February 2nd, 2009

Focus on success: HubSpot's rapid growth

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 11:15 am

Categories: Branding, Corporate Social Networking, Lead Generation, Marketing, Public Relations, Q&A, Social Business, Social Media

Tags: HubSpot, Q., Marketing Research, Marketing, Jennifer Leggio

HubSpot seems to be everyone’s favorite marketing firm these days — or at least the favorite of many. The firm, which charged into the market two years ago, now has more than 1,000 customers leveraging its inbound marketing services. I know I’m not alone in being fascinated by HubSpot so I spoke to Mike Volpe, vice president of marketing, about the company’s rapid growth, the benefits of “eating its own dogfood” and how his six-person marketing team appears larger than life.

Q. [Jennifer] HubSpot seems to be on fire in terms of it’s brand exposure. Over the last year, at the least. What do you credit with that?

A. [Mike] Really? Thanks! Two years ago we were five people with an alpha product and 12 customers. Today we’re 65 people and have 1,000 customers. But we’re not a household (or business-hold) name yet. We have a long way to go in terms of building a company and brand. But, the growth we have experienced is completely based on having a great team that has built cool marketing software products and marketing content that people seem to like. All we try to do is build things we think people will like – both software like HubSpot and the free marketing tools at Grader.com and other things like our blog articles, Webinars, videos, and HubSpot TV – and then share these things with people and ask them what they think.

Q. Are you guys “eating your own dogfood” — so to speak — with inbound marketing?

A. Yes, absolutely. About 90 percent of all our leads are inbound. There are two huge benefits to that.

First, the lead quality from inbound marketing is much higher since all of our leads approached us. We make zero cold calls. Every single phone call one of our sales reps makes is calling someone back who has already used one of our software tools or watched a webinar or something like that. A lot of people we call say “Oh, HubSpot, cool! I was hoping you would call. I just watched your webinar and I had a question…” Our sales reps are a lot like marketing consultants because they are highly trained in marketing and are just there to answer questions about our product and how you can use it to drive more marketing results. At other companies you’re making a cold call, and the person either doesn’t answer or when they do answer they start thinking “who is this person calling me and why do they think I want to talk to them.”

Second the cost per lead is much lower from inbound marketing.  Our cost per lead is about five to 10 times lower than the benchmarks for most other B2B software companies. And that enables us to have a very low price product and serve a much larger market of small businesses, rather than spending lots of money and having to go after a small number of large companies and charge really high prices.  It also enables us to grow a lot faster using less capital than other companies, and we can spend a higher portion of our dollars on product development and enhancements, which makes customers even happier. There are a lot of positive reinforcing loops when your company embraces inbound marketing.

How does HubSpot measure success? –>

December 2nd, 2008

Fortune 500 series: How Newell Rubbermaid uses social media

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 11:42 am

Categories: Branding, Corporate Social Networking, Fortune 500 Series, Lead Generation, Marketing, Public Relations, Q&A, Reputation and Privacy, Social Business, Social Business Case Studies, Social Media, Social Media Best Practices

Tags: Brand, Social Media, Newell Rubbermaid, Graco, Graco Team, Branding, Marketing Research, Marketing, Jennifer Leggio

A couple weeks ago I began a series focusing on how Fortune 500 companies are leveraging social media and the thought leaders behind the companies’ programs. The questions from company to company are often similar, but the answers are vastly different. The first Q&A centered around Bob Thacker, senior vice president of marketing and advertising for OfficeMax, who has had great branding success for his company thanks to some social programs.

Now the focus is on another Fortune 500 company, Newell Rubbermaid, the parent of many wide-ranging brands, such as Sharpie, PaperMate, Rolodex, Shur-Line, Calphalon, Graco, Levolor, and of course the classic Rubbermaid product line. With such a huge brand inventory, how could social media potentially span that broad to help the company overall? I asked Bert DuMars, vice president of e-business and interactive marketing for Newell Rubbermaid, to explain the company’s approach, as well as why, over time, each of his brands will need a dedicated social media expert — and why those experts need a solid background in traditional marketing.

Q. [Jennifer] At a high level, please tell me about Newell Rubbermaid’s social media strategies.

A. [Bert] Our strategy is to listen to our consumers first, understand how they would like to engage with us and/or how they would like us to engage with them. We are using strategic methodologies developed by Converseon (specifically for our Graco brand) and Forrester Research Groundswell (POST methodology — specifically for our Rubbermaid brand). This has led us to start small, experiment and see what works. We then expand the particular tactic based on consumer feedback that they are receptive and that we have developed a level of trust with them in the conversation. Graco has been a first mover for us in blogging and outreach to “Mommybloggers.” Rubbermaid, Dymo and CardScan have been first movers in consumer generated reviews and ratings. These leadership positions allow our other brands to learn what works and then determine how they might like to proceed with social media marketing strategies with their consumer segments.

Q. When considering new social media strategies, what is your first move…To hire? To invest? To seek out market data?

A. We definitely seek out market data first. This is a new area for us and heavy investing (whether dollars, personnel or both) without understanding how, when and why our consumers would like to engage with us is risky and dangerous for our brands. I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to listen before you leap. We use ForeSee Results consumer satisfaction service to help us listen to our consumers specifically in the interactive marketing area. We also need to determine if we have something positive and influential to add to the conversation. Our Sharpie brand has done limited to very little social media marketing to date, but there are many positive Twitter posts, YouTube videos and blog posts on the brand and products. So, the real strategy that needs to be considered for this brand is what can we add to the conversation that is not already, organically happening. I think there are some social media tactics that will work, but if there is already a large amount of activity and it is positive, you need to be very careful not to disrupt and/or interrupt it.

Next: The importance of a social marketing team –>

November 28th, 2008

Social media marketing opportunism during tragedy = fail

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 12:11 pm

Categories: Branding, Corporate Social Networking, Lead Generation, Marketing, Microblogging, Snake Oil, Social Business, Social Business Analysis, Social Media, Social Media Best Practices, Social Networks, Twitter

Tags: Marketing, Social Media, Jennifer Leggio

I wrote just a few minutes ago about the communication issues that stem from social media in the time of crisis, i.e. the Mumbai attacks. In doing some additional reading after posting my article, I ran across something that I find not shocking, yet abhorrent — people spamming using the #mumbai hashtag to market their products or services. Here is the most prominent example:

Twitter user @seanzyville (who I hope is deleted soon) apparently created this profile only to promote a CRM demo from Web Solutions. The links he has posted as shown in the screenshot above go to:

I wasn’t the only one to find this behavior disgusting. I found the following tweet from Roberto Rocha, journalist for the Montreal Gazette:

I don’t think I need to say much more. If your company is considering trying to take advantage of the brewing conversations about Mumbai on social networks to squeeze in news about your company — don’t.

November 26th, 2008

Where’s the beef? Social marketing decisions will not come easy in 2009

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 8:15 am

Categories: Branding, Corporate Social Networking, Lead Generation, Marketing, Social Business, Social Business Analysis, Social Media, Social Media Best Practices

Tags: Beef, Financial, Social Media, Value Proposition, Kristi Grigsby, Marketing Decision, Marketing Research, Roi/Tco, Marketing, Finance

* Jennifer Leggio is on vacation

Guest editorial by Kristi Grigsby

There’s been a lot of rumblings lately about the value of social networking at an enterprise level. The rumblings are not new, of course. What’s new is the growing intensity around the financial implications, and our industry’s inability to produce real ROI metrics.

While many continue to base the value propositions associated with social media on the ability to open dialogue or create a buzz, marketers are screaming ‘Where’s the beef?’

Is it any wonder? Marketing decisions are under some pretty intense scrutiny these days. Despite budget cutbacks, layoffs and corporate restructurings, companies cannot stop marketing. But they can do a better job of controlling that spend to ensure that every dollar invested is optimized to yield an even greater return.

Why would we think social media should be treated any differently? After all, as a decision-maker within your own company, would you risk putting your career on the line to recommend a costly investment that yielded no tangible return?

In a recent post, blogger Marc Meyer recapped his experience grappling with these very issues. While his experience was no doubt painful, he deserves a lot of credit for choosing to boldly relive the regret through his keyboard rather than hiding under a desk with his tail tucked between his legs (like he probably wanted to do).

The fact is, Marc is not alone. From presentations by ‘the experts’ at industry conferences, to our own experiences learning from customers who have conducted extensive research, the value propositions are limited to discussions like ‘expand your reach,’ ‘amplify your messaging’ or ‘excite your customers’. And they’re not very compelling.

One has to wonder what the value proposition was behind Johnson & Johnson’s highly publicized Motrin campaign (‘publicized’ in a very unfavorable way, as seen here and here and here). As one commenter pointed out on the Forbes blog, “I’d bet there were words like “prompt a dialogue” or “create buzz” in the PowerPoint presentations selling it internally.”

Whatever happened to cold, hard metrics? You know…the kind of numbers that financial executives can really sink their teeth into?

Here’s the difference:

Value proposition A

A social media strategy will enable you to engage your customers, give them a voice, and build loyalty among those consumers who now feel as though they’re a part of your organization.

Response from the CMO and CFO on the other end? If you’re lucky, you may be offered a drink of water before being escorted to the door.

Value proposition B

Response from the CMO and CFO on the other end? Tell me more…

Incidentally, the latter value proposition is very real – and it’s one that we delivered to our customer. These metrics are not impossible to ascertain, and companies have not only a right to demand them, but also a growing obligation to do so.

Too often social media technologies are deployed at the forefront, with no clear ROI orientation, strategy or accountability. In these cases, any success is purely accidental. Try selling that to an executive whose career is on the line.

The approaching 2009 is a new ball game. Most companies realize the necessity of incorporating an enterprise ‘social’ strategy into their business plans. But it’s not going to be an easy sell. Like Wendy’s ad campaign from the 80’s, marketers will quickly tire of the ‘Where’s the beef?’ question and will simply stop asking. Those who are unable to produce ROI won’t even get in the game.

Kristi Grigsby leads the marketing efforts for Neighborhood America from its headquarters in Naples, Florida. Her career has focused on both finance and marketing, providing her with a unique perspective on how these two disciplines must work in tandem to bring value not only to the company, but also to the customer. She can be reached at kgrigsby [at] neighborhoodamerica [dot] com or on Twitter.

November 24th, 2008

Which firm really gets it? A social public relations survey

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 11:21 am

Categories: Branding, Lead Generation, Marketing, Public Relations, Social Business, Social Business Analysis, Social Media, Social Media Best Practices

Tags: Agency, Social Media, Survey, Public Relations, Advertising & Promotion, Marketing, Corporate Communications, Jennifer Leggio

You run a pretty tight marketing budget. You need to see quantifiable value out of your contractors and agencies, especially when it comes to PR. Yes, relationships aren’t quantifiable, but as PR and social media become more integral to other areas of your business, there is more pressure on you to show ROI for your department’s activities. You need a PR agency that can partner with you, who understands the social landscape, and can help you beyond media relations 101.

I’ve written in the past about my thoughts around PR and social media:

• Social media will not kill PR, but it does expose industry weakness
• Social media and enterprise IT demand gen - a wrong fit?
• Bloggers vs. PR - the broken record continues to skip

No, not trying to get you to read my stuff, but merely offering a little perspective as to what I am doing what I am doing now. And what is that? A survey. I’ve made some claims over the last four months about what clients need from agencies and what agencies I believe “get it” in terms of social media. From my perspective, having been an agency and internal PR person who manages agencies, I also have strong opinions about how PR agencies should be stepping up as business consultants versus merely serving as dial-for-dollars phone pitchers.

The survey is seven questions long and is designed for marketing and business decision-makers who have hired or plan to hire a new agency. It takes into account what is important to clients in terms of social media and also puts some of the onus on the agencies. I want to be able to write about:

• What clients really want
• Which agencies really are getting it
• Which agencies clients are looking to hire

The resulting blog post — to be published in early 2009 — will be based solely on the trends indicated in the data. No identifying data will be requested of any of the respondents but proactive commentary on agency experience is always welcome and can be sent to the email below.

What are you waiting for? Here’s the survey. Data collection has been extended to Jan. 15, 2009.

November 20th, 2008

Fortune 500 series: How OfficeMax uses social media

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 11:46 am

Categories: Branding, Career Development, Corporate Social Networking, Fortune 500 Series, Lead Generation, Marketing, Public Relations, Q&A, Reputation and Privacy, Social Business, Social Business Analysis, Social Business Case Studies, Social Media

Tags: OfficeMax Inc., Social Media, Jennifer Leggio, Marketing

“Social media can change your business!”

“You need a social media strategist!”

“Social media can save you money!”

Those are just three of the primary claims I’ve been hearing over and over and over again since I started following social business trends. Are they true? Sure. Are they false? Sure. The definitive answer is, “It depends on your business.”

While there are a whole slew of case studies on Internet-based businesses who have grown their businesses or marketing programs through social networking and social technologies, the larger company case studies are just starting to eek out. I decided to help it along, not by exactly doing case studies, but taking a look at Fortune 500 companies who are implementing social programs, and getting their first-hand take on how those programs are shaping their business.

I started with Bob Thacker, senior vice president of marketing and advertising for OfficeMax. OfficeMax is facing similar economic woes that other big businesses face, however the company is still focused on continuing the social programs it started testing out in 2006. I spoke with Thacker about these programs, future marketing plans, and even social talent hiring practices.

Q. [Jennifer] Tell me about how your team uses social media to build the OfficeMax brand.

A. [Bob] Marketing is all about change. There’s a saying that “if you don’t create change, change will create you.” It’s a great thought. I’m continually open to new ideas and new media and new approaches and new methodologies. At OfficeMax, we’ve embraced social media and incorporated it into our marketing strategy to reach today’s digital consumer through humor, entertainment and personalization. Social media marketing today is about having conversations with consumers in a fun, rewarding manner that they choose to engage in and share.

Q. When considering new social media strategies, what is your first move…To hire? To invest? To seek out market data?

A. As social media marketing opportunities evolve, we are constantly evaluating and seeking new ways to become part of the consumer conversation. We discuss new social media strategies among our team and will try them out first-hand to determine if it’s a good fit for a present campaign or something we may keep in our back pocket. At OfficeMax, we’re unconventional, always testing new waters, and not afraid to take chances. A saying I often use, which applies to our social media strategy is, “If you’re going to crash a party, bring a bottle of wine,” and by that I mean if you’re going to be a party crasher, like advertising, then make the experience better for people – help them, inspire them, enlighten them, entertain them, amuse them, delight them, bring them something that makes the time they spend with you a rewarding experience. Once we decide upon the strategy, we seek the best industry partner to bring this concept to life.

Next: What’s a recent social success? –>

November 19th, 2008

Social media marketers can - and must - prove ROI

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 9:56 am

Categories: Branding, Corporate Social Networking, Lead Generation, Marketing, Public Relations, Reputation and Privacy, Social Business, Social Business Analysis, Social Media, Social Media Best Practices, Social Networks

Tags: Social Media, ROI, Roi/Tco, Finance, Managerial Accounting, Jennifer Leggio, Kyle Flaherty, IOR

Guest editorial by Kyle Flaherty

“In today’s uncertain economic times…” those five words seemingly lead off many of the emails I’ve received over the past several weeks, mainly from PR folks pitching me different products and services. I can’t really blame them; of course the economy is on everyone’s mind and will be for the foreseeable future. I’ve also seen these words attached to many blog posts from social media type bloggers either worried that this will be the death of social media or simply the dawning of a new era of transparency and community engagement (the dramatic effect is all mine). This post is a warning for folks that they need to end their debating before they are fired, or as we like to call it during these times “downsized.” A better way to say it is how my CEO put it recently during a company meeting: now is not the time to turtle, now is the time to stick your neck out and move forward.

The question is not whether you should or shouldn’t deploy social media strategy during a recession, this simply isn’t smart thinking. Instead, everyone needs to be creating and tracking proof that any and all of their job functions are leading to business and determining how much business they must win in 2009 to succeed. That includes social media. There is no better way to lose a job than to spend all your time telling your boss the company needs a Twitter account versus showing your boss how you directly helped bring in revenue last quarter.

Let’s assume you are in a marketing, PR or product-marketing role for an emerging-growth or start-up company, because that is what I know the most about, here is my advice:

Do NOT ask “How will the economy affect social media?”
DO ask “How can I prove and then improve how social media affects my business?”

Yes, Virginia there is Social Media ROI
Now here is where you say something along the lines of “BUT everyone tells me you can’t measure social media ROI” and I tell you “you need to find a way ASAP”. The social media ROI debate that seems to be raging throughout the interwebs seems to conclude that proving social media ROI is at worst an affront to the “Cluetrain Manifesto” or at best something that can not be done. If you believe in either I’m afraid you are already turtling; come out of that shell and let’s chat. Not only can you measure social media against business benchmarks, more importantly you MUST in this economic environment. Let’s use a pretty picture next:

Next: How do you determine your social media ROI? –>

November 3rd, 2008

Facebook, Salesforce.com aim to create common developer network

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 10:12 am

Categories: Corporate Social Networking, Dreamforce 2008, Facebook, Lead Generation, Life Streaming, Salesforce.com, Social Business, Social Media, Social Networks, Tech Companies

Tags: Salesforce.com Inc., Facebook, Network, Force.com, Sales Force Management, Sales, Jennifer Leggio

Facebook and Salesforce.com today announced that the two companies will partner to make it easier for Force.com developers to utilize Facebook’s API while creating hosted applications. According to Facebook, the new relationship is designed to create a more established development community between Facebook’s 120 million users and Salesforce.com’s 100,000 developers. The news was announced at Dreamforce 2008, the Salesforce.com user and development conference, in San Francisco.

The Force.com for Facebook sites claim to help developers use Facebook APIs within any of their developed Force.com applications. The Force.com for Facebook capabilities use Facebook’s social graph to create social data to merge with recruiting, productivity and project collaboration applications. Force.com for Facebook will help developers build social and business applications that leverage:

• Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect
• Full support for FQL and API calls
• FBML generation for native Facebook applications
• xFBML support, profile presence support
• Custom components for Facebook Pages
• Access to the Facebook APIs directly within Force.com’s Apex Code

According to a Facebook statement:

The tools will give developers a new means of creating business applications that greatly expand Facebook users’ ability to do corporate work on the site, by managing sales data, organizing business events or automating marketing decisions

“We are seeing social meet CRM and the enterprise for the first time,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, Salesforce.com. “This is the premier social graph fully integrating with the premier enterprise cloud computing company—-this is the true power of Internet.”

For more on the news coming out of Dreamforce 2008 — and more in-depth analysis of Salesforce.com announcements — be sure to read Michael Krigsman.   

October 22nd, 2008

Social media and enterprise IT demand gen -- a wrong fit?

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 12:41 pm

Categories: Corporate Social Networking, Lead Generation, Marketing, Public Relations, SAP, Social Business Analysis, Social Media, Social Media Best Practices, Social Networks, Tech Companies

Tags: Information Technology, Social Media, Sales, Al Krueger, Brian Solis, Jennifer Leggio

Al Krueger’s “Comet Branding Internet Radio” show always sparks interesting discussion. This morning I joined him, Brian Solis and Nicole Jordan to discuss “The Changing Role of PR as Media Evolves.” While our PR fundamentals discussion was compelling, it momentarily branched into something that I feel is a bigger issue — how social media relates to classic demand generation.

While discussing why marketing leaders should or should not blindly get social, Solis said that social media can not only support lead generation but it also helps convert leads into bona fide sales deals. I respectfully disagreed, saying that social media can be used for brand awareness which may lead to demand generation, but it will not be present during the entire sales cycle.

I’ve yet to see any solid case studies that show how social media has helped convert leads into paying customers, especially for enterprise IT companies trying to sell into the Fortune 500. Solis says he has some — and I want to see these.

Following the conversation I had a chat with Steve Mann, global vice president in marketing for SAP, where he leads the company’s social media strategies. Mann said that while social media is very good at the top of the demand generation funnel and good at the bottom of the funnel, it is not useful for moving people down the funnel into conversion.

“At the top of the funnel, social media is fantastic for building awareness and generating interest. It’s easy to use,” Mann said. “But once there is interest, we haven’t yet cracked the code on how to leverage social media to take a qualified lead down the funnel to a sale.”

However, once the lead is at the bottom of the funnel social media can be used to connect a prospect to a customer reference. For a real-world example, Mann says the SAP Community Network of 1.5 million members is a resource for its sales teams to do just that. Prospects can come in and kick the tires on SAP by talking to customers who are implementing or have implemented its solutions. It is therefore incumbent on SAP’s marketing team to leverage the community in their marketing strategies to the company’s sales targets. But, he says, the marketing strategies must make sense.

“Using social media for social media’s sake is not the right thing to do,” Mann said. “Using social media to connect with prospects and have a conversational dynamic is the right way to approach this.”

The challenge of social media and the demand or lead generation connection is that, in enterprise IT, the sales cycle is tremendous. Because social media itself moves fast and furious and quickly evolves, it almost begets an element of instant gratification. But that just doesn’t work for enterprise IT companies.

“Selling to the enterprise is a very sophisticated buying cycle. The cycle can be many months long. You’re not at the top one day and at the bottom the next day,” Mann said. “There are many steps a prospect must take before it becomes a customer. If someone says that you can use social media at every step in the sales cycle, that is incorrect.”

Have questions for Mann on social media and demand gen? Find him at his Twitter feed.