Social Media B2B » David Thomas

MPB2B: Structuring for Social Media Success

Jeffrey L. Cohen — Tue, 04 May 2010 14:13:16 +0000

David Thomas, Social Media Manager, SAS presented on how a company’s social media policy is the key to their social media success. It was an interactive session where Dave spoke for a brief time as an introduction, and opened up the floor for discussion. Companies use social media as a new way to communicate.
Build awareness – Find the people who will guide the policy development, including the evangelists and the skeptics. The practitioners must be there with the rulemakers too.
– Figure out what’s important by determining your goals based on your industry and company culture. Zappos is a good example of a company that integrates social media throughout the organization.
- Focus on recommendations for what the company should do using social media. Clear guidelines developed by all stakeholders helps
Build framework
- Create a position to shepherd these policies through the organization. Make sure it is someone who is already is practicing social media, and is a part of the communications team (marketing, pr, external communications).
- Create guidelines for employees that includes the dos and the don’ts of social media. Guidelines need to encourage social media, not prevent it or show it as too legal. Guidelines also need to be concise and clear so people will actually read them.
- Communicate the existence of your guidelines over and over. Make sure employees know where they can find the guidelines. Spotlight success of social media connections as a means to show what works.
Build strategy
- Define success by understanding what you are trying to accomplish and how you are going to measure it.
- Give your employees the tools to succeed, including sharing plans and templates from internal teams.
- Map social media to goals and utilize existing processes for tracking those events

Note: some questions were answered by Dave, while others were answered by session attendees.
Question: How do you deal with international divisions that have their own social media approach?
Don’t create new presence in country without determining what else is out there. Provide tools to field offices to present a company branded look online. Also create a corporate hub online, for example on Facebook to aggregate profiles.

Question: What are some basic guidelines for sales on social media?
It’s important to understand how to communicate online by first listening. Use Twitter for gathering information or connections, not sales and marketing messages. In any big company, who owns the message? Social media forces companies to re-evaluate internal communication policies.

Question: How do you deal with legal department with social media approval?
An executive champion can help solve the problems of legal delays. The legal team is never going to feel the same way about social media and its importance that you do. Make sure a member of the legal team is part of your policy development team.

Question: How do you deal with a CEO who prevents employees from being on social media?
Show the value of social media as a means to personalize the company and products. Find real examples that show conversations. Establish some parameters for safety. Jennifer Kane takes the classic mom approach and tells C-level executives that they are not cool enough to the use social media. This turns them right around.

Question: How do we establish Twitter rules?
Empower company employees to use Twitter personal accounts to represent the company. Many companies required branded accounts to be handled by communications people. There are already computer policies and company policies in place and you need to remind them that these policies are still in effect online.

Question: How do you approach listening?
PR team can set up Google alerts for key terms. Social Mention and Tweetdeck work for searches. Don’t forget that Twitter search has RSS enabled. From a policy standpoint, people need to understand the process and responsibility of how to respond, or not.

Question: What are simplified tactics to recommend to the non-marketer?
Start with a social media audit to develop some initial strategies based on what is online.

All B2B Companies Need Social Media Policies With social media policies in the mainstream news from both...
Empowering Employees For B2B Social Media Success Having silos in an organization is bad, most people who...
Video: Social Media B2B Panel at Blog World Expo Social media in the B2B space is becoming a much...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Video: Social Media B2B Panel at Blog World Expo

Jeffrey L. Cohen — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 17:28:47 +0000

Social media in the B2B space is becoming a much talked about topic in marketing, pr and communications circles. There was track on B2B at last week’s Blog World Expo in Las Vegas. Kipp Bodnar moderated a Social Media B2B panel featuring the following social media practitioners:

David Thomas, Social Media Manager at SAS
Kyle Flaherty, Director Of Marketing at BreakingPoint Systems, Inc.
Mica Veihman, Social Media Team Lead at Monsanto Company

Below is the video of the panel. They addressed many components of social media for B2B companies including: lead generation, employee social media policy, social CRM, resources needed, and B2B blogging. Scroll down below the video for some key takeways.

Start by listening to customers online. Integrate any communications plans with other marketing initiatives.
Communicate with your customers where they are. Even if they are not on Facebook, they are using online communication tools
Get everyone on board to establish social media policies
Demonstrating value of blogging helps recruit corporate bloggers
Match engaged employees and their skills with the right tools and social media outlets
Establish goals to measure ROI against those goals
Track all your leads from social media to determine ROI
Find company evangelists to help you build your online company
Always remind your customers about your online presences

And watch to the end of the video for one final piece of advice from each of the panelists.

If you have any additional questions for Kipp, or any of the panelists, please let us know in the comments below.

Social Media B2B Panel At Blog World Expo! Blog World Expo is one of the best social media...
Social Media B2B Panel at Social Fresh Kipp Bodnar and Jeff Cohen spoke at the Social Fresh...
Event Showcases B2B Social Media Case Studies And Round Tables Kipp Bodnar and Jeff Cohen of SocialMediaB2B.com will be speaking...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Ten Tips for Establishing a Social Media Policy

Jeffrey L. Cohen — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 12:30:48 +0000

Our friend, Dave Thomas, the Social Media Manager at SAS, recently posted a short video about the ten tips for establishing a social media policy. You may remember Dave from our interview with him. Because SAS is located in central North Carolina, where we are, it was easy to conduct this sitdown interview with Dave. Whether he admits it or not, his position makes him an influencer in the B2B social media space. SAS is a large B2B software company and Dave’s role is to help guide the development of social media, and document the process along the way. That’s why we keep asking him to appear on panels with us (Social Fresh, Blog World Expo, the upcoming Social Media Business Forum, and even our submitted panel for SXSW that we hope you voted for).

I am going to embed the video, but also list the tips below. You can watch the video for more explanation on each tip, but if you just want the overview, read on.

Ten Tips for Establishing a Social Media Policy from David B Thomas on Vimeo.

1. Get everyone together and create a council

2. Invite the skeptics as well as the evangelists

3. Involve the practitioners

4. Get legal and HR involve from the start

5. Determine how to deal with conflict

6. Include best practices

7. Policy needs to reflect company personality

8. Publish your policy online (which Dave has not been able to do at SAS)

9. Communicate policy to employees constantly

10. Lead by example

And if you have any questions or comments, go over to Dave’s blog and leave them for him. He likes comments.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Social Media B2B Panel At Blog World Expo!

Kipp Bodnar — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 12:05:52 +0000

Blog World Expo is one of the best social media conferences every year. It is an event that brings the industry’s best and brightest together in Las Vegas to learn from each other. Here is how the conference describes its self:

“The 2009 BlogWorld & New Media Expo will take place at the Las Vegas Convention Center, beginning with the exclusive “Social Media Business Summit”(TM) conference on October 15th and continuing with the BlogWorld & New Media Expo and Conference October 16th-17th. This is first and only industry-wide tradeshow, conference, and media event dedicated to promoting the dynamic industry of new media including: Blogging, Podcasting, Social Media, Online Video, Music, TV, Radio, Gaming, Entertainment and Communities. In addition to the only industry-wide new media industry exhibition, BlogWorld & New Media Expo features the largest new media conference in the world including more than 50 seminars, panel discussions and keynotes from iconic personalities on the leading-edge of online technology and internet-savvy business. If you are currently blogging, podcasting, vlogging, producing other forms of new media content, entering the new media industry, or researching ways to leverage new media for your large or small company, then you need to be at the only comprehensive new media convention”

This year Blog World Expo has added a social media and B2B panel. I will be moderating the panel and will be joined by:

David Thomas, Social Media Manager at SAS
Kyle Flaherty, Director Of Marketing at BreakingPoint Systems, Inc.
Mica Veihman, Social Media Team Lead at Monsanto Company

So what are we going to talk about? We have a lot of information to cover in only an hour. We are going to address many components of social media for B2B companies including: lead generation, employee social media policy, social CRM, resources needed, B2B blogging, as well as other relevant topics.

The panel is in the first time slot of the conference, 10 a.m. on Thursday, October 15th. Please join us and ask questions. We need your help to improve the conversation for everyone!

Social Media B2B Panel at Social Fresh Kipp Bodnar and Jeff Cohen spoke at the Social Fresh...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Social Media B2B Panel at Social Fresh

Jeffrey L. Cohen — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 18:00:53 +0000

Kipp Bodnar and Jeff Cohen spoke at the Social Fresh social media conference in Charlotte, North Carolina on August 24. Kipp moderated a panel on Social Media B2B which included Jeff, Nathan Gilliatt of Social Target and David Thomas of SAS. The video of the complete panel discussion is below (except for a bit at the 2 minute mark where we experienced technical difficulties and had to change cameras). We discussed some of the following topics tying B2B social media to business objectives, social media policies, listening and monitoring in the B2B social media space, and offering some actionable takeaways for B2B companies. If you have any follow-up questions to the information presented in the panel, please leave a comment below.

SocialMediaB2B Site Creators to Speak at Social Fresh Kipp Bodnar and Jeff Cohen will be speaking at the...
Upcoming Social Media Business Forum with B2B Track There is lots of talk of social media being the...
7 B2B Panels Up For Voting For SXSW Interactive Conference Vote For The SocialMediaB2B.com SXSW Panel! The reason Jeff and...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.