Source: ZDNet
For you business to business marketers and owners asking for relevant examples of other btob companies “like me” that have successfully used social media as a marketing tactic–this bud’s for you.
My erstwhile fellow marketers and bloggers have been on their toes and documented an interesting example, BreakingPoint Systems.
Brian Carroll and Jennifer Leggio both blogged about the company’s social media success in late 2008.
Brian wrote a step-by-step case study and Jennifer published a guest post from Kyle Flaherty, BreakingPoint’s (then) Marketing Director on the pesky question of ROI results.
Here are the tools and strategies they used; in a future post I’ll provide you with a Social Media checklist you can use to adopt these practices.
BreakingPoint (a high-tech startup in the network testing equipment space) used social media to generate leads and establish thought leadership. They started with a company blog and monitored online conversations for industry topics to create the content. TweetScan gave them ideas for keywords and issues mentioned in Twitter conversations.
They used a Twitter account to alert interested folks to blog posts, webinars, contests and focus group questions.
Establishing a LinkedIn Group to discuss industry issues around networking security allowed BreakingPoint to further their thought leadership positioning. They do not directly promote their products but act as hosts, letting the 450 group members take the lead in topics and discussions. They contribute to the conversation when it’s appropriate.
To get the word out about the company’s social media presence, employees added LinkedIn Group and Twitter links to email signatures.
The last key step in BreakingPoint’s social media success story was to diligently track, measure and analyze the results. In his guest post Kyle Flaherty reported that his team used a mash-up of tools (which took a lot of work and some time) to help with ROI. (Sorry, dear readers, Google Analytics alone won’t get you where you need to be…)
In addition to Google Analytics, some of the online monitoring tools he listed: GetClicky, BUDurl, Google Reader, HubSpot, and more. Above Here is a snapshot of their results posted on Jennifer Leggio’s blog.
Kyle talks about the ability to tie integrate social media efforts with other marketing tactics such as webinars. He says in part,
“For example, we are running an upcoming webinar and I’ve used all of our social media outlets to let the community know and interact. Using BUDurl I can tell how many folks have signed up for the webinar through Twitter, I use GetClicky to see the folks who went to the webinar page from our LinkedIn Group and I’ll even be able to view the folks who watch the webinar live on USTREAM the day of the event.
We can see how many participants then sign up for a product demo, choose to do a product evaluation and ultimately buy the product. I’m obviously simplifying this process, but it is just that, a process of measurement based on certain triggers that can show me the business impact of social media.”
Interesting stuff, right?
BreakinPoint’s blog is here. Follow them on Twitter here or (for all of you network security fanatics) check out their LinkedIn Group here.
Brian Carroll’s full post is here. Kyle’s guest post on Jennifer Leggio’s blog is here.
It’s good to read an article with some specifics about how “social media” was actually used.
I would posit that a key element of BreakingPoints success was their focus on measuring what they did and the results. Simply the act of measuring something requires a focus that many marketing efforts lack.
The other point that occurs to me is the simple fact that increasing the number of people who read, hear or see information about you business will help drive growth.
I mean it’s possibly true that the power of new online marketing opportunities is not really in their sophisticated targeting and community building but simply that they are one more way to get people to know about your business and products.
My two cents anyway.
Cheers
Sam