Panel Members:

Dave Williams, CEO, President and Co-founder of BLINQ Media
Leslie Darling, Vice President of East Coast Media for comScore, Inc.
Donna Bedford, Global SEO Lead of Lenovo

From the program:

Interacting with vertically-focused online communities

How content can enhance customer interaction and loyalty, while also increasing word of mouth

Challenges of regulated industries

Involvement in Social Media for B2B:

Dave Williams: Target audiences. Using LinkedIn, Facebook, we can hyper-target and engage audiences. Social media is a great compliment to other forms of media. We layer. Largest transition of budget to social media is coming from newspaper and magazines.

Donna Bedford: We want an honest view of the web. We want to interact with our customers. A lot is internal, so we have one voice for the company. Right now we tend to talk to consumers and businesses in the same way. We primarily do it as a branding exercise. We also use it for customer service to get customers answers.

Leslie Darling: We’re constantly looking at new ways to build out products and solutions through social media. What we’re trying to do is tie online activity with offline activity. What are people thinking about your brand? About your products and services? About your competition?

What can I glean from a lot of people liking a post?

Dave Williams: Focus right now for a lot of businesses is on building rather than monetizing. We help brands drive engagement through advertisements targeted by interests that are highly correlated with the brand. Understanding the demographics of that audience, we optimize the campaigns focusing on those who will be most responsive.

Social Analytics:

Leslie Darling: We can see where people are going, what type of social media sites they’re using. We can report on number of posts that are taking place on any type of site.

Which social commerce tool to would you use for product promos?

Donna Bedford: Facebook. I wouldn’t use paid advertising, but we’ve done programs like giving away a scholarship. Working through our fan base, offering them discounts and promos, has worked very well.

Dave Williams: Driving engagement through social media is extremely powerful. What’s most effective is tying the media around large promotional periods (i.e. Black Friday, Cyber Monday) to drive awareness of these times. Along with that, offer something special or unique to that audience. Leverage online to drive offline activity.

Leslie Darling: We’ve seen an average lift of 18-21% in offline sales from using social media.

Dave Williams: Remarketing is targeting non-brand related searches. People who aren’t specifically aware of your brand. You place a cookie on a user when they visit your site. For a window of time, you can follow them across the internet with your ads.

We develop out creative and targets very quickly. We can then divide those targets. We publish ads through the Facebook API and can create large campaigns in a matter of minutes. We feel there’s a big opportunity in the social media space to take advantage of the targeting abilities.

ROI

Leslie Darling: We look at who in the marketplace is advertising online. Who are the advertisers that are really engaged in social media? We look at listening. You need to know what people are saying about your brand, products and services, your competitors and the industry. Those are key to building out the overall strategy. Not all platforms are going to be relevant to your industry.

Donna Bedford: You should also be interacting with places like WikiAnswers. We drive a lot of traffic from Wikipedia. It shouldn’t just be about matching media against Facebook.

Dave Williams: It’s not all about spending money on advertising to drive commerce. One of the biggest things recently is Facebook opening up their social graph API. A lot of sites have seen a significant lift in traffic because of that. Facebook is really becoming the operating system of the internet. Facebook is making search more relevant to what you like, what your friends like.

Advice?

Leslie Darling: They “know” they should have a Facebook page, but don’t know how to implement it. It’s great to have bells and whistles but what do you want to do with social media? Think about who your audience is? How are you going to reach them best? How are you doing to target them? What networks and sites are really going to fit with your objective?

Donna Bedford: Be honest because it will come back and haunt you.

Dave Williams: Look to leverage social media almost the way you would a Sunday circular. Something that’s going to offer value beyond a brand message.

Lift: The B2B Social Commerce Summit is a “must attend” event for marketing executives, senior management and business owners looking to apply real-world social tactics that drive sales lift to their business.