Social Marketing Conversations

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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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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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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In our previous episodes of this interview with Andrew Pickup, Chief Marketing Officer for Microsoft in Asia Pacific we’ve learned about the 3 digital networks that are an integral part of the marketing campaigns that Andrew and his team work with.  We also caught a glimpse of the tools and tactics they use to manage the 100’s of thousands of posts in social media that are made about them every day and in the last podcast, Andrew talked about the challenges the culture, communications infrastructure and geography pose for him in managing the far-flung reaches of his region.

In this episode Andrew shares that the best ROI for Microsoft in social marketing come from the owned and operated media network they manage.  With over 650 million visitors a month to their owned and operated media assets (Bing, Windows Live, etc.), it easily represents the best place for Microsoft of promote and market their own products and services – but how do they get people there?

The flow of consumer awareness and engagement goes from the paid media Microsoft can buy, which helps create interest and engagement in consumers who produce their own content about Microsoft (both good and not so good) in the earned media network and ultimately, the engagement will draw consumers to Microsoft’s owned and operated media network where again, they can best represent the brand and products they sell to consumers and businesses.

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A small business or individual can get a pretty good handle on their social presence with a few of the low or no cost tools our there; Tweetdeck, Seesmic (my favorite) or Sobees come to mind right away.  When your brand gets hundred of millions of comments, posts, tweets, re-tweets and more your talking about a whole different ballgame however.

Andrew Pickup is the Chief Marketing Officer for Microsoft Corporation for the Asia Pacific region, based out of Singapore and in part one of this series we uncovered the 3 digital networks that Microsoft looks to for their online and off-line marketing.

In this episode Andrew shares the tactics and tools Microsoft AsiaPac uses in the tracking the “Earned Media” of which social media is a big part.  These are tools that need to be able to encompass hundreds of millions of people making posts, tweets and the sentiment of the comments made everyday.

As far as tactics, Andrew and his team divide the stream into managed and unmanaged, or rather those posts that warrant a deeper engagement versus those in which an ‘aggregated’ engagement is more appropriate.

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Andrew Pickup is the Chief Marketing Officer for Microsoft Corporation in the Asia Pacific Region.  We were very excited to get the opportunity to speak with Andrew and find out about the work they are doing in Asia Pacific.  Joining Guy Powell and myself for the interview also was our co-author, Jerry Dimos of LiTMUS Group in Singapore.  Good to have you on the call Jerry!

We begin our interview with Andrew as he shares a few bullets from his presentation at the recent ad:tech conference in Singapore on the Windows7 Launch.  The campaign focused on the aspect of the development of Windows7 that leverage consumer input and ideas and with 8 million beta users, the campaign put real users in front of consumer in a way that helped people to see themselves in the role of “I’m a PC and Windows7 was my idea’”.  The campaign was a great success for Microsoft and helped support the worldwide launch very effectively.

Microsoft’s approach to social marketing comes from a perspective that they should be a leader in social media and able to engage very effectively.  With 93 of out every 100 PC’s sold coming with the Microsoft operating systems and the majority of people are buying a PC today to connect to the Internet, most computer systems today present an opportunity to connect consumers with their social media presence.

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Social media applied to business is marketing and we’re seeing the use of the phrase ‘social marketing’ being used more and more by marketers – we agree.  Dan Marks and the gang at First Tennessee Bank are at the forefront of testing and learning what works best in social media.

Dan’s day-to-day concern is the question of “am I missing something that might be important?”.  Based on what we heard during the interview, I do not think so.  Dan shared an example of something that could not see the ROI on and they decided to test it.  They placed an ad on a job hunting site – the job site was a social site for sure,  but as it turned out job hunters were not good banking prospects.  So they ceased the campaign.

The team at FTB keep an eye on the acceptance by consumers of messages by brands in social media.  If they sense that social media participants begin to actively resent overt advertising and marketing, it might impact the ability of the bank of adopt social elements more deeply.  Social is merging with traditional and fast becoming a feature of ‘Web3.0’.  Dan sees that consumers will be able to interact in social regardless of the platform they use to connect to the web.

According to Dan, the issue for marketers advertising with social is a leverage point; if you got a good product people will know about it, likewise if you have a bad product, people will know about it.  Product flaws and operational errors in the organization will be discovered and commented on, not in attempt to be derogatory, but possibly just a way to be more helpful.  The ability to hide from the conversations is not feasible any longer; you’ll be a part of the conversation whether you decide to participate or not – how you decide to respond will impact the brand.  Participation can enhance your brand, while ignoring the discussion will not.

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