Alex Plant is the Head of Social Media at NetApp. He will present NetApp’s emergence as a leading social B2B brand at Summit 2010.
At Summit you’re going to talk about how B2B companies use social to drive sales. Could you give us one example of how NetApp has done that?
When we think about social media at NetApp, it’s definitely a marketing tool. We’ve always looked at it as a way to build awareness. A lot of us come from a communication background and our focus of this year has been to try to forge relationships with our field sales and our demand generation team so that we start to integrate different calls to action into every single communication that we have on social media. If you can, every tweet, every Facebook post, every YouTube video gives a reason to extend the lifecycle of the engagement. So, they’ve read your tweet. Then what? Bring them back to NetApp.com. You want to keep taking that concept further. So we work with our marketing team and ask what else would these people be interested. Is there a whitepaper you can give them? Something else?
I’m not going to lead them from Twitter to a registration page because that violates all the tenets of social media. What we will do is lead them along a logical path to an end point.
To give you a tangible example, we have launch coming this fall. We’re going to be really making sure we have a few carrots out there, we call them honeypots. What we’re going to do is find out where our key influencers are and make sure that information is there. Whether it’s product information, a customer story or a technical discussion, we’re really thinking about the buyer’s journey.
The other part of the idea is bringing listening back into the sales part of the business. I was just in New York meeting with several of our salespeople. Their reaction was like “Social media? What? I don’t need that. My seventeen year old uses Facebook!” But then I showed them tangible examples of customer complaints, leads that have generated through Facebook, information and intelligence that we can glean from our competitors.
I think that it’s not only important to push information out with social media but also to bring it in to the business. That’s one thing I’ve learned this year as a huge value-add to anyone who thinks social media is their profession.
What should B2B brands who are interested in expanding to social know before beginning?
Enter into it with a persona or audience mindset. At least think about who you’re trying to reach. It’s very easy for people in my situation to just say, “Great, we have a Facebook page and Twitter account.” But your demographic may not be on there. As you go, don’t be afraid to make mistakes.
I think people misuse Facebook a lot of the times, but it’s a great corporate brand tool. So we had to figure out what tools matched what audiences. We have a very technical audience and knowing that was the key. If you try to have a social media strategy that tries to be all things to all people, then you will find it will be nothing to anyone. No conversations will be started and it will be a huge miss.
The other part that they should know is the measurement standpoint. What are the tools that will really help you to show value internally. It’s one thing for you to speak in your own language to talk about share of voice, sentiment, and tone. That’s great, but it only gets you so far. One thing that is really powerful is understanding internally how people determine value and how I can create metrics to get us there.
