Generate More Leads with B2B Social Media

Inside View created this awesome infographic that pulling together many statistics, ideas and examples about using social media to help drive leads and sales for B2B companies. You can look through the stats yourself, but here are some to consider:

  • 61% of US Marketers Use Social Media to Increase Lead Gen
  • IBM saw an Increase of 400% in Sales in a Social Selling Pilot Program
  • 55% of Buyers Search for Information on Social Media
  • 75% of Buyers Likely to Use Social Media in the Purchase Process
Social Media Leads Infographic
Selling Through Social Media to Close More LeadsInsideView

Category: Social Media

Fuel costs in the UK.

There are 31 million cars on the road in the UK, Ever wondered how much we spend a day on fuel?

I had a go at calculating the answer…..

(Based on the following averages)

So here goes – this is what we spend a day on fuel….

How does this compare to the USA? (based on 31m cars! I know they have more)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edit 14/04/2012 – I stumbled on this infographic, depicting costs of fuel in the US. In comparison the UK is just over $9 dollars a gallon

Category: Retail

An Intelligent Museum – The Louvre

With its new intelligent management system, the Louvre Museum can protect and maintain artwork while keeping galleries open to the millions of customers who visit yearl.

“Managing thousands of repairs, indoor and outdoor cleaning or maintenance visits per year to preserve the facilities and artwork while keeping the galleries available and accessible to visitors is a daunting undertaking,” said Metin Pelit, department manager of computerized maintenance management system, The Louvre Museum. “Thanks to our new software systems, we’re able to visualize our entire infrastructure and make better, more informed decisions about when and how to respond to problems — and about when to proactively address a potential problem that we otherwise wouldn’t have seen coming.” 

The Louvre’s management system can now aggregate data from individual systems within the museum, providing the museum staff and its vendors, coherent and real-time information on each asset. Additionally, the software provides a predictive view into the performance and reliability of the facility equipment and systems, allowing museum staff to better determine which assets need to be repaired or replaced.

   

“Buildings are massive systems of systems, and these systems need to talk to each other for a building to become smarter,” added Pelit. “In the Louvre’s case, there’s the added challenge of being home to thousands of irreplaceable pieces of art which must be carefully preserved while trying to accommodate millions of visitors annually. By using Maximo software to monitor the condition of assets across the museum’s facilities in one single database, these systems begin to talk to one another, allowing staff to preserve artwork and facilities with more ease and efficiency. As a result the Louvre is now able to keep the majority of their galleries open to customers on a daily basis while simultaneously reducing costs and energy consumption.”

For more on this story please visit: UK Smarter Buildings

Category: Smarter Buildings, Smarter Planet

Ditch your inbox: Luis Suarez interview

Luis Suarez is a social computing and business evangelist at IBM, but don’t bother emailing him to ask about that. Or do – but he’ll search for you on the social networks and reply that way if he can. Because he announced four years ago that email was inefficient so he would be abandoning it, and has subsequently cut 98% of his emails out.

If a colleague tells you they get too much email the usual default response is to nod sagely and carry on as if nothing was ever going to happen about it. This isn’t good enough for IBM’s Luis Suarez, who announced in 2008 that he was going to cope without it.

“I am not the guy who killed email,” he says, which is what a lot of press and bloggers have called him. “I can see good use cases for it.” One of these is when something is confidential and needs to happen on a one to one basis, such as salary discussions with an HR team. But there aren’t many instances in which he’d choose to use it.

“You can’t build your online reputation with email,” he points out. In the same way you can’t check someone’s credentials as immediately – click through their name on a LinkedIn message and you have their CV. “Communication needs to have a context,” he says.

This is why, if you want to contact him, the best starting point is to enter “Luis” into Google and you’ll find him on the first page. You won’t find his email address but you’re likely to be able to engage through Google+ or Twitter (his preferred contacts) and IBM-ers can use the company’s own internal network.

Email, outside a couple of good uses which involve legally or ethically confidential material, is open to abuse, he says. “People play political games and power struggles with the CC and BCC buttons,” he says. “I’ve had that and I’ve blogged it – the whole conversation.” Email can too easily end up as a weapon people use to fight each other in a business, he says.

Social interaction is different. If he’s away, for example, and someone asks him a question through IBM’s internal social communication system, then because it’s visible to all of his contacts there’s a good chance someone else will answer. This isn’t taking advantage because he’s on holiday, he says during his presentation – pronouncing the word “holiday” very carefully in case any corporate types have forgotten the concept. He does the same to help colleagues. And of course if he responds to something then his answer is permanently available in IBM’s knowledge base – so someone may not have to ask next time, everybody has access to it and it’s a lot more open.

He enthuses a great deal and after our interview he asks everyone at his presentation to stop responding to emails, which will cut their workload down. It’s clearly worked for him – but you do wonder how many audience members will actually be that brave.

Luis Suarez’ keynote presentation video ‘Thinking Outside the Inbox…There is no WE in Email‘ from Unified Communications Expo is now available ondemand in the Unified Communications Online Video Library.

Luis on Twitter @elsua

A world without email

 

Category: Email, Social Media

Digital Influence

There is a great deal of interest and many different answers to the age old “what is the ROI of social media?”. To date I have not seen a definitive answer to this.

The other question I hear is “How do we measure success”, then – “what is the definition of success?”  Let me ask you this, do you measure the success of using email, instant messaging or the phone?

Why is there this obsession to measure social media when in essence its just another tool, another form of communication that, lets face it, is meteroic.

Yesterday Brian Solis, Principal Analyst from Altimeter released a report – The Rise of Digital Influence. A fasinating read if you have time. Link is further down.

Here are some of the highlights, I found interesting.

Lets begin.

The are many tools that you can use to measure influence. Before we take a look at what they are and what they measure, lets first take a look what defines influence. Brian mentions there are three pillars: 

Pillar 1: Reach: A measure of popularity, affinity and potential impact

Pillar 2: Relevance: The measure of authority, trust and affinty

Pillar 3: Resonance: The sum of the above, frequency, period and amplitude.

Now lets take a look at an action plan.

1) Benchmark: Understand where you are now so that you can track progress caputring sentiment, behaviour and awareness.

2) Audience: Who are they, where do they hang out, how are they connected and what information do they value

3) Strategy: Develop a strategy that connects the dots between you, connected consumers, and their communities.

Thats a rather brief synopsis of Brian’s full report which can be found here. The Rise of Digital Influence

So your ready …..

Lets take a look at the tools on offer:

 

Pillar 1: Reach

TwitterGrader compares Twitter profiles to millions of other users already indexed to establish a score between 1–100.
Using the  following elements:
o Number of followers
o Power of followers
o Number of updates (the higher the better)
o Update recency (the sooner the better)
o Follower/Following ratio
o Engagement (retweets and responses to an individual account)
Use Case: TwitterGrader is a performance metric for handles in comparison to other accounts. It’s ideal for quick one-to-one analysis when new, potentially influential individuals are identified using other services.

TweetLevel was developed by Edelman for communications professionals. It measures
40 different elements to quantify the varying importance of individuals using Twitter based on the context of their online activity.
TweetLevel’s measures of influence include the following attributes and output a number between 1–100:
o Buzz around specific topics
o Who the most relevant and influential users are
o The context of relevant topics
o What else people talk about and to whom
o What web links are most frequently shared
o Idea Starter metrics: does the individual generate new thoughts and content or merely amplify others
o Broadcast to Engagement ratio: assesses level of providing interesting and relevant content vs. engaging with others
Use Case: These services are purpose-built tools for the PR and marketing teams that give actionable insight into which people are influential within the right context in the right platform. PR teams can use the export feature to embed influence lists into their campaigns. These tools also offer insights into influential voices during crisis management.

TweetReach provides insight into the reach and exposure of a tweet or Twitter campaign. The service tracks any topic on Twitter and measures its exposure, activity, and contributors to identify trends and surface topical influencers.
Use Case: TweetReach offers data on the relevance, reach, and resonance of everyday conversations. Studying this information provides organizations with the ability to benchmark activity, benchmark against competitive activity, and also monitor the experiences of relevant individuals for later engagement.

EmpireAvenue.com is a virtual stock market that trades on the social capital of personal brands and real-world brands alike.
Use Case: Companies including Audi, Intel, Ford, and AT&T were among the brands that invested time and resources in EmpireAvenue. As businesses connect multiple branded channels, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs, etc., they push newcontent into the EmpireAvenue stream. Investors will see this activity in their news feed and ,as such, engage, invest, and recommend the stock. Businesses claim to see
increased engagement within EmpireAvenue, as well as in their specific channels directly.

Pillar 2: Relevance

Kred calculates dual metrics for Influence and Outreach by analyzing a person’s ability
to inspire action and level of interaction with others. Influence, scored on a normalized
1,000-point scale, measures the ability to inspire action or influence others in the form of
retweets, replies, likes, new follows, and other actions.
Use Case: Gathering intelligence around communities of focus and interest graphs. Using the self-service dashboard, businesses can learn more about the people and their earned social capital related to key topics. It offers a glimpse of reach and authority based on individual activity and the related activity of those around them.

PeerIndex provides an overview of an individual’s stature, relevance, and reach within social networks based on cumulative activity. Sources include Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Quora, and blogs. PeerIndex consists of four components: resonance, authority, activity, and audience.
o AME (Arts, Media, and Entertainment)
o TEC (Technology and the Internet)
o SCI (Science and Environment)
o MED (Health and Medical)
o LIF (Leisure and Lifestyle)
o SPO (Sports)
o POL (News, Politics, and Society)
o BIZ (Finance, Business, and Economics)

Use Case: The PeerPerks program is a marketing program that delivers scalable word of mouth and rewards programs. It does so by characterizing what makes a likely socialadvocate for a brand and then helping brands reach and engage many thousands of those advocates at a time. PeerIndex also provides enhanced tools for behavioralprofiling and integration into a range of social platforms for select clients.

mPACT is developed by mBlast and is designed for marketing professionals in companies and agencies with an emphasis on identifying the specific individuals who are the established authorities on any given subject.
Use Case: Because mPACT’s strength is on topical relevance, the ability to identify connected individuals who matter to your market is revealing and insightful. Running a search by the keywords that define your industry will introduce you to the most relevant people who are already talking about your space, with or without you.

Traackr positions itself as an influencer discovery and monitoring platform. It uses a proprietary search engine and scoring algorithm to convert any keyword query into a list of top influencers ranked on the Reach, Resonance, and Relevance of each person discovered in the search.
Use Case: Traackr is dedicated to influencer identification and engagement. Focusing on communications rather than rewards, Traacker will help businesses create and manage ambassador programs and also shape influencer relations campaigns. Users can also track mentions and engagement metrics.

Radian6 developed an Influencer widget as part of its listening and engagement platform, which helps brands identify important individuals related to their markets across a myriad of social platforms, including blogs and Twitter.
Use Case: Radian6 provides social media monitoring, analysis, and engagement for all types and sizes of organizations. For communications professionals who focus on influencer engagement, it offers a deep and clickable path to better understand why someone is potentially influential and why he or she is important to the business. The Radian6 widget is ideal

Appinions is an influencer management platform, which is the result of over a decade of technology development at Cornell University. The platform is based on two key pillars: technology and access.
Use Case: Intended for agencies and brands, Appinions is designed to identify relevant influencers for intelligence gathering and engagement and is used by social out-reach, PR, strategy, and research teams.

Pillar 3: Resonance

Klout uses over 50 variables to measure what it calls the “standard for influence.” Its public-facing service presents the social capital and capacity for an individual’s ability to influence behavior and outcomes in social networks. Klout’s algorithm involves three separate stages of semantic calculation: True Reach, Amplification Probability, and Network Value.
Use Case: Klout offers a free search tool to identify individual ranking by username. To use this tool effectively, brands must first have an idea of who they would like to learn more about and then use the search function to analyze their social capital. Additionally, organizations can partner with Klout through its paid Perks program to target influencers by Reach, Relevance, and/or Relevance.

Twitalyzer evaluates Twitter activity based on a deep set of factors to assess signal-tonoise ratio, generosity, velocity, and also clout.

Use Case: Twitalyzer offers a detailed Benchmark report that provides brands with ranked lists of Twitter users based on their stated location and the tags that have been applied to their profile. Reviewing this list of potential influencers and analyzing their activity provides brands with insight into the nature of the dialogue, as well as opportunities to engage influencers.

PROskore focuses its influence analysis on professional reputation. It scores and ranks individuals based on professional background and experience, peer validation, popularity, and engagement in social networks, as well as within the PROskore community. PROskore’s algorithm places emphasis specifically on LinkedIn, Facebook Pages, Twitter, and blogs. The end result is a score that is designed to help professionals network with partners and prospects to “generate business.”
Use Case: Whereas other influence vendors focus on helping brands connect to influential people in digital word-of-mouth marketing applications, PROskore assists businesses by introducing hiring managers to ideal employment candidates. PROskore also brings to light the notion of internal influence. By tapping personal brands as company stakeholders, the right influencer can spark important dialog from within and ultimately impact external conversations and actions. Although PROskore can help hiring managers and employment candidates, it also helps businesses identify leads and
sales opportunities.

eCairn’s Conversation platform was developed to help marketing professionals identify influential communities and the influencers who drive relevant market conversations.
Use Case: eCairn is an influencer relationship management solution designed to help brands find and engage with topical influencers and experts.

Category: Social Media

Should Your Business Be on Pinterest?

It seems like everyone’s jumping on the Pinterest bandwagon. But is the latest social media rocket a place for your business?

Software company Intuit published a helpful infographic to help businesses figure out if Pinterest is right for them. If your business is contemplating joining Pinterest, follow the below guide to help decide whether it’s a smart decision.

 

Infographic designed by Column Five Media and published by Intuit

Category: Pinterest, Social Media

When Social Becomes Business as Usual

Guest Post by : Miguel Garcia

These days it seems that everything has become social.

We have social media, social gaming, enterprise social networking, the social web and the list goes on. It seems that social has taken over our world, but has it really?

The very fact that we use this word simultaneously with so many different types of applications means we’re only at the verge of maximizing its real value. The truth is that we’ve always been social.

Our interactions in social networks are simply a reflection of our offline lives. The grand majority of us communicate with the same group of people every day and we have small groups of people that we trust. These are the same friends, family, and acquaintances that we keep separated in our circles of influence online. Paul Adams, author of “Grouped: How small groups of friends are the key to influence on the social web”, describes this in length.

He points to the changing nature of the Internet from a repository of documents linked together towards a new structure built around people and their relationships. This has implications for businesses and their customers, but when you really look at it there’s nothing drastically new about all this “socialness”. It’s simply being communicated with new tools and having a farther reach. The thousands of years of hard wired emotions remains unchanged in humans. Yet, we fail to communicate the naturalness of these tools by instead concentrating on the technicalities and market hype.

In many ways we’re being duped into believing that social media is this strange and exotic world that only a few can master. When in reality any reasonable human being can do just fine. The trick is remembering to stay true to yourself, act as you would offline, and do what you enjoy. Easy enough right?

While many of us reading this consider ourselves savvy enough with social networks there is still many that see them as something very different to what they’re used to. They fail to see that they’ve actually been social networking all their lives and just because you can now do it on a laptop or mobile device doesn’t mean it’s suddenly a foreign concept. Emotional connections need to be made so that more people can see the value of social networking in their lives.

As the social web becomes a reality and available in many forms we will find the online and offline worlds becoming blurred. A multitude of social networks may remain prevalent but your identity will travel with you wherever you go, whether in your personal or professional life. All these advances are actually returning us to our social roots in a new and improved way. However, we’re still tweaking it and much remains to be done to maximize the real value of social in our new world.

Social networks will become the normal conduits of communication and that will be when social is simply the norm, not the differentiating factor. How will we know when social networks reach this point? When we stop thinking of them as social and start thinking of them as business as usual.

Connect with Miguel Garcia

Original Post

Category: Social Media