Thursday, May 31, 2012

A nation of small businesses?

According to UK government statistics SMEs account for 99.9% of all enterprises and almost two thirds (64.2%) of private sector businesses are sole partnerships.

Perhaps not just a nation of shop keepers, but apparently a nation of small businesses anyway, with many enterprises having just one person doing everything. And not unsurprisingly non existent marketing budgets. Yet marketing guidance, advice and implantation is what they need to flourish. We can speculate the reasons why there are increasing numbers of what might be termed 'micro businesses' not least the complex and all reaching mass of employment legislation that is probably deterring many growing companies from taking on employees. Preferring instead to sub contract to other micro businesses creating a network of inter connected enterprises. Into this space comes LinkedIn.

LinkedIn seems to target professionals and has kind of evolved into, not exactly a job site where people looking for employment post their CV, but nonetheless a place to publicise skills and experience and garner glowing testimonials from people you have worked with. There are groups to join where ideas can be exchanged and through connections access to millions. And yet are people attracting business enquiries  from this source? I suspect that for most the leads and conversions are small, if any. Meanwhile it becomes another time consuming investment to develop contacts aded to the time sunk into other social media platforms.

Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Now everyone can be a publisher is there too much news?

The volume of company announcements has increased rapidly with the ability to self publish online, but how much of it is really news?

Before the Internet, most b-2-b marketers had limited media access to reach their target audiences with news - typically trade journals, local press and a company newsletter. The press release is a formal company document, although often researched and written by a PR agency, it was (and still is) approved before issue,  so the process takes time. The PR specialist identifies news stories that are likely to be of interest to a magazine editor, will look for a unique angle on the story and provide a captioned and credited, professional photograph - the more eye catching and compelling the better. Once the press release reaches the editor's desk along with hundreds of others, probably only one in twenty gets selected for publication. Unpublished stories can still be used on the company web site and in newsletters. A Virtual News Office is a great way of publishing company news. But formal company news is not the reason for 'news' overload - it is the social media channels. Frequently the tweets are links to another online item. Even video is running the risk of over exposure.

Twitter and Facebook are probably the biggest culprits in churning out news by the minute. In the first case, most of it isn't interesting news just inconsequential comments of the moment. For example, by following tweets from companies and organisations active in a particular b-2-b market sector, even if you are following relatively few, it generates such a deluge of information that it soon becomes unmanageable and consequently unread. Amalgamating news feeds using something like Hootsuite clearly demonstrates the scale of the problem. One organisation told me it has about half a dozen people each tweeting 5 or 6 times a day. With the filters  - PR agency and magazine editor - on what constitutes 'news' removed, quality is obviously one casualty, interest another and the risk of losing the attention of your customers an all too real possibility. Is a development engineer or an architect keen to be kept informed of new products and projects really going to be impressed by being swamped with company tweets and Facebook messages, or would they prefer just to stick with what is important and relevant to them? Has anyone even asked? Perhaps the 'less is more' philosophy would work better.

On the other hand selectively used social media can add to traditional news broadcast methods. Tweets as headlines of press releases can link to the full story on a VNO. Blogs provide a channel for very targeted information appealing to very specific, small and focussed target audiences that would never have supported a printed magazine. Videos are good for providing supporting information on the YouTube channel. For b-2-b marketing not everyone will be social media users and marketing strategy must recognise the diversification of news delivery, maintain quality, publish information of real interest and value to the target audiences and avoid over kill.


Thursday, May 17, 2012

Will the Facebook IPO be liked?

Later this week Facebook will make its initial public share offering predicted to value the business at around $100 billion and immediately become one of the biggest companies in America.


This blog has frequently commented on Facebook as a marketing medium. Undoubtably in its short history it has been a phenomenon, but is it sustainable? Lets evaluate the product against some fundamental criteria. According to books and the movie describing Facebook's origin and short history it grew out of a student venture that wasn't based on a particularly novel idea or execution, or from the result of in depth research. Neither was it driven by a business plan and financial forecasts. The surprise is that it took off in spectacular fashion with users signing up at an amazing rate to currently around 900 million world wide. Big numbers inevitably appear attractive to advertisers seeking to reach big audiences and this in turn led to talk of monetizing the product and then to the IPO.


As Facebook kind of 'took off' there is always the concern that if the fundamental appeal of the offering is not understood, then keeping the users happy if what it is that made them happy in the first place is itself not clear, there is always a risk of alienating them. Of course the initial success is based on a free product that generates just $5 per member. If it cost to join, would users pay to belong and would it have taken off as it did? Initially there was some exclusivity in so far as you needed a university email account to join.Two things that might just alienate users are the use of personal information and the presentation of advertisements on personal pages. Offering very targeted audiences appears to be an advertiser's dream suggesting low waste of advertising dollars.  I have just returned from Thailand, Vietnam and Malaysia and suddenly all the advertisements served to me are in Thai. Spooky, but not really appropriate especially as I can't read them.


And despite the big numbers of users,  it is still a small percentage of the world population which is counted in billions. And what proportion of an advertiser's target audience total population are regular Facebook users? In traditional marketing target audience populations can be defined and media addressing a particular group similarly evaluated. I wonder how many companies have any idea what proportion of their target audience are regular users of Facebook and are they typical of the whole target population or a sub set with different needs?


In the UK and other countries numbers are falling.This Guardian article quotes  Magnus Hoglund, chief executive of the law media portal Law360.com, who has worked on digital media companies for the past decade, saying: "From my experience, I get the sense that being on Facebook is not cool anymore. The early adopters and trend setters are moving away. [But] these are also exactly the type of people brand advertisers want to reach; if they are leaving, it doesn't look good for Facebook." The Daily Telegraph reports, "Facebook now has more than 900 million users, who share 46 billion pieces of “digital content” every day. That content might be short updates, photos, links to other websites, or invitations to events. Many of Facebook’s members use it instead of email. Others play a variety of games. Then there are those who follow pages run by celebrities, sports teams and even brands." It goes on, "All of the data those hundreds of millions of users add to Facebook contribute to building a profile of their interests. Using Facebook’s tools, advertisers can target very specific sections of the membership. If you want to reach women aged 18 to 24 who live in London and are fans of Lady Gaga, then Facebook can sell you an advert that will be shown only to members who match that profile." It begs the question, will it so effectively deliver engineering specifiers who work in Birmingham for a b-2-b company producing components?

Then as Facebook themselves have pointed out the greatest growth is in mobile platforms - smart phones and tablets - which they have not yet monetized. Commentators seem to agree that income will primarily be from advertising and this is unlikely to be additional money, but diverted from other media.  Interestingly General Motors has announced it will no longer pay to advertise on Facebook.


Of course companies can still communicate through their Facebook page without paying to advertise and here is another dilemma - what is it that Facebook does for b-2-b's? Other social media platforms have a ready-to-understand proposition. YouTube is great for videos - product demos, user endorsements, events etc. Twitter great for news headlines. LinkedIn for professional contacts and recommendations, blogs for specialised content, but Facebook's heritage is in personal communication  rather than broadcast messages and it takes resource and effort to build a loyal group  of followers. There then remains the not trivial task of then turning them into buyers!