B2B Social Media: Putting a Human Touch

B2B, or business-to-business, describes commerce transactions between businesses (e.x. between a manufacture and a wholesaler) as opposed to B2C (business-to-Consumers) or B2G (business-to-government).

You may wonder why I am writing on this topic since I’ve decided to focus more on consumers in this blog. Well, the point I am trying to make with this post is that we may treat B2B more like B2C when implementing social media efforts.

As Li and Bernoff point out, it’s important to look at the target audience of B2B not only as businesses (organizations), but also as businesspeople (contact points representing the organizations). This concept is crucial when a business approaches another business using social media- you cannot connect, communicate, and share ideas with a business, but the people doing the business.

My experience as a marketing communication intern in a Raleigh-based PR agency has helped me understand the importance of putting human touch to B2B. I have worked on three B2B projects using social media to help our gaming technology clients (game engine, game localization, and game artificial intelligence) develop and maintain relationships with such businesses as game developers, game publishers, and game education institutes. We make efforts to reach them, impress them, and make connections with them, so as to create business opportunities for our clients.

In retrospect, the critical part of our work always involves learning and connecting with the key people in the businesses. For example, we do regularly email campaigns for a game engine client to inform game publishers of the technology. We customized campaigns when reaching various key decision makers. For CTOs and chief programmers, we inserted video demos in the email, and included the link to the online community where they could discuss technical details with the engineers from our client side. The strategy was implemented based on the fact that management on the technology side contribute to the decision making by making critical judgment of advantages and disadvantages of technology, so they need to know what kind of technology is available here. Whereas for CEOs and CFOs, they go to trade shows and they care about price, value and budget. Thus we reach them with the help of Salesforce event management function- before major trade shows, they would receive emails that inform them of our client’s competitive edge (addressing past successful titles of similar genres developed with the technology, price-performance ratio, etc.), plus a chance for a coffee together in the upcoming trade show.

In a word, knowing who you are communicating with is essential to B2B social media practices. Are they more of spectators than critics? Would they appreciate an opportunity to create contents? Or maybe they are fine as long as they can make comments, or subscribe to things, or share things? Strategies are built on the people, so start to learn them.

Don’t be Evil… Says Who?

My previous blog about Pizza Hut’s viral marketing through social media in China brought Paromita and I into a very interesting discussion about ethics of social media marketing. Was it unethical of Pizza Hut not to disclose that it was the creator of the original post? If you were on the team that strategized and implemented this campaign, knowing that self-disclosure was not essential with the local law and industry regulations, plus absolutely tempted by the fact that the campaign would sell much better if “astroturfed”, what would you do? Where would you place ethics for an organization such as a corporation? What would be your priority, and at the same time, how would you define your bottom line financially and ethically?

How I wish there were a universal ruler that measures ethics, but after all, life is never a black-and-white, good-or-bad dichotomy. In the business world, ethics is a challenging issue full of gray areas, entangled with variables. Yet, for organizations, attempts must be made to answer these questions, because publics of interest care to know what kind of player you are in the market before they decide what kind of relationship they want to have with you. To help with the thoughts, I’d like to share Google’s word about ethics.

“Don’t be evil,”

says Google in their organizational philosophy. As a technology/service provider that integrates information, Google believes that it is unethical, evil to manipulate information. This ethics standard can be seen as an underlying motive of Google’s recent statement about leaving China (by closing its google.cn domain) when Gmail accounts of several pro-democracy dissidents’ were censored and hacked. While many thought it was a morally advantageous excuse to shut a poorly performing line of service (google.cn’s market share has been disappointing), many believed Google was a hero. As the picture below shows, some people even presented bouquets (as a way to say goodbye to the beloved) to Google’s Beijing office when the announcement was made.



I tend to believe that Google’s ethical practice in China has largely combined interest of itself and the key publics. Google’s revenues rely on a stable service that reflects natural unmanipulated information flow, which serves as a legitimate reason for Google to stick to the ethical standard. More importantly, Google’s key publics (users, investors, the press, etc.) expect to see consistent execution of “don’t be evil”, even when it means making clear the core values against the "Great Firewall of China" (Government PR efforts are much needed after that though.) It reassures them that Google is trustworthy, protects the brand, and in the long run, it helps cultivate the Chinese market. Thus, what Google did in China was both a moral bottom line and a moral high ground for its stakeholders and itself.

What I’ve learned from this incident is that, for organizations, ethics can be and should be strategic. Ethic standards should direct organizations to developing positive relationships with their key publics. Organizations need to decide the ethical DOs and DON’Ts in a big picture thinking about long term consequences, and in the eye of the publics on whom an organization's success or failure depends.

Eat up Pizza Hut

I’d like to share a story about Pizza Hut in China, but before I do, I’d give some background information: 1) with many remarkable efforts, Pizza Hut has successfully upmarketed itself in China. It is relatively expensive, but offers happy exotic dining experience. Therefore it is typical to find young couples going on a date or celebrating Valentine’s in Pizza Hut (to get a feel of its branding strategy and target consumers in China, here are some commercials of Pizza Hut China); 2) on its menu, there is this all-you-can-eat fruit salad. It is self-served, comes with a tiny bowl, can be fetched from the salad bar only once, and costs ￥30 which is not inexpensive at all considering its regular amount.

Anyway, some three years ago, a post titled “How to Eat up Pizza Hut” became extremely popular and got forwarded onto thousands of discussion forums, blogs and SNSs in China. In fact, a search of the title in Chinese still generates 48,300 exact results now.

The post begins by complaining that Pizza Hut’s all-you-can-eat fruit salad is ridiculously expensive. Then it gives detailed instructions on how to take steps to pile up the salad really high so as to maximize the amount. Here are some crazy pictures from the post-







So the post became sensationally viral, and everyone after reading the post wanted to go and try eat up Pizza Hut. It wasn’t learned until last year that the one that called on eating up Pizza Hut was Pizza Hut itself.

In my opinion, the most amazing part of this social media campaign is that NOBODY, for two years, felt it was a campaign! People went to Pizza Hut out of curiosity. They believed it was one of them that had sent the original message.

Three lessons I’ve learned from Pizza Hut:

Research Comes First.
Pizza Hut obviously had learned what held their consumers back from buying the yummy salad (i.e., the price/amount ratio). When it becomes so tempting to just use the social media to make a buzz (as if such a function were automatic), it is important to make sure that you have carefully listened to and thoroughly understood your consumers.

Choose the Right Channel.
Being able to differentiate various social media technologies and employ them appropriately is also crucial. Pizza Hut ‘made the wave’ (thanks everyone for liking the metaphor!) through discussion forums, blogs and SNS as these social media spread entertaining contents very rapidly, and congregate the most young audience among whom many are Pizza Hut’s target consumers.

It’s a Conversation.
Social media is about communication, connecting, and sharing. Thus, instead of treating it as a one-way marketing channel and directly pushing messages across the board, organizations need to engage in conversations with the audience. Like the post by Pizza Hut, it encourages people to come with ideas of how to pile up the salad higher. In response, many netizens posted their Pizza Hut triumphs. Some even posted salad piling structural charts to teach people how to build a stable salad foundation! The orange bars in the second chart were supposed to mean carrot sticks :)





FYI, the campaign was so successful that recently Pizza Hut China had to take all-you-can-eat fruit salad off the menu. Pizza Hut is happily eaten up.

Into the Groundswell

Imagine a sea of information.

Imagine your Facebook pages, your Twitter updates, your blogs, your comments and reviews being small drops of water in that sea. What would you think if you are told that you have a good chance of making a very big wave, a groundswell in the sea?

That’s what Li and Bernoff try to tell today’s corporations, governments, and all other kinds of organizations in their book Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. A negative ZAGAT review could influence or change someone’s decision making on where to dine; a Tweet calling on supporting disaster relief in Haiti could be retweeted many times to spread the word and motivate action among thousands of people; a big thumb-up to M.A.C. Brush 187 in some Japanese girl’s makeup vlog (boys, feel free to replace it with, say, Ford Mustang in car blogs) may make you curious enough to get to a local Sephora in Raleigh and try it out. Today’s consumers are no longer their own islands. Between them and the information in traditional forms of pitches from salespersons, commercials, advertorials, news releases and so on, there are fellow consumers that inform, educate, share experience with, and bring changes to one another, making big waves together. Social media is definitely changing the social/economic/political dynamics locally and globally. Thus, traditional institutions like corporations must learn how to become wave makers, or at least decent surfers.

As a marketing communication analyst in a PR agency, my constant interest lies in helping businesses understand, communicate, and manage relationships with consumers. Since most target audience today is in the groundswell made possible by social media, it is thus natural to feature in my blog three key players- consumers, social media, and public relations. I’d keep exploring how businesses can effectively establish and maintain relationship with consumers using social media. I’d look for insights into how leaders of organizations can jump out of comfort zones, and genuinely embrace the groundswell.

Welcome aboard, and let's start the exploration!