Facebook has an image problem.

It started as a social network that was initially invented to provide a voting platform on rating the popularity of the fairer sex. It was more about girls than commerce.

The CEO who might be on Facebook  with his own personal profile, often has trouble seeing its value beyond its initial primary use as a channel to connect and share with family and friends.

Senior managers who were not brought up in the world of texting, instant messaging or watching YouTube videos often do not know that there are 3 types of  Facebook profiles.

1. Personal Facebook profiles for individuals
2. Groups for community organisations and clubs
3. Facebook “Pages” for brands and companies

It is often forgotten that brands and companies on Facebook is only a relatively recent addition to the web (less than 3  years)

Facebook is Growing Up

The young pimply adolescent social networking platform is becoming a serious grown up business marketing channel.

It started light and fluffy but now it’s full of application interfaces, apps and advertising. Facebook design and its interfaces and features are now even extending into online stores that reside within the Facebook ecosystem.

Facebook is Not Just a B2C Marketing Channel

The image of Facebook as purely reserved for B2C  with its casual terms of “fans” and “friends” has slowed its adoption by companies that sell to other business not just consumers. Facebook as a “B2C” (Business to Consumer) marketing and online asset is easy to see but you need to think a bit harder and longer to realize its potential as a B2B (Business to Business).

Facebook should be thought of as an extension of a businesses website, blog and online store that promotes and publishes to the channel where its customers are hanging out.

10 Facebook Tips and Tactics for B2B Marketers

These are just some of the key ways to use Facebook for B2B marketing. I am sure that once you put your creative hat on and spend a bit of time brainstorming you will be surprised by how many more ideas you will come up with!

1. Video Channel with “How To” Tutorials

Don’t just publish or embed videos in your blog or website also place them onto your companies Facebook “page”. It could be just as a news update to your wall if it is topical.

If you are providing evergreen content via videos that describe how to use equipment or explain a difficult concept visually it is best to create a separate Facebook  ’Tab” that provides a quick click to your online video library of educational videos.

2. News Updates in Your Industry

Keeping up with trends is important in any industry so placing the latest breaking news can provide yuor customers and prospects with a resource that keep them up to date and informed.

3. Provide an Incentive for Growing your Facebook “Likes”

Facebook “Likes” are the social networking equivalent of those all important email subscriber lists. Provide a reason for customers and prospects to give you their email address  and you will drastically improve your email acquisition rate.

Clear Risk has a compelling reason to “like” its company Facebook page.

4. Capturing Email Subscriptions for Lead Generation

The “shiny new toy” syndrome of social media marketing and Facebook has blinded many marketers to the continuing power of  capturing those all important emails for lead capture and ongoing marketing.

5. Targeting Decision Makers

If you want to target decision makers with paid advertising on Facebook  then tight demographic targeting can be achieved via Facebook’s self service advertising feature.

6. Market Research and Surveys

Capturing information from prospects and customers is vital to understand what is important to them and provides valuable feedback to bring new products and services to market. Facebook provides a simple but free question tool that is placed in the main share tab section of your Facebook page. If you want to  get a little more funky and complex “Survey Monkey” has a Facebook app that makes it easy to run market surveys without having to custom build your own.

7. Promote your Thought Leaders

People buy from people and showcasing your experts is a great way to build trust and position your company as a thought leader in its industry. Here is how GE promotes its “Guru’s” on its company Facebook page.

8. Sell Your Products and Services

There are many apps emerging that make it possible to sell your products and services without making people leave your Facebook page. One example of this is Big Commerce’s online store app for Facebook.

9. Leverage the Trust Factor through Shareable Content

Research shows that we trust our friends and peers 90% but advertising only has a 14% trust factor so making it easy for people to share with friends and colleagues via Facebook is vital

Create engaging, interesting photos and videos that people will share on Facebook. Humour helps! Watch this Cisco video that they embed on the Facebook page.

Click here to view the embedded video.

10. Make your Company Human

The social web has created a much more casual, real and authentic web. Use your Facebook page to highlight the human side of your company. Post videos and images that are not photo shopped models or plastic people and write articles that are more about educating rather than putting corporate spin on your image.

11. Provide Customer Service on Facebook

What is often overlooked is the marketing power of great customer service to encourage that all important word of mouth referrals. Here is how “Get Satisfaction” an Internet software company that uses Facebook to achieve that goal.

How are you using your Facebook “page for marketing in a B2B environment? Look forward to hearing your stories

More Reading

• How To Take Your Company’s Facebook Fan Page from Zero to 40,000 Fans
• The 10 Best Facebook Campaigns
• The World’s 10 Most Popular Company Facebook Pages
• How to Increase Your Facebook Page Fans by 1,000%

Image by topgold

There is a continuing disconnect with people’s personal use of the internet and how they then apply digital marketing to promote their business.

The company CEO will use Google for researching and buying a new car but when it comes to optimizing his web site for ranking high in Google he struggles to see the value and perceives that building a website is all he needs to do to be “found online” and generate mountains of cash.

The Company With A Feeble Digital IQ

Only the other day I heard about the owner of a company who had recently won a business award  and when they came to present it they mentioned that everything was great about his business except they were surprised that he didn’t even have a website!

This disconnect between time spent on media and use of media for marketing becomes quite apparent when you look at the hard data and becomes apparent that organisations are lagging the consumer.

Companies Media Marketing Dollars Are Being Wasted

JP Morgan research shows that only 7% of media is consumed through our newspapers, yet corporate America is allocating 20% of its media dollars to traditional  newspaper marketing (this is a bad forward leading indicator for shareholders of newspapers).

Looking at the Internet figures it reveals that only 12% of media marketing spend is allocated to online media but 26% of media time is spent online. If we dig a little deeper on the numbers it is even more damning. If you are under 40 and earning over $50,000, media consumption increases to over 50% for the internet. In essence corporations are spending  much more on media where the consumer is no longer hanging out and is somewhere else.

Note:For more on this and the trends and impact on digital competence check out Scott Galloway’s presentation

The reality is that we are still transitioning from the traditional TV industrial complex into a knowledge economy that is continuing to disrupt traditional business models and the advertising monoliths and corporate CEO’s are still struggling to adapt to the digital economy.

In fact you could say that their Digital IQ is in some cases severely challenged!

Scott has come up with  an interesting take on how you can measure companies Digital IQ and here are the 5 categories.

The 5 Digital IQ Categories

Category One:

Category Two:

Category Three:

Category Four:

Category Five:

Brands With A High Digital Marketing IQ Sell More

The commercial reality is that the top categories are outperforming their peers in sales according to NYU Stern.

• Brands ranked as “Gifted” or above demonstrate a 6% advantage over brands ranked “Average” or below
• Brands categorized as “Challenged” or “Feeble” saw sales decline 12% or greater

So what is your companies Digital Marketing IQ and what are you doing about it?

Online creative marketing  has been taken to new levels in the last 2 years with social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube providing new and intriguing digital channels to promote and market companies products.

Facebook due its massive audience is being chosen more often as the social media platform of choice on which to base a marketing campaign.

Ford has been using social media creatively since 2009 with its breakthrough marketing campaign for the Ford Fiesta headed up by the passionate Global head of social media for Ford, Scott Monty and continues to lead the way in its innovative approach to digital and social media marketing. Their latest campaign has taken some risks with it being based almost exclusively on Facebook and replacing a traditional auto show product launch with a virtual digital car launch.

Ford Explorer 2011 Facebook Reveal Marketing Campaign

Ford decided not to release its new 2011 Ford Explorer at an auto show which has been done for the last 50 plus years but launched it on Facebook, which I believe is a world first. So instead of a real auto show Ford released its new model in a virtual online world. This focus on Facebook was all about spreading the brand by “World Of Mouth” instead of relying on traditional mass media marketing and traditional word of mouth. It took the lessons of its Ford Fiesta social media marketing campaign which I covered in an article “The 7 Secrets To Ford’s Social Media Marketing Success” and created a Facebook centric promotion that allowed a global audience to view the unveiling. The campaign combined the synergy of paid and earned media to produce a multiplier effect that could not have been provided by a traditional auto show launch.

The 10 Key Elements Of The Ford Explorer Facebook Virtual Auto Show Campaign

1. It was run as an all day event with the goal to gather 30,000 Facebook fans for its page (It now has over 142,000)
2. Goal was to reach 50 million people  using digital marketing
3. The campaign was designed to synergize paid and earned digital media
4. The marketing team at Ford made a number of strategic digital ad buys to drive people to the Facebook page on hundreds of websites including Facebook and Yahoo (the top two websites in digital display ads)
5. It planned a series of videos and events to replicate an auto show experience but with more insights including interviews with executives including the CEO
6. It placed  a “Reveal” tab on its Facebook page at just after midnight to kick off the all day Facebook “Auto-Show”
7. 7 Hours later it released a video that displayed the Ford Explorer in Auto-show style
8. This was followed by indepth detailed tours during the day with photo galleries, live Q&A on the Facebook wall and Facebook live chats
9. Ford used Facebook’s Open Graph to implement “Like” buttons into the ads themselves. This means that Ford gathered “likes” from ad viewers
10. The 2011 Ford Explorer  virtual auto show on Facebook was launched 6 months out from the actual product being available to buy

The Results

• 75,000 Fans logged on the day of the virtual auto show
• The #1 Twitter trend on the day
• The #2 Google trend
• Over 1 million views on YouTube
• The Ford.com website had its second busiest traffic day
• Ford Explorer wins the “North American Truck Of The Year”

These are the soft results with the hard results for the Ford Explorer yet to be realized in actual car sales (so watch this space). There is one thing for sure that a car company that spends twice as much as its  competitors on digital media, has led the way on use of social media since 2009 and has just announced  its best profit results in more than a decade ($6.6 billion profit for 2010), is doing something right.

So how could your company take a traditional marketing campaign and instead use Facebook as your marketing platform of choice?

Image by Jason Pier in DC

The chief executives and owners of companies are often asked to participate in conferences or seminars because of their influence and insights into their industry as thought leaders and experts in their field.

In times of crisis a CEO proactively communicating about how they are solving the problem can calm stock markets and be a great public relations strategy to protect market value and brand integrity. Just recently Alan Joyce the CEO of the airline Qantas had to very quickly and proactively communicate with it’s customers and community about the the airlines safety after an engine blast on a Qantas Airbus A380 flight from Singapore nearly turned into a major disaster.

How CEO’s Can Get Their Message Out

Leaders very often need to get their message out and in the past the only means they had was via mass media and Alan Joyce was on every major TV channel to reassure the flying public that they were safe flying with Qantas.

Communication is not always about good PR strategies in times of crisis but also continuing to proactively position the company and the brand as thought leaders in their industry.

CEO’s and senior executives now have other means to communicate to the market and in real time and they are the new social media channels that can continue to provide information about the company and the industry as it happens.

The 3 Essential Social Media Tools

So what are three tools that can help a CEO communicate,lead and inspire his troops that is proactive and displays leadership?

1. Blog

A blog is great way to provide insights that employees can read and view at any time. Blogs can also help a leader get his message out about how he sees the industry and what they as a company should be doing to grow their sales and improve their service to their clients. The blog can include video snippets of conferences that the CEO has attended  that can be both inspirational and informative and ensure damaging rumors are nipped in the bud. It is also a very authentic way to communicate that can build trust and morale that can maintain respect and leadership to the corporate  team. Also a blog can reveal a passion about the company and the industry that is hard to display by other means.

2. Twitter

Twitter is a great tool for people to communicate directly with the CEO and also for the leaders to make announcements in real time. Twitter can also be a great way for the CEO’s blog posts to be promoted and spread

3. LinkedIn

LinkedIn’s vast network of nearly 100 million professionals is a vast community that has many groups and professional groups from retail to tech. Senior executives and CEO’s participation can be influential and be a efficient way to network in their industry. Also on LinkedIn you can display your Twitter feed and also the latest blog articles

Greg Savage the CEO of FireBrand Talent use all these tools to great effect to communicate, maintain his authority in his industry, rally and inspire his team and continue to develop respect from his peers.

Check out his his blog ( The Savage Truth), Twitter and LinkedIn Channels to find out how he uses the fast evolving social web to both his and FireBrand’s advantage.

This “New Media” enables CEO’s and executive to place their stamp and authority on their industry and creates an influential digital  brand that is an ongoing online asset that in the end is hard to ignore, because they are everywhere.

I heard a really scary story the other day. One year ago a company placed an order for a Yellow Pages print advertisement for a fee of $90,000 for the year after being persuaded by the account manager to place the order for the ad. The marketing managers comment to Yellow Pages was that he would keep count of the number of leads that it would produce and 12 months later the results are in and the grand total was “two leads”.

That equates to $45,000 cost per lead!!

Now I don’t know about you but that acquisition cost per lead is a touch expensive and I would love to know what the effectiveness of $90,000 spent on the following would yield in leads and sales.

• Search engine optimization program that would ensure key words and phrases that are used for finding a company appear on page one of Google. (Nearly 90% of all clicks through to a website are a result of a website being on the first page of a search engine results page)
• Google adwords campaign that places paid banner ads driving traffic to a companies website or special offer landing page derived from keyword searches on Google that appear in the right and top areas of a Google search result page.
• Facebook targeted banner ads that are demographically and highly targeted and funnel traffic to the website for capturing leads and enquiries
• A full time content creation position who creates and promotes the company’s thought leadership with blogs and online videos that educates and promotes the companies brand 24/7.

I also wonder – “does he still have a job?”

This story displays the challengers marketers face to educate and inspire leaders and CEO’s of organisations to take them from the wilderness of analog traditional marketing to the promised land of an increasingly digital savvy audience and the leverage of the social web.

So here are some of my ramblings and resources that you may find useful on educating and evangelizing to baby boomer CEO’s and senior management who struggle with the generational shift to a digital world.

1. 5 Creative Ways CEO’s Use Twitter - This article looks at some of the ways CEO’s use Twitter including “Following the Alpha Geeks”
2. Social Media and The CEO – Video Interview With Greg Savage CEO of Aquent – Greg kindly spared his time to chat with me about his companies experience with social media marketing and thought leadership on a personal and corporate level. (by the way through a corporate restructure he now heads up Fire Brand Talent globally)
3. 7 Ways To Get The CEO Crazy For Social Media Marketing – Some observations and suggestions form some of my readers
4. 10 Simple Questions To Assess Your CEO’s Marketing IQ – A list of questions that assess the digital literacy and readiness of an organisation
5. 12 Key Findings On Social Media’s Impact on Business and Decision Making By CEO’s and Managers –  Including “Younger respondents are more likely to read a company blog and to query the Twitter channel vs. older demographics”
6. How CEO’s and Executives Socialize Their Brands – A look at the role of CEO’s and how they are changing some organisations including Zappos and E.L.F.
7. 40 Reasons Why The CEO Still Uses The Yellow Pages And Not Social Media – A fun post with some serious insights
8. New Harvard Study: 30 Key Findings on How The CEO Engages With Social Media – Including evidnece showing that professional decision-making is becoming more social,  traditional influence cycles are being disrupted by Social Media as decision makers utilize social networks to inform and validate decisions.
9. 14 Ways A CEO Can Benefit From Social Media: A True Story- An insight into a global brand management firm STC Associates by the CEO, Sophie Ann Terrisse
10. 6 Questions To Ask The CEO When He Says Social Media Won’t Work For His Company – Questions to ask the the CEO to provide context and relevance to the chasm between personal use of the digital world and how it is not often applied to a corporation.
11. 9 Ways To Convince The CEO To Use Social Media and Enter The 21st Century – Some simple tactics to employ to educate and exhibit to the CEO the fast emerging digital universe.
12. 28 Reasons Why The CEO Is Afraid Of Social Media – A fun post listing the basic fears that senior management and CEO’s have with new and emerging technologies

So what is your CEO experience?

Image by Walking Geek

So you want to excel at what you do, you want to be the best,  then the famous quote  ”If you want to fly like an eagle don’t hang out with the turkeys” is worth taking note of.

To help give you that boost to take off and escape the mundaneness of the ordinary you need to emulate successful people and CEO’s certainly fit into that category.

Bloomberg recently listed what some CEO’s thought of Twitter and how they used it for their personal and corporate brand.

So what are some of the creative ways Chief Executives are using  Twitter?

1. Tim O’Reilly – CEO of O’Reilly Media

“Watch the alpha geeks on Twitter”

How Twitter helps him run O’Reilly Media: “Twitter is a great way to ‘watch the alpha geeks,’ which is my shorthand way of saying that a lot of what we do at O’Reilly is pay attention to people at the edge and look for technologies that are ready to move from the edge to the mainstream that we can help along by publishing, conferences, magazines, online publishing, or activism. There’s this great William Gibson line that I use all the time: ‘The future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.’ And sometimes we describe what we do at O’Reilly as ‘redistributing the future’ and helping it to get here more quickly.”

2. David Sifry – CEO of Technorati

“To have questions answered”

How Twitter helps him run Technorati: “I subscribe to lots of people who say interesting things, and I listen [and] read a lot. I find that these people become a sounding board for ideas, and I learn a lot from them. When I post to Twitter, sometimes it’s about interesting things I’ve seen or observed, and sometimes it’s ‘questions to the world’—where to find a good consultant for a particular niche specialty—or I ask questions that I can’t find easy or reliable answers [to] just by searching Google or reference works.”

3. Jack Dorsey – CEO of Twitter

“Create smallness and a cohesive team by sharing small details about life”

How Twitter helps him run Twitter: “It’s the fastest and best way to get feedback on what we’re doing, how we’re doing it, and what we should do next, both from users and my co-workers. Speaking to the latter point, Twitter makes our company feel smaller and more cohesive. There is something to be said about sharing the small details of your life with those you work with daily.”

4. Christine Perkett – CEO of PerkettPR

“Connecting and pitching to reporters using Twitter”

How Twitter helps her run PerkettPR: “We tweet about our own industry insights, technology, PR, and more—and people have been receptive and responsive. We feel we’ve earned a new respect as communications professionals in this way. We’ve had the advantage of receiving ‘first mover information’—benefiting both our agency and our clients—by connecting with reporters who often tweet about what their stories are going to be before anyone else knows about them (like this one!) and analysts/influencers—some of whom have shared early insights into reports or other important information that they only offered to their Twitter followers.”

5. Mike Troiano – CEO of Matchmine

“To raise Matchmine’s visibility among thought leaders online”

How Twitter helps him run Matchmine: “1) It helps make me more of a real person to my team. 2) It helps me stay closer to what’s happening in the lives of my own people. 3) It’s an invaluable business networking tool. 4) It helps me raise Matchmine’s visibility among the thought leaders online. 5) It’s just plain entertaining.”

So what are some of the creative uses you have found for Twitter?

Image by _DaniloRamos

The challenge for a majority of Chief Marketing Officers is convincing the CEO to take the plunge and use the power and leverage of social media to amplify the presence of their brand digitally online. There are some CEO’s who don’t need to be  convinced because of their own experience with social media.

A couple of days ago I had the privilege to sit down with Greg Savage the CEO of ‘FireBrand Talent” (a global digital recruitment company with nearly 70 offices worldwide) who understands and “gets” the power of social media to spread the influence of his personal brand and his companies brand globally to great effect.

Greg is on Twitter and has a blog titled ‘The Savage Truth‘ and these two social media channels are just part of his activities on social media. Most of the recruiting staff of FireBrand Talent also have corporate Twitter accounts and have personal optimized LinkedIn accounts as part of the corporate social media strategy. In the interview Greg covers some of the moments of truth that brought home to him the need to get engaged online in a digital world. This interview is in two parts

Video Interview – Part One

Click here to view the embedded video.

Video Interview – Part Two

Click here to view the embedded video.

One of the biggest challenges any company or CEO has is trying to decide on what to devote your time and resources on to achieve the best result.  Some of the questions the CEO is going to ask are..”Do we spend more money on making the company more efficient? ..do we focus more  budget on marketing to increase sales?.. do we invest in more technology to reduce costs? … and the list goes on.

The reality is that the CEO has to be behind any project for it to be provided the resources and commitment for it to ultimately succeed.

For your social media marketing to be successful the first and most important step is the support and backing by the CEO.

Last week I had the pleasure to catch up for a coffee with Greg Savage the CEO of ‘Firebrand Talent” (a global recruitment company with nearly 70 offices worldwide) who I had met through his marketing executive, Carolyn Hyams via the social media network. Greg is a CEO who ‘gets social media‘ and is using social media successfully, both personally and for his company.

Greg is on Twitter and has a blog titled ‘The Savage Truth‘ and these two social media channels are just part of his activities on social media and he uses them to enhance his personal brand and extend and optimize his influence both offline in the real world as well as digitally online.

In a future post I will be publishing an online video interview with Greg on how he and his company are using social media.

In the meantime here are some posts that look at the CEO and social media.

1. 28 Reasons Why The CEO Is Afraid Of Social Media
2. 9 Ways To Convince The CEO To Use Social Media and Enter The 21st Century
3. How CEO’s and Executives Socialize Their Brands
4. 40 Reasons Why The CEO Still Uses The Yellow Pages And Not Social Media
5. 10 Simple Questions To Assess Your CEO’s Marketing IQ
6. 12 Key Findings On Social Media’s Impact on Business and Decision Making By CEO’s and Managers
7. New Harvard Study: 30 Key Findings on How The CEO Engages With Social Media
8. 6 Questions To Ask The CEO When He Says Social Media Won’t Work For His Company
9. 7 Ways To Get The CEO Crazy For Social Media Marketing
10. 14 Ways A CEO Can Benefit From Social Media: A True Story

Does your CEO ‘get’ social media or he still in digital deficit?

I recently spoke and presented to some of my customers to increase their awareness of social media and all things digital and online. The purpose was to raise their understanding and provide them with a vision of social media and its power to leverage and spread content and create brand awareness whether that be corporate or personal.

Those of us who work day in and day out in the digital and social media marketing sector sometimes forget that most people still work in very traditional industries and are not fully immersed in the burgeoning swirling world of cyberspace.

To disturb the conservative and safe  paradigms that companies fall into with their marketing, you may need to implement a project ‘disrupt‘..this is part of the journey required to take them from sceptics to believers. You need to open their eyes take them out of the traditional paradigms that they have wrapped themselves in for decades.

Part of this challenge is that to make things really happen in an organisation you need to get the CEO and senior management on board.

It doesn’t matter if you you have the best plans in the world but if you don’t have the management onboard and the CEO, it is going to be hard (try impossible) to get the funds and resources you need to make your social media marketing  a success.

If you have a look at the top brands and how they are using social media whether that be Ford or General Motors or Starbucks you will find that they have CEO’s and senior executives that ‘get it’ and understand the power that social media marketing can provide for a brand.

In a post last year I received a lot of comments on how to convince the CEO to use emerging social media technologies rather than the yellow pages (and other declining mass media).

So here is a bit of crowdsourcing to bring you the best 7 comments and suggestions from the post as to  how to convince the CEO to  enter the 21st century and embrace the new media of the social.

1. This from ‘Ted’

“Align your social media discussion with the mission of the organization. Help the CEO answer in his/her mind, how is the strategic and tactical use of social media going to either increase profit, decrease costs and/or increase client satisfaction. Ultimately, a CEO cares about money in their pocket”.

2.From ‘Laurawynn’ who said

“Hit on the struggles faced by those of us transitioning from traditional marketing to social networking and ….bring the decision makers with us!”

3.M. Wallcom’s comment

“One important thing I would add is to be prepared to succingtly answer the question “If we endorse it, what will we achieve in the short and long term?” You may only get one shot – be prepared.”

4. Cortney Rhoads made this suggestion

“One idea (to start off slower) is to capitalize on an existing industry niche the company plays in and create a social media strategy for that industry within the larger company. The head of the practice or industry group can blog about issues germane to the company’s core messaging but also start engaging as an industry/service expert, listen to people, start a twitter feed.”

5.Lorraine Antrim had this to say

“When you can show that a social media strategy not only can accelerate growth but also bring the CEO’s vision closer to reality, you’re in like flint!”

6. Gerry McCusker made his suggestions via a YouTube Video

“At IABC World conf in San Francisco in June 09. As part of a 2.5hr session, I used this clip to illustrate the rise in techs and attitudes of Web2.0 stakeholders – sure helps scare C-suite types”

7. Andrew Davis also took the video response comment route.

Some other resources that are worth checking out are the original post

‘9 Ways To Convince The CEO To Use Social Media and Enter The 21st Century‘ plus

‘10 Steps To Get CEO Approval For Online Marketing’

So how are you convincing the CEO to abandon his yellow pages?