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?

We think there is a paradigm shift  happening in marketing’s market conversation–a change from the concepts of just social media marketing to conversation marketing–strategic and tactical ways in which a company chooses to participate/engage/interact in the market conversation. As opposed to the typical definition of Social Media Marketing, Conversation Marketing focuses on building mutually beneficial relationships with Influencers; responding to market conversation topics and initiating topics that do not include traditional marketing messages; extrapolating market conversation content to utilize as company/product proof points and to counter sales objections; and internalizing the market conversation for business growth.

We hope to have the rest of the series out soon. Enjoy!

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.

Everyone is talking about it these days.

What is it?  Ways a company should use it. Even why companies should not tweet. 

Friday, it truly entered the mainstream..

Oprah has entered the Twitterverse.

Even before her first tweet, Oprah had more than 73,000 followers. Hours later, that number has nearly doubled. Twitter itself has been experiencing phenomenal membership growth.

So people are asking…

Will this be the demise of Twitter?

I don’t think Twitter is going away any time soon. People will just change how they interact with it.

Even though I don’t follow hundreds of people, I sometimes get overwhelmed with the number of tweets I go through daily. There is a lot of noise out there. Once the ‘Oprah Effect’ fully takes its course, the noise will be exponential.

I’m sure there will be more and more ways for customizing and filtering tweets for people to get through the noise. (Just look how RSS has done that for other types of content.)

That’s only part of the equation of filtering the noise.

The other part…reputation.

One of the people I follow Twitter regularly adds value and tweets about product experiences, movies, events, music, and other things that are interesting and/or helpful. This person captures my attention. I typically will read every tweet this person writes.  

One the other hand, one of my other friends on Twitter writes mostly about what they had for breakfast/lunch/dinner (or other things that add no value). After reading their tweets over the past few weeks, I now skip reading their tweets

(even though technically I’m still a ‘follower’).

Reading tweets on my phone, I use this simple filtering system:

People who regularly write interesting tweets = Pay attention.

People who don’t = Skip/Ignore.

I’m sure a lot of you do exactly the same thing.

The reason I mention it is that it illustrates why just joining the conversation is not enough. It’s about adding value to the market conversation.

Companies that listen to what’s being said, contribute with (non-marketing-speak) content that people want to respond to, comment and share their views will build a strong reputation – breaking through the increasing noise. This will also enhance their relationship with their prospects and customers and help position them as a quality participant in the market conversation.

In doing all this… companies will actually be able to reap the benefits of the upcoming ‘Oprah Effect’.

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.

I posed the question in two groups: 1) Technology Marketing Community and 2) On Startups (I was hoping to find recommendations on some startup companies.) Here is what I received in response from these community groups:

• A total of 9 comments posted: 8 were NOT recommendations, they were all sales pitches directly from providers and 1 was a “recommendation” but from someone who has a vested interest in the company they recommended.
• 10 inmail messages directly to me: All 10 were sales pitches
• 7 phone calls: They tracked down my business number and, you guessed it, all were sales pitches.

My first reaction is to ignore them all, but I am looking for someone to do this work. I’m quite bummed that not one of my marketing peers looked to help me out with a recommendation, but perhaps my interests would be best served to go find reviews of companies instead of seeking advice from peers who are busy trying to find recommendations for their work.

What’s your opinion on the sales pitches? Is it detremental to the group if sales people are trolling for prospects this way and they all pounce when they see a chance? If I had turned to a web development community group and asked the question there I would expect that the members of that group would come back saying they offer that type of work. But I went to a marketing and a startup business group to ask for recommendations, not sales pitches.

I enjoy participating and listening to the groups I’m a member of, but this type of experience reduces my enthusiasm.

What do you think? Is it a positive marketing or sales approach to troll for leads this way?