Posted by Katherine Canipelli on Tue, Apr 14, 2009 @ 02:03 PM
What's your network worth? According to new research on the value of business network connections, the answer is $948 per contact.
This week, IBM Research and MIT's Sloan School of Management announced study findings that indicate that, relatively speaking, the more connected among us tend to be the top producers. No big surprise, right? What makes this insight different is that it's based on the Web-based communications. Using algorithms to correlate professionals' communication patterns with revenue, researchers modeled the value derived from email address books, employee communities and, to some degree, the newer social networks like LinkedIn and Twitter.
Despite the surge of B2B social networking in recent months, web-based social networking is still very much a green field for most industrial managers. Some prefer not to engage, others are simply too busy. An an Operations exec in my network explained his challenge this way:
"Sadly, I just don't make much time to figure out new stuff unless I know it's necessary for my job. And the transportation industry isn't exactly on the technological edge. You know the story."
For industrial B2B, social networking potential is fairly obvious for Marketing and Sales, yet still obscure for everyone else. The table below features four distinct social networking tools. Click on the name to link to their sites.
SOCIAL TOOL | WHAT IT IS | HOW TO USE IT |
| Xobni | Outlook plugin that shows you the networks behind the people and emails in your Inbox--it searches Hoovers, LinkedIn, Facebook and your own archive of emails | Efficient Communications: See your contacts' vital info & their connections to your network, at a glance from your email screen. |
| LinkedIn | Leading professional network tool in the US and Europe | Thought Leadership: Make your profile public or private. Join industry-specific Groups to tap other's knowledge--or share your expertise and shine a light on your company.
|
| Twitter | Micro-blog with limit of 140 characters per post; people with similar interests will find you, follow you and share what you have to say with their networks. Twitter works with your PC and mobile device, and now integrates with Salesforce.com. | Promotions: Announce new products and business news, with links to your website. Business Intell: Monitor what people are saying about your company and your competitors'. Customer Service: Listen and talk to customers in an open channel, to get important info out quickly.
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| Business Exchange | BusinessWeek's community with direct access to industry specific data, commentaries from leading execs, and opportunity for network exchange with other members | Market Trends Research: It's like attending a top notch executive conference without the cost of registration, travel and time.
|
Certainly, some caution is warranted when launching into social networking; your company's reputation is at stake, as well as your own. Since any of these tools require time investment to maintain, before you start, assess your means to execute and pin down objectives. And, of course, this will help you answer the core question: What's the return on investing in your network?
NEED HELP?
If you're wondering how to integrate social strategies with your everyday business processes, marketingFOLIO can help. We'll provide insight on how your industry is (or is not)
embracing these tools, who's using them, and what strategies you can
use to gain and sustain advantage. Transform your network into a lead generation machine.
>> Contact us for a FREE consultation.
REFERENCE
Interested in B2B social networking trends? Read these:
Posted by Katherine Canipelli on Thu, Apr 09, 2009 @ 07:21 AM
Perusing the New York Times last evening, the future hit me over the head like a volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica.*
- Micro-blog tool Twitter got front page coverage for its role as a beacon for Moldovan anti-Communist protestors (until the authorities cut off Internet access, routing protestors to older cell phone instant messaging technology)
- Magazines including Time and even Scholastic have defied the American Society of Magazine Editors to blur the lines between ads and articles (horrors!)
- Content arbitrageur Google, disguised as a search engine, defends its use of newspaper headlines and story snippets as the publishers scramble to reinvent their business models —while also defending new digital library of scanned orphan books in a quarrel with university libraries who are the keepers of these out-of-print gems of cultural history
The social media technology revolution is reconfiguring how we work, how we communicate, and increasingly, how we become educated.
Citizen journalists (a.k.a. bloggers) proliferate without limit (or standards). Editorial is increasingly promotional. Knowledge (or at least the raw materials) is be available where you happen to be, on the device you prefer to use. But what does it get you? Can you trust it?
Yet like so many technology shifts throughout history (think telephone systems or transportation networks), the full value won't emerge until the networks reach critical mass. The value IS the network, based on scale, flexibililty and open access. Linear connections (e.g. early party line phone systems, traditional media journalism, and conventional e-learning sites) channelled information exchange but didn't require shared engagement. Wikipedia showed us how even a small group of highly involved contributors sharing knowledge can create something real without formal process and a minimum of rules.
In the new social network models, sharing is the default standard. In fact, one must opt out to avoid the shared environment. My Tweets have the potential to reach everyone unless I choose the direct message option.
There is both upside and downside to this. Shared information enables greater freedom, literal and figurative. But the noise emanating from so many fragmented channels overwhelms our capacity to make sense of it all. Which is the best source of insight on the Darfur situation in Sudan? Encyclopedia Brittanica, Wikipedia, or an activist's blog? All or none, depending on the context. This opens the door for new knowledge intermediaries to step in and make things simple again. As is happening with Twitter, whose users migrate to TwitterDeck and other aggregators. If only someone could tell me which posts I must read and those to ignore—to clear the channel for me, customized to my unique way of learning, so that I can (again) relax and read in the evenings.
The history of technology is the story of revolutions.
Innovation, resistance to change, counter-revolution, and, finally, better things emerging from the conflict.
Still, for the present, where "sharing" isn't a norm in an industry (process, resources or assets), resistance to social media trends will persist. Until one day, when the critical mass is achieved. Minds—and business opportunities—will open as social media becomes the new norm. And a huge entree for the information gatekeepers.
All that was old becomes new again.
* One can still buy Encyclopedia Britannica in print form, as well as the newer DVD and online versions. The company has recovered from its disasterous shift to a "media advertising revenue model" (giving content away free online, subsidized by Web-based advertising) and has successfully expanded their subscriber base across old and new technology platforms.
NEED HELP?
If your company is struggling with how social media fits in with your business processes, marketingFOLIO can help. If you've got customers, you need to understand how these networks operate. We'll provide insight on how your industry is (or is not) embracing these tools, who's using them, and what strategies you can use to gain and sustain advantage. Contact us for a consultation.
REFERENCES
If you're interested in these April 2009 New York Times articles referenced, here are the links to NYTimes.com:
Posted by Katherine Canipelli on Tue, Feb 17, 2009 @ 09:44 AM
Technology changes everything: at home, at work, in our communities. Take this new tidbit: 1 Billion Internet users. Back in 1995, 1 million people were using the Internet worldwide (per MIT, based on hosted computers or IP addresses). Now, according to comScore world Metrix, the world bumped past the 1 Billion user milestone last December (2008). And this stat doesn't include scores of mobile users who connect primarily via iPhones, PDAs, practically every new phone sold, or the local Internet cafe.
Information is the Antidote to Commoditization
Emerging technology is transforming many markets and businesses. According to a recent The McKinsey Quarterly article on business tech trends to watch, "Technology alone is rarely the key to unlocking economic value; companies create real wealth when they combine technology with new ways of doing business." The leading activities cited for transformation are managing relationships, managing capital and assets, and leveraging information in new ways. I couldn't agree more.
As with any network model, the more people that use it, the more value it offers. Thus, as social networking extends rapidly (e.g. LinkedIn and Plaxo) and as more business processes shift to SaaS platforms, the Internet is destined to be the ultimate business utility at home, at work and everywhere in between.
Business Process Innovation isn't Limited to Operations
It's those inbetween areas where new value lurks for the industrial B2B sector. As example, executives in my network tell me that their Internet use is greatest during business travel--primarily on mobile devices--when they're not occupied with leading people.
Although industrial business has embraced web-based technology to support core operations, B2B execs often overlook--or ignore--how they might leverage their commercial development with new web-based communications technologies. This isn't to suggest that we throw out the old, tried-n'-true approaches; it's time to explore how the new tools fit in and where they have greatest impact.
Three Steps You Need to Take Now
Industrial B2B marketers and product managers should champion new tools to spur awareness, demand and sales leads--working smarter with some time invested but no significant capital outlay:
- Rethink market communications with web-centric strategies: expand promotions reach at low cost (effectiveness), increase control of your leads pipeline (efficiency), and facilitate a two-way information flow that will set you apart from the competition (innovation)
- Be where your targeted decision makers are: add mobile device support to your market-facing and customer-facing websites--especially for data/transactions that feed their KPIs (excellence)
- Get comfortable with how social networking and social communities work for your business context: test them first with your employees and channel partners for knowledge exchange (alignment), then develop customer oriented "social" contexts that reinforce your value (EVA)