Social media and thought leadership: The virtuous circle for B2B marketing

As B2B marketers invest more money and time in both thought leadership and social media, they risk missing a great deal of potential benefit they can achieve by bringing the two together in a holistic way.

All too often, at least in my experience in the tech sector, marketers investing in thought leadership view social media primarily as a channel for disseminating content. 

They get the idea that social media is important, and that relying on traditional media channels (including email and websites) to promote their ideas is no longer enough. 

As such, they're beginning to slice and dice thought leadership content into blog posts, tweets, videos, and the like -- and use Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, SlideShare and other platforms to promote that content as widely as possible in the social sphere.

This all seems fine, but I think it's far too limited a view.

In fact, isn't this just a more refined version of the same old one-way broadcast mentality? Ponder big thoughts, maybe do some research, put together a presentation or white paper, and then release it to the world and wait for the acclaim and customer inquiries to come rolling in. 

"Going social" with content gives it a better chance of being seen, but a more collaborative approach to understanding customer issues and creating new Points of View before even creating any content greatly raises the chances that customers will actually care.

Socializing every aspect of the thought leadership process requires a more fundamental shift than just reformatting content and creating a longer checklist of places to publish. 

It means letting go of the notion that you have all the good thinking locked inside your organization, that you shouldn't publish anything until it provides all the answers, and that thought leadership is about you talking and customers listening. 

It means taking the zeitgeist of social media seriously, that it's not a "channel" at all, but a way of thinking and doing business based most of all on listening, sharing, and collaborating.

The reality is that lots of great thinking and experience lie outside your organization (to say the least), customers and partners want to collaborate in developing new approaches and solutions, and the best way to demonstrate expertise is to ask the right questions and facilitate ongoing conversation.

The virtuous circle of social media and thought leadership includes five main elements, discussed below:

 

1. Customer and market insight: Tapping social media and networks to dig deeper (and often faster) into the issues your customers and prospects really care about. This can begin as simply as using Google Reader and Google Alerts to follow important online conversations. It can be as sophisticated as using high-end monitoring and analytics services like Radian6 or Nielsen BuzzMetrics, organizing "Innovation Jams" like IBM, or building your own customer communities to ensure a steady flow of deep customer insight.
2. Collaborative Points of View: Rather than rely on a single expert or a purely internal team, why not work with customers and other stakeholders to craft a more relevant and compelling Point of View to undergird thought leadership content? Executive interviews, client roundtables, external working groups, academic and think tank partnerships can all be part of the thinking process, not simply vehicles to disseminate finished products. Social tools make these collaborations far easier and more affordable to manage.
3. Relevant routes to market: This is the area of marketers are already digging into, and with good reason. If you're NOT taking advantage of social tools and networks to disseminate your thought leadership content, you're missing an enormous opportunity to reach key stakeholders where they are increasingly spending their time searching for new ideas. The recent Forbes study, The Rise of the Digital C-Suite, is only one of a multitude of survey reports documenting that executives now rely on online search, video, and social networks as a core information source.  
4. Viral leverage: Your customers and prospects trust independent experts far more than company spokespeople, as Edelman's Trust Barometer shows every year, and gaining their support is far more likely to trigger social media sharing than anything you do directly. Identifying and reaching out constructively to the new influencers in your markets (bloggers, analysts, community managers, etc.) is now essential to thought leadership success.
5. Conversation and community: The old broadcast mode of thought leadership assumed a straight line from polished publication to customer inquiry to sales presentation. In a few rare cases of truly blockbuster ideas, this may even have worked. In today's vastly more networked world, customers want to chew over and debate your ideas at length -- and often without you even present. Inspiring, facilitating, and participating in the conversation is the right goal for thought leadership marketing, and using social platforms and communities is the best way to make this possible. Not incidentally, it's also the best way to gain deep and ongoing customer and market insight, which keeps the whole circle going.

Make sense? What do you think?

Comments

[Amber Naslund]

Rob -

Nice thinking here. I'm of the personal opinion that B2B social media is even MORE compelling and advantageous, given our longer sales cycle and the unwavering importance of establishing long term relationships and loyalty. It's a nurturing vehicle for all phases and touchpoints, and serves as an enhancement to the phone, email, dinners with clients or a round of golf. It's a communication touchpoint that serves many purposes, and I think B2B can reap enormous benefits if their intent is in the right place.

Thanks for the post (and the mention).

Cheers,
Amber Naslund, Radian6
@ambercadabra

[Rob Leavitt]

Thanks Amber. Not sure if I agree social media is necessarily more compelling and advantageous for B2B than B2C, but its certainly as important. Its also different, for the reasons you cite around sales cycles and relationships. This, to me, is why thought leadership is so important. Great social media for B2C can be entertaining but it usually needs to be more educational for B2B (although entertainment isnt a bad thing, if it can be both!). And educational in ways that are truly useful, which is not simple given how inundated everyone is with purportedly helpful but mostly me-too content. Your own blog is a actually great example; its certainly entertaining because you have a nice style and tell good stories, but most of all its educational in a compelling way because youre talking from real experience and a real commitment to help the rest of us learn how to do better.

[B2BThoughtLEAD]

I agree with Amber. Social media is very important for B2B marketing for those reasons and more. For example, social media is excellent for nurturing prospects that have yet to emerge and raise their hands as "interested parties".

Regarding B2C vs. B2B, as one CPG chief marketing officer recently said to me, "Social media is just one more channel for us. TV, radio and advertising are not going away for us." So the conclusion to be drawn is that social media is more important because it is cost effective (not many B2B companies can even afford TV, radio and advertising) and more appropriate for the longer sales cycle (which Amber elucidates quite nicely).

[Ckochster]

Hi Rob,

Great post. I agree that we have to think of thought leadership in terms of both development and dissemination. As you say, marketers are best at the latter--because it fits our natural strengths in communication. Marketers need to facilitate rather than lead the development process, which makes it much harder to build and sustain. I think the best thought leadership marketers have been doing that for some time--through things like customer councils, academic partnerships, internal knowledge sharing, etc. I'm going to use the c word and say that social media is an excellent channel for increasing the reach of and involvement in your thought leadership network. But I don't think social media can form the basis of that network. Seems like there needs to be a foundation of old-fashioned mechanisms like customer councils to create fodder for the thought leadership development conversation in social media.

[Rob Leavitt]

Thanks Chris -- Im traditional enough to agree that you need more than just social media for thought leadership development. Customer councils, face-to-face interviews and briefings, live roundtables, and the like can be extremely valuable, too -- along with formal partnerships with academics and research institutes.

But Im not sure I agree that the old fashioned mechanisms are necessarily the foundation and social media is an add-on. Rather, I think that the lines are blurring and will gradually disappear. The thought leadership networks you mention are themselves expanded and enriched with social tools and online interaction -- but there is no real separation or distinction between offline, online, and social mechanisms. This is really what I mean by talking about socializing thought leadership.