The
market is shouting at you. Are you listening?
According
to go-globe.com, every minute on the internet there are 98,000 tweets, 1500
blogs, 600 new videos, and 1140 SlideShares are posted. Word of mouth
marketing and getting to pulse of your market today has taken on an entirely
new scale that can deliver tremendous benefits.
As the
voice of the market, we product managers are constantly looking for
opportunities to improve our product roadmaps, identify new customer
requirements, understand the latest market problems, or track the latest
competitive threat. And as the voice to the market, we product marketers
are perpetually taking charge of launch plans, developing new sales tools,
improving thought leadership or delivering new presentations and demos.
Today,
engaging with the market – whether you are listening or sharing – is easy with
the right plan and approach. And to top it all off, tracking your return
on investment in the socialsphere has never been easier for product managers
and marketers to measure.
Here are
three tips to get you started:
Get
out there, now.
A few
years ago, I wrote an article – Cubicle vs. Airplane Marketing --
about the need for product managers to get out into the market in order to meet
their customers face-to-face, test their sales tools first-hand, and understand
the real world requirements of their markets and buyers. Even though I
still highly recommend getting out of your cubicle and onto an airplane to
truly understand your customers, the value of social communication tools grows
stronger for us every day.
For
example, I once led a global survey that queried the state of market adoption,
customer challenges, and business use cases for the Microsoft SharePoint market
my company was targeting at the time. The survey ran every six months and
we promoted participation heavily on Twitter, LinkedIn, and several highly
frequented industry blogs and communities.
Using
these forums, we boosted participation to over 3,000 people in the survey
giving us a solid representation of the market, its users, and
requirements. Taking advantage of large existing communities online meant
that we spent less time building our own forums --allowing us reach sizeable
audiences instantly. That kind of scale and speed would have never been
possible on an airplane.
Even
better, we published updated survey results to the market through those same
social channels, paired with conference speaking engagements, hundreds of
tweets covering survey findings, blogs focused on analyzing the results, and
posting off-the-cuff video responses to the findings from industry influencers
on YouTube. On SlideShare alone, the survey findings resulted in over
65,000 views – not only promoting visibility to the results, but dramatically
amplifying word-of-mouth about our company and my role as a thought leader in
the market.
The
impact of social amplification was summarized well in a recent Harvard Business
Review article that shared, “word of mouth still influences purchasing
behavior. Only now, social networks increase that circle from a few
trusted friends and family to hundreds of people online.[i]”
Frequency of participation in the most active channels has a direct correlation
to the value and feedback you’ll receive.
As I am
sure you already have LinkedIn, Twitter, SlideShare, and YouTube accounts, I
wont recommend signing up – but make sure that you are participating in at
least one of those channels daily.
If you
really want to know what the market is thinking, you need to get out there,
now.
As
product managers, we need to think on a larger scale about gathering market and
customer requirements that influence our product roadmaps. Crowdsourcing
is one such option. For years, companies like salesforce.com, Microsoft,
Cisco, and LEGO have enlisted their customers and the public to help identify new
ideas or to narrow down potential feature sets to the most impactful
innovations. For example, Facebook has used crowdsourcing since 2008 to
create different language versions of its site, providing versions that are
more compatible with local cultures.
For
product marketers, consider a roadmap of engagement. The best product
marketers understand that social media is not simply about sending a tweet here
and there, or posting news or questions to a LinkedIn group once a
quarter. To achieve the best returns on your social activities, you need
to plan ahead. Rather than thinking of social connections and community
engagement as ad-hoc activities, consider building roadmaps to sustain your
momentum. Consider how to engage for the long-run.
Think
about how many of us plan our launches to blast out new content within one or
two weeks and we then hibernate for six months until the next product
release. For the next launch you plan, consider a six-month mixed-media
conversation roadmap with your market.
Here is
one example of “conversation” roadmap starting off with a webinar. Coupled
with the traditional promotional campaigns around the webinar, be sure to post
the webinar slides on SlideShare and then tweet about them. In the
slides, insert suggested tweet opportunities and a call to action that drives
readers to your blog site, where you post new updates, news or insights every
week. Invite blog readers to join you at your user conference in three
months, and query LinkedIn and other online communities as to what topics they
would like to ensure are discussed at the conference.
Capture
video feedback from attendees at the conference to post online. Then use
those same forums to crowdsource market requirements for your future
releases. Even better, consider capturing candid video feedback –
positive or negative -- on your product or demos to share internally with your
development teams. While all this is happening, be sure you have
scheduled a gaggle of tweets to share across your communities at regularly
scheduled intervals; for major launch events, I know of teams that
pre-scheduled nearly 200 tweets to go out over their first month in market.
By
planning ahead with a conversation roadmap, your voice to the market will be
much more consistent and you will produce winning results.
By the
Numbers. I
have tweeted 2, 228 times and have 596 followers. Last month our blog had
over 4500 visits. My SlideShare decks have been viewed over 100,000
times, my LinkedIn profile has been viewed 399 times in the past three months,
and the internal sales enablement video I posted on our private YouTube had 72
views in its first day online.
These
stats are not offered as bragging, as I know I am still a social neophyte
compared to many others out there. The stats are simply offered as
evidence to how easy it is to track one’s activity, its reach and the
impact.
The great
thing about so many social media channels is the ease of quantifying market
participation tends, daily community impacts, and return on your social
investment. There are those of us who remember when it used
to be challenging to measure the ROI of marketing efforts, but social media
outlets have improved their analytics tremendously over the past five years.
Remember,
in the socialshpere, be sure to measure the reach and impact of your
activities. With metrics that show how you are building awareness and
consideration of your offerings in the market, social media activities will be
viewed less as a hobby and more as a strategic marketing endeavor.
Want to
add some fun into your numbers? Consider waging a friendly competition
within your marketing and product management teams. Because the stats are
so readily available, set up a competition to see who is getting the most retweets,
comments on their blog post, views on their product demo, or feedback on their
potential feature list.
As a
former business school professor of mine used to say, “keeping score, improves
the score.” In the socialsphere, living and playing by that mantra has
never been as accessible as it is today.
A
Final Recommendation. Be Human. When you have your plan in place and you
venture out into the socialsphere, leave your industrial messages behind.
People don’t just want to hear about “ZipBang v2.3 was just released”,
“Download the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant here”, or “read my latest
blog”. Those kind of industrial tones are generally turn offs, and get
passed over as quick snippet headlines.
Show your
personality, post an opinion, or share your excitement. “I was flattered
to see”, “Listen to her first-hand account”, or “Here’s where they got it all
wrong” kinds of communication engage people, encourage reaction, and invite
action.
Post more
pictures, charts, and videos. Just as you experience with your friends on
Facebook, pictures, videos, and images help show more of who you are. Let
your personality show and invite people into a glimpse of your world.
Lastly,
remember you are not in this alone. The greatest achievements in our
lifetimes were not accomplished by individuals, but by large communities of
people working together. Join us, share with us, and count yourself in.
Information and Image Sources:
HBR.org,
The Future of Corporate IT Looks a Lot Like Google. http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/07/the_future_of_corporate_it_looks_a_lot_like_google.html
Arianna
Huffington, Inside the Twitterverse. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/inside-the-twitterverse_b_3647114.html
Bullhorn: http://www.prwatch.org/news/2009/08/8498/cash-roots-manufactured-anger-and-hot-air-over-health-care
60
Seconds: http://www.rogerkohlcfo.com/files/2011/10/go-globe-60-seconds-internet-580x410.jpg
Crowdsourcing: http://www.clickwrite.com/Blog/CrowdsourcingPt3ManagingYourCrowdsource.aspx
Roadmap: http://www.skyanalytics.com/media/bid/271715/A-Roadmap-for-Leveraging-Legal-Analytics-Part-1-Introduction
Scoreboard: http://www.sierra-winds.com/scoreboards.html
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