Crisis in the concept house

I recently had a conversation with a prospective client regarding possible topics for a workshop at their up and coming annual conference. The conference was for a network of business partners from all over the world. My initial idea was to bring up the case for social media in a B2B environment. To my surprise the client thought about it for a while and came to the conclusion that social media really didn’t have any relevance to a B2B audience. I didn’t pursue the matter, but it did leave me questioning myself.

I knew that social media already formed an important part of many B2C companies marketing programs aimed at reaching a consumer market but I really had to go off and do a bit of research to convince myself that my idea was indeed a valid one in a B2B environment.

Paradise regained

It turned out that I didn’t have to dig too deep or Google too hard to come across plenty of musings, blogs, news articles, forum posts and industry journals confirming my assumption that Social Media was already in the hearts and minds of B2B marketers.

I confess a mental sigh of relief, however this was immediately replaced by thoughts about why the client had been so quick to dismiss this topic.

In my initial findings one statistic that was quite revealing was that in a recent B2B industry survey, 46% of the respondents reported that the perception that social media was irrelevant was an important internal obstacle in getting social media initiatives approved.

Have you checked in?

Perhaps the perceived view of social media in certain industries is limited to the recreational aspects of Facebook, Myspace and Foursquare. I acknowledge that having your Facebook page ‘liked’ or your YouTube video viewed thousands of times doesn’t necessarily translate to increase sales and will never convince company bean counters to part with their marketing cash. The metrics for measuring the success of a social media campaign have always been a contentious point (a MacDonalds Foursquare campaign that ran in 2010 is a contender for this dubious award), with increased web traffic being the most commonly used metric. But like most marketing fields there are dozens of social media tools at our disposal and I would never recommend that a client use all of them.

This seems familiar

I knew that if I had ever got to present this workshop, the first thing I would have needed to explain to the delegates was simply what the hell all this social media talk was all about. The first thing I would point out is that social media extends well beyond their teenage kids updating their Facebook statuses. Here’s how the very ‘social media’ online encyclopaedia wiki puts it:

“Social media marketing programs usually center on efforts to create content that attracts attention, generates online conversations, and encourages readers to share it with their social networks. The message spreads from user to user and presumably resonates because it is coming from a trusted source, as opposed to the brand or company itself.”

The fact that these delegates from all around the world were gathered together to meet, compare industry experiences, foster new relationships and reinforce relationships with existing partners was without doubt simply a real life social media event happening in the first person. Social media is all about con­ver­sa­tional mar­ket­ing and so in essence it’s not new to them at all, they have been doing it most of their working lives.

I would have asked them why they were there and what they hoped to achieve whilst at the conference or what they would like to take back with them when they returned to their companies. I would try to convince them that these are the same values and business commodities that the modern digitised social media platform is able to deliver only in a much wider, quicker and efficient way.

People buy Expertise

Each of the delegates would have been there as a representative of the expertise their company offers in a specific field, and that after all is what people buy. People buy expertise. This is probably the main difference between how B2B business operates as apposed to B2C companies. On a consumer level you might buy an object because of its features or taste, but B2B sales tend to be driven by demonstrating some type of expertise in a particular field, service or industry sector you are in. With this in mind it becomes clearer why using social media effectively is a real asset to boosting B2B sales. If you can demonstrate your expertise through social media, you can have a measurable impact on your sales efforts.

One of the main benefits of social media is its high visibility and its ability to make your expertise widely available to your audience.

Don’t I know you?

The relationships that are fostered and forged through social media networks are already more familiar to a B2B company than they are to a B2C company. B2B businesses have had these relationships for years and understand them more fully. Whereas B2C companies are forever chasing the relationship, trying to coax new levels of interaction and brand trust from their mercurial target markets.

With Google now spidering and referencing sites like Twitter and LinkedIn (a perfect example of a truly B2B social networking site) and creative link building via online PR and social media having grown increasingly more important as a part of SEO optimization, the science of search marketing is increasingly becoming more reliant on social media. And although it appears that B2B companies have been slower to get on board the social media train, perhaps it is because they have been more cautious in their approach, more selective about their social media tools, and rightly so. After all social media in this context is all about the critical few rather than the masses.

To be or not B2B?

I’m not sure I have made a cast iron case for Social Media in the B2B workplace where my client is concerned and perhaps those particular delegates would have just stared back at me blankly, but perhaps I have opened a few doors of possibilities. But next time you doubt whether social media is right for B2B com­pa­nies, think about what B2B strat­egy is all about: It is about the rela­tion­ships and part­ner­ships you build with your colleagues, and there’s no easier way to do this today than through social media.

Did I mention it’s cheap too?

Social media in B2B is all about the ‘know’ rather than the ‘sell’. People are getting jaded by the generic marketing push and are becoming increasingly attracted to the personalized approach. It’s already a far more social activity than B2C commerce as it is built entirely around relationships, trust, passion and knowledge. So if you are a B2B company, get out there share your knowledge and demonstrate your expertise.

Finally here are a couple of throwaway stats you can impress social media naysayers with:
Intel has 220,000 Facebook fans and they don't sell chips to consumers. IBM has 139 official Twitter accounts and they don't sell to consumers either.

Regardless of business size, selecting a partner to help develop your search marketing can be a confusing and at best daunting experience. To the uninitiated, SEO at best can appear like a dark art and this perception is certainly not helped by the shroud of secrecy that Google keeps about the true nature of their engine. This quick guide, although by no means exhaustive, is aimed to help business decision make an informed decision when choosing the right agency to work on a SEO project.

Black, white and grey hats – the importance of ethical SEO

A problem, particularly for small businesses, is that there is still what can be best described as cowboys operating, often making wild claims of getting your company to the top position of Google within weeks. Although, a part of SEO has historically been about reverse engineering the search engines algorithms to perform better than your competitors, there is a dividing line between what is considered acceptable. What at first may appear to gain you a short term boost in rankings can often run the risk of having your website removed from the search engine index indefinitely.

Black hat techniques are sometimes referred to as search engine spamming. One example is repeating an important keyphrase many times on the home page. Another is using text that is the same colour as the background of the page, so the keyphrase is visible to the search robots but not to the human reader. Engineering pages for robots is a practice known as “cloaking”. Other well-known examples are doorway and visibly optimised pages and the use of link-farms.

Such approaches should always be avoided if you care about long-term success. Only ever talk to a search optimiser who wears a white hat (although many may wear a grey one). A white hat approach uses an ethical approach that conforms to best practice set out by the search engines. A good rule of thumb is to ask yourself  “Does this aspect of a search imitative make the visitor experience or the way the brand is presented better or worse”.

Always ask a potential agency of examples of how they achieved success for clients. If they don’t list ethical techniques such as Keyword Analysis, On Page Optimisation, and SEO Link Building and above all creating relevant and engaging content head for the hills.

Does size matter?

Big brands tend to naturally choose one of the bigger, better known SEO agencies. Large agencies will have a higher daily rate but will have the experience of delivering results and their size gives them the chance to hire staff with a wide variety of skills. Change is constant in this world, so the more time a company can dedicate to staff education the better. In smaller agencies, a lot of time will be spent simply learning on the job and their time may be split between several clients.

However, there is also a risk with selecting a large search-marketing agency. If a client is relatively low value, then they may get less attention from account managers and may not get the best available SEO technicians. A smaller company may also have the motivation to go the extra mile to help build reputation so big doesn’t always equate to better. The final decision will usually be dictated by size of budget but remember SEO is a long term strategy and most agencies will insist on a minimum contract period of 6 to 12 months, with appropriate exit clauses.

Get with the program

Search marketing is a hugely dynamic discipline; what is accepted practice today can be outdated by the next. Although it is an exciting time to be involved in the sector, more and more search practitioners are being left behind, adhering to what used to work and sticking with habits even if they don’t produce tangible results. But how do you tell the search-marketing dinosaurs apart from the more progressive and cutting edge professionals? The following is a quick overview of some of the tell tale signs.

Too much emphasis on keyword density

Keyword or keyphrase density remains a useful SEO technique. It aims to sensibly place key search terms into your web copy (typically repeated to a predestined percentage). But over reliance on density of keywords is a far too simplistic method to estimate what is a hugely complicated process carried out by all the engines to determine the relevance of page content.

What are more important is context, relevance and meaning. Consider the following scenario; Google has two different pages to consider when returning search results for the term The Rolling Stones.  One has the phrase Rolling Stones but in context of a scientific study of the rate of movement of rocks down a mountainside, the other is a biopic of the rock group containing relevant words such as Mick Jagger etc – you get the picture. We can safely assume that the page that ranks higher will be the latter. As a search engine’s value is measured by the relevance of its results to the users intention, it must judge content not by how many times a word appears but the content of the supporting copy. Therefore, creating expert copy that uses relevant and authoritative language will always be far more important part of an overall strategy rather than simply repeating certain words.

They don’t mention creating content for your site

“Content is king” has always been the mantra of search professionals although not everyone practices what they preach. Alarm bells should start to ring if an agency doesn’t display a creative approach to adding new and compelling content to your site. Search engines just love regularly updated content, and tools such as blogs are one of the best vehicles for achieving this (it also generates extra content from contributors).

Don’t have an integrated approach to Link Building/Online PR

Although link building has long been a central to any SEO strategy, gone are the days when the accumulation of large volumes of inbound links was a fruitful exercise. Gaining relevant inbound links from high-ranking websites requires an approach that is truly multi-disciplinary and collaboration with your PR team is pre-requisite for any successful natural search campaign. Specific promotions, for example, should focus on seeding content throughout a wide range of targeted websites and a variety of other online channels such as social media and news aggregators.

Lack of in-depth tracking and reporting

Constant reporting is crucial to the DNA of SEO. In order to assess and measure the relative success of any campaign, monthly reports historically normally show page rank for a wide variety of targeted keyphrases with associated conversion rates.  However, when assessing path to conversion metrics, most tracking software fails to give a true picture of user journey. For example, a sale may be attributed to a click from an affiliate banner ad or PPC ad without showing that the same user may have previously found the same product via an organic search. Without using the latest, most sophisticated tracking software, crucial information is usually missing that would otherwise let us see the true performance of your organic traffic.  

Of course, by the time you probably read this current thinking would have probably moved on…