Following is an excerpt from the new Real Magnet eBook The Social Starter Kit, available as a free download here.

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In some ways, Twitter is a lot like email. It is a channel that allows for broadcast messages, and many people follow other people and brands expressly for the messages intended for a mass audience. But it also allows for one-to-one communication, with the main difference to email being that even the one-to-one communication reaches your entire list of followers. It is as if you are sending a message to one person and cc’ing ten thousand. In email, this practice would be unendurable, but Twitter messages are infinitely more transient than email messages. They do not land in an inbox waiting to be dealt with, but appear fleetingly on a feed before disappearing into the ether. Instead of being roped into someone else’s conversation unwillingly, seeing a conversation on Twitter is more like eavesdropping.

Brands use many different content strategies on Twitter. Here are a few of the most popular:

Example 1: Broadcasting
ForeSee
http://twitter.com/ForeSee

Perhaps the most common use of Twitter for business (particularly with B-to-B brands) is for content broadcasting. Brands that generate a lot of original content (such as blogs, articles, white papers or research reports), or supplement their online activity with in-person events and conferences will find Twitter a handy channel to keep an audience informed and updated on relevant news.

ForeSee is a B-to-B company serving the digital retail industry. Its twitter account (below) focuses principally on content broadcasting, alerting its audience to new blog posts, research reports it has contributed to, and events where it is exhibiting.

The challenge to this content strategy is to maintain engagement with your audience, as content broadcasting is really just talking about yourself. It is only productive if you have a sizable and engaged audience, so supplement broadcasting with other types of content that help grow your audience, allowing for more profitable and scalable broadcasting.
Example 2: Customer Service
Zappos.com
http://twitter.com/Zappos_Service

Twitter has become the go-to channel for real-time customer service, in part because pioneers like Best Buy launched high-profile real-time customer service initiatives in the channel, conditioning customers of all brands to expect the same level of immediate attentiveness. Zappos.com wins accolades for its outstanding customer service every year, and was quick to meet customer expectations for Twitter-based service. The company has several Twitter accounts, including the one below expressly for customer service.

You will see in the example that the Zappos staffer who is currently on duty introduces herself in a friendly and approachable way. (There is no point in a customer service channel that is off-putting.) The other two tweets in this example are direct to specific customers, in response to questions to @Zappos_Service that are not visible on this feed.

When a customer sends a tweet to a brand, the tweet is visible on that person’s feed and could be seen by all of his or her followers. It is this public correspondence that compels brands to respond, as ignoring the tweet could well prompt another tweet from the same person, with growing impatience at the lack of a response. Zappos responds to tweets from its customers publicly, which means that all 11,781 of its followers might see its advice to @FeeFiFoMennifer that she should wear the shoes around the house for a while, and its response to @Theresa_is_Dead that she is welcome (presumably for something Zappos told her through Twitter previously).

Why would Zappos include all 12,000 followers on these one-to-one conversations? More importantly, why would 12,000 people follow this account knowing that one-to-somebody-else conversations are the principal content? The answer is that this is both how and why Twitter works. It is a hybrid channel, allowing for broadcasting and personal communication, at the same time. Zappos wants 12,000 people to see it taking care of @FeeFiFoMennifer and @Theresa_is_Dead because all of these people also realize that when they have a problem, they will enjoy the exact same immediate and personal attention that Mennifer and Theresa are receiving. This level of service is a powerful statement to be able to convey to customers and prospects. How powerful? Enough that 12,000 of them would follow this account to witness it.

It is worth noting the volume of service activity here as well. Zappos is a huge retailer, owned by Amazon.com and doing many millions of dollars of business every year. Yet Tanya, who signed on a few hours ago to handle the Twitter volume, only has a couple of tweets to manage in a couple hours. Reviewing a longer duration of activity on the account reveals that @Zappos_Service typically has about 50 tweets per day, or one every 30 minutes or so. Most of these are direct response to service inquiries requiring little or no research, such as “You’re welcome – glad to help!” or “Eep – that sounds rough? Call our customer service at 1-877-927-2332 and we’ll try to resolve it for you.” Opening up a service channel through Twitter does not increase the amount of service your brand will have to provide; it just gives your customers another way to reach you.

Example 3: Engagement
PowerBar
http://twitter.com/PoweBar

PowerBar uses its Twitter presence principally to deepen its relationship with customers through engagement. Its products are aimed at endurance athletes so much of its Twitter content is not only about competitive events, but indicates also the brand’s (and its people’s) involvement in them. PowerBar uses its Twitter account to demonstrate its authenticity for its market, by showing that the people at PowerBar are athletes (and people) just like its customers.

In the feed sample below, PowerBar tweets an ad hoc contest, giving someone the opportunity to win an entry to an upcoming triathlon. The design of the contest is clever. Many brands will run social contests where the first person or 10 people to tweet or RT win something. PowerBar opens the window for entry for two hours, and asks its followers to reply to @PowerBar with “Pick Me” for a chance to win. Remember that all of these tweets will show up in the feeds of everyone who follows each person who participates, so over the next two hours the PowerBar brand (and its contest) will generate tens or hundreds of thousands of highly impressions among the friends of competitive athletes, all for the cost of a single triathlon entry (about $100).

We see also the tone that PowerBar uses in its tweets, speaking directly to people as if they are friends, using colloquial and relaxed language. Fans can hear a person on the other side of the @PowerBar account, which helps build engagement with the brand through the approachability.

Speaking to a single person on Twitter may seem like a tactic that squanders social’s scalability, but the opposite is true. Every fan who sees a brand interact directly with another fan begins to realize that this is a brand that cares what its customers have to say. The fan does not need to be part of the direct conversation for the impact to register.

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For more tips on creating and executing your social media strategy, download our free eBook The Social Starter Kit.

Critical Mass isn’t a term we use in email marketing. It’s true that the larger your list the more absolute response you can expect, but results scale linearly along with list size. Your open and click rates are the same whether you have 100, 1000 or 10,000 subscribers, assuming of course that they’re all equally well-qualified. Mass helps, but it is never technically critical.

Social media – Facebook in particular – is different. There, success is a function of conversation and engagement which creates some visible social interaction around a brand. Conversely, it can be difficult to build momentum in social media without an audience of a certain size. If a brand generates a 1% interaction rate from its audience, it needs 100 fans for each response to a post. Driving a lot of comments and conversation help show that a brand is lively, conversational and approachable, but a Facebook page without interaction does not create the same inviting feel. It’s like the empty restaurant during the dinner rush. If nobody else is eating there, why should you?

Facebook’s latest version of Insights does an excellent job communicating the brand impact of this engagement. In addition to the number of fans a page has, Facebook now publishes a number for “How many are talking about this,” which reflects the total number of people who have liked or shared or commented on a brand’s content. Additionally, Facebook Insights now publish statistics on “Reach,” which is the total number of people who see the brand’s content on the brand’s page as well as in their own news feed and other places across Facebook, as their friends interact with the brand. For example, a brand that has 500 fans might have a reach of 2,000 people through viral interactions – each time a fan comments on some brand content, all that person’s friends may see that interaction. That’s the viral appeal of Facebook – that brand interactions are witnessed openly by your customers’ friends, turning comments and “likes” into tacit brand endorsements.

As reach goes up, more people are exposed to the brand, creating more fans and driving a virtuous cycle. So on Facebook there is a point where critical mass is reached – where an fan base is large enough to drive visible conversation for a brand that bounces around Facebook and brings in even more fans. The actual number, as you may have guessed, depends. The more a brand drives interaction (which is a function more of its content strategy than the brand alone, as we’ll see), the fewer fans are necessary to reach this sustained and growing fan ecosystem. Anecdotally, I see many Facebook fan pages run up to about 300 fans quickly, then stall out. At the same time, many pages that reach 500 fans quickly grow to 1,000 and beyond. So absent perfect information I’m comfortable saying that Facebook critical mass is about 500 fans.

How do you reach Facebook critical mass? Here are some suggestions:

Post Frequently: News Feeds, unlike inboxes, are transient and permeable. Everything that flows in flows right out unless something – like interaction – causes it to swirl around for a while. Posting on your company’s page will remain visible to everyone visiting the page, but most of the interaction around your brand happens on the News Feeds of your followers. The more friends they have and brands they like, the less opportunity your content has to even hit their radar. Facebook publishes impressions on each post for Facebook page administrators to see. If you have 500 fans you may see that your post has fewer than 500 impressions. That’s because other content pushed it from News Feeds before your fans got to it. As your interaction goes up, your posts linger longer, so your 500 fans may generate 800 or 1000 impressions. Here is where the viral impact starts to take hold. But to get there you have to post frequently enough so that you are increasing your chances of getting into News Feeds when your fans are online.

Aim for Interaction, not Conversion: As email marketers, we’re closers. Our messages are commonly designed to drive a purchase, conversion or other direct response. But the tactics with Facebook are different. To grow your Facebook audience, your content should aim for interaction instead of conversion. “Register for the Conference today – click here” may drive some clicks, but nobody on Facebook will see them. Instead, a post like, “We’ve just announced our 4 keynotes – which are you most looking forward to?” invites responses and interaction, which will be seen on News Feeds all across the service.

Use Interaction-friendly Content: Questions and comment invitations like the example above are one way to drive interaction. Another is to spare the 1,000 words and use a picture instead. Glossy product shots are OK, but if your aim is to drive interaction then candids from the office or the last conference may work better. People are likely to comment on pictures of themselves or people they know more than products they like or events they may attend. And because Facebook is far more casual than your website, mobile phone photos are not only acceptable – they are de rigueur. Too much polish makes a brand feel inauthentic on Facebook.

Sponsored Stories: Facebook offers a number of advertising options. My favorite is Sponsored Stories, which lets you target friends of your fans with ads telling them that their friends like your brand. Sponsored Stories amplify what Facebook does best – enables your fans to recommend your brand, explicitly and tacitly. And Sponsored Stories become more effective as your fan base grows, as the universe of people who are friends with your fans increases exponentially as well.

Last week I wrote about how the new analytics available through Social Magnet can lend some valuable insight into marketing results contributions. For the first time we can see exactly how many clicks from a campaign are attributable to email, and also how many are from Facebook and/or Twitter. This type of data is more than just an interesting topic at the next marketing department meeting. It helps marketers score their various marketing channels for effectiveness in order to determine how future investments (in cash and time) are best spent.

At first, comparisons between channels are likely to be in aggregate, across all messages. Over time, marketers using Social Magnet will begin to see which channels work best for different types of messages. In some cases that won’t mean a change in action – if the objective is to notify your entire audience about a webinar or conference registration deadline it will make sense to use email, Facebook and Twitter, even if one of the three works significantly better. But in instances where social channels work better, marketers may start to thin the number of messages they send to their email list in order to rest the inbox a bit, and save attention in that channel for when it is needed more urgently.

Deciding which channel is ideal for different message types can make a marketing program more efficient, but increased effectiveness comes from investing resources into the channel where they will provide the biggest lift. Here’s where Social Magnet can have a pretty profound strategic impact on your marketing communications.

Let’s say that one of your projects scheduled for next quarter is an initiative to increase the number of your email subscribers. Now that you’ve got Social Magnet, you may want to revise that item on the to-do list to increase the size of your audience. Through the analytics, you may find that each incremental Facebook fan or Twitter follower is worth more than an additional email subscriber, or that the energy required to bring in one more subscriber to a relatively large list would bring in 10 fans or followers to your smaller social channels. One of the ways Social Magnet can help is the response-per-audience across all your lists. For example, let’s say that you have 10,000 people in your email list, 500 Facebook fans and 1,000 Twitter followers. Over the course of a few months you send out 10 messages to each of these groups, all attached to each other through Social Magnet, promoting the same thing and including a link (or at least one link in the email). You get the following results:

Email List:
10 messages to 10,000 = 100,000 messages
1,500 total unique clicks
1.5% average click rate

Facebook:
10 messages to 500 = 5,000 messages
250 total unique clicks
5% average click rate

Twitter:
10 messages to 1,000 = 10,000 messages
750 total unique clicks
7.5% average click rate

You see in this example that Twitter has the highest average click rate of the three, which is not purely hypothetical. Some studies are finding that click rates on Twitter can be remarkably high, with Facebook not far behind. As with all things analytics, how they apply to your business depends on a number of different factors. In this example, the company built out its Facebook and Twitter audiences organically, relying on content to spread and attract people who would be interested in the brand. If they had launched in to a blind follow campaign on Twitter or run thousands of dollars worth of ads and promotions on Facebook, they would have a larger and less targeted audience that wouldn’t yield the same average click rates.

If we stay with the scenario above, this brand might find it worthwhile to put more energy into growing its social channels. Because they are small, the available and untapped audience for them is larger (with the lowest hanging fruit to be found within their own house email list). And each person on the list is currently more likely to respond, or to pass along a message to people who respond (which is a factor in the higher click rate – not all of the 750 clicks on Twitter are from the brand’s followers if the messages are retweeted).

Resource allocation is never binary, however. Deciding to ramp up your Facebook presence does not mean abandoning your email efforts. Social and email work well together, to load balance communications. Social Magnet can help quantify some of the decisions that we face with our communications program each day, replacing many of our hypotheses with actual insights.

The big news over here at Real Magnet HQ is the launch of Social Magnet, an update to our application that has some innovative features integrating email and social media, and allows for unprecedented analytics and attribution. We’re really excited to see our customers dig in and unearth some all new multichannel insights. For MediaPost this week I took a look at some of the analytics that you won’t see in Social Magnet, the thought being that we need to understand how email and social are different as channels in order to compare metrics in a way that makes sense.

Email + Social Integration: More Useful than a Holy Grail
by Mike May
published in MediaPost’s Email Insider, 10.19.11

I’m not letting anybody in on some big secret when I say that social media is the next great communication channel. We email marketers love it because it reminds us of our inbox comfort zone in so many ways: it is inexpensive and scalable, provides immediate response and feedback, is able to be managed by our existing in-house resources, and promises tremendous ROI.

Social is also similar to email in that it is permission-based. As email marketers we already have the skills needed to earn an audience over time, develop content strategies to keep them involved, and suffer the consequences of abusing the attention our audience has given us. Sure the tactics we employ to do all this in social media are very different from the ways we operate in email, but the strategy and skillset are the same.

Combining email and social media has become a sort of Holy Grail quest for marketers and the vendors who support them. It is an apt analogy. Combining the conversation and social spreading power of social media with the analytics and visibility of email would lend some much needed accountability to social media, increasing its adoption among companies that rely principally on email and earning it a protected line item status in the budget. As marketers, it’s easy to love the potential of social media, but hard to quantify what resources to allocate to it until metrics comparing email to social are available.

These analytics tools to integrate and measure email and social are now starting to appear on the market, and I expect the conversation will quickly turn from SWYN and “Use email to grow your social audience and vice versa” towards a new round of engaging tales of integrated communications.

We could all use some guidance on what to look for and how to execute using these new tools, so I’d love to write that helpful article. The only trouble is that I can’t – I don’t know yet what tactics will work great and which won’t bear fruit because the tools are so new and the metrics they provide are unprecedented.

Instead, maybe it’s worthwhile to spend some time on what email and social integration will not look like, so we don’t look like Monte Python in our quest for marketing’s greatest treasure.

Here are some things that we can’t do with the next round of email + social integration:

Improve customer engagement intelligence: Social analytics can provide a lot of intelligence on what messages are generating responses, but fall well short of email in their capacity to identify who in particular is responding. Yes you can see who on your page and feed is liking this or retweeting that, but it amounts to anecdotal information, not institutionalized learning in the way our subscriber email metrics show up. There is no automated way to identify who from your email list is interacting (or even following) socially, or vice versa. If you want to tag social activity back to a customer database you need to do it manually. For most marketers, this means it won’t be done.

Combine email’s targeting with social’s warm brand fuzziness: One challenge with social media is that targeting is difficult. It’s true that on Facebook you can restrict status updates to custom segments of a page’s fans, but other than geography, how do you go about and create meaningful segments? With email it’s easy to segment based on previous message responders (or non-responders), past customers, or any other attributes you collect and attach to a record. In social media there is no such record you have access to. And if you did, would you use it? Targeting in a social context is tantamount to filtering, or limiting the number of people who can interact with your message and spread it around. For most marketers, that outcome truncates the whole social value proposition. So no, this isn’t part of the email + social Holy Grail either.

Analyze the same metrics across all channels: It would at least be great to compare social media using the same metrics we’ve grown accustomed to in email, like delivery, open rate and click-through, right? That’s not on the near-term horizon either. Of that list, only click-through is a common denominator across the inbox, Facebook and Twitter. (Facebook’s Insights are improving with respect to communicating how many people are seeing content, which is a suitable proxy for Email Opens. But I don’t know if it will be available through an API for external integration.) By using a tracking URL for each channel that ties back to an integrated analytics platform, it is possible to see how many clicks for a given message are coming from email, Facebook and Twitter respectively. But even here marketers have to think of the channels differently. With email, each recipient gets a unique tracking URL so the aggregate metrics are a roll-up of all the activity around a given link or message across all subscribers. With social media, it is a single tracking URL per channel, whether there are 10 fans and followers or 10,000. There is no way to know how many of the clicks come from unique DNA, or how many come from outside the fan and follower base.

It’s worth pointing out that nobody ever found the Holy Grail. (Indiana Jones doesn’t count and Monte Python isn’t exactly revered for their marketing best practices.) Similarly, we should focus on the new possibilities email + social integration do open up for us, instead of hunting for a treasure that will never be found. I don’t know about you, but when it comes to marketing I’ll take good tactics over a hidden treasure any day.

What is the best way to promote the early deadline to your upcoming conference – sending an email or posting to Twitter and Facebook? Most companies’ response to this question is an immediate, “Why email, of course.” We know email works, through experience and analytics.

The challenge with social media adoption has been the absence of the analytics that have endeared marketing budgets to email. Without them, we simply cannot know how well the channel works, and have little reason to shift resources away from email and other channels that prove themselves with every view of the Track Message tab.

But what if social works better than we’ve given it credit for? That question was the impetus behind the creation of Social Magnet. For an email company, we’re actually pretty channel agnostic. We want to help you drive your business forward with a strategically managed communications program. If 250 million people install messaging receptors into their cerebral cortexes, we’ll build the tools to help you reach and measure into that channel. But until then, we’re focused on the 250 million people using social media. As marketers, we shouldn’t take a leap of faith into some new channel because it’s popular, hoping that it works. We should move into it strategically, focused not just on driving results, but being able to measure them so we can replicate results and allocate resources accordingly.

Social Magnet has a batch of analytics that allow us to measure the contribution of social media in unprecedented ways. As a guy at Real Magnet whose job it is to help promote and explain these new tools, I’m eager to get to work. But as a marketer facing the prospect of getting smarter than ever about how social media impacts my campaigns and results, I’m positively salivating.

Over the next few articles I will look at how to measure the impact of social on marketing programs. I will start with the first topic that I as a marketer intend to get strategically smart about:

What impact do Facebook and Twitter have on my actual marketing results?

I know I’ve got fans and followers, and I see whenever people like or comment or retweet, and I can also see who those people are. What I don’t know is how much of the response I get to messages comes from social channels as opposed to email. When I want to drive traffic to a website, I promote via email, Twitter and Facebook simultaneously, and I get results – but to what channels do I attribute the success?

With Social Magnet, I can attach social messages to an email and analyze all three at the same time. For example, if I want you to register for my next webinar, I can send an email out with a link to the registration page. In the same Real Magnet application I can also compose a Facebook status update and a tweet, both with a link to the same page, and attach them to the email message. Then when I look at the response to that message, I will see how many total clicks it received, including a breakdown by channel. Maybe I’ll see 100 on email, and then another 30 on Facebook and 20 from Twitter.

Without Social Magnet I’d still get these 130 clicks. Using the application does not necessarily increase the productivity or effectiveness of your marketing messages (not yet anyway – but analytics always drive better results so they will come in time). But I wouldn’t know how much of my results – if any – to attribute to social channels. I can look in Google Analytics or another web analytics program but they don’t exactly have Six Sigma accuracy on attribution. Many people access Facebook and Twitter from mobile devices or apps that are not webpages, which are often not measurable in analytics programs and show up in the large, vague “Direct” category of traffic sources.

Social Magnet works differently because the measurement is done through a shortened tracking URL the program creates. Whether someone clicks via email (in the inbox or a smartphone), on Facebook’s or Twitter’s sites, or on apps or dashboards used to view and manage social media, the URL is constant and Social Magnet tracks it.

In my example, social media is responsible for one third of my click-through results. Whether it is one third or one tenth, it is intelligence I never had before. Now I can start to approach the channel more strategically.

Next time:
Social Magnet Analytics, Part 2: Should I prioritize growing my social audience over my email list?

I’ve been spending a lot of time here on the blog lately writing about social media, particularly with respect to B-to-B companies. We’re about to launch our new Social Magnet product, designed to make it easier than ever to accelerate your social strategy, and easier to find the resources internally to support it. Today I’m staying on that same road, but approaching the intersection of email and social from the point of view marketers most appreciate – ROI.

A study last month by research firm Chadwick Martin Bailey sought to get at the heart of how valuable Facebook fans are. (The data to follow is specific to Facebook, but I’ve seen similar trends regarding Twitter followers.) I know that social media, particularly with respect to B-to-B companies, suffers from the perception of suspect ROI. And while not all of these statistics will remain true for every brand, the data is nevertheless directionally encouraging, and does help to confirm what many marketers find so irresistible about social media – that all of the personal and social interaction there can be a huge boon to brands that have successfully inserted themselves into the conversations between friends.

Here’s the data. Consider how these trends might reflect on your organization as you ponder your own social strategy:

Fans recommend: According to the study, a fan of a brand is 56% more likely to recommend the brand than someone who is not a fan. In email, I talk a lot about relevance – how relevant messaging makes a brand more important in a person’s life. That concept is channel agnostic, and we’re seeing evidence of it in this study. If your brand is on Facebook or Twitter, and you are interacting with your customers there just as you always have in the inbox and trade shows and direct mail and your other channels, you are more in that person’s world. And because social media is permission-based, like email, you’ve been invited into that world. You are more relevant to those people, so it is no surprise they are more likely to recommend you.

Fans are selective: The threshold for becoming a Facebook fan is theoretically lower than it is to sign up for a company’s email, due to the nature of the content stream. With email, every message from every brand you subscribe to hits your inbox and has to be managed. You need to read, sort, skip, delete, filter or otherwise triage that message, or else your inbox loses its vital utility. With social media however, the news feed in which messages appear is transient. If you miss a message it just moves on, with no backlog for you to work through in order to recognize the utility of the channel. So it comes as a surprise to me that the number of brands people become fans of is relatively low. According to the study, 78% of people who “like” brands on Facebook are fans of 10 or fewer of them. To the marketer, this means a relative lack of clutter in the news feed. The fewer other brands your fans follow, the more likely they are to see your posts pop up. As email marketers, we already know the challenges associated with clutter. Curiously, they may be somewhat mitigated in social media.

Fans are already customers: 58% of a brand’s Facebook fans are already customers, according to the study. The upshot here is due to the social nature of Facebook. People talk to each other and, as we see above, recommend the brands they follow. If these people are already your customers, they have a more informed perspective and are better able to tell your story, particularly through their own lens. Someone who says, “I bought from them and loved it,” has more influence than, “I like them a lot and intend to buy from them one day.”

Fans are loyal: Only one in four fans ever “unlike” the brands they follow. True, that is higher than your unsubscribe rate for any given message, though over the course of a year losing 1 in 4 email subscribers is very likely. Owing to the transient nature of the feed content, this data does not surprise me. It is much harder to annoy or cloy a fan through Facebook than it is overwhelm in the inbox (though of course it does happen). But the other reason I think loyalty abounds in social media is that the channel can drive some pretty deep engagement. Not only are people not annoyed by the brands they follow: successful social initiatives create even greater engagement and expectation. Many people keep an email subscription active “just in case” or because they don’t mind it so much. But increasingly brands are using Facebook to drive meaningful two-way interaction.

Fans buy more: The study also revealed that a Facebook fan is 50% more likely to buy (or buy again) from the brand after becoming a fan. It’s not clear what the causality is here – whether people become a fan in the course of their research and intent to buy, or if becoming a fan and interacting with the brand socially is what compelled the purchase. Regardless, the correlation is meaningful, so moving your prospects towards your social presence does drive results.

In Part 1 of this series I provided some advice on social media strategies B-to-B brands might consider adopting, designed to expand reach, deepen connections and generate leads. Those were the examples; this week come the warnings. For every good social media strategy for B-to-B, there are a dozen lousy ones. I’m going to help you steer clear of them.

There is no shortage of coverage of scintillating social media campaigns to regard as examples, many of which are festooned with superlatives like “best” or “most successful” or “awesomest”. But 99% of these are B-to-C brands, and most are B-to-C brands with multimillion dollar budgets hiring the most progressive agencies and allocating considerable internal resources as well. What works for Starbucks will positively flop for most B-to-B brands. Here are a few of the more popular social approaches employed by major B-to-C brands. While the results they achieve are appealing, they’re out of reach for B-to-B. Worse, poor response to social campaigns like these can make a brand appear less relevant than it is. When you have a million customers and disappoint a few, it’s a problem but not a crisis. With B-to-B however, alienating even a single important client can have immediate ramifications on the bottom line. It’s better for B-to-B brands to hit singles consistently than to swing for the fences and whiff.

Here are a few Don’ts for your B-to-B social strategy:

1. Don’t crowdsource or run user-generated content contests. B-to-C brands love these, as they are able to harness the creativity and passion of a few of the most engaged fans and make it appear like a groundswell of brand enthusiasm. But the success of initiatives that rely on followers to create media, generate ideas, and otherwise propel the campaign forward publicly rely on a sizable audience. One of the most famous is MyStarbucksIdea.com, a social media site create by Starbucks for their fans designed to solicit and vote on great ideas to roll out in their stores. The initiative won Starbucks accolades across the industry for its inventiveness and social underpinnings, but the data on the initiative reveal the massive scale necessary to perpetrate it. When Starbucks launched the program they had about 10 million Facebook fans (today it’s over 25 million). From those 10 million, they generated just 53 ideas for their community to vote on. That’s a participation rate of .0005%, or one entry for every 200,000 fans. Most fans – particularly for brands that have sizable followings – are more casual than impassioned. Soliciting creative participation requires not only a very high level of engagement, but also followers who are creatively inclined in the first place. Absolutely these people exist within your own B-to-B brand’s fan base, but unless you have tens or hundreds of thousands of fans the probability of generating participation great enough to support a campaign is slim.

2. Don’t rely on going viral. Going viral is the holy grail of social media marketing, as it fans your message out to thousands or even millions of people without costing you a dollar in media. The first viral message I remember was an email sent to millions of people containing a spoiler plot for the final episode of Seinfeld (which was actually either a hoax or just inaccurate). Since then, viral dreams have moved out of the inbox and onto YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Videos, articles, blog posts and other messages go viral when there is some attribute within the that is not just appealing to millions of people – it has to resonate so soundly within this population that each person it touches is transformed from a passive consumer of media to an active sharer of media. Look at your email open rates to see the challenge of even finding passive consumers of media. Your click-through rates represent active consumers of media. What percentage of these do you believe are actively sharing what you send? It is possible that a B-to-B brand could put together a successful viral campaign, but the content would almost have to be so far removed from the brand’s central tenets that the brand would hardly benefit from it. It’s very hard for a B-to-B brand to be relevant to millions of people, and also not necessary. Instead of aiming for viral supremacy, targeted pass along makes more sense for B-to-B. Leave the teeming millions to the Old Spice Guy and laughing babies everywhere.

3. Don’t ask for input you don’t intend to use. Many brands’ social strategies can be summed up as “we’re listening to our customers.” This is perfectly appropriate, provided that the brand is genuinely listening and intends to act on the input it receives. In the My Starbucks Idea above, the 53 suggestions from 10 million fans only resulted in 6 actual initiatives by the company, the most successful of which ended up receiving a relatively low number of votes. The challenge for all brands with feedback initiatives like these is that the brand often believes (correctly or not) that it knows better than its customers. So these programs end up as exercises designed to pump an idea that already exists under the guise of a customer-generated suggestion. For B-to-B brands in particular, audiences are smaller and the people who are engaged enough to provide suggestions publicly are very often the same people actively involved in other ways – as key customers, highly active members, conference speakers or committee members. B-to-B customers often regard the brands they do business with not as mere vendors or suppliers, but as business partners or industry colleagues. Not using their ideas often requires a personal explanation, and can risk bending a nose out of shape. Even if bold new ideas were to come from the exercise and be adopted by your B-to-B brand, the backlash still is not worth it.

My column for MediaPost this week is another look at the intersection of email and social, this time within the context of B-to-B, as that is where most of our clients operate. The opportunities for B-to-B companies in social media are not the same as for Starbucks or Red Bull. But the opportunities exist, and given the low cost, scalability and potential ROI of social, my objective was to try and remove some barriers by debunking some of the myths keeping B-to-B companies out of social media.

Mythbusting The Differences Between B-To-B Email And Social
by Mike May
published in MediaPost’s Email Insider, 9.21.11

Depending on whose statistics you believe and where your company does business, there are somewhere between 250 million and 1 billion reasons to accelerate your social media strategy.

But the email clients I work with are principally B-to-B, so the sheer tonnage appeal of social media is not as persuasive with them. If a company only needs a dozen new clients to hit its numbers for the quarter, what should it care that 35 million soccer moms are playing “Farmville,” or that #quikster is trending? Instead, it’s easy to point out the ways in which email and social media are different, and how it is possible to conclude that a company that has built its communications program on email should not move resources into social.

I hear the arguments a lot, and will of course concede that the tactics for success in social are very different from those in email. Ambient atmosphere, message frequency, message length, content strategy and conversational expectations can be wildly different between the two channels. But email and social are alike in a very significant way: They are the only two permission-based channels.

I believe marketers whose teeth are sharp from email head into social with a  competitive advantage, as they already understand the principals of audience acquisition, respect, empathy and relevance. How you execute on these principles varies between email and social, but for the email marketer, operating within them is already second nature.

That email marketers make excellent social media marketers is one very good reason to supplement communications through social. Still, there are many counter arguments I come across, some less defensible than others. Here are a few of the most frequently cited, each in need of a little mythbusting:

1. I don’t really know who my fans and followers on Facebook and Twitter are.
With email I know who they are. If you have open subscription for your email list, I would posit that the same is true –you don’t know who your subscribers are, either. Sure, you may know their names and companies (unless they use Gmail or Hotmail or Yahoo, which is common even in B-to-B), but you also know the names of your Facebook fans, and most Twitter accounts use or reference real names as well. What you don’t have in social is the ability to see who exactly is reading or clicking. Instead, you know who is commenting, liking and retweeting. Isn’t that just as valuable?

2. Not everybody uses social, but everyone is on email.
It’s true that only 250 million Americans, out of a population of 307 million, are on Facebook. And it is possible, I suppose, that the 19% of the population who are not on Facebook are highly correlated with your customer base. But statistics aside, is everyone you want to reach already on your email list? And if they are, do you enjoy 100% open rates, consistently? Most of the population on Facebook and Twitter is not a direct hit for B-to-B marketers, but your audience is there — and your business would benefit from reaching them.

3. Business doesn’t get done in social media. It’s where people talk about where they went to lunch and look at pictures of high school reunions.
“On Facebook / Twitter” and “at their desk, doing work” are not mutually exclusive. Your audience may be doing both at the same time. Even if they are snickering to themselves at the 25 pounds Cliff gained since prom, they’re still only a quick shift in attention back to doing their job. And if they are completely immersed in Facebook, you may find it’s easier to get their attention there than to try to lure them back to the inbox. It’s a water cooler environment. Conversations happen there that you are only privy to if you’re present.

4. My brand isn’t right for social media.
Is Vistaprint’s? It has 33,000 Facebook fans and 9,000 Twitter followers. What about The American Society of Mechanical Engineers? Its industry recruiting program on Facebook earned 10,000 “likes” in only a few months. Both of those brands, as well as Omni Hotels & Resorts, Optify, Lexis Nexis, Sybase, Cisco Systems, EMC and others, were all B-to-B Magazine 2011 Social Media Marketing Award Winners. If your brand says something to your customers, then it is absolutely right for social media.

5. I can control my message in email, but in social media it’s up to everyone else.
I’m not sure this is such a bad thing. Look at it this way: Which would you rather have — an unqualified email address, or a visit to your website from an in-market prospect referred by one of your customers? Good things can happen when your customers help tell your story, even when you have to give up a little control to let it happen.

6. I like email because of the one-to-one targeting. With social, you’re just talking to a sea of nameless, faceless, largely anonymous people.
Let’s be honest here. Do you really do any one-to-one targeting with email? I mean, besides inserting your subscriber’s first name after “Dear” and maybe segmenting by geography or some other fairly wide attribute? Truer one-to-one conversations happen in social media, owing largely to the expectations that customers have about their questions being answered. Whole Foods reports that fully 80% of the company’s tweets are part of individual conversations with customers. And one of the reasons Vistaprint has been so successful in social (see above) was a company policy to respond to every Twitter mention directly, whether it was positive, negative or neutral. As a result, its Twitter followers more than doubled and its NetPromoter score (a scoring of customers who would recommend the company to others) also increased.