GUEST POST: Microsoft shares B2B social secrets…and moves beyond measurement

Does social media have a part to play in business-to-business marketing?

Many observers say it doesn’t, and that social media marketing is only a useful marketing discipline for communicating with consumers. So are the naysayers right?

Are Twitter, Facebook et al useful platforms for communicating with businesses?

One of the major problems in forming a cogent argument for social media in the B2B marketing mix has been the dearth of decent case studies. There are some good resources (socialmediab2b.com is a blog that offers some great thinking and insights) but until recently there have been few examples to call on that demonstrate its value. Certainly not in the same way that Dell and Zappos have shown the power of social media in talking to consumers and generating sales.

Well maybe that’s all about to change. In recent months several B2B case studies have emerged and now the world’s biggest technology company, Microsoft, has released a short whitepaper chronicling the success that Microsoft Advertising division has had in reaching a business audience.

The first thing to recognise in highlighting this case study, and using it to champion the role of social media when marketing to businesses, is that the Microsoft Advertising team have been largely preaching to the converted. They haven’t faced a challenge in finding users online because the division’s customer-base is largely made up of digital marketers who spend most of their lives online and embrace every new social network and development.

That said you’d be hard pushed to find many people who don’t spend at least part of their time online these days, and most people experience the internet through the prism of a social network. Whether it’s an office worker logging in to Facebook at lunchtime, or a bored exec checking their Twitter feed during a meeting – increasingly people experience the internet through social networks. And the link ecosystems that social networks create guide many users through the billions of web pages out there.

Back to Microsoft Advertising though, and quite openly and honestly the division recognises that it first took interest in social media (and founded a community team) to tackle negative publicity surrounding the launch of adCenter in 2005:

At its beta launch, adCenter was met by the search engine marketing community with some consternation. It seemed that excitement at a potential rival for Google Adwords, coupled with an expectation that Microsoft would deliver a

comparable user experience right out of the gate, led some detractors to start writing on blogs and forums that Microsoft didn’t know what it was doing, that it was subversively forcing advertisers to use Internet Explorer as adCenter was not compatible with rival browsers, and that a software company could not possibly compete or react quickly enough in such a fast-changing environment, given its background in 2- to 3-year cycles of product releases.

The Microsoft Advertising community team was born out of necessity in some ways. But that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. They knew very early on that they weren’t just shamelessly plugging their products and that they had to enter a dialogue with users to help them understand the value of adCenter, help answer their queries and challenge any misconceptions.

So what came next? Well, let’s remember this was back in 2006. Twitter didn’t exist, Facebook was just finding its feet and likewise LinkedIn wasn’t the huge phenomenon it is now. So the team created its own platform by launching a blog:

We started our blog back in 2006 as an official voice, our calling card, if you like. If you wanted information or news from the most credible source, the adCenter blog would be where you’d find it first. It served as a tool for telling our story in a world where marketing-speak sometimes just doesn’t wash, especially if the tide of opinion is against you. It provided valuable data in the form of comments and links from other posts, which we could collate and feed back to product and marketing teams to show what the real pulse was out there in the marketplace.

A Twitter profile and Facebook page followed when the time was right as the team recognised another important social media lesson – not everyone will come to you, you have to go to them. Finding the right context for conversations with your customers is just as important as what you say.

Sitting side by side with context is ‘content.’  The mantra ‘content is king’ still holds true but there is no point in generating content if no one consumes it. And likewise there is even less point having a load of different social media profiles that are not updated. Content and context are both equally important – an observation the team picked up on:

It takes time to build a community on each and every platform, and the web is littered with stale Facebook pages and dormant Twitter accounts because a marketing department saw social media as a quick win, a viral excuse for hard graft in engaging customers in an authentic and timely fashion. If you’re taking your message off-site, you have to budget for some extra time, education and execution to keep that conversation alive and ongoing.

Another important point to draw from this excerpt is that social media is not a ‘quick win.’ There is a tendency to equate the real-time nature of social media with immediate results.

The community team saw this was not the case. But despite the indulgence of a multinational corporation (the whitepaper says that before the explosion of social media ‘our team was seen as a support function, very much a “nice to have”.’) and all the time and resources you could ask for, the team did think hard about measurement.

And in thinking about how to measure social media engagement they derived  two very interesting conclusions; that time spent answering customer queries online is cheaper the alternative, and that online activity is ‘earned’ and therefore a lot cheaper than conventional advertising:

We track and monitor all clicks on links in our Twitter feed, learning what is most popular for future reference, and multiply their number by our call centre costs. Add incremental revenue to that number and you have significant cost savings.

Tallying up how often our content is shared and putting a realistic monetary value to how much that exposure would cost in the press is one way of demonstrating the value. Our Twitter following is more than 8,000, but regularly our reach grows to more than 50,000 internet marketers when our followers deem something we’ve said as worthy of sharing.

I think these are the two most interesting elements of the whitepaper. Both are bold steps and give social media legitimacy as a measurable, cost-effective B2B marketing channel

Of course Microsoft is a huge corporation, and one that spends as much, if not more time talking to consumers. But how many marketing departments in companies around the world wouldn’t sit up and take notice of Microsoft Advertising’s experiences? I’m guessing very few.

By making that leap from measurement to return on investment this whitepaper joins the dots and moves the debate on a long way.

Perhaps most surprisingly it has come from Microsoft, one of the most maligned tech companies around. In many ways this illustrates the transformative powers of social media marketing – even companies with poor reputations can pick up the baton and start having open and frank conversations with their customers again.

Joel Turner is an account director at digital PR specialist Tinderbox Media.