As social media continues to make it easier for consumers to communicate with one another and share experiences and information, companies are changing their marketing priorities to line up with the trends and greatest impact.  We now see companies focusing on Owned Media, Earned Media, and Paid Media in that order.

Forrester defined these three types of media in this blog post last month and you’ll start to hear this more and more as you attend various marketing conferences and strategy sessions.

The first priority for companies with a strong strategy in place will be to build a consistent base with their owned media such as their web site, blog, Twitter account, Facebook account, and newsletter.  Consumers will choose how they want to interact with a company, if at all, and having a presence in these areas builds a solar system that allows your company to be engaged regardless of the channel.

As your company builds its presence and successfully interacts with customers and prospects, the goal is to build that positive word-of-mouth into earned media.  It’s important to note that while earned media is something that will likely be tracked by your Marketing team, it has less to do with marketing and much more to do with the quality of your service or product and the sales and support experience your customers and prospects have with your company and your web site.  Make sure that the task force responsible for earned media is made up of the right people from the groups that have the ability to impact it such as Product Management, Support, Sales, and your web site team.

Last but not least is advertising, i.e. paid media.  While advertising is on a drastic downturn as consumers and prospects train themselves and use technology to ignore it, it is not going away.  Paid media is still a powerful way to ignite a marketing campaign actually being carried out via your owned media.  Many companies have used paid media as a catalyst for a larger online or social media campaign to do things such as naming a new product or submitting a short video to be the next commercial or idea for the company with wild success.  That said, advertising is becoming more valuable as a catalyst and not a foundation as it once was.

As social media and technology continue to impact how we all interact, advertising and other interruptive forms of marketing will continue to move to the bottom of the marketing to-do list and play a more supportive role in a company’s marketing strategy.

We’re all used to going online and finding outside information in the form of ratings and reviews in the B2C world, however when it comes to B2B, service providers still tend to be the gatekeepers for prospects in terms of finding customer feedback before they decide to purchase.  It’s not that they intended to be the gatekeepers, it’s just that nobody else shared or organized the information with the exception of high-end analysts firms that sell their reports and evaluations for a fee that most small to mid-size businesses can’t justify.

However, with more people participating in social media for their professional lives, that’s changing fast.  People are creating and joining professional groups and networks to share information with one another relating to their jobs and responsibilities.  As this trend progresses, more professionals are starting to share their experience with business products and services and the companies that provide them just as they do in their consumer lives.

While your business will never be able to control or manage what’s discussed about your company and solutions, there are steps you can take to curate positive reviews and referrals in a way that helps them rise to the top of your prospects radar.

Create a referrals or customer comments page on your own site.

Something that is well within your control is to create your own customer comments and referrals page on your site.  Ask key customers to provide you with a recommendation that you can publish.  In addition to displaying those comments on your respective product pages, create a specific landing page for each one with a title like “[Product Name] Reviews” or “Customer Comments on [Product Name/Company Name]”.  Make sure you also include those terms in your page meta-data.  This will increase your chances of the positive reviews you’ve put together coming up at the top results when someone does a search.

Listen and participate in social discussions on your company and solutions

Use a listening service of your choice to closely monitor any mentions of your product/service or company.  Thank those that are positive and address the negative ones.  If someone’s had a bad experience and is making it public, do your best to resolve that mistake and/or apologize to the customer in the same medium.  Not only will this ensure that prospects that see the comment also see your resolution but there’s a good chance that you’ll turn that upset customer into a company advocate.

Ask key customers to provide a recommendation of your company on other sites

In addition to getting customers to provide you with a recommendation on your own site, it’s also worth it to get them to provide a recommendation on your company on other sites that prospects may go to in order to learn more about your company.  One key point here is to make sure that the review/recommendation is for your company and/or solution and NOT for a person on your team.  Why? People and companies take different paths and if that person leaves, it does you no good.

Taking these steps will allow smart businesses to curate comments about them or their solutions.  It won’t totally control the conversations and it isn’t a magic bullet for marketing but as the use of social media continues to grow for B2B companies, it’s a best effort to make sure the positive Word Of Mouth from your customers gets heard by as many people as possible.

Last week Marketing Charts posted the results of a study done by Rubicon Consulting that shows how online reviews are second only to word-of-mouth when it comes to influencing someone’s purchase decisions.

Per the article,
“Online reviews and comments written by users – often overlooked by marketers in favor of things they can control – are disproportionately influential to consumer buying decisions and are second only to personal word-of-mouth for purchasing influence for Americans, according to research from Rubicon Consulting.”

This is the whole reason we started FYIndOut.  We firmly believe that there’s a lot to be gained by both buyers and marketers in the B2B market in using social media and communicating directly with each other instead of at each other.

The article also stated,
“Many companies downplay the importance of online communities because only a few percent of all Internet users contribute to them heavily,” said Harry Max, a principal at Rubicon Consulting.  “What they don’t understand is that most other Internet users read those reviews and rely on them heavily when making purchase decisions.  Taking good care of online communities can be a huge money-saver for companies trying to get more marketing impact from limited budgets.”

We can’t agree more and we believe that FYIndOut will be a leader in helping to make this happen.