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This six-part series of Webinars unveils a proven framework designed to help BtoB marketers understand today's technology and best practices for online lead generation.
Next Up: Developing a Powerful Message for Your Lead-Generation Campaigns
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June 2007, Issue 40 |
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Content, Conversation and Community: Leveraging Social Media for Lead Generation
By Christopher Kenton, President of MotiveLab
With so much hype surrounding social media, the question smart marketers are asking is how to leverage blogs, wikis, consumer-generated content and other types of social media to meet tangible business objectives, such as generating leads. Many companies are waiting on the sidelines until the answer becomes clear. Others are jumping in just to be on the innovation bandwagon, with no clear sense of direction for their latest podcast or foray into second life. Between those two extremes, savvy marketers are systematically experimenting with many different social media options to add to their lead-generation tool kit.
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The first thing to understand about social media is that it signifies a shift in marketing that is no longer driven by your carefully crafted and broadcast message. It's about content, conversation and community. It's not about blasting messages relentlessly through a series of channels to gather your 1.5% response. It's about listening to the conversation taking place in your market community and responding. In a very real sense, your market is now a networked community of customers, and technology has amplified the conversation to the point where people see more value in learning about your product from others like themselves than from your marketing campaigns. That means instead of blasting the market with pick-up lines, you need to listen to, engage and catalyze your customer community. If you do it well, your market will spread your message for you.
Find Your Hot Spots
The best place to begin is by finding out where your customer community is already gathering to talk about your market, and who is influencing the conversation. You can begin the process online by using some of the many new tools focused on searching through social content. You can search social bookmarks for keyword concepts related to your market on Del.icio.us or Ma.gnolia. You can search for recent blog postings on Technorati. You can search for news items related to your market that were highly rated by Web users at Reddit, Digg or Sphere. And when you're ready to start seriously tracking the flow of conversation and the impact of key influencers, you can check out tools like BuzzLogic and Factiva's Reputation Intelligence.
Listen Before You Launch
The point of all these tools is to find and track the influential hotspots where market conversations are percolating. Once you know who's driving the conversation and where, you can start to participate more effectively by listening first. What are people talking about? What issues are driving the discussion? If you have something meaningful to say, then jump in. But get engaged as an interested participant, not as a product shill. Imagine yourself being at a dinner party with friends. How would you feel about a salesman butting into your conversation to promote a product, or defend his brand against something you said, and then walking away to butt into the next group?
Design Your Campaign to Fit Your Community
Once your team is engaged with one or more of your market communities, lead-generation programs can be a lot more focused. You'll have a much better sense of which community hot spots are attracting traffic and driving conversations. A lead-gen campaign for a bike company at MySpace, for example, might focus on leveraging a big personality like Lance Armstrong to attract friends and drive links. A campaign at Mountain Bike Review Forum, with 60,000 dedicated cyclists, would be more product-focused, maybe organizing a demo ride. The program you put together should be designed to fit the community, and you'll only know how to do that well if you're engaged.
With any lead-generation campaign that engages an existing community, it's also important to connect with the facilitators of that community before you do any serious program. You should understand and respect any policies they might have about commercial campaigns on their networks. Some communities will have additional opportunities for sponsorship, or co-branded content, which might help you create a more effective campaign. If you're just interested in testing the waters to see how a community—particularly a large community—might pull in a broader campaign, you can often buy banner ads or adword campaigns that focus on particular sites so you can test the interest in program concepts.
Offer Opportunities for More Conversation
Finally, there's always the potential to use community development as a lead-generation program, rather than tapping into an existing community. Starbucks, for example, has been exploring a number of word-of-mouth campaigns, including their "Let's Meet At Starbucks: Invite a Friend" campaign, while many big brands like MTV are trying similar programs in virtual reality with Second Life. Initiatives like this make the campaign offer a socializing opportunity, and the possibilities are endless, for both retail and B2B companies.
Once you are oriented to your market community, campaign execution will look surprisingly familiar. It's still important as ever to have a compelling offer, a clear message and to test everything you can to continually improve effectiveness. The difference today is that you need to be much more transparent, honest and accountable in the ways you engage your market. Prospects aren't just individual "targets" to pick off like sitting ducks. They're members of a community where word travels fast.
Christopher Kenton is president of MotiveLab, a social marketing agency based in San Francisco, and is a long-time blogger on marketing strategy at Marketonomy.com.
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Marketing Watchdog Journal is a monthly newsletter from Bulldog Solutions, a lead optimization and lead management company dedicated to helping our clients generate more, better leads and turn them into revenue. We welcome your feedback on this newsletter's content and design, and encourage you to share your ideas for topics you would like us to cover in future issues. Please send your comments or questions about Bulldog Solutions to Amy Bills, senior manager of Field Marketing.
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