Social Media Guidelines

I've posted a couple of blogs recently about the rise of the social media function and how BtoB companies can best leverage social media. A common theme has been the need for marketing to provide guidance, guidelines and infrastructure without stifling the power of this new channel to reach customers, prospects and influencers. To help with your journey, I've included below a list of social media guidelines that several companies have published:

• Adobe Acrobat Users: http://www.acrobatusers.com/blog_guidelines


• Cisco: http://blogs.cisco.com/news/comments/ciscos_internet_postings_policy/


• Dell: http://www.dell.com/content/topics/global.aspx/policy/en/policy?c=us&1=en&s+corp&~section=019


• Mayo Clinic: http://sharing.mayoclinic.org/guidelines/for-mayo-clinic-employees/


• BT: http://richarddennison.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/bt-social-media-guidelines-mar09.pdf


• eBay: http://ebayinkblog.com/2009/03/06/new-social-media-guidelines-for-reporting-company-information/


• HP: http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/blogs/codeofconduct.html


• IBM: http://www.ibm.com/blogs/zz/en/guidelines.html


• Intel: http://www.intel.com/sites/sitewide/en_US/social-media.htm


• SAP: http://www.sapweb20.com/blog/2009/07/sap-social-media-guidelines-2009/#
  
• Sun: http://www.sun.com/communities/guidelines.jsp

Have any others to share?. . . Please comment below.

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How Social Media Helps Enterprises During Hard Times and Layoffs

In my last blog, Rise of the Social Media Function, I focused on how companies need to best organize their marketing team(s) to leverage social media to connect with prospects, customers and their markets. I'd like to add another dimension to this discussion: social media within your own corporate community. I've invited Caroline Dangson, IDC's Social Media Research Analyst, to provide her insight and perspective on this important area.

"Thanks Michael.

Hardly a day goes by without a company announcing layoffs. The U.S. jobless rate in February marked a 25-year high of 8.1%. Organizations are scrambling to hold on to business under incredibly limited resources. The workloads of 651,000 jobs lost last month are now being picked up by the workers who remain. This means an incredible shifting of roles and responsibilities within American businesses. And with that, a shift that is disrupting information flow within the enterprise. Information is money, and the loss of information that occurs with the loss of employees is doubling the economic impact on businesses. IDC estimates that even before this recession businesses were losing an average of $3,300 per year per employee due to ineffective information searches, poor and inconsistent access to tools, recreation of content that already exists, reformatting/versioning and multipublishing/multiformatting (source: The Hidden Costs of Information Work, IDC #217936). Furthermore, an IDC knowledge worker survey showed that employees typically spend the equivalent of one work day (6–10 hours) each week searching for information (source: IDC #212580). Businesses can hardly afford to lose more time, money and productivity these days, not to mention employee morale. IDC believes internal social networks to connect employees can help with all of the above.

Social networks make it easy for participants to share unstructured and ad hoc information that can decrease the time it takes to find information to solve problems. Social networks also encourage employees to help each other. This will foster improved morale among employees and help take the strain off of overwhelmed and understaffed IT departments. Member profiles containing a record of recent activities and publications on social networks aid in locating colleagues who can help with specific issues. Once members are connected via the social network, their conversations persist and are searchable. The digital trail of message exchanges will create a repository of useful information employees need. Because the conversation is persistent (as text), it is possible to read or query the log instead of soliciting information from each participating member. Quite often workers operate in their own silos trying to solve the same problem. A social network can help connect these people to the answer in its one-to-few and one-to-many function. Things learned from one conversation can be shared with everyone. You may also discover some unknown talents or expertise from the most unexpected people in your company that are now being leveraged.

A few MIT studies of workplace productivity link worker productivity to information flow. What they refer to as ‘digital networks’ enhance information flow among employees according to these studies. In the most recent study, MIT researchers discovered that workers who participate in a digital network were 7% more productive than workers who did not participate in a digital network (MIT study as quoted in Harvard Business Review, February 2009). While at first glance this may seem small, every percentage counts these days.

More importantly, perhaps, social networks connect people. There could not be a more important time than now to help reduce the doom and gloom of the work environment after layoffs. Feeling connected to coworkers creates a more comfortable work environment where individuals support one another and become more vested in the company. Some companies are even extending internal social networks to employees that are laid off as a way to keep in touch and possibly rehire them when the market improves. According to Anne Berkowitch, CEO of SelectMinds, rehiring former employees through an alumni network has reduced the money and other resources her clients typically spend on recruiting, interviews, and training. In fact, Berkowitch says the money saved from five to 10 rehires can pay for the cost of licensing social networking software for one year. Of course, there are also free tools such as Ning, LinkedIn Groups and Yammer that employees can start using today."

Thanks Caroline. Please feel free to comment below, or you can contact Caroline directly at cdangson@idc.com.

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Rise of the Social Media Function

Many opportunities exist for B-to-B marketing organizations in the social media space. . . .and they're not all limited to what you can do with Twitter, Linked-In and YouTube. Just a few of these opportunities include:

• Establish a direct, relevant connection with your customers as a source of voice of the customer for new product development (e.g., through an on-line community)
• Improve customer satisfaction (e.g., enable customers to share experiences on-line by creating a self-running community where customers can interact with and learn from their peers)
• Increase the speed for troubleshooting and R&D by reducing the distance between customers and engineering
• Join the on-line technical conversations about your products that your customers are already having, by either leveraging your own community or listening to and participating in other companies' communities

Best-in-class organizations are adding a new social media role to their organization to capture these opportunities. The social media manager may report to the digital, interactive or web marketing team; integrated marketing communications; directly to the CMO if it's a new and/or especially important area; or even within product teams within more decentralized organizations. Potential responsibilities include:

• Establish the social media strategy in collaboration with the digital marketing team, PR, events, product management as well as other parts of the organization. (Refer to a prior post: BtoB Marketing's Response to Social Media: Have we Lost all Control and Impact?)
• Provide the training and infrastructure to empower your organization to interact with customers and prospects on-line (e.g., ambassador training program by Logitech, Intel's digital marketing training program)
• Develop community sites within the company web site (e.g., Citrix's community site offers a clean, comprehensive community site design with many unique features)
• Collaborate with product management, engineering and customer service to monitor and contribute to on-line communities. (internal and external) In some cases the social media team may act as direct contributors to on-line content or they'll provide the infrastructure and guidelines to facilitate contribution by other internal teams.

This role is only in the early stages across the technology industry; however, those companies that best leverage this new area to connect with prospects, customers and their markets will increase their differentiation in this increasingly mature technology industry.

Contact me at mgerard@idc.com for a copy of our recent telebriefing on "Key Success Factors for Your B-to-B Social Media Strategy". Do you have a social media role within your company?. . . please share your insight in the comments section below.

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A Preview of IDC's 2009 Tech Mktg. Benchmarks: A Focus on Marketing Automation

As discussed in my last blog entry, Are you Ready for Marketing's 2010 Annual Planning Process? , the IDC CMO Advisory Practice is “in the thick” of collecting surveys for our 2009 Tech Marketing Benchmarks study. We expect to collect detailed marketing investment data from nearly 100 hardware, software, and services vendors. With this is hand, we will be well prepared to provide our insight and guidance to tech marketers for their annual planning process.

I'd like to invite Seth Fishbein, a senior IDC analyst on our team, to provide a preview of some of this research, focusing on CMOs’ marketing automation priorities for the coming year. A more comprehensive analysis of this topic will be included in IDC’s 2010 Marketing Investment Planner, due out in late September/early October.

"Thanks Michael. Based upon interviews with leading tech marketing executives over the past month, the following three areas represent some “low-hanging fruit” in the marketing automation space for 2009/2010:

• Development of a formal marketing automation roadmap: Tech marketers should take a fresh look at their marketing IT tools and applications to look for redundancies and cost savings. Not only has IDC observed that most marketing organizations under-invest in automation tools, but most have not developed a roadmap or formal taxonomy to align their systems to strategic goals and related processes. A couple of verbatim comments from our study:
  
  - “We are reviewing all of our marketing systems, from owners to costs to measurements, to see what is truly being used and what is needed…”
  - “We are hoping that an audit of our marketing automation systems will help us integrate our lead management system with SF.com in order to automate and measure the flow of marketing opportunities to sales…”
  


• Simplification of marketing processes and systems: A common thread among tech marketers is the lack of data quality and consistency in their lead management/CRM systems. In particular, a frequent challenge is field marketing’s adherence to data-entry standards. IDC is observing that more marketing organizations appear to be moving in the direction of simplifying their marketing automation strategies and taxonomies in order to make processes easier for global users.
  
  - “More [investment in] automation is not a priority, [but] process improvement is…and we will then automate more where it makes it easier.”
  - “We are trying to streamline our campaign management systems so all users, from North America to Japan, can select from a list of 10 campaigns as opposed to 30-40.”
  


• Improvement to sales enablement and marketing asset management technologies: IDC research shows that over 40% of all marketing assets handed over to sales are not in use today (IDC’s Best Practices in Sales Enablement – Content and Marketing (to be published end of July)). This includes assets that have been developed for sales, channels, prospects and current customers. IDC estimates that at least 30% of companies' marketing investment, including program and people spend, is dedicated to creating content and marketing assets. Clearly, marketers can leverage cost reduction opportunities if they take the time to improve their content management process and technologies.
  
  - “Our content is all over the place…a more formalized content portal is being created to get our sales team the most relevant materials when they need them.”
  - “…marketing is funding an improved marketing asset management system and we are hoping to achieve 3% - 5% reduction/reallocation of spend on annual asset development and improved production efficiencies.” (improvements in production efficiency, reduced program time-to-market, and reduced re-work).
  
  In the next several weeks, IDC will be publishing a sales enablement report highlighting best practices in marketing content management from a lifecycle management, technology, and measurement perspective. Detailed company case studies will be also be included.
  

Please keep in mind that we are currently in the process of collecting surveys for our 2009 Tech Marketing Benchmarks study. If you are interested in participating in this study and have not received a survey, please let us know as soon as possible. Thanks!"
Seth Fishbein, Senior Analyst, CMO Advisory Service (sfishbein@idc.com)

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Are you Ready for Marketing's 2010 Annual Planning Process?

Have you started planning for your 2010 fiscal year yet? Our best practices study in planning – people, process and technology indicates that the average marketing planning cycle begins about 6 months before the fiscal year end. (for CMO Advisory Service clients, refer to "Marketing’s Planning – People, Process and Technology, IDC Doc. #216134) If you're one of the more mature organizations, planning will be part of the fabric of your weekly, monthly and quarterly team meetings.

Regardless, a significant part of this annual process is assessment of your current "operational" metrics and development of next year's projected investment strategy. I define "operational" metrics as those metrics that track your marketing investment strategy, including:

1. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) – such as Marketing Budget Ratio (marketing spend as a % of revenue), Program to People KPI, Revenue per Staff, Staff Throughput (program spend per marketing staff), Centralization KPI (% of marketing investment that is centralized vs. decentralized), Awareness-Demand KPI, etc.
2. Staff Mix (fixed spend) – such as advertising, product marketing, marketing operations, etc.
3. Program Mix (discretionary spend) – such as advertising (print, broadcast, corporate sponsorship), digital marketing, event marketing, etc.

IDC has published a complete taxonomy of these KPIs and staff and program mix areas to help marketing operations and marketing finance executives best manage their investment. (for CMO Advisory Service clients, refer to IDC’s Worldwide Sales and Marketing Taxonomy, 2008: A Blueprint for Cost Control, IDC Doc. #211900)

Tracking and evaluating these KPIs, program and staff mix levels across the organization, over time and versus other companies will best prepare you for your upcoming planning sessions; for management of your resources as well as for increasing marketing's credibility with other parts of the organization.
IDC's CMO Advisory Practice is in its 7th year of its Tech Marketing Benchmarks study. If you would like to participate in this research, including receiving a copy of the above Taxonomy, an overview of the results of the study and an invite to our annual marketing benchmarks telebriefing in August, please contact Seth Fishbein at sfishbein@idc.com. You will be joining the 100+ global companies that work with us year after year as part of this industry study.

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Sales Enablement and The Year of the Sales Rep

I've spoken about sales enablement quite a bit in this blog, and I'll continue to do so as marketers improve their ability to better enable the sales process from an internal as well as an external perspective. With this in mind, Clare Gillan, IDC's SVP of Executive and Go To Market Programs, will share some of her insights in the sales enablement area. . .

Thanks Michael. At IDC's recent annual Directions event, I gave a presentation titled "The Year of the Sales Rep." In response to The Year of the Sales Rep notion, an SVP of sales asked me, "Why does this year have to be my year?" "Precisely," I responded. Let me explain. . . . never have we more needed our sales reps to be successful and never have they needed us more — those of us in sales, marketing, and executive management.

The crisis in sales is driven not by the economy alone but by an evolution in how buyers buy. Sales organizations, in general, have not kept up. The economy heightens a need for change in how the IT industry "sells" — better mapping to how buyers buy.

For nearly 10 years, sales organizations have emphasized the desire to become "trusted partners" with their B2B customers. Nearly every sales organization has been through "solution selling" programs of one form or another. However, only one in five buyers will tell you that he/she is generally approached by sales reps prepared to discuss solutions. Too often, the sales engagement continues to be product led. Further, buyers will tell you that the pre-purchase experience is becoming a more important indicator of post purchase value. Buyers increasingly consider "relationship ROI" as well as product ROI. And, buyers will tell you that, in this economy, they no longer have tolerance for uninformed vendor representatives who come through their doors. The sales rep must come to a meeting prepared to discuss the buyer's specific business — yet 31% of sales reps are not prepared with even a basic level of Web available information before taking a buyer's valuable time. Only 16% are extremely prepared — these are the reps positioned to take share for the companies they represent.

The technology purchase decision is rapidly moving from a product decision to a relationship decision. Buyers can generally find a number of products that can do the job and within the same price range. They will select the vendor that will make them successful over time even if the vendor does not offer the very best up-front price. The shift from product-led selling to relationship-led selling calls for a significant transformation of sales — enabled by a transformation of marketing.

This transformation requires marketing to gather intelligence and create assets that better map to what buyers value and then make the intelligence and assets "accessible" at key points along the go-to-market chain for use by sales and partners. This requires researching buyers (and I stress--from the buyer's point of view), auditing program investments against what buyers value and other related investments your company is making, creating strong content assets (and then making these consumable in a variety of formats), and, finally contributing to a sales enablement process developed in partnership with your sales "partner".

Thanks Clare! Contact me at mgerard@idc.com for a free copy of a recently published report by Clare entitled "Sales Enablement 3.0: A Transformation of Sales Enabled by a Transformation of Marketing".

More to come from IDC's CMO Advisory Practice on the emerging practices in this area of Sales Enablement.

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BtoB Marketing's Response to Social Media: Have we Lost all Control and Impact?

For decades marketing has been desperately trying to connect with their customers in a controlled, one-way fashion. We had control of the brand, all marketing content as well as the traditional channels that were used to communicate with the market. And even on occasion, we cautiously exposed our executives and engineers to our customers while all the time holding our breath that they didn't say the "wrong thing" that would hurt our image, costing us millions of dollars in marketing investment and countless hours including nights and weekends executing our marketing strategy.

It reminds me of a time when I was a product marketer in the semiconductor industry. I would visit customers quite frequently with our lead engineer. In one meeting this engineer exposed our greatest product flaw to one of our key customers. As I cringed in my seat, I expected the ROI from millions of dollars of investment into the brand value of this product to be instantly destroyed not to mention the lifetime value of this customer as they quickly switched to our competitors' products. To my surprise, the candor expressed by this sincere engineer did not doom our company's success at all. In fact, it was a key factor in gaining credibility with our customer, including serving as the basis for a joint discussion and future research to solve these problems in a collaborative fashion. This new problem-solving process served as a key differentiator for our products in a very commoditized market.

What's the connection? Imagine 100s or even 1,000s of your engineers, developers and/or product managers interacting directly with your customers through their own blogs, contribution to other blogs, interaction through Twitter or countless other social media applications. Sound familiar to anyone?. . . How do we stop this PR nightmare?. . . How do we control them?. . . How do we ensure that they stay on-message with our brand?. . . How can we review every bit of content that they put on the Internet? The simple answer is that we "don't" try to control them.

Not to say that we should hang up our marketing hat and make wine in Napa Valley. In this new social media model we need to devise new ways of helping our organization to best represent the company while keeping the needs of the customer at the forefront of our communications; and even better leveraging this new found connection to the customer. Some ideas include:

• Increase your resources dedicated to internal communication. We've always said that everyone needs to be a salesperson. With the new social media model, we all have to be marketers as well, more than ever before. [CMO Advisory Service clients should refer to a recent publication entitled Intel Launches a Comprehensive Digital Marketing Training Program for its Global Marketing and Sales Staff, IDC doc. #218416]
• Ensure that specific marketing staff are accountable for your company's social media strategy.
• Don’t “control” the social media strategy, “guide” it (e.g., evangelize, train, share best practices)
• Provide the infrastructure for your social media "ambassadors" to communicate and interact with your markets (e.g., social media applications/platforms, basic guidelines for communications)
• Integrate social media across the organization’s existing efforts
  - Develop private communities for customers to provide a self-serving environment for peer-to-peer interaction, as well as providing a great source of voice of the customer for product improvement and new product development
  - Establish public communities on your web site to share insight into new solutions for customers' challenges; and contribute to other communities (no one will go to your party if you don't go to theirs)
  - Integrate on-line and in-person social networking strategies (e.g., facilitate collaboration for an in-person event amongst prospects and clients before (on-line), during (in-person) and after (on-line) the event
  - Include social media as part of the overall marketing mix [CMO Advisory Service clients should refer to a recent marketing mix study entitled 2009 CMO Tech Marketing Barometer, IDC Doc. #217640]
• Ensure that your social media strategy aligns with your customers' needs. For example, relevant content from independent sources continues to be the greatest magnet for attracting our customers' attention. Ensure that your communities remain on target to your customers' needs.
• Don't forget performance measurement. Sample metrics for measuring the impact of social media include: customer satisfaction and retention, marketing reach and engagement (e.g., click-thrus, time spent on-site, more qualitative insight such as types of conversations)

Taking a more strategic perspective to leverage the power of new social media channels without stifling their potential will enable marketing to significantly increase its impact on the organization.

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