CEOs Love Pie: The B2B Social Media Case Study, Part 2

Author:

Eric Anderson

Source:

My previous post described the social media adoption gap that our B2B marketer survey identified, and it noted that social media curmudgeons among the B2B C-suite were largely to blame for it. I then promised a 3-part guide for building a B2B business case to win over those C-suites, but then only managed to deliver one of the lessons, which involved widening your CEO’s perception of what constitutes social media. Have you done that? Great. Here, then, are the remaining two lessons:
 
2. Social media is what everyone else is doing.
If you’ve ever observed toddlers at play, you know that the desirability of a given toy increases exponentially as another toddler plays with it, and it reaches a fever pitch if the other toddler appears to be misusing the toy, e.g., eating Barbie’s hair. With all due respect to both CEOs and toddlers, I must report that this behavioral tendency does not disappear with age, and you can use it to good effect in your business case.
 
At White Horse, we’ve made it a standard practice to present a sample one-month social media monitoring report for B2B clients in order to show them that conversations are indeed taking place around their brand. They really lean forward in their seats, though, when we show them what their competitors are doing – what share of the social conversation belongs to them, what perceptions accrue to them, and what keywords are used to describe them. All of this data can easily be obtained through a low-cost social media monitoring platform (we use Radian6 for our clients), and ginned up in a few hours of analysis.
 
“All well and good,” you might say to me, “but if I had budget to spend on a social monitoring platform, I wouldn’t be reading your damn blog post on how to get budget for social, now would I?” Fair point, and since we’ve already established that you’re not going to ...
 
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