Social Marketing Conversations

The opportunity to speak with the global Director of the Small to Medium Business Division for Dell was a chance to get some insight into how a Global 500 company leverages social media to market their products and services to both the business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) and our time with Michael Buck was no disappointment.

Michael is the Director and General Manager for the Global Small and Medium Online Business at Dell, and is responsible for the overall online business and strategy for Dell SMB worldwide.  When he spoke with us from his offices in Stuttgart Germany, Guy Powell and I were able to find out a great deal about how Dell manages and measures their social marketing and their online presence.

In our first episode, we learned about the Four Pillars of the online marketing strategy they employ and in episode 2 we heard about the five Customer Value Drivers and the five key metrics they apply to measure the success of their online efforts.  In our last episode, Michael shared how Dell works hard to present a broad offering of online communities and communications options to support the B2B and B2C initiatives and to give customers a chance to have their voices heard and to drive the innovations in products and services they want to invest in from Dell.

In this episode, we wrap up the conversation with Michael with him sharing how Dell is absolutely committed to social media as a fundamental tactic because they see success in it and they see how well the customer base responds to it.  He also points out that the massive increase in social engagements in other geographies, away from North America, to other regions that including Brazil, Russia, India and elsewhere.

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The team at Dell really gets social media in its various applications for the enterprise.  From monitoring the social media ecosphere for customer support issues, to creating $19M in revenue via sales connections made on Twitter.  Blogging, micro-blogging, forums and online social networks are all part of the Dell toolset.  There is no doubt though that the processes developed by the Dell people are firmly rooted in an ROI strategy that demands efficiency. 

In previous episodes we met Michael Buck, who is the Director and General Manager for the Global Small and Medium Online Business at Dell, responsible for the overall online business and strategy for Dell SMB worldwide.  He spoke with us from his offices in Stuttgart Germany and first told us about the Four Pillars of the online effort at Dell that are a part of everything they do.

In our last episode, Michael shared how the approach differs for a business-to-business (B2B) customer versus a business-to-consumer (B2C) customer and how they make sure the top Customer Value Drivers are embedded in their tactics.  In that episode he also shares what the top five metrics are that they apply to their online marketing and social media efforts – all really great information.

In this episode, Michael declares that ‘Marketing is the New Finance’ because with the power of social marketing, Dell is able to affect both the revenue and the expenses of the organization.  He tells us that eCommerce is not the beginning of a relationship with their customers – it is an outcome of the relationship they build via the online elements they deploy to connect to their customers.  Michael goes on to share that they have been benchmarking social tactics versus traditional and find that social elements are so powerful that, in the SMB education they provide to their customers, in some cases social elements warrant a clear consideration to perhaps flat out replace some traditional components.

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In our last episode we met Michael Buck and he shared with us the Four Pillars Dell relies on for their online presence.  This is a presence that has supported millions of dollars annually in revenue and support call center avoidance.

In this episode Michael suggest that while there are distinct differences in employing social media to connect to the business-to-consumers (B2C) and the business-to-business (B2B) audience, both groups benefit from the engagement between the vendor and other customers.

What Michael shares with us is that the B2B sector is not as active or engaged in popular social media platforms as B2C and that B2B requires a bit more facilitation to get them to interact and participate.  What he also tells us is that there is a much broader set of influencers and decision makers in a company setting that need to be addressed and that Dell deploys a broader set of communication tools in the effort to reach them.

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So far in this series of podcasts we have had truly powerful participants from businesses all over the world and we look forward to many more as we continue to explore what works and does not work in measuring and managing the Return On Investment (ROI) of social media for business; what we refer to as social marketing.

One of the big names that always comes to mind for social marketing success is Dell Computers.  They adopted social media early on for a number of reasons, primary of which is the belief that listening to a customers wants and needs is the best way to market to them.  It has not always been perfect – the ‘Dell Hell’ posts by Jeff Jarvis on the BuzzMachine.com was a wake up call back in the 2005 and it seemed to get Dell to invest more heavily in tools like Twitter.

The headquarters for Dell is in Round Rock, Texas, just outside of Austin.  Austin is the host city for an annual event that showcases the best in social media, South by Southwest (SXSW), which is an art & technology event that many social media participants and technology providers launch new products and capabilities – Twitter was debuted there in 2006.  So being near ground zero in social media may have had an impact as well.

Dell has been regularly referred to in case studies too,  many of which point at the $19M in revenue they attribute to the social media effort and others point at the call deflection that saves them millions in customer support costs – with all that history, we could not wait to get a chance to talk with Dell about their social media programs.

Our co-author Jerry Dimos of LiTMUS Group in Singapore helped set up the call and it was a great pleasure to talk with and interview Michael Buck who is the Director and General Manager for the Global Small and Medium Online Business at Dell, responsible for the overall online business and strategy for Dell SMB worldwide from his offices in Stuttgart Germany.

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Esmee Williams is the VP of Brand Strategy for AllRecipes.com, the largest online community for food and home entertainment.  How they achieved that position, what they’re doing in social media, how they measure their ROI and what they see coming up is what we’ve had the pleasure to discuss with Esmee in this series of podcast episodes, all part of the ROI of Social Media series.  In our last episode, Esmee shared how they work with the brands from various Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) companies to support efforts to connect with the AllRecipes community on their site.

In this episode, Esmee tells us that in the food world people tend to use traditional media because the format (print) is ideal for use in the kitchen and for casual reading – the typical consumption pattern for food and entertainment content.  Esmee and the team are keeping an eye on devices like the iPad and how they impact that model.  What Esmee sees is that there are two modes of use the device bridges – one mode of usage is the casual reading we just covered and the other is when a user makes a search on specific ingredients, usually indicating they are looking to prepare a meal for those ingredients.  Both are common with their member / user base and they want to make sure they address the different user models regardless of platform.

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It’s still frequent that companies do not want to invest in a robust communication strategy with their consumers via a social media presence.  Sometimes they do not understand the channel, the ROI behind it or they may still believe it’s only a fad and will not stay around much longer.

Esmee Williams, VP of Brand Strategy for AllRecipes.com, and her team have seen it before too as they work with brands from Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) companies.  In previous episodes we have heard Esmee share tips on how AllRecipes.com grew to become the worlds largest food and recipe site in the world, the way they tailor the presentation of content for the platform the user opts to access the sit with and in the last episode she told us about the most important metrics they use to track what is or is not a successful effort.

In this episode, Esmee tells us about the two types of social media campaign categories they manage at AllRecipes – one for programs off the AllRecipes site and the other for efforts based in the AllRecipes site.  The on-site efforts are often campaigns for a CPG company where they integrate the brands content into the site, supporting an opportunity to connect with members in a peer-to-peer relationship.  Esmee states that a peer-to-peer type connection is better because people want to be spoken with, not spoken to – we agree.

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Social interactions provides a draw for AllRecipes.com cooks off the site and provides a bit more distraction, but they do not displace anything they are doing.  Integrating AllRecipes.com into the social media ecosphere however does help to extend the brand experience, ala a Facebook Fan Page and a Twitter presence that spans not only AllRecipes.com news, but country specific IDs for Australia / New Zealand, Quebec, the UK, Nederland, and France.

In our last episode, Esmee Williams, VP of Brand Strategy shared ideas about the way they tailor the presentation of content for the platform the user opts to access the sit with.  In the first episode, we met Esmee and she gave us tips on how AllRecipes.com grew to become the worlds largest food and recipe site in the world.

What’s the most important metric for AllRecipes?

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Esmee Williams is adding a dash of social media into AllRecipes.com and a few teaspoons of social marketing.  In our last episode we heard from Esmee Williams, VP of Brand Marketing at AllRecipes, that household cooks all across America have been using the site since 1997, well before social media was in vogue but in a very social way.  The growth of the site to become the worlds largest recipe and food-oriented site was due to word-of-mouth and consumers just telling other consumers.  The effect is over 16M visitors a month and over 3.6M paid members.

In this episode Esmee shares that since then , the consumers interest in social media has only driven more and more growth for their vertically oriented community site.  The primary challenge for Esmee and her team are in meeting the expectations of the consumers by adding just the right tools and capabilities that make the content more useful and meaningful to the primary audience at AllRecipes – busy Moms needing quick, delicious recipes.

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AllRecipes.com is the worlds largest online recipe site on the web with 3.6M members and over 16M visitors every month.  For those of you who don’t know AllRecipes.com, it is the world’s largest social network of food and entertaining enthusiasts.

They get more than 390 million annual visits from home cooks and everybody is sharing recipes, reviews, photos, personal profiles and meal ideas.

In this interview episode we meet Esmee Williams, Vice President of Brand Marketing, who has facilitated the development of AllRecipes.com brand from the start-up phase to today with award-winning dedication and creativity in the area  of brand strategy and new product development.  She has been the power behind the concept and development of many of AllRecipe’s most successful partner integrations, marketing and promotional programs to date.

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I found and used Andrew Pickup’s Twitter ID (@AndrewPickup) profile in the recording where he introduced himself as “Husband, father, friend, and colleague; currently Chief Marketing Officer for Microsoft in Asia-Pacific; a bad-golfer, dangerous-skier, and a frequent-traveler; lives in Singapore, works anywhere.”

He has since updated it to read “Husband, Father, Microsoft, Marketing, Asia-Pacific, Singapore, British, Golf, Ski-ing, Travel, Kids, Fun. Not necessarily in that order…”.

The the changes I think reflects a perspective that, like the rest of us, his and Microsoft’s social media presence is an ever evolving aspect of daily life (at least is golf is no longer bad and his skiing is no longer dangerous!)

We were really grateful to have corralled Andrew for a about a half hour to conduct this interview via overseas long-distance, so while the recording quality is so-so, the content has been tremendous.

In previous episodes Andrew introduced us to the concept of the 3 digital networks that Microsoft work with and we heard about the tools and tactics they use to manage the 100’s of thousands of posts that are made about them every day.  Andrew has also talked about the challenges the culture, communications infrastructure and geography pose for him in managing the far-flung reaches of his region and in episode 4 yesterday, Andrew took us through the path that a consumer might follow to the digital network that delivers the best ROI for Microsoft in AsiaPac – the owned and operated network of Microsoft’s own online media assets.

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