So, full disclosure on this post, the new collaborative networking tool I’m talking about is RGlobe and I am engaged with RGlobe as a consultant on their marketing communications. But I would still endorse the product concept even if I wasn’t working with them as they’ve hit on something really terrific for sales professionals.

Though they haven’t officially launched, RGlobe is working with their first enterprise customers and several analysts are extremely excited about the product. (Check out this upcoming event on October 7 with Forrester Analyst Tim Harmon in which the RGlobe CEO will be participating: Emerging Technology Trends for Channel Sales and Partner Marketing.)

RGlobe is the first company to offer enterprises a private collaborative selling network that allows their sales professionals in-house to network and collaborate on deals with their partner companies. Partner leveraging has long been an issue with channel partnership models because of inefficient processes and security risks in sharing information across partner sales teams. RGlobe addresses these issues with their private collaborative selling network allowing users to connect and communicate across their partnerships for real-time collaboration.

An enterprise builds their private collaborative RGlobe network and invites their partners to join. That enterprise then  instantly increases its social capital by expanding its prospecting funnel to include all their partners who they now have connectivity with through the RGlobe Network.  All of the sales and biz dev professionals within the enterprise company are now aligned by account coverage and competency with all of their counterparts at each partner. But the prospecting funnel expansion is mutually exclusive. The partner companies benefit from being on the enterprise’s RGlobe Collaborative Selling Network because they are able to connect, communicate and collaborate with the enterprise’s internal social capital pool, but they have no access to any of the enterprises other partners on the Network. Only the enterprise’s sales teams are able to connect with others across all their partners within the RGlobe Network, thus increasing the number of individuals they can now connect and communicate with considerably.

RGlobe utilizes many of the common social networking features to allow users across partnerships to collaborate efficiently and effectively. For sales professionals, being able to connect with their partners sales pros who sell into the same companies and industries offers terrific potential for them to share information with each other that will help them close deals. The RGlobe solution also encourages and facilitates the assisting of other users with User Incentive Recognition and a Trust and Value Rating System. It’s very much a Whuffie Factor enabler! And if you read my blog often you know I’m a big believer of the Whuffie Factor concepts.

Check out RGlobe for yourself. RGlobe will also be in San Francisco during Oracle Open World later this month–they’re taking meetings with companies interested in viewing RGlobe.

Yes. Smart marketers will find a way. It’s not a matter of jumping on the bandwagon with the unknown destination…it’s a matter of using conversation marketing with existing content to increase your page rankings, improve your SEO, or better target your leads…which conversation marketing done the right way does.

So yes, Mrs. CMO — you do have to include Conversation Marketing in your marketing strategies…well, if you want to increase your SEO and rankings, yes you do.

How do you fund conversation marketing or social media initiatives?

1) Conversation Marketing is Comprehensive, Social Media Marketing is Not

If you’re new to the blog you’re probably wondering why the quotes appear around “social media marketing.” It’s because we (my partners and I at Idiom Strategies and more marketing thought leaders every day) consider social media technologies/sites/outlets to be tools and/or conversation locations. Noise is noise no matter where you have it. The main goal of conversation marketing is to stop creating noise and start interacting in the market conversation with quality content. Here’s a BtoB Magazine article with some great advice for Conversation Marketing (not just social media as the article title suggests): 5 tips for b-to-b social media marketing.

2) Not Every Company Needs Every Conversation Tool or Location

Just because it is there does not mean your company needs to do it. Another BtoB Magazine article that caught my attention is B-to-B followers flock to Twitter. This article is one of the better pieces I’ve seen about using social media tools/locations, and it’s helpful whether your are BtoB or BtoC. The article mentions how some companies are using the social media tool Twitter to converse with current customers AND watch what is being said about them in the market conversation (or at least in the Twitter feeds.)

“Twitter is just another tool we have in our marketing toolbox to create another way for us to communicate with our customers,” said Scott Townsend, United Linen’s marketing director. “I am careful to use the word “with’ because social media is fantastic for giving us the opportunity to not only send information but, more important, receive information from our customers and employees.”
“Businesses need to be careful when using social media outlets such as Twitter because they tend to want to start selling stuff now,” Townsend said.
“But Twitter is more about creating and furthering a relationship with a customer, becoming a resource to them and showing yourself [to be] available to provide solutions.”

This guy get’s it. Interacting with the market conversation means actually having a conversation with them that is mutually beneficial. Don’t market AT people, talk with them and they’ll be far more likely to listen to you and be interested in what you offer.

The thing this article is missing is that companies should look beyond just searching Twitter and the entire Internet for mentions of their company or products. If you define your market conversation space well enough, you’ll be able to extract conversation content that can be used as vendor-neutral proof points for your sales team to use. Also, your R&D department can get a big boost by understanding what is at the heart of the market conversation ecosystems needs and wants–valuable insight into further product developments.

3) Identifying the Right Influencers to Interact with is Key

The idea of targeting certain demographics groups was revolutionary in it’s time and with it came the flood of ways to identify your perfect audience and serve them your marketing bullet points. But with so much noise out there, even if you hit a location that attracts your perfect audience, they’re ignoring your marketing fluff. As technologies move forward and people weed through the noise, the better approach is to identify the Influencers who are driving your market conversation. In the article Making Social Networks Pay Part 1, writer Ned Madden discusses the challenges of social media networks and tools developing “sustainable and scalable business model that can satisfactorily monetize the vast ecosystem of the social networks.”

Madden mentions profile data extraction and mapping services, brand monitoring and network analysis tools and marketing automation options. Companies offering these things are popping up like mad, right now, and many of them are really terrific for gathering info, but simple demographics don’t work anymore. People don’t care about products, they care about their wants and needs–that is what they want addressed regardless of where they go to listen to the market conversation. So the prudent thing is for companies to spend the effort to Identify the Influencers who are driving the market conversation around fulfilling ecosystems wants and needs. Interact with those individuals in the conversation locations they use and build a relationship with them through the conversation tools they choose to use. By doing this, companies will be seen by the other conversation Participants and the vast number of Listeners who look to those influencers for purchase advice.

The benefits to joining the conversation are many. Some of the best sales tools and product features ideas can come from participants who take the time to offer feedback. This provides valuable user generated content to help drive your business and most important, been able to extract content to offset sales objection. However, the prevalent benefit I see is that providing a platform for your customers and prospects, and leveraging that feedback in the form of actionable insight for product, marketing and sales strategy on an ongoing basis. Remember, this does not give companies a license to plastering their marketing messages in the different social media locations. Your customers and prospects are looking to fulfill their wants and needs, provide relevant information, NOT your products and services marketing pitch.

More importantly, companies will find that they become an increasingly important player in their industry, an influencer themselves when they become a trusted advisor. They will find that surprising and disruptive opportunities materialize that would never have been there if they hadn’t been engaged in the market conversation.

To actively participate in the conversation require an ongoing investment of employee time and effort, but the benefits can be tremendous:
• Build relationships with influencers
• Raise meaningful industry topics
• Increase brand visibility
• Increase direct inquires that are also more qualified leads
• Increase sales
• Increase sales win ratios
• Increase customer retention
• Reduce impact from negative user-generated content
• Decrease market research costs
• Increase equity of your created content

Join this conversation and share with us on why B2B companies should participate in the market conversation. I will share the “how” in my next blog post.