The Five Laws of REAL Social ROI

B2B Marketer Alert: Look In Before Looking Out

Another Social Media Week has come and gone, 5th year in a row. Where are we today? Have we really moved on from Social 101 and Social for Dummies? From a B2C perspective, I think we certainly have and that is inevitable given the popularity of social media channels and the ease of communication. We know that social advertizing has also come a long way with new tools and platforms available to marketers so they can drive conversion and monetize their social activities.

But I am not talking about advertising and certainly not about B2C. Our world, the B2B world is a completely different planet as we know. And on this planet, we still need a logical ecosystem. On my part, I have really made a very diligent effort to find B2B social media best practices. I look for the leaders who have driven innovation and change and been able to translate that into tangible results.

Social media is a great catalyst for effective demand generation but have we found the secret sauce for converting a prospect into a qualified lead or sale for a company? It all depends on how you deploy social within your organization. The need of the hour is to achieve total alignment of all go-to-market tactics. What is happening in most organizations, sadly, is that whether it is the hired consultants or in-house social media boss, these experts tend to look at social media as a single-focus tactic. But it is not a proven tactic yet! B2B marketers—my call to you is to start thinking integration and alignment.

I have seen recent advocacy of various measurement metrics, social ROI measurement formulae—this one here, I actually read with keen interest. On the surface, it does seem very logical and simple. I just can’t see a B2B company actually being able to use these formulae very effectively.

The organizations that have seen some B2B social media ROI worth mentioning are focusing first on becoming social organizations within their own four walls. Here is a good case study from CIO magazine about how TD Bank formed an enterprise social network that fuels innovation internally and helps serves customers better on the outside. The bank has seen ROI in the form of:

• Time saving
• Increased productivity
• More effective communication

The 5 Laws that can Deliver B2B Social ROI

There are some useful lessons we can learn from the success of organizations like TD Bank in the case study I mentioned above, and more from Cisco—take a look at this SlideShare presentation: How Cisco Operationalizes Social Media for Repeated Success. Yes, I realize it is a bit dated but it still reiterates the point I am making about “looking in before looking out” and hence, I think it is worth reading. Here is another example of how this company shows “love”. With the combined effect of internal and external social media training, Cisco is seeing greater success in this space—as Elizabeth Houston says in this interview. She also stresses the point I’ve been making: Tons of people are interested in consumer products, but the audience in B2B is more of a finite audience – it requires a specific approach and targeted strategy.

So to quickly summarize what in my opinion should be the tenets / laws / rules, call them what you will of B2B social media:

1. Test your social business initiatives—always—just as we always did with traditional lead generation methods. It’s not worth flying blind when your customers are signing your paycheck!
2. Benchmark internal processes so that even before you start to test your initiatives, you know the direction you are headed in and the goals you hope to accomplish.
3. Collaborate with your employees and learn and share together. Pushing social strategy down people’s throats won’t work, just as no other marketing tactics work either when there is not sufficient buy-in and commitment.
4. Look at ways to utilize your company and executive leadership to see how social processes internally can be enhanced and become value-driven.
5. Don’t worry about fancy metrics and formulae. Relationships cannot be measured by those yardsticks. Your social listening posts and proactive initiatives will yield better results and more meaningful measurement.

On one last note, I want to remind my B2B friends (because I am seeing a lot of this going on and I feel it is my duty to say something)—I don’t believe that employees or executives have the time to Tweet to your customers all day. And your B2B customers don’t have time to read them either. Let’s leave all this noise-making to the Hollywood stars and the Oscar stage. We have a business to run—we need to think Value, Relationship, Originality, Omniscience, Measurement—VROOM…let’s go! (Could not resist that…it came about as I wrote.

About the author: Louis Foong  

Louis Foong is the founder and CEO of The ALEA Group Inc, one of North America’s most innovative B2B demand generation specialists. As a thought leader with more than three decades of experience in the field, Louis guides his team and ALEA’s clients through the dynamic, evolving lead generation landscape. His astute sense of marketing and sales along with a clear vision and ability to see the “big picture” has proved beneficial to numerous organizations, both small and large. With the right advice and a slew of result-driven services, he enables clients to gain maximum return on investment for their lead generation efforts. His clients include companies in the technology, telecommunications, software, healthcare and professional services industries. Prior to starting the ALEA Group, Louis Foong has held various senior executive positions within corporate America. Today he is known and well-respected as a thought leader and pioneer in this industry. Foong is a published blogger and among the top authors on CustomerThink, a global online community of business leaders.