The following B2B social media case studies are based on my experiences supporting my prior product lines and branding.
The “Team” Approach to Blogging
YouTube Interviews Of Technical Experts
Photo Blogging to Ease Post-Acquisition Concerns and Maintain Brand Goodwill
CASE STUDY: THE “TEAM” APPROACH TO BLOGGING
Preface: the below story was written before I joined my current employer, which has very successful content marketing sites called Verification Academy and Verification Horizons. Indeed, the opportunity to contribute to these “team blogs on steroids” were among the reasons I signed-on.
Even the most gregarious wordsmith can have trouble pulling together a blog post on a regular basis. Plus, when the subject of the blog is something complex like electronic design automation software used to design and verify the largest chips & systems in the world, there typically is no single person who can speak in worthwhile detail about every valuable aspect of the product(s). Soon after my company launched our blog program in the fall of 2008 and I began to blog for myself, these two realities became viscerally clear to me as I cast about for ways to promote my products in this new medium.
Fortunately, the epiphany for creating a “team blog” came shortly thereafter, where I discovered blogs like TechCrunch that were fed by a rotating slate of domain experts. [Head smack] I realized I could do essentially the same thing with my team – I’d be the editor, and the different members of the product team — R&D personnel, the Product Engineers, Field Application Engineers, Support – even 3rd party partners and customers — would be coaxed to contribute a post every now & then. Thus, with some editing & writing support from yours truly (see “Key lessons learned” below), the “Team Specman” blog was launched in December 2008:
http://www.cadence.com/community/posts/teamspecman.aspx
Initially I setup a small core team to maintain a rudimentary editorial calendar. However, over time it became unnecessary since “obvious” topics kept cropping up and/or blog post candidates were readily apparent per the go-to-market plan. Furthermore, spreading out the idea flow across a large group of people actually worked, so to this day posts from a variety of volunteers continue to go out on the wire with some regularity.
Upon switching over to manage a different product line, I was able to put the portability of the team blog concept to the test. Hence, the launch of the “Team Verify” blog in April 2010:
http://www.cadence.com/community/posts/teamverify.aspx
In the fullness of time Team Verify has also developed a loyal following, and after each post goes up I typically get some feedback – either a public comment to the blog or an email from an Application Engineer wanting an in depth follow-up with the author.
Inspired by the success of Team Specman and Team Verify, as of this writing 6 other product teams have adopted the team blog concept for their own products & methodologies.
But why start a whole product line focused blog in the first place? Why not just push product-related content into the company’s regular blog streams, PR channels, or Customer Support pages? Consider:
1 – Users love to hear new tech tips that can make their lives easier, and/or learn about what other users are doing. A blog is a great way to share this level of information – i.e. data that’s not quite right for the regular reference documentation, too short for a whitepaper, or too small/narrow to interest a trade publication.
2 – Power users in particular – a/k/a the people that drive the usage of your tool within their company and vocally advocate it in industry forums — only care about content that’s exclusively focused on the tool(s), product lines, and/or methodologies that they rely on to do their jobs better than anyone else; and/or to build their technical credibility in their industry. Everything else is noise to them. (All those beautiful branding pieces, the stuff on “holistic solution flows”, etc. – they could care less.)
3 – Products that come into your company/portfolio via acquisition are often subjected to unfair and damaging competitor-driven FUD attacks. What better way to quash such FUD than to direct confused users to a regular stream of fresh blog posts about said product(s)? (This issue was a motivation for, and strategic successes of, the Team Specman blog.)
4 –While tech tips are certainly compatible with the Customer Support mission and channels, in many cases access to Support is restricted to paying customers. The virtue of an open product blog (beyond the specific application of point (3) above) is to highlight features and methodologies that you are comfortable making public, and will also show off your thought leadership. As such, your field organization can easily forward relevant blog posts to new prospects, and search engines can index the blog posts so people curious about a given topic in the future will discover your expertise. (Fact: over 80% of our blog traffic comes in from Google searches weeks, months, and even years after an article was posted.)
Key lessons learned:
* It might sound obvious, but it’s important to realize that power users of products / product lines are members of a natural affinity group. In a word, they are fans who are hungry for any and all content about the product(s); not unlike the way serious swimmers want to know what equipment, training, and race strategies Michael Phelps employs. Because these fans can be so influential, make them the team blog’s target audience; anyone else that comes along is gravy. The larger point is to focus on quality vs. quantity – a few in-depth posts a quarter are better than a shallow daily journal. For evidence you are succeeding, look closely at the average time spent on page. It should be on the order of minutes vs. the media industry ideal of 30 seconds.
* The great thing about a product line blog is that there is never a shortage of relevant source material. For starters, if you ever get writers block call your Support manger and ask what are the top 5 FAQs coming in on the hotline and pen successive blog posts about each issue. (If it’s a genuine bug, if you’re honest and acknowledge it’s a known bug, then share the work-around & roadmap for a permanent fix – users will positively respond this level of respect!) Next, ask the Product Engineer(s) what are their favorite tips&tricks to save time configuring the tools, their favorite ways to rapidly input data, favorite helper scripts that automate menial tasks, special methodologies for interpreting output data, etc., etc. Of course you — the Product Manager — are going to have ideas for articles of your own to promote heavily requested features on the product roadmap, upcoming webinars, real world events related to the products, etc. (IMHO, as long as the event(s) are truly relevant, it’s OK to occasionally post “commercials” for product-related events on the blog. Here is an appropriate example of this by Team Verify.
* While there are often exceptions, most team members will probably need your help fleshing out a blog post. In my experience, the top 3 most common reasons for this are: they are constantly traveling to customers, English is not their first language, or they are getting crushed by their own tasks. In short, to make a team blog strategy work the Product Manager must be willing to step in and whip-up a rough draft based on a handful of bullet points, augmented by notes from a quick follow-up phone call. Then either wordsmith the article personally, or get the support of a tech writer that knows your products well. Of course you will have to iterate with the author on the text, perhaps asking them for a (pseudo) code example if it’s relevant. But if you have taken care to grasp the moral of the story in the initial “interview”, usually only one feedback loop on the post’s text is needed.
CASE STUDY: YouTube Interviews Of Technical Experts
Preface: While the B2B promotional use of YouTube is now common place in the years since I wrote the below story, it surprises me that today more companies don’t leverage their in-house experts in this manner.
While YouTube is a popular medium for broadcasting cat antics, music videos, and silly stunts, because of its ubiquity YouTube is also becoming an important B2B communications channel. In fact, most all Fortune 500 companies maintain YouTube channels as part of their outbound communications strategy. In my corner of the enterprise engineering software world, we’ve long known that short&sweet “how to” product demos are popular with customers. However, what I’ve recently discovered is that interviews with domain experts – even when the expert is relatively unknown, and is speaking about a topic that’s quite obscure – can draw a substantial number of viewers as well. In fact, of the over 30 videos that I’ve shot over the past few years, one of the most popular by far is this interview with Matan Vax, an architect in our R&D organization, about a paper he gave earlier in the day at an industry conference.
As the developer for the core of one of our most sophisticated products, I expected that his paper – and thus, a video interview about his paper – would be of natural interest to:
* People who already saw the paper at the conference, but wanted to recall its key points
* Engineers that wanted to go to the conference, but couldn’t
* Subscribers to the Team Specman blog (since the core technology of the Specman product is a central issue in the paper)
* Subscribers to overarching Cadence Verification Community blog stream (since the issues in the paper ultimately relate to the end-user efficiency possible in this whole product segment)
When you add up these constituencies, one could imagine views in the 150-200 range – above average for what I’ve been getting for interview videos, but not unheard of either. However, what I believe has propelled this video to over 1,000 views is a combination of:
* Matan’s points are well spoken, and provocative. They challenge industry conventional wisdom and really make you (re-)think about your position on the issues. Hence, if you are at all interested in this subject, you are going to watch this video all the way through. I also suspect you’ll probably play it again – several times, even – to let the points really sink in.
* The video is not afraid to get technical, and stay technical. It’s immediately obvious that it isn’t some marketing puff piece, and it really digs in and elaborates on technical issues raised in the paper.
In short, when it comes to B2B video with a technical audience “content is king”! (Who knew? 😉
Key lessons learned:
* Videos that support/complement/reinforce another “thing” – a conference paper, intriguing blog post, trade press article, new book being published, etc. – seem to draw more views than unaffiliated issue-oriented interviews.
* Videos on deep technical topics seem to draw substantially more views than more accessible subjects. My theory: because there is far less content available for narrow topic(s), any relevant videos on said topic(s) are sought out like water in the desert?
* Yes, there is a lot of crazy stuff on YouTube. However, there is also a rapidly growing library of serious B2B content from widely respected entities as well. Your customers know this and won’t blame you and/or think less of your brand for the occasional mix of circus and serious in intra-YouTube search results, so don’t overreact and reject this powerful medium.
Case Study: PHOTO BLOGGING TO EASE POST-ACQUISITION CONCERNS & MAINTAIN BRAND GOODWILL
Preface: To this day the “Denali” brand name is still applied to both the products and the annual event.
While corporate-sponsored parties can be amusing, enjoyable even; more often than not they aren’t truly fun. However, there are exceptions that prove the rule: over 10 years ago an IP provider called Denali Software created an annual event , nay, phenomenon, at our industry’s trade show that people genuinely looked forward to every year (the party was/is open to the whole conference – including competitor personnel). Hence, when Denali was acquired by my employer, literally the first question out of anyone’s mouth – from customer CEO’s, down to end users, the trade press, etc., was whether the new owners would continue to sponsor “Denali party”, and preserve its traditions. Of course, embedded in the question was the concern over keeping the very successful Denali people and products together as an effective business unit post-acquisition.
Very early on the executive decision was made to continue to invest in the event and maintain all its popular features (inviting everyone – including competitors, open bar up to the top shelf, hiring a really good live band, etc.) to allay any customer concerns, and to enrich the great brand equity from the acquired entity & the event itself. To make the PR/branding task more challenging, due to the economy far less people would be attending the trade show at all. As such, many who would have gone to the event in years’ past weren’t even going to be in town to see the event for themselves. In short, it was even more necessary this year to use any & all channels to reach out to the many regulars who were stuck at home.
While Corporate Marketing did a great job promoting the party before & after, skepticism of official channels is practically unavoidable when there is an emotional component to the story. Consequently, I did my part for the cause by taking snapshots of my own during the event for twitpics and an informal, post-event photo blog. Traveling light with my Canon point&shoot, I casually snapped away at the various goings-on, all the way past the band’s second encore at 1am.
It didn’t take long to confirm the interest level in the event – heralded by a blog post & tweets, the views of the Flicker set and select images within rose faster than anything I’ve ever posted, and it remains one of my most viewed sets ever.
Key lessons learned:
* Pictures truly are worth a 1,000 words. With the wealth of positive images coming out of the event, combined with the positive buzz the days after in various blogs and tweets, any remaining customer concerns about the post-acquisition health of Denali seemed to evaporate.
* Encourage people to take their own images of the event, and let them share them far & wide. If the event is well executed (why wouldn’t it be?), the goodwill / branding rewards will far outweigh the risks. This is doubly true with employee bloggers: in this day&age people know they can get fired for an inappropriate tweet, blog post, or image, so you can pretty much rely on people only sharing the most attractive and/or positive images, and self-censoring any unflattering or naughty stuff.
Reference link: the full photo blog on the “DAC 2011: Cadence-Denali party”
Joe Hupcey III 