10-Point Checklist: Getting C-Suite Buy In for Social Media

Part 1

“What do you mean we need to increase our social media budget? Isn’t it free? I thought we don’t need a budget.”

And another senior marketing manager bites the dust! This is not fiction-drama. This is rampant ignorance among the C-Suite in corporate America. B2B marketing professionals are challenged every day with how to get executive management to buy in for social media. “It’s free”, “We need huge numbers”, “We need a multi-channel presence”, all of these and other confused C-Suite perceptions about the role and purpose of social media make it increasingly difficult for social to be adopted as a must-have. The fact is, social is now an integral part of lead generation and marketing programs.

Mark Yolton, senior vice president of digital, social and communities at business software and services purveyor SAP was quoted in a recent eMarketer article: “Social media marketing is no longer a nice to have—it’s a must have. Our customers expect it. Our competitors are all doing it. And unless we embrace and excel at social media marketing integrated into the full marketing mix, we’ll be at a competitive disadvantage.”
 
(Note: Mark has recently transitioned into a new role and is now Vice President of Digital Strategy & Enablement at Cisco.)

So how do you gain that competitive advantage? You’ll need the blessings of “the powers that be”. How will you convince them that social media today is a necessary cost of doing business?

Here are 5 Fundamental Steps to Help You Get C-Suite Buy In for B2B Social Media

1. KNOW YOUR INTERNAL AUDIENCE. What type of personality are you dealing with internally? Here are the most common demand generation personalities.
2.  UNDERSTAND YOUR CMO’S PROFILE. Which one is your CMO? Pick from this list.
3. EMPHASIZE THE NEED FOR A SOCIAL VOICE. Not too many members of the C-Suite are used to being hands-on with day to day operations. Explain to your top management why having a coop student or intern to Tweet and blog and post Facebook updates is not okay anymore. You need trained and experienced hands that understand customer relations, branding and lead generation. As you start to build customer engagement and loyalty through social media, you will need a core team to maintain and strengthen your company’s social voice.
4. SHOW WHY MONITORING IS IMPORTANT AND HOW IT HELPS. Typically, the C-Suite loves numbers. If you can enable some number crunching in terms of social ROI, you have a stronger case for continued and strategic social media marketing. Explain that while free tools can be useful, you may want to consider investing in better measurement and reporting tools. After all, you do want to go beyond counting your likes and fans to actually throwing light on engagement and lead progression levels with your key target audiences. In addition, track and monitor multiple social touch points to better respond to social conversations.
5. PROVE IT. Nothing you say can be as convincing as the proof of success. Run a few small, highly-focused and easily measurable campaigns to show that B2B social media really does work. The taste of success can be a heady one! Top execs will find it easier to commit to ongoing social media programs once they see a few quick and effective campaigns in action. Be sure to make them aware though, that short bursts or spike marketing cannot drive long-term results; only a sustainable social strategy can.

Look out for the next 5 steps on the road to getting C-Suite buy in for social media.


Image credit: Shutterstock

About the author: Louis Foong View all posts by 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.

The Top Social Media Skills Marketing Executives Need in 2013

Social Success is a Matter of Choosing the Right Ingredients 

Dan is a marketing executive for an IT network management company. I am a B2B lead generation specialist. We both love food so our business meetings frequently happen over lunch. While Dan is satisfied with a nice meal, I am always curious about what went into my plate. Food, like travel, is my passion and needless to say, the two go hand in hand. I travel around the world exploring different cultures, ethnicities, lands, people and their cuisine. While I cannot say I have traveled extensively in the Indian sub-continent, I certainly have had the opportunity to savour Indian cuisine for many years. Right here in Toronto too, there are Indian restaurants, actually, many of them are small take-out food places that serve up the most delicious Indian snacks, full meals and desserts.

What I find most intriguing about Indian cuisine is the sheer variety—in fact, if you ask an Indian in the western world if they cook Indian at home, she or he will probably ask you what you mean by “Indian”! Literally, every region of the sub-continent dishes up its own unique taste of food. You have North Indian food (or Moghlai) which is so different from South Indian; East Indian which is not anything like Indian coastal cuisine, and so on. And, each of these cuisines has its own set of ingredients—spices, herbs, chilli peppers, seasoning, etc.

So while our simple Chicken Parmesan will primarily have two main ingredients, chicken and parmesan, Butter Chicken (or Murg Makhani which is the correct term for this popular Indian dish) has a lot more going into it besides butter and chicken! Yes, you can try to make it with a ready-to-heat bottled sauce but when it’s made from scratch, the chef has a carefully (masterfully) selected list of aromatic and flavourful spices that go into it, in a precise step-by-step manner. You have to know the right ingredients to choose from a kitchen stocked with a hundred different options.

Chef de Cuisine for Your Company’s Social Media Platter? 

What Skills Do You Need? How Do You Pick the Right Ingredients?

Dan was talking to me about his continuing challenge with social media. What he said to me probably echoes the sentiments of many other marketing heads of B2B organizations:

• I’m under pressure to deliver results from social media marketing.
• My boss wants to see results fast but I also have to stay within budget.
• Some of the other VPs at my company think we should really go all out and use this shiny new toy called social media, but the bean counters, will of course pin me to the wall about ROI.
• I do want to make social media work for us but I don’t know how. Where do I start?
• The social media expert we hired says I must start Tweeting. I feel stupid even just saying the word ‘Tweet’!
• Tell me the truth – what do I have to do? What’s the minimum I need to know and do to be successful in 2013?

While I may have been lost without a guide in Peru, I fortunately have not been abandoned when it comes to social media, and the journey continues. So here is the advice I offered to Dan from a lead generation and social media effectiveness standpoint. 

The Essential Social Media Skills You Need As A Marketing Executive In 2013:

1. Have the ability to determine what counts, what doesn’t. A blog post being picked up by other sites, blogs and industry forums counts. That will add to your position and credibility as a thought leader. The rub-off on your brand will be valuable, meaningful and contribute towards lead generation. On the other hand, a photograph being pinned on Pinterest, a Tweet being Re-Tweeted or a thumbs-up on Facebook will usually not count towards lead generation or lead nurturing even. 
2. Whether you use the various platforms or not, you should know the terminology. Keep handy this list of commonly used social media lingo so you can keep up with the social media mavens when they start throwing the jargon around.
   
3. Know the difference between making a noise and making an impact. Don’t add to the noise on social media channels; offer value instead.
   
4. Differentiate between brand “ambassadors” and “influencers”; they are not always the same. Try to find individuals who may or may not even talk about your brand on social conversations. You may be able to piggy-back your brand’s capabilities onto some best practices, trends and winning value propositions that these channel influencers talk about.
   
5. Learn to customize content for different segments of your target market. If you want to stay relevant, you cannot neglect this aspect and get carried away with producing high volumes of content.
   
6. Think ahead and plan your social calendar. But realize also that social is real-time and it requires 24/7 monitoring, listening and being proactive. You have to be flexible, nimble and be able to think on your feet.
   
7. Be patient. Social is a complex medium and structural in nature. There is no rule book, secret sauce or silver bullet. You can’t work at it with the expectation of immediate returns. You need patience to see this through. If you are able to understand the mid to longer term impact of social versus the short term one, you may be on to something good…and profitable.

And How Do You Select the Right Ingredients?

The only way to do this is to think very carefully through your funnel optimization strategy and monitor lead progression. It’s very easy to find yourself overwhelmed with the various social platforms and build an equal presence on each. Remember, you are the Chef de Cuisine—you only pick the best ingredients for your dish. You don’t take everything that is on the spice rack and pour it into a melting pot of goulash. When you undertake an activity or a piece of content marketing that is customized to one channel, align your other marketing activities, offline and online to work together and push qualified leads further along through your sales funnel.

I can’t remember where I read it, but I consider it is a very wise and pertinent comment—“think about the social, not about the media”. And when you think about how to be social and how to make an impact on the audience that matters, you craft a strategy. For the different media that you plan to use, you just need the right tactics and the right tools. So—there is no such thing as a Facebook Strategy. There can be a set of tactics that may work for Facebook marketing. Although, in my honest opinion, Facebook is still a long way off from being in any way useful and effective for B2B lead generation. 

Does your organization have a hand in every social media pie? Are you monitoring effectiveness and impact? Please comment below. If you want to learn more about B2B lead generation, please join our email list and download the free ALEA Lead Generation Playbook here.

About the author: Louis Foong View all posts by 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.

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.

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 formulas. 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.