A new marketing paradigm?
Marketing professionals agree: the digital world has changed the basic relationship between customer and marketer.
Today, our strategies must be built for the age of influence marketing. Much like a political process, they must focus on building constituencies instead of customer bases. Both messaging and offering must be flexible: portable, customizable, socializable, allowing the customer/constituent to make them their own.
Keys to this new intimacy are two current Web 2.0 mega trends: The Channel of Me and The Channel of Us.
The Channel of Me recognizes the new culture of customization and control. It creates a new model where the user is at the center and brands revolve, and evolve, around him. It allows the customer to define a much more personal relationship with the brand, thus guiding us in strengthening that relationship.
The Channel of Us leverages the powers of collaboration and influence that have emerged in the connected society. It makes the brand a part of the conversations that are occurring naturally in these groups, embracing the dynamics of collective wisdom and an open, honest, flexible relationship with both the community and the individual.
Much has been made of these changes in the B2C world. But the same shift in purchase decision-making is occurring within the enterprise, as traditional business buyers bring their consumer digital habits and tools into their business processes.
The result is a new view of the B2B market. One we call B2BC, or Business to Business Consumer.
The nature of enterprise technology adoption and business decision-making is evolving and emerging from behind the curtain. It is being driven from the ground up, by changes in how people are using new platforms as well as existing channels to do business with each other.
And it has the potential to fundamentally alter how we view and approach the market opportunity.
B2BC: Moving from Web 2.0 to Enterprise 2.0.
The B2C world is embracing the Channels of Me & Us to create seismic change in the way they go to market. But don’t assume that Web 2.0 is just for consumer marketing.
The ecosystem “out there” has become the ecosystem “in here” — impacting the way people inside businesses integrate countless activities. Evidence the rapid introduction of new enterprise-directed services and products that enable shared intelligence, internal content syndication, collaboration, community building, constituency support and relationship management. Services like:
• Attensa – an Enterprise RSS feeder that synchronizes feeds among multiple platforms, offers shared intelligence technology, and notes which news feeds are drawing the most attention across the enterprise.
• Notefish – a search and collection application that allows users to cut and paste search results into link-sustained content that can then be shared.
• iBelong Networks – an enabler of social networks for any portal or affiliate group, with a set of functionality and tools that allow the user to join and create new communities on a permanent or ad hoc basis.
• Visible Path – a beta service that provides a “private” way for users to manage their relationships in real time: seeing who’s getting stronger and weaker in their relationship network, and expanding it to corporate colleagues to capture all their contacts and exchanges.
Andrew McAfee,the Harvard Business School Professor who helped coin the term, “Enterprise 2.0,” notes: “Two transformations have occurred: one on the Internet and one in the enterprise.” This transformation, he contends, is driven by the same forces seen in the B2C space: simple, free platforms for self-expression (Channel of Me), and the power of self-organizing/emergent structures rather than imposed ones (Channel of Us).
The next step in the process will be bridging the gap between current established IT infrastructure and the less structured collaborative environment of the “new web” inside the corporation.
But make no mistake; this is not about top-down IT structure. The B2BC market is a bottom-up, user-driven phenomenon focused on how business does business, with infrastructure as enabler instead of determiner of what is useful.
B2BC: An evolving platform for Relationship Marketing
Microsoft is in a unique position as the largest technology company in the world. The audiences inside companies who are important to Microsoft’s future (those in IT, Development and Design) are the same audiences who are both adopting and adapting to these radical changes.
But understanding how to do relationship marketing in the waters of constituency engagement and extended “group think” is more than enabling blogs and wikis inside companies. It involves understanding and responding to changes in perceptions and decision making processes among those who ultimately have to decide how to manage this evolving business infrastructure.
That means understanding the blurring of the line between TDM and BDM. In a B2BC world, the current job role-based segmentation and profile-based targeting is nearly useless. The challenge becomes how to find new ways to target decision constituencies – a fluid group of individuals who change depending on their current need and the demands of the decisions being made or objectives being pursued.
Targeting the individual. Observing behaviors and responding to them in real time is key. This means putting control in the hands of the individual to enable them to target themselves (personalization) and others who are connected to them. It can take the form of distributing content, tracking and managing relationships, sharing perspectives and information, or anything that creates group expertise or extends group knowledge.
Targeting the community. Measuring “buzz” isn’t enough. We need to understand who is really talking, who is really listening, and why. Creating the means to expose the social structure of a conversation, and align with it. The good news is that these social structures are emerging from behind the curtain, becoming more observable, and more understandable, in ways that marketers can act on through the power of influencer analytics. (SEER example or other?)
The changing nature of engagement. The appeal of offering relevant information isn’t what changes so much as how relevant content is created, dispersed and shared. The user wants a voice in the creation of content – personalizing it for his or her use. They also want choice in what content they select, what gets filtered out and what gets used, as well as control in how it is re-formed around their needs and the needs or their community.
Ultimately, marketers need to bring value to the community relationships and behaviors within the organization and not simply the relationships they have with individual roles that are deemed important to purchase decisions.
B2BC: Putting it into practice.
We can begin by looking at how two central marketing concepts are expanding and blurring. These trends change the very nature of a marketing strategy, but in ways that give us some clear direction on how to move forward.
1. The Walls Are Falling
For very practical reasons, the boundaries of our marketing strategies have always been defined by what we can measure and what we can influence. It makes no real sense to define a strategy that relies on things we can’t affect, or that we can’t measure if we did.
Those limitations have led marketers to a “walled garden” approach, where we try to drive our audience into an environment in which we have complete control. In the walled garden model, our potential customers have to agree to behave in measurable ways, in a measurable environment, for us to offer a mutual benefit.
That model, however, is starting to change dramatically. One primary reason is that our ability to observe the world beyond the walls is expanding. New tools actually allow us to peer into the structure of the conversations occurring, tracking content, mapping influence and monitoring activity outside our walls.
This means that we’re starting to have the same level of granular, detailed insight “outside” the walled garden that we do “inside”. Those expanded horizons should redefine our expectations of how we design a strategy, and how we track its results. It means we can:
• Move from assumption to observation
• Use digital anthropology
• Expand our participation in the broader ecosystem
• Design content and services to live outside our walls
• Share control with the audience
• Use new metrics like “content reach” and “service touches”
• Plan across ecosystems
• Gain access to other walled gardens
• Define engagement models based on behaviors
• Design campaigns around groups, not just individuals
2. Leads Are Everywhere
The new B2BC world changes both our ability to target prospects and the need for it. We must employ a full range of tools, and new thinking, in order to capture the expanding opportunities.
Our ability to find individual prospects is expanding. Because we can measure behaviors across the entire ecosystem, we can use behavioral targeting approaches to dramatically expand the pool of prospects.
Our ability to qualify individual prospects is expanding. Using tools like monetization, we can create qualification models that focus on the value of specific behaviors by both groups and individuals.
Our ability to cultivate prospects is expanding. We have a much larger “value inventory” with which to invite prospects into a deeper relationship, and we can create differentiated plans to serve individual populations.
As the distinction between “our” sites and “external” sites disappears, it explodes the scope of our strategic ambition and our ability to identify its target. In traditional digital marketing, our strategy was tightly focused on the elements we controlled. In the next generation of modern marketing, any robust strategy will not only be driven by an understanding of this broader environment, it will expect to measure its effectiveness throughout.
B2BC: Take Microsoft, for instance.
Is the notion of B2BC relevant for how Microsoft engages customers and audience groups?
We would argue that the B2BC notion is supremely relevant because it is basis on which next-generation audience engagement should be built.
Microsoft invests over $5B in marketing each year, of which approximately $2B is invested in RM efforts. Yet despite these investments, Microsoft still has only a limited ability to narrow-cast messages to specific audiences; minimal ability to capture or to allow customers to share with us real-time information from which compelling content and offers can be tailored; and provides a highly fragmented, impersonal, and inefficient online experiences for key audience groups such as IT Pros and developers .
How might this situation be different when re-imagined through the B2BC lens?
Imagine a new developer experience that shifts the balance of control to the audience, giving them more control over what they do, and when:
• A highly modular and customizable MSDN experience organized functionally just as developers organize their world (around tasks and the specific language & technology they prefer).
• Tools that allow rapid discovery, reuse, and dissemination of highly technical content (such as the beta TagSpace tagging tool and social bookmarking technologies within one’s own “portal”), tools that provide technical experts a super-easy ways to organize and access content from MSDN, related sites, and even 3rd-party sites if desired.
• Clever integration (beyond simply links to these sites) of third party sources including the ability for developer-specified OPML-compliant external sources to be highlighted, semantically grouped and shared.
• Custom “vertical” search engines whereby developers can create, store, reuse, and share narrowly tailored search queries (for example, narrowed to specific URLs, document types, or even specific tags).
For the developer community, this re-engineered experience would drive a previously unattainable level of interaction and engagement. And perhaps most importantly, it would start to generate a user-generated map and taxonomy for the vast resources in MSDN, encouraging greater adoption and advocacy among developers.
Does giving control to the audience mean giving up on our ability to deliver targeted content and messages? Quite simply, no. Sharing control with the customer simply means our audiences have more influence over the time, place and manner of consumption.
And shared control doesn’t mean we compromise on rigorous measurement either: With basic architectural forethought, distributed content and portable experiences like those described above will stay firmly tied to our RM discipline—we can clearly see and quantify how they are being used (via incremental content reach and service touches) and therefore tie them to ROI metrics. Vehicles like portable content allow Microsoft to offer real contributions to a broader ecosystem no matter where it coalesces.
Imagine a different, even more intimate scenario: being able to define segments and target individuals based on real-time online behavior:
• Capture anonymous on-site behavior as an IT Pro flows from MSCOM to a TechNet vlab to the related product pages – a flow that suggests evaluation behavior. Using this type of data, we could redefine the nature of a “qualified lead” and create qualification models that are triggered by high value-behaviors.
• Create prospecting models that focus on the value of populations, in addition to individual and organizational data.
• Develop differentiated plans, ones that respond to overt needs, not those inferred from a Standard Individual Profile (SIP) or other static data source. An IT Generalist could receive IT Manager-type offers – despite his or her profile – based on the nature of their interaction with us rather than only on segment membership.
• Build incentives such as enrollment in beta experiences, event registrations and the like based on observed behavior.
These are just faint outlines of how B2BC-infused activities could take shape within Microsoft, but we must accelerate and globalize these efforts and overcome institutional inertia and silos in order to deliver world-class RM experiences.
B2BC: An ongoing discussion.
In hindsight, the emergence of a business consumer community within the enterprise comes as no surprise. It is a natural evolution brought on by the shift in control that is happening not only between businesses and marketers, but also between businesses and employees.
But many questions remain. How deep, and broad, will this segment go? How….HELP HERE!
We suggest that the answers to these questions will come from a very Enterprise 2.0 source: group expertise and discussion. To facilitate those discussions and information sharing, we have created a community site at www.b2bctalk.com. There you will find expanded information on the b2bc concept, comments from Microsoft and agency partners and more.
In addition, we will be bringing the b2bc online community into the offline world, with specific events to help you apply and profit from this new view of the enterprise market.