This week, B2B marketers with a hunger for change came together at the B2B Marketing Europe Conference in Berlin. The conference was designed by KGS to bring together senior marketers to share experiences and learn how to optimize & nurture leads, align sales and marketing and to maximize social media marketing results. Great companies with even better speakers, the crowd was just big enough to inspire while providing good networking opportunities.

In this post, some key take-aways still in my mind. Also, I’m sharing my own presentation.

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Some participants were quite active updating non-participant real time through the micro blog: #b2beu

Five highlights:

1. People – in all presentations one thing stood at the basis of innovation: it is about people. People buy from people and not from a corporate sales brochure. Also, People want to communicate with people, not with logos. Or, as Madlen Nicolaus from Kodak pointed out: “they want to talk with, not be talked to”;
2. Social – logical consequence of the above is the focus on social media. Here, I think the conference went a bit overboard following the enormous focus on all things social media. Let’s not forget the Big Ideas that Ignite, like Rick Segal from Gyro HSR pointed out;
3. Listen – all companies are or acknowledged they have to get started with listening online to learn about their clients: who are they, what moves them, what do they truly care about, where can I be relevant. Keynote speaker Chris Brogan said it best: you shut up!
4. B2B is changing, fast – all companies, including the ones which make you think of previous centuries, acknowledge the need to change in their full marketing approach. They see that they, as marketers, are evolving to a new role, where they become connectors instead of pushers, facilitators instead of controllers.
5. The lack of waterproof metrics in social – it was confirmed no company has yet found the way to report on social media ROI in a solid way. We all know the direction is positive and it adds value, but how do you report on this and make them relative to for example advertising GRPs? We are all still learning.

Brands, People and Blogs

My presentation was supposed to be called B2B Blogging for business success. I named my presentation differently, as I feel the previous title sends out the wrong message. A blog is just a blog and as such won’t bring you any business success, let alone direct business success in terms of sales conversion. What a blog can do is act as the new corporate website: a digital headquarters in an online landscape, which is becoming more social whether you and I like it or not. I therefore focused my presentation on Brands, People and Blogs.

After explaining the challenges we were facing in marketing Accenture 5 years ago, which were the basis for starting this blog, I shared our vision, related to this.

Fist premises: If we look at telling our deeper story, we  have to realize that we are in a people business. Accenture is a people business. People buy from  and like to communicate with people, people do not buy or communicate with brands. Second premises: you want to able to tell a deeper story, you want to engage with people in order make them understand your story, not just hear it. And if you take these as the premises of your vision, you immediately get very close to what we now call Social Media. In this we try to stay away from the hype as we believe it is in its core not that much different from how we approached the market 20 years ago, except there’s a whole new playing field, on a whole new scale.

What we see is still a lot of anti-social communications throught the brand, instead of between people. We see this in corporate websites, in the still large share of traditional advertising, traditional send-receiver PR, etcetera. It is like we’re trying to hang on to the 4 walls of our offices and try to minimalize the communication of our people with the outside world.

What we are doing is moving from People behind the Brand, to People in front of the Brand. Here, the brand becomes a Facilitator of Connections between our people and the outside world. From here, we focus on communities, dialogue, engagement, pull and transparency . Marketing becomes the facilitator of engaging communications between our people and clients and candidates.

We call this Digital Citizenship. We match our thought leaders, as Digital Citizens, with our key themes, like innovation and we are facilitating them with platforms to strengthen relationships and form new ones. We do this offline by for example relationship events and we do this online. We have a social media landscape where these people live. Here, they talk about our key theme’s and interact to make our target audience understand….just like Confucius taught us. Interesting here: everybody, all companies, have a social landscape, whether you like it or not. People are talking about you on these platform and marketers better listen….

I finalized the session with 5 lessons we learned from 5 years of corporate blogging.

1)      First, keep a clear focus on your target. What is the reason you started this blog? Don’t start blogging because of blogging like you don’t start facebook or twitter for facebook or twitter. Use the Forrester POST method as a systematic approach to your social strategy and see if and how blogging fits in here. People Objectives Strategy Technology. It starts with your target audience….

2)      Lesson two, dive in very deep into that target audience. Where are they, in other words what is your online landscape? How do they navigate online, what moves them, what formats do they consume.

3)      Your internal organization: the biggest cost of social media, and therefore of blogs, is time. How will you keep your bloggers motivated? But also, is there content worth sharing?

4)      Linked to this is the culture of you organization. How open and authentic can your organization be? This is a big one: blogging creates the perception that you are open and willingness to go into dialogue. What will you do if there’s a lot of criticism? You need to address these points up front and get the full support before going live.

5)      Measuring and reporting – Make sure you measure and analyse for three reasons: 1) to optimize your blog, what works and what does not work? 2) to motivate your bloggers, what am I doing all this work for? And 3) to inform your senior management on the ROI. Make sure you mutually agree with them on KPIs before launching, so it’s easy to report on.

Thanks to all participants, speakers and of course KGS. It was inspiring and we have to stay connected.