One of my favourites is “River Cottage”, by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, a chef well known for less dependence on the outside world, food integrity, and the consumption of local, seasonal produce.

In the latest episode, Huge came up with a few creative ideas that immediately made me think about content opportunities for B2B companies to better market their products and services.

1. Pick a Theme

This chef is constantly exploring all the angles of seasonal food. He doesn’t just do mixed ideas and dishes but rather focuses on maximising specific content. The latest episode was about “fish”

B2B pointer: Start by segmenting your solutions (products and services) by audience. If you produce a piece of content that is aimed at a specific target with a crafted title/theme, chances are the impact will be higher. Also more relevant people will find you through search engines.

2. Provide a taste of your knowledge

Huge went to a local fishmonger. The shop was displaying a rich selection of fresh fish. He asked: “What’s the difference between a local fishmonger and the one from the supermarket?” The reply was: “My customer knows more about fish“.
Then, the chef decided to take the fish to a local square where many people walked by, improvised a food stand and shouted: “This man has fresh fish and I’ve got great tips!“. Huge then started to sell the different types of fish by delivering easy recipe ideas. “This boneless piece of hake goes fantastic with olive oil, garlic and white wine…“.  In between the tips, he would fillet, marinate the fish and wrap it in aluminum foil for customers to put straight in the oven!

B2B pointer: Loads of potential customers need your solution (Many don’t know it yet). The way you get closer without interrupting, is by providing a bit of specific education (no strings attached) to help them make a decision and move forward. If, on top of that you deliver the solution on a golden tray, easy to take off your shelves (like the fish already marinated and ready to cook in the aluminum foil) you’ll improve distribution. Also, if people learn about your product and want to go ahead right now, is there a contact form, an email address or phone number easy to find?

3. Go reality-show style

Chef Hugh then went to the house of two college students that knew very little about cooking. He took them for a walk to the local fish market, taught them a bit about the different types mixed with recipe ideas, made a purchase and went back home to show them how to make a simple, inexpensive and delicious dinner.

B2B pointer: Hire a video production team. Pick a new customer or an existing one willing to explore one of your new products/services. Go out to them. Show the problem (customer’s pain). Listen, acknowledge and deliver your thoughts/approach. Even better, take that customer to your warehouse/office/factory so he/she can meet with your company experts.
Video content is very powerful and will certainly make you different. Chop the whole story into 2 to 3-minute episodes and promote them in your social media channels. Finally, do screenshots of the different story sequences and create a short ebook on PDF. The title should describe the problem you’re solving. Get it out there for free download and send it to the customer segment via email.

4. Get other experts on board!

Finally, Hugh shared the stage with two local chefs that showed us how to make a few quick meals with the catch of the day.

B2B pointer: Think about your partners, contractors, sales team, etc. These folks know your solution really well! Let them show your audience how to get the most out of it in their own style. This move will not only give you the chance to showcase the diversity of experience within your company but also, it’ll save you a lot of time if you were thinking about creating content just yourself or your department.

Has any show sparked business ideas for you recently?

A few weeks ago, we wrote a post about how cluttered Twitter is. It doesn’t matter any more how many followers you have since your message barely gets seen.

On Tuesday, I read this other post where Niall Harbison from Simply Zesty, wrote about how difficult it is for brands and companies to get exposure on Facebook unless they invest money in ads. Number of fans, again is not enough folks. He ends the post saying “Basically if you want exposure on Facebook now you need to pay. Simple as that. Facebook have done a wonderful job of locking every area of the platform down so as they control most of the ad revenue that flows through it. Even the feed is getting harder to access and with ads coming there this month things will get even harder…”

Companies approaching social media as a mere distribution channel will have to think harder and re-visit their budget for 2012 if they want to see positive results.

So, what could you do?

Here are only four suggestions that will hopefully make your decision a bit easier:

1. Only measure what matters: This means that you will have to rework your objectives and KPIs for your existing social media platforms. For example, if before you where tracking “number of followers” as a key metric on Twitter, it’s time to bring that to the bottom of the list (or even not make it a KPI) and maybe focus on something more useful such as “number of interactions, number or positive mentions, number of sales queries”, you get the idea. If you can demonstrate a growth in these figures, it’ll be easier to make a business case to dedicate more time to specific platforms that impact the bottom line.
2. Scan your audience: Ensure you understand who are your LinkedIn-company-page followers (linkedin.com/company/yourcompanyname/followers) and who is in your email database. Take the time to go through the names and companies. You’re putting all this effort in social media and as a result you’re building a valuable audience. Don’t think of them as just a “bunch of people”. If you take the time to understand who they are you’ll be able to serve them better, avoid spending unnecessary time pushing more messages and also detect any positive or negative trend on the kind of professionals your content is attracting. Investing time in your existing audience pays off, investing time in pushing random messages here and there (noise), doesn’t.
3. Facebook is no longer free: Those companies fast enough to invest in strategic and creative Facebook advertising will be seen and stay ahead of the game. In parallel, you should keep posting everyday and talking to your fans of course.
4. Integrate as much as possible any offline with online actions: This can take a bit more time but if it’s done well, it could deliver very powerful results for your company.
   Complement all current gaps in customer interaction with online interaction. As a result, your customer or prospects will keep you fresh in their heads. For example: write down in detail your sales funnel. Include every single step. Some people know this as the AIDA model (Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action). Then, these type of questions should follow: What do we do currently to get a prospect talking to us? What do we do with prospects that are nor ready to buy righ now? Do we communicate / stay in touch with recent customers from the past three months? How and when do we knock on the door again?

In 2012, we will have to  get more creative. Publishing a few messages and having thousands of fans and followers won’t cut it any more. How are you going to make the most of your social media time to avoid the noise?

There are two vaults we need to open (or improve)  in 2012 and more importantly, use wisely:

Open your knowledge vault

If there’s one major mistake that companies and brands keep making year by year is to keep betting most of the chips on “interruption marketing”.  I still see loads of organisations delivering “we’ve been 20 years in business” as their unique selling point or differentiation factor. We can do better than that.
Turn it around by sharing nuggets of the knowledge that you’ve phenomenally achieved during all these years. One of the best ways to do that is through a company blog but, please do not focus on the technology or think this is something for the “social media person” to be hired (hopefully) next year. This is your knowledge vault remember? This will be your golden avenue to share with the world “knowledge gifts” (no strings attached) that will help your audience of prospects and customers to make better decisions, to find you, to come back to you and more importantly, to trust you.
The fact that you will share business solutions (in the form of a blog post) for problems that people have doesn’t mean that they’ll get the advise for free and run away. Many professionals think this way.
Your company blog and outposts (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube accounts) are in charge of connecting with people that are looking for what you have but still don’t know that you exist or for those who know you exist is helping answer the question “why should they go with you?” Your content should make that decision a no-brainer for them, whenever they’re ready to make a move.
Connect at a deeper level with your audience by listening to what they’re saying and write effective content as primary and nuclear fuel to propel your business beyond the competition.

Open your ideas vault

Facundo and I have been using for a few years two main platforms to save all different types of ideas (personal, for the business, for blog posts, new ventures, etc): Google Docs and Evernote. The latter is very handy since you mostly manage it through the mobile app on the go. You may take a picture of something, record your voice or write the idea, label it and it will stay there!
Imagine, in a 12-month period, the hundreds or thousands of ideas that you and  your team will come up with. The problem is that if you don’t save them somewhere, they’ll be gone with the wind and you’ll miss out on potential solutions that could make your business more effective, innovative,  profitable, fun and memorable.
Take the lead to create a space to save all ideas. If people tell you “I don’t have good ideas“, reply: “…tell me all the bad ones you have“, as Seth Godin would say.

2012 is another chance to make every minute count, every penny. Look around your business, your context. Are you saying you’re doing things differently already? Try harder because you are not. Do you have great ideas but the C suite can’t envision them? Get creative or get out of the comfort zone.

2012 is your best shot.

Yesterday I started using the free Cardmunch app, built by the LinkedIn team. Here’s how it saves you time:

* Scan the business card (like in the picture) and if you’re happy, upload it.

* The app will process the data on the card and match it with the same person’s LinkedIn contact!

* Finally, you will get a record of the card at the very top of the contact page and if you scroll down you will see more valuable information about the professional plus all connections in common.

* You can also add notes for each card.

* From now on, all business cards travel with you and every time you pull one, you will get a lot more than a piece of paper

Have a look at Cardmunch in action:

Note: This new iteration of the app went live yesterday. Currently, it’s only available for iPhone and in the following countries: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, UK and US.

Have you tried it? What do you think?

Besides the traditional activities that you have been executing all these years, here are a fresh bunch of social media ideas by platform to boost event results (please share more tips in the comments below):

Main content hub (or Blog)

• Create a microsite or dedicated landing page for the event with all the relevant information. This should be built several months before the event if possible.
• Publish blog posts about the event but more importantly around the main topics to make it more engaging. Remember that there will be a lot of people that are not aware of the event, so if you focus on providing valuable what’s-in-it-for-the-audience content, many will feel identified with certain problems and feel  that the event is a must.
• Consider using Tumblr.com. If you’re short of time, Tumblr could help you launch a blog as landing plage for the event. You can easily publish videos and photos during the event straight from your mobile, on the go.
• Implement a chat widget for live chat. We use Zopim.com. It will give you powerful, real-time insights and the ability to chat with people that have questions before and during the event for instance.

LinkedIn

Facebook

Twitter

Foursquare

Email Marketing

YouTube, FlickR, Slideshare

I started off by reading online reviews but didn’t help much since all the consoles seemed to have clear advantages. The next step was to ask a couple of friends personally. I ended up hearing great things about PlayStation and Xbox (Good bye Wii).
On October 24th,  I decided to ask my Facebook and Twitter friends (with an obvious “I’m-ready-to-buy message) but, since I tagged the manufacturers, I really expected them to reach out to me first and help me decide or offer a special deal. I also used hashtags (#gameconsole #videogames) so my message could be discovered by other people or companies that might have wanted to help me.

The Results: Are you surprised at all?

Xbox, PlayStation and Wii never appeared. Maybe they’re too busy counting money and didn’t find time to help a prospect ready to buy…
Their Facebook pages have millions of fans. The walls are restricted to their posts only so, we could say that based on that setting, they didn’t see my message.
But Twitter? It’s very easy to see who’s talking to you on Twitter. It should be used by these brands as a customer service tool but hey, if you have a PR company, busy pushing messages there, they might have better things to do than talking to a prospect or customer, right?

Our post from last week was about Twitter for business and how your message gets lost. That was proven again in this experiment.
Facebook was clearly the only saviour. The platform facilitated the connection between my message and my friends (thank you guys!). Despite any comment we might have about Facebook’s algorithm, my post was clearly seen and received immediate feedback the very same day.

On November 6th, I bought an Xbox 360 game console (special thanks to Benito!) with an additional wireless controller through Amazon (Better price and free shipping).

What decision/s have your social media connections helped you made recently?

Here’s the deal: The more people you “follow” the busier your stream gets and the harder it is to digest the information. Only a minority of users know how to use Twitter really well, building a true listening station so you can read specific conversations, avoiding the clutter.
There’s an increasing amount of people using Twitter. The number of people they’re following happens to be increasing as well. The problem: There’s too much noise and people don’t see your message as often as they used to.
Those of you that have been using Twitter for a few years: Do you remember when you published a shortened URL in 2008 or 2009 and tracked the clicks along with response time? Your content would have traveled very far in a matter of seconds and get at least 5 to 10 immediate clicks. Now, you’ll be lucky if you get 1 or 2 clicks in an hour. Don’t take my word for it. Gary Vaynerchuk is going through the same problem…

So, is Twitter a bad tool now?

Twitter is still a powerful, real-time communication tool that can help you connect with customers and prospects. You will perceive the most value when people talk to you (publicly or privately) and you’re able to conduct short conversations.  Publishing doesn’t have the same impact and your content won’t resonate much. Last year, Brian Solis said that the life span of a tweet was one hour. I believe, nowadays, that has probably dropped to one minute possibly.

Conclusion

When you define your customer/community and start working on your social media strategy, do consider Twitter but be very careful on the expectation.
If you’re a big brand or company that has a big portion of the audience on Twitter and/or many mentions already, you may expect to receive immediate interaction and faster results. On the other hand, if you are a small or medium sized business, you may find Twitter a good place to listen to strategic conversations and also have a dedicated real-time channel, available to connect with customers and prospects. However, do not count with a quick, tangible ROI.

How is Twitter working for you currently? Share your story below.

We did a post last year about Foursquare for business networking, but I came across a great video interview with a company that provides feedback on how and why they use this platform.

The Corcoran Group sell multimillion dollar apartments, mainly in New York. Their approach consisted on leaving “tips” for specific locations such as shops, bar, restaurants, etc. Why on earth would a busy, money-making company, be leaving tips on Foursquare?

Matthew Shadbolt, Director of interactive marketing, shares some great insights  (short video at the bottom) but, here are three BIG ones:

• “The idea of how you find a great apartment, has much more to do with what’s around the building or apartment itself, just as much as what’s in the apartment. We call this: going beyond the four walls”.
• “We believe it’s helpful to guide people around the city through the lens of the Corcoran group’s expertise”.
• “Foursquare is a great place for us to share local insights and expertise and transfer what real estate agents have always done but in the mobile space and in a more meaningful and helpful way to our audience”

What I love about this approach is that is focused on helping prospects and customers in line with business objectives, rather than interrupting them with marketing messages. By facilitating the access to deals, they’re presenting themselves as a company that knows the area,  improving their positioning in people’s minds.

Thinking beyond four walls

This post is not just about Foursquare. The idea is that you can see more than your own company in the big picture and work in sync with an ecosystem that will make your brand more powerful than if you’re the only one pulling from the rope.

I can hear already Management asking: “So, what’s the return on investment for every tip, tweet, video we post?”. That’s a valid question, but it’s up to you to broaden their views, painting a bigger, more beneficial picture about how can your company be more successful. It will help to first build a strong purpose to back up any plan. In the case of Corcoran Group, they didn’t start with “we aim at X amount of tips that will return X amount of leads”. There’s nothing wrong in measuring that. It’s better to understand first the “why” behind what you’re doing. Example: “We believe it’s helpful to guide people around the city through the lens of the Corcoran’s group expertise”. Find your angle.
Obviously, as Matthew explains in the video, Foursquare is not a stand-alone tactic but rather one piece within their overall strategy.

Tactics don’t last forever. Twelve months from now, the company might no longer see big value in Foursquare and may move on to another platform. If your problem is time, simply don’t juggle with five platforms at the same time. Start small. Focus on small wins that can demonstrate specific results and you’ll gain trust from the board. Hopefully, time and also resources will be allocated to your social media programme gradually.

What social media ideas have you tried beyond the four walls?

First of all, let’s have a look at the current situation. The year already started, objectives have been set and budgets allocated to each department. Before you find time, think about funding and/or resources for this new initiative. Getting funding means that budget X will be taken away from other projects within your organisation in order for you to execute yours.
Once you have this clear, here are 3 basic points that will help you build your business case and hopefully find that precious time:

1. What’s the plan and how will it impact your goals?

People tend to think about social media as this “separate thing” on top of what they’re already doing. That’s not sustainable. A social media programme should blend gradually with what you’re already doing to help you achieve the same goals. Period. Otherwise you’d be just giving yourself and your team useless “homework”.
If you devise a medium or long term plan that makes sense by showing the necessary steps to improve X outcome (financial or non-financial, according to the department’s needs), you’ll be in a much better position to sell the project to the C suite. If you succeed, priorities will hopefully change. For example, you might get help from other resources within the company or maybe a new hire. You might also be relieved from certain tasks in order to execute this new initiative. The most important point is that you’re making sure that management won’t pull the plug of your programme at least in the short term, giving you the time to get started.

2. What current activities are not working?

Get together with your team and make a list (as big as you can) of all the tasks you perform throughout the day, even the very little ones. Then assign a time in minutes to each one of them. Once everyone shared the results, your objective will be to focus on those activities that have been going on for a while (or not) and that have demonstrated unsuccessful. The next step would be to assess if they can be replaced with activities of your social media programme. Through this exercise you might find hours of new “available” time.

3. Leverage your community to create fresh content

Many companies understand the potential value of a blog as a main hub in their digital strategy but they also see it as the biggest obstacle: “How do we commit to regular fresh content, how do we write good posts, what do we talk about?“.
You can learn how to produce good content very easily. One of the  ways to find time to publish more posts is by not thinking of you as the only content producer. A core step when devising your social media strategy lies on defining the persona of your ideal customer and also your community (people, brands and companies that don’t necessarily compete with you but share the main general topic). If you are a technology company , then people within the community could be: engineers, distributors, partners, installers, official body representatives, etc. Make a selection and invite them to contribute to your blog (your stage), explaining that they’ll be exposed to a relevant audience. Example: The distributor (even if they distribute other competitor’s products) could write posts for buyers that are looking at ways to go through renewals/ assessment processes more efficiently. The engineers could share insights on how to select a given product line/ family. The installers could cover DIY processes or how to put an adequate team together for X or Y initiative around a given technology. You get the idea
This tactic could help you find that time, keeping your blog content interesting while generating win-win relationships with your partners.

It could feel overwhelming at the beginning, but if you work on a good plan (on your own or with help) and are confident that your social media programme can yield results, you’ll find the time one way or another.

In which other ways would you find time?

If your company has already faced the “time problem” and moved on, how did you manage to overcome it?

Sales

Professionals that sell solutions to distributors know that a sale doesn’t close immediately and that “lead nurturing” is highly important. One of the ways in which you can generate an immediate impact with a prospect and stay longer in their minds is by being unique.
Online video messages make you memorable. We started using them two years ago and it has worked really well. We took our personal video messages to the next level last year by creating private video-message-pages on our site. Now prospects watch the video in a more relevant context. The idea is that the person connects with us through any of the calls-to-action and obviously can navigate our site and learn more.

Customer Service

Your reps collect feedback from customers face-to-face and via telephone. Pay attention (and tag if possible online or on a piece of paper) what type of product is being mentioned the most, especially those with challenges. Take down as much information as possible about customers’ questions and suggestions.
Ideally, by now your company has a blog. With all the data collected, work with the relevant department to make progress on those changes. Once that’s clear, produce a video where you acknowledge the issues with the product, thank your customers for all the input and finally set expectations in terms of how the company will overcome the challenge (e.g. improve product, replace it with a new one, information about recalls, etc).
Once you make a video post, including a good title and tags so more relevant folks can find you, here’s what’s going to happen:

• You’ll be producing a piece of highly relevant content that many people will read/view and interact with (comments)
• You’ll be leaving on the web a public valuable breadcrumb that will contribute 100% to you company’s reputation
• You’ll make your company more approachable since you’re clearly listening to customers and facilitating a solution (Making things easy)

Marketing

Uploading your TV commercials and promotional material to a video platform is OK, however it’s far from really embracing online video.
The whole idea is that you serve your community. Videos like the first example above would certainly do that and the best of all is that it’s also a piece of marketing Just because you work in the Marketing Department it doesn’t mean that videos that you upload must have a “corporate message”.
So, how can you be different? Live video is a phenomenal option. I’m sure you have product launches every now and then. Why not showcase your new product and the experts behind it LIVE to anyone in the world? You may use professional live streaming service such as  Livestream or Ustream as the ideal platforms (For optimum results and piece of mind, use paid versions which start from $350 and $400 dollars/month respectively).
The idea here is not to get rid of all the traditional methods by which you promote your new products every year. The goal is for you to own a global platform that will offer you a bigger and cost-effective reach, while offering your prospects and customers an opportunity to engage and ask you questions.
One great example is Cisco, a manufacturer that “shaved $100K off their product launch using social media“.

What other online video tips would you add?