Scaling Social: The Future of B2B Social Marketing

The days of being happy with mentions and followers on social media are over. To take your social marketing to the next level, it's time to build relationships.

The Social Media Ecosystem Report "Rise of Users, Intelligence, and Operating Systems" (pdf) was put together by the folks at Jordan Edmiston Group, an investment bank focused on media and marketing services, with support from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB).

Before I go further, a quick shout-out to the Salorix team for getting lots of great coverage in the recent report. They were talked about, quoted and got to submit a chart, too … all in the section: Big Data Enables Enhanced Business Intelligence.

But why did this early-stage company get covered in this report — alongside IBM, Google and Adobe no less?

Well, it turns out the “big data meets social media” thing is hard. Or as the report says:

“Scaling social with intelligence is extremely challenging”

And this is what Salorix is looking to solve with their technology platform.

Brand Mentions are no Longer Enough

You see, we can no longer be happy simply responding to brand mentions and boasting about our likes, retweets and followers.

We need to also:

• Identify relevant and influential brand-related conversations
• Engage the consumers doing the talking
• Get them to amplify our brand message to their social network.

That does sound hard, especially since 90 percent of those conversations are happening outside of brand-controlled properties (this is what Salorix says). Makes me long for the days when ad banners still worked. (When was that exactly?)

Future of B2B Social Marketing

As B2B marketers, we've done a good job embracing the role of influencers as a way to sway the moods and minds of our prospects. Well that's no longer enough, either.

Instead, we now need to engage our prospects directly, using what we learn from finding and listening to them on the social web. What platforms they use, how active they are and what they're talking about, sharing and creating. This then informs our content marketing strategy and how we look to convert these prospects into leads.

Remember, it's not about quantity and growing audience, it's about quality and building relationships. Why? Because we're B2B not B2C.

With this in mind, here's what you should focus your social media activities on:

• Developing detailed buyer personas that take into account how your prospects behave on social media.
• Creating content based on what your prospects are saying and sharing across the social web.
• Optimizing your content for social engagement and social distribution.
• Tracking and measuring how your social content converts into shares, clicks and leads.

This is the future of B2B social marketing, and how you'll scale social with intelligence.

So, how are you adapting your social media practices to connect with prospects, customers and influencers? Let us know in the comments section below, let’s keep the conversation going!

Image courtesy of Cienpies Design (Shutterstock)

Editor's Note: To read more of Carter's B2B marketing advice, check out Struggling with B2B Social Marketing? Here's What to Do Now

About the Author

Carter is the Founder and CEO of Leadtail, a marketing agency that focuses on online marketing and social media for B2B companies. Carter and his team have developed and implemented social marketing programs and campaigns for leading consumer and business brands including Avaya, Alcatel-Lucent, British Telecom, Symantec, and TiVo. Continue the conversation @Leadtail.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Mzinga Debuts OmniSocial Engaged for Deeper Social Intelligence

Social intelligence provider Mzinga has debuted a customizable platform for addressing targeted audiences at a deeper social level called OmniSocial Engaged.

It's a suite of features that can integrate into existing systems or be a standalone product for better search and meaningful experiences with analytics and reporting for better insight.

Engage with Customers

Creating better customer experiences is about how people feel. Can they find what they are looking for on your website? Do they get rewarded for being involved and even helping others? Online groups like enthusiasts, for example, will benefit from these kinds of features, but they are also good for improving customer support. 

Retailers or service providers need as many ways as they can get to make support less painful, and one of those ways is to offer a self-service solution. This can include things like Facebook Page integrations, website widgets or full blown customized websites.

Multiple solutions are included with OmniSocial Engaged, and that means better targeting and happier customers.

OmniSocial Features

OmniSocial combines multiple solutions to meet these customer engagement challenges. Community managers and moderators can take advantage of things like banned and watch word filters, user permissions and a moderation queue dashboard. Additionally, managing content can be automated for removing harmful content and enforcing Terms of Service.

The product includes gamification elements, allowing companies to assign badges and reward icons for top contributors, engaged members or influential members to give customers incentives. Mzinga has been going down this road for some time now, and offering more personalized experiences is what the company is all about. That's important because at least one recent study has found companies see a lack of quality social business analytic products in the market. 

That is particularly true of hard to measure things like ROI, sentiment analysis and identifying influencers. However companies are engaging customers, making support and search less painful are always welcome, even if the entire industry sill needs more fine tuning.

OmniSocial Engaged is available now, and pricing is available on request.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Oracle Debuts Free Version of its ADF Application Building Tools #oow

Developers who have been thinking about building enterprise level apps now have a chance to use the same tools the big boys use because Oracle has released a free version of its Application Development Framework.

It's called ADF Essentials, and it's a Java platform that provides a ready to use base upon which new apps can be built and integrated into legacy systems.

Build UIs and Reusable Components

ADF Essentials includes tools for easily building advanced UIs and reusable components with common design patterns. It does not feature tools like a granular security layer, declarative customization, integration with Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle ADF Mobile like the full Oracle ADF does. However, ADF Essentials will be supported in a future Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse release.

ADF Essentials is a core tool for building multi-channel apps that access a variety of data sources and business services.

Oracle OpenWorld Looms

Oracle's yearly trade show OpenWorld starts Sept. 30, so this a good chance to get started with ADF and then hit the conference with some big ideas and well thought out questions. OpenWorld has several tracts, one of which is the JavaOne section that is tailored to developers and Java technologists. 

Hasan Rizvi, Oracle senior VP of product development will be giving a keynote on Java product strategy that should be a good overview for those just getting started with the company's developer tools. Additionally, Judson Althoff, Oracle senior VP, will be giving a Java market strategy keynote that could be a good source for new app ideas. 

For more in depth sessions, check out Tim Ellison, senior technical staff member, IBM UK, and his take on some of Java's real world compatibility issues. Also, try the GlassFish Unconference to meet some of the leading minds on Java EE and GlassFish open source server. GlassFish Server Open Source Edition is how Oracle ADF Essentials is deployed, so this session would be very advantageous for any new ADF developers. 

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Livefyre Debuts StreamHub Engagement Management System

Livefyre has announced a new engagement management system called StreamHub, and it takes the company's interactive commenting system to a deeper level, with more features and control.

StreamHub will be available to existing Livefyre customers right away, and for publishers especially, the new features should help drive traffic, increase social interactions about their company and generally make those websites even more interactive. 

Conversations Across Networks

Livefyre already integrates social media into its commenting system, but StreamHub adds an engagement dashboard for customizing layouts and tailoring the conversation by categories like topic or location.

By making it easy for people to link social media to comments, conversations can go back and forth across networks and mobile devices. StreamHub has two main components; Core and Curate. Core is the bulk of the system, and once that is set up, customers can opt for the Curate feature. StreamHub Core adds the engagement dashboard, and the ability to easily filter content to tailor a website with the kinds of ideas that build engaging relationships.

Here's how the dashboard works:

StreamHub expands a website's reach, and with Curate, can even pull in content from around the Web.

Engaging Comments and Liveblogging

Through Twitter's API and RSS, content from around the Web can be pulled into a liveblog, chat or comment stream with Curate. Using hashtags or @ mentions, anything relating to the topic at hand can be gathered from the Web to be used on the host website. 

Livefyre is working on doing the same thing with Facebook, although that feature is not ready yet. The company did not give any hints about other social networks this feature could extend to, but it sounds like it holds bigger potential. 

Curate has real potential to make more personalized online experiences.

One unique way Curate changes liveblogging is the ability to reply to individual posts. Say you are watching the iPhone 5 launch, and a stream of images is going by. With StreamHub, it's not necessary to reply to the whole event, but instead only the images you find relevant. Those comments can be tagged, and followed and replied to just like in a more static page. 

What social platform would be complete without analytics? StreamHub can create customized reports and is compatible with Google Analytics or Omniture. Tell us in the comments if you are an avid commenter and if you think you would like to have your social media integrated like in StreamHub.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Eclipse Corp Deepens Oracle Partnership Extending Document Automation Reach

It's quiet in the wake of Labor Day, but document automation vendor Eclipse isn't resting as it moves to Silver level membership of the Oracle Partner Network (OPN).

For clients of the companies involved, these kinds of partnerships are usually a good thing and generally result in better, or more, products. For the companies involved, it usually means extended reach into the markets they are operating in already, and the opening of new markets.

Oracle With Eclipse

With this partnership, Eclipse says that it will be able to add Oracle’s 1-Click line of products to its portfolio enabling what it describes as “competitive positioning” — which generally means better pricing — as well as, and probably more importantly given its products, increase its presence across the midsize market.

On top of that it will also be able to use the OPN portal tools and resources, as well as the expert help in the Oracle Partner Business Center, which it says will enable it to maximize customer offerings and customer retention as a result.

For Oracle, which is giving Eclipse access to its customer base, the principal benefits seems to be the fact that it will be also able to offer a new range of document solutions to its customers.

Eclipse Document Automation

Eclipse has an interesting set of solutions that build on the idea of Integration without Modification (IWM). This enables users to build all kinds of documents and forms without every having to go near the source code.

It also does away with the need for Change Management associated with document presentation and delivery.

Eclipse builds enterprise document generation software solutions and e-forms, specializing in the technology that enables companies to develop business documents.

According to Eclipse, all of its solutions come with Enterprise Cloud Fax Service that effectively does away with the need for fax servers, phone lines and physical fax machines.

The result is batch faxing that is not only up to 20 times fast than traditional faxes, but is also capable of sending 250,000 faxes in a single transaction.

Eclipse Corporation provides automation software solutions. It also provides consulting, installation, implementation and support of document automation and management software. A side note, it is not the same as the Eclipse Foundation, which is a community for individuals and organizations who wish to collaborate on commercially-friendly open source software.

More on the Oracle and Eclipse as releases happen.
 

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

A New Way to Think About Social Media #socialintel2012

Day One at the Social Media Intelligence Conference yielded thoughtful amendments to the word-of-mouth textbook on enterprise-level social media strategy. As the opportunities for social networking expand exponentially, so do the possibilities they offer. 

You'll still hear no (smart) business person deny the relative infancy of social data, but like the medium itself, a pervasiveness of theory, experimentation, pontification and opinion is helping to shift some preconceived notions into practiced, applicable strategy.

It's A One-Way Mirror

Dorothea Bozicolona-Volpe's keynote had a purposeful stride which succinctly summarized the most basic ideals of utilizing social media in a business environment. Volpe argues that this stuff is in our DNA, and we have an innate capacity for it. And sometimes it does seem to be the graphical representation of our inner monologue, reflecting everything from our most profound realizations to our most mundane events. 

There's a prominent looking glass right before our eyes, where we're compelled to notice and analyze our lives as they happen, potentially causing more narrating than living. Smart businesses capitalize on your vanity; absorbing your narration, converting it to data and, ideally, responding with an affirmation that you've been recognized in order to kickstart the cycle again. We are in a worldwide focus group, except we don't know when we're being watched (assume: always).

When you go through the looking glass to observe the unfiltered world, you get truly honest data. These are, as Jesse Gross of Semphonic put it, unsampled, unsimplified, real-world totals. How many marketers have yearned to be a fly on the wall, gaining real insight into the perception of their product? Sally Falkow pointed out that while that used to be a dream, it's now a standard and fundamental tool at our disposal.

Transparency = Authenticity

The social landscape has no hiding and no gatekeeping. There exists unfettered creativity, constant interaction and complete visibility. Not only do mistakes and issues refuse to be buried, they are frequently propelled to viral fame. People love to promote inspiration and discourage deception. En masse via social media, they have the power to do both.

To encourage a positive response, initiate a positive emotion. To dispel disparaging accusations, admit wrongdoing and offer to make amends. Don't deny or deflect, because authenticity earns respect, not avoidance. The consumer holds grudges, and is pretty damn wary of being deceived.

We're Not Kidding Around Anymore

The truth is, the Internet is social by nature. Whatever persona we thought this phenomenon would embody, that's where it has gone. Social interaction is woven into the technology, as it serves to provide worldwide connectivity. Policing connectivity by attaching each interaction to a real, live person is what social media does. That has the added bonus of making each interaction valuable and measurable, rather than ambiguous or distant (like an impression or a visitor).  Like the average social media user, responding to your emotions is not only innate, but useful. Merging intuition with data should make for a pretty effective combination.

About the Author

Matt traveled here from the 1950's in a time machine made from an old jukebox, and now spends his days staring in wonder at all of the awe-inspiring innovations that clutter the digital age.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com