It boggles the mind and makes one try to find some sense in it. What does it mean?

Well, it certainly proved the tremendous reliance we all have on the content that comes from Twitter. Some would say investors rely too much on automated trades based on tweets.

It also proved the great value our society places on Twitter as a provider of content and information.

Yesterday Yahoo announced that it was taking Twitter very seriously indeed.

In her blog, Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo stated, “Tweets have become an important information source for many of our users, so we are thrilled to announce our partnership with Twitter to bring Tweets directly into the Yahoo! newsfeed.”

She went on to say that over the next few days users would begin to see Tweets “personalized to their interests and preferences” appear in their content stream, delivering on earlier promises that the search and new aggregation giant would move toward more personalization of content for its users.

[An interesting side note is that the title of Mayer’s blog post “@Yahoo delivers #bestoftheweb” is really not very tweetable. Oops. To start a tweet with a Twitter name is a mistake unless you are talking ‘at’ that person/account. It will not appear as a normal tweet.]

Yahoo’s big search competitor, Google wasn’t able to keep its former relationship with the microblogging giant. Twitter results disappeared from Google some time back, making this quite a win for Yahoo.

But what does this move mean for communicators?

While few details have been revealed, it’s probably safe to assume that Yahoo will feature tweets that are popular, influential and of course meet certain criteria for authenticity and newsworthiness.

As communicators we should be prepared and simply take this as a reminder of some best practices for content creation:

1)  Create share-worthy content with tweetable headlines and by highlighting crunchy, interesting facts in bold font or in bulleted lists.
2)  Cultivate social networks. Build credibility for your content and your brand.
3)  Build relationships with influencers.
4)  Calibrate your team for rapid response to current events.

Perhaps your content will make it to the Yahoo news page along with relevant content from trusted news sources which Yahoo customizes based on user interest.

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Originally posted on BeyondPR by Victoria Harres on May 17, 2013. 

Until now, pins acted simply as a link to the original website. Now, Pinterest is working with dozens of popular brands to show more information — such as recipes, movie reviews, product availability and pricing — on pins. A small icon that appears below the picture in a pin will indicate when a pin includes more information.

This change will make it easier for users to get the information they need, and it will make branding more effective for organizations using Pinterest for marketing purposes. And with pricing and availability information included as part of some pins, participating vendors are also likely to see an increase in sales from Pinterest. Pinterest itself will also likely see a nice boost as keeping users on its site instead of directing them elsewhere will increase its stickiness.

Participating retailers include — but are not limited to, by a long shot — eBay, Home Depot, Target and Walmart. Sources for recipes include Better Homes and Gardens, Martha Stewart Living, Skinny Taste and Whole Foods Market. Movie sources include Flixster, Netflix and Rotten Tomatoes. (For a full list of participating vendors, see Pinterest’s blog post on the new pins.)

Pinterest has also announced that it is making its Pin It button available in mobile apps.

What value do you think the new pins will bring? Please let us know in the comments section below.

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Originally posted on InformationWeek Social Business by Deb Donston-Miller on May 22, 2013.

Welcome to the visual social web. Photos, images and infographics now generate more user engagement, sharing activity and traffic than a tweet, blog post or other written content. According to ROI Research, social media users prefer pictures over jokes, status updates, or other types of content, and they are also more likely to engage with posts from brands when the status update involves a picture.

Content may be king, but today, a picture really is worth a thousand words.

Does this trend toward visual social networking really apply to tech marketers and the business-to-business market in general? What are the savviest tech companies doing on platforms like Pinterest or Instagram—and what can you learn from them?

In this white paper, we’ll take a look at the visual social media revolution and how it applies to tech marketing—and offer 5 tips on how your brand can boost its connection with customers by going visual.

Download Now!

Visual Social Media
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To lead in this century requires different steps than in the last. You must use your social strategy to enhance the mindset of your senior leadership and your board of directors.

This involves three tasks:

• Broadening your base.
• Assembling and aligning the critical mass of talent in your organization to achieve your growth priorities.
• Winning mindshare among all your key constituencies.

I’m writing this as a follow up to my recent post on the Relationship Economics blog, “Use Your Social Strategy for Return on Impact,” about how to lead in the age of connected relationships.

Here is how to execute on those three tasks:

Broaden Your Base

World-class organizations create engagement by focusing their market outreach on delighting customers. Your most profitable members, sponsors or customers all have strong emotional bonds with your organization. You must consistently recognize and strengthen these bonds. How do you emotionally engage and build a trusting relationship with individuals you cannot interact with in person? You have to think differently about engagement. You know your individual buyers are smart and getting smarter — they’re engaged in social networks where they are learning from every interaction that delivers recommendations.

Each buyer draws on that network to interact, form relationships, make decisions and buy products and services — all to solve the problems that keep them from doing what they want to do.

To broaden your base, find groups of individuals who have problems that are driving them crazy, and who are willing and able to pay for solutions to solve those problems. Engage them on social platforms. How? With compelling content. Your customers/members lean in to the conversations that promise to connect them with interesting people and ideas. Daily, low-cost interactivity gives them compelling reasons to come back frequently, become engaged and involved.

Deliver real value to people looking for “who can I meet?” and “what can I learn?” Become a student of your market’s problems, and bring your leaders and board into the conversation so they can engage with the members, partners and external knowledge assets. Leaders listen and learn.

Assemble And Align Critical Talent To Achieve Growth Priorities

In your organization, regardless of its size or governance structure, you have growth strategies. Approaches vary by industry, business segment and circumstances. Organizations achieve growth either by offering its existing value to new members/customers, or through offering new value to existing members/customers.

What most consumers don’t want is more of the same. Over time, existing offerings lose their attraction and become commoditized. Any organization that isn’t broadening its base must find new value to offer that base, or it will lose ground. Any organization that offers existing value to new customers will broaden its base, but find it difficult to hold the ground it gains unless it can also develop innovations that bring new value to that base consistently over time.

In Return on Impact: Leadership Strategies for the Age of Connected Relationships (ASAE, 2012) I used the example of the Wisconsin Institute of Certified Public Accountants (WICPA). The group’s critical differentiator is the depth and scope of its educational offerings — far greater than any of its competitors. However, about 50% of its members are dispersed geographically outside the population-dense Madison/Milwaukee/Green Bay areas, so providing greater access to educational programming is a challenge and a key priority.

WICPA sought member feedback and learned that it could add a great deal of value by compacting and customizing its programming. Today, subject areas such as nonprofits, tax accounting or specific industries organize WICPA’s conferences. It is expanding its online educational offerings to serve its distributed population.

WICPA listened to its market, then aligned its talent around the growth opportunity it discovered — solving its members’ problem of access to education. That strategy is generating new value for the existing base, and a compelling value proposition for new members to join WICPA.

Which goal is your strategic priority? Does your organization now include the talent you need to execute on that? You must assemble a critical mass of talent at the board and senior leadership ranks, and align them with the responsibilities and skills required for your growth strategy.

To succeed in the 21st century, social must be a component of your growth strategy, regardless of your approach. Social can be a unique and effective enabler of growth. Give your board and leaders a role in your social strategy. Let them hear directly what the market conversation is saying.

Win Mindshare Among All Key Constituencies

So you’ve got your leadership team listening, leaning in and driving innovation that creates new value and reaches new markets. Or do you? To be sure you’re winning their mindshare, you need a means to measure it. Social analytics are the barometer of how well you’re doing. Metrics should measure against agreed-upon objectives and values to help create course corrections along the way. Social analytics should reveal how well you’ve aligned objectives with strategy, the effectiveness of your implementation process, and how well you’re moving your members or customers to their next logical decision point.

Your social strategy must include meaningful metrics. As social media took off, a cottage industry of vendors and platforms for social media measurement appeared — but too often the tail wagged the dog. Organizations allowed the tools to dictate what they would measure. Only when the organization understands what data is needed can it assess the right class of tools to use. Do your due diligence to put in place the metrics you need to monitor your mindshare among your key constituencies — customers, the market, employees, key competitors, the media. Share your analytics with your leadership and board, in brief, actionable insights that make key insights stick.

Broadening your base, aligning the right players around the right goals, and winning mindshare are the steps through which your social strategy will enhance the mindset of your senior leadership and your board of directors. Develop a strong listening platform for your leaders and board that gives them clear visibility into the social conversation about your organization and brand. This isn’t a suggestion. It’s a critical business strategy without which you can expect to fail.

Takeaways:

– Broaden your base by finding customer niches with problems they are willing and able to pay to solve; engage them on social platforms with your compelling content.

– Specify your growth priorities; assemble and align the critical talent you need to achieve them.

– Win mindshare among key constituencies; measure and share insights about mindshare with your leaders and board.

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Originally posted on InformationWeek Social Business by David Nour on May 17, 2013.

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B2B media and marketing professionals have to rethink how we serve professionals to attract new customers and create new products and revenue streams.  One of the most effective ways to make this happen is through customer modeling: using data, insights and targeted marketing techniques to unlock new opportunities.

There are many variations and interpretations of data-driven customer modeling.  My colleagues and I at UBM Tech defined customer modeling in a few ways (often these can overlap):

• Discover new customers – “find me more of these types of professionals”
• Develop new products – “uncover unmet customer needs”
• Improve customer engagement – “deliver targeted content and offers”

Our effort to gain deeper insights and apply customer modeling started with overhauling our technology and processes.  We needed the tools and techniques to capitalize on the data, draw business and customer insights and act on them in our media and marketing programs.  This is a work in progress as technologies evolve and techniques are mastered (you are never done building and iterating).

The first step was to consolidate our databases, from roughly 23 databases to one, providing a single, 360-degree view of our customers (audience).  We also deployed a marketing automation system (Eloqua) to automate our customer communications processes as well as our ability to capture and integrate online and offline behaviors and preferences.

At the same time, we began to deploy techniques to convert organic web traffic from passive visitors to active registered users.  We did this by leveraging both existing high-value content and creating specific types and formats of content (special reports, research, infographics, slides shows, etc.) targeted to specific visitors. Then, we applied analytics and gathered data to set benchmarks to understand what was working so we could deploy similar approaches on a larger scale.

The data we aggregated over time allowed us to segment customers, providing both a way to identify the best methods to engage and convert prospects to customers and to set customer valuation, what we call ARPU (average revenue per user).

Frictionless Engagement

Another important piece of the puzzle was to make the customer/user experience frictionless and easy to engage with brands, content and products.  This includes the ability for the user to control preferences for how they are communicated with and what they want to receive, and when.  This effort is ongoing; because of many disparate legacy systems, we still have a ways to go.

As these key pieces were implemented, we were able to yield positive results.  Here are some ways in which we are utilizing customer modeling to drive new customers and revenue:

• Customer segmentation:  We segmented our database into five unique profiles based on past behavior and engagement.  This guided us on how to communicate with customers/prospects in unique ways.  For example, nearly 50% of the database records were “fading” – meaning these users had not engaged with us in the last 12 months.  Instead of sending more product offers, we targeted them with “we want you back” communications, offering unique content based on past behaviors. The content included special reports and career-oriented information.  This effort resulted in more than 53,000 re-engaged, reactivated customers, a large number for B2B media.  With ARPU at approximately $150, you can see the potential for revenue growth.
• Identify untapped or non-core audiences: Our core audience is information technology (IT) professionals.  However, through regression analysis to identify patterns, we found that there were non-IT people (lawyers and professors, for example) who were paying to come to our educational conferences. We are now able to develop new content tracks for these types of non-IT pros and tailor our communications to their needs, making the content much more relevant.
• Cross-sell and up-sell products:  It would make sense that somebody who downloaded white papers or reports on cloud security, for example, would also be interested in attending events on the same general topic.  Over a 12-month period, we were able to cross-sell using this technique, yielding nearly $2.5 million in identifiable revenue we can attribute to these efforts.

Creating A Data-Driven Culture

These results don’t happen overnight.  Organizations must begin to create a data-driven culture to support these efforts.  Here are some things you can do to make build a strong foundation for data-driven marketing and customer modeling:

• Build a blueprint and then achieve quick wins. Like any successful project, define what success looks like, create a blueprint, go at it and adapt along the way.
• Start with a business/brand that has the most upside. Avoid “big bang” projects that require deployment across the entire organization.
• Create a culture of measurement, metrics and analytics. Using data to drive insights can eliminate guess work and back and forth.  Just as importantly, using data builds trust with stakeholders and can enable more funding to create even bigger results.
• Develop data-driven talent. This is one of the most underestimated areas.  You can accelerate your impact by both developing/training existing team members and bringing in outside talent with expertise and a “make it happen” attitude.

We believe we are just scratching the surface of what is possible and, by no means, have we unlocked the “holy grail” yet.   We are developing our blueprint, looking for quick wins and sharing our learnings along the way.

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Originally published in eMedia Vitals on May 1, 2013.

It wasn’t long ago that companies such as Jive and Yammer were proclaiming the era of the social enterprise. Knowledge workers no longer would be slaves to email. The best parts of social media would find their way to the workplace (sans photos of drunken friends). Knowledge and data would be found and shared with ease. Communication would be neither push nor pull but one or the other in the most appropriate times.

And indeed the social enterprise has shown its worth. Insurance giant Allstate’s 10-day innovation blitzes spring to mind: Practical applications of internal crowdsourcing and collaboration techniques to inspire new business ideas have become part of Allstate’s culture. In vertical industries like education, social collaboration solutions like Edmodo are re-writing how teachers and students interact and learn.

The question now isn’t whether such tangible results, or even less lofty ones, are worth pursuing. They are. The challenge now is how to wire social constructs into all business practices. Soon enough, social business will simply be business as usual.

The technologies and platforms are still important, and will become more so, but companies will harness their power more in the context of business tasks and within “non-social” applications.

Adam Pisoni, Yammer’s co-founder and now the general manager of engineering in Microsoft’s Office division, talks about a future filled with context. “Social feeds are just a user interface,” Pisoni says, emphasizing that social messages are encoded with information such as location, conversation participants, roles and other data often derived from mobile (and, in the future, wearable) devices. That infusion of informational structure and relevance is changing the potential of social interaction. Business users connect not for the sake of conversation (being social), but to complete a task, share knowledge and discover opportunity — doing so with context is far more efficient and effective. Marketing opportunities might be more ripe for exploitation when, say, location and weather data are factored in, for example. (Pisoni will be part of the E2 keynote lineup, and we’ll cover that ground.)

Yammer competitor Jive, another early social business leader, finished its most recent fiscal quarter with 33% year-over-year revenue growth, including strong customer renewal numbers. The vendor’s latest product reflects its work on partnerships: integrations with Box.com and Salesforce.com — to drive specific business outcomes, around shared documents and projects, or sales opportunities, for example. Jive’s goal is to make other business processes work better within Jive, to make it a hub of communications to simply “get work done,” a company spokeswoman says.

Jive’s recent acquisitions of Clara and StreamOnce point toward that more streamlined social future. StreamOnce, for example, brings LinkedIn, email, Marketo (marketing automation), Salesforce (CRM) and Workday (HR) into the social sphere. (Jive CTO and co-founder Matt Tucker and Marketo CMO Sanjay Dholakia will also be part of the E2 Conference keynote lineup.)

Social Business In Context

Salesforce is the most visible driver of social business in the context of an enterprise application, making Chatter a core service of its cloud-based CRM offering. Now, having hammered home the social enterprise message, CEO Marc Benioff is talking more about customer-centricity, where other data points, such as location awareness and identity management (read: more context), are important. “All of these things are taking us to a customer revolution, and it’s the next logical step for our industry,” Benioff said at a recent gathering in New York.

Just last week, Salesforce announced Communities, which brings the notion of context full circle. Collaboration systems, Salesforce says, are “disconnected from the business.”

Alex Dayon, Salesforce.com’s president of applications and platforms, says: “The next generation of enterprise apps are social with business data embedded at the core and accessible from any device.” The goal is to deliver more data with more context to more constituents (in its case, communities of sales and marketing partners).

Workday CTO Stan Swete talks about integrating social platforms and social techniques with Workday objects. For example, Workday’s HR suite features built-in commenting and exposes shared professional experiences among workers. (Swete will be a featured keynote speaker at the E2 Conference.)

Kenandy, another emerging leader in cloud-based ERP (manufacturing and financial applications), is built on Salesforce’s Force.com platform, and it’s decidedly social. A manufacturing company can create a purchase order, find out if the supplier has parts via Chatter and embed that interaction into the context of the purchase order. “Social in the context of doing business,” is how a Kenandy spokesman phrases it. Sound familiar?

Enterprise application vendor Infor last month rolled out Ming.le, a collaboration feature where users can follow not just people but KPIs, data, documents and workflows. One customer Infor cited is using the technology internally and with partners, in the context of inventory lookups, so that information about part availability, approvals and other communication is all accessible in one place.

Naturally, the pure plays such as Jive and Yammer see social interactions through the lens of a platform, whereas application vendors see that interaction through their own application viewfinders. Either way, the implicit message is that context and relevance (and, yes, Salesforce, the customer) will drive the true value of social business.

Social is simply the means to a business end.

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Originally posted on InformationWeek Social Business on May 14, 2013.

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With the rise of Klout and other personal influence measurement tools, much of the talk around influence marketing has focused on how to best target and engage high-ranking influencers.

But new research is showing that a focus on mid-level influencers is actually far more effective when it comes to engagement and driving earned media, and at a much more efficient cost than working with “professional” A-list influencers.

This is the conclusion from a SocialChorus analysis of over 200 social word-of-mouth campaigns, which shows that large-scale social engagement is increasingly driven by a group of influencers the company refers to as the “Power Middle.”  These influencers typically have a smaller but very loyal audience (2,500 to 25,000+ unique monthly visitors to their blog or other social networks). Because their communities are so loyal, these Power Middle influencers drive an average of 16x higher engagement rates than paid media and owned alternatives–and at a much lower individual cost than professional influencers.

Interestingly, these findings match what many experienced marketing people have known for years. In an interview a year ago, Zoetica co-founder Kami Watson Huyse talked about how to leverage the power of the “Magic Middle“–a term based on a 1996 article by Technorati founder David Sifry–to build long-term relationships and form enduring communities around your brand or initiative.

The SocialChorus analysis finds that brands can achieve both scale and engagement when working with 100 – 300 power middle influencers, vs a smaller number of high-end influencers with larger followings. Over the course of three months, a Power Middle campaign with 100 influencers routinely drives 10 actions per influencer and 30,000 to 40,000 social endorsements delivered to millions of consumers.

Why do these mid-tier influencers drive so much engagement? Their audience isn’t just consuming news but often feels a true connection and allegiance to the influencer. They are part of a community and an ongoing conversation.  As a result, a mid-tier influencer’s audience is much more likely to engage with an influencer-endorsed brand.

Campaigns targeted to Power Middle influencers tend to be far more cost-effective. In the 200+ programs SocialChorus has run, the “social currency”–content, access, product and other rewards used to engage the influencer–has averaged under $100 in total value per influencer, within a range of $0 (when highly exclusive content is involved) up to $500. In contrast, professional influencers can require thousands, even tens of thousands of dollars to work with brands. The lower cost of the Power Middle allows brands to approach a wider set of influencers with different personalities, perspectives and vertical areas of expertise, which, in turn, can drive more focused engagement from each influencer’s audience.

Successful social brands truly see these campaigns as two-way relationships. One way they increase audience actions is by repurposing influencer-generated content on their owned channels. Influencers appreciate the attention and are more likely to link to your brands and encourage their audiences to do the same.  SocialChorus found that when their clients repurpose Power Middle influencer content on their owned channels, it outperforms the brands’ own content by an average of 3 to 5X and as high as 10X when used for (Facebook and Twitter) sponsored stories.

Echoing the conclusion drawn by the influence marketing panel at this year’s SXSW, the Social Chorus analysis shows that ongoing relationships are more important and effective than sporadic campaigns.

For more details on the analysis, including how SocialChorus measures and compares engagement rates across different types of platforms and campaigns, you can download the complete Power Middle white paper (free, registration required).

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Originally posted by Tonia Ries on The Realtime Report.