures, too. Folks love finding themselves in pictures.

What would you add? What defines “helpful” content to you, and how would you encourage businesses to use content to connect with their customers and prospects? Love to hear your comments.

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