We had the privilege of interviewing one of the most well known, respected and influential figures in new media (basically a celebrity to us), Brian Solis. After seeing Solis speak at TWTRCON San Francisco in 2010, we discovered his original creation, the Conversation Prism. The Conversation Prism visually articulates the organization of the social web. We knew that gaining insights from Solis would be invaluable and relevant to our goal of effectively communicating with engineers and educating ourselves and others about the ever-changing state of the social media environment.

Brian Solis is the author of Engage, the complete guide to build, cultivate, and measure success in the social web. Solis is globally recognized as one of the most prominent thought leaders and published authors in new media. A digital analyst, sociologist, and futurist, Solis has influenced the effects of emerging media on the convergence of marketing, communications, and publishing. He is principal of FutureWorks, an award-winning New Media agency in Silicon Valley, and has led interactive and social programs for Fortune 500 companies, notable celebrities, and Web 2.0 startups. BrianSolis.com is among the world’s leading business and marketing online resources.

(Please see end of post for key takeaways)

Darcy & Hannah: We were very intrigued by your Conversation Prism. Can you please share with us why and how it was created?

Brian Solis: My post introducing Version 3.0 of the Conversation Prism has a very deep view into the why and the what. In the comments section of the post someone had asked for the first time ever, “Why is it called the Conversation Prism when it looks like a color wheel? If it has nothing to do with a prism, why is it called that?” That’s the first time I had been asked that, so I decided to address it because there is a reason. It was originally a prism because of the way a prism works—it is a refraction of light. The Conversation Prism was a play on “light” and “enlightenment”. Instead of taking the conversations that are happening on the social web and looking at them as one stream from an audience, run it through a prism; it bends the light so that you can see the light refract, and therefore see all of its separate conversations taking place. That was the premise of the Conversation Prism. We eventually had to put it into a circular format because after the first round of research, there were too many players to fit in the design of the original prism. If you can envision what Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon album looks like, which was basically a prism, that was the original concept for how the original Conversation Prism would look and work: one light bending into the prism that was tiered from top to bottom. There are just too many solutions out there, so it had to become circular in order for it to make sense.

The inspiration behind the Conversation Prism was two-fold. One was that it was to visualize the social media universe. At that time, there had been an attempt to do just that where people were saying, “Show me all the networks for imaging, show me all the social networks, show me all the networks for music,” etc. Of course at the time, the popular ones were YouTube, Pandora, Facebook, Twitter and everyone seemed to attack it the same way. They would start in PowerPoint and create a slide to depict whether or not a business should be present in all networks, which was a popular theme several years ago. Another motive for these social media universes was to demonstrate the need to pay attention, because it was a big universe. I decided to bring a little more structure, or intelligence, to the understanding of the social web to demonstrate that consumers/individuals were using social networking in ways that could be compartmentalized. It was organized by how they were using these types of networks, hence each of the categories. The second inspiration for it, was to then say, (and this was in direct argument against all of the people saying you needed a presence in every one of those networks) “look, these are the four tools. Each one of these networks has a search box where you can use traditional Boolean logic search techniques to figure out whether or not that community was active for you and your market.” Using the Conversation Prism as a template, you should go through it and try to see where you customers are active, so you can put together a social map of where you should focus your attention and prioritize based on the results that come back. It also serves as a foundation or blueprint for how businesses should listen to conversations and put a structure around it. In fact, many listening tools today will tell you that they use the Conversation Prism as their framework for putting together their listening systems.

(http://www.theconversationprism.com/)

Darcy & Hannah: In your blog post titled, “The Business of B2B Social Media”, you stated that “B2B. . .is faced with a prime opportunity to not only cultivate communities in social networks and other social channels, but also amplify awareness, increase lead generation, reduce sales cycles, and perhaps most importantly, learn and adapt to market dynamics in real-time.” Elaborating on this, how can B2Bs, in general, apply the Conversation Prism to their efforts and their strategies?

Brian Solis: It’s interesting because I get a question similar to this a lot . . . It’s usually asked this way: “Brian we always see examples in B2C, but what’s the real play for B2B? How do B2B’s get something out of social media?” I stop and think, “You know what, I actually understand what you are talking about. Everyone is talking about the same examples over and over again: Virgin America, Starbucks, Dell.” I have this saying, this motto or mantra that is, that I really just encourage people to read the success stories of how people are using social media today, how businesses are increasing sales and attracting customers. At the same time though, you can’t make any assumptions that these successful companies had a strategy plan, had metrics going or anything like that. At the end of the day, every business is unique, the culture is unique, the market is unique, the conditions are unique. The answer for B2B is the same as it is for B2C, and it brings us back to your first question. The Conversation Prism is designed to get you answers, it’s designed to tell you what, when, where, how, why and to what extent. Most people approaching social media right now do not have those answers. Even those who are listening, monitoring and reporting on what they find, they’re still not able to tell you what the top-down strategy is and what the exact goals and predicted outcomes are. Most only know that that they want more fans, more friends, maybe some coupon redemption, maybe some sales or conversions, but really what we need to be looking at is “What is it that you want to know? What is the outcome? Where is this activity taking place? Who is leading that activity? Who are the influencers? Really, what you do to figure this out is you start to reverse engineer. So for business-to-business, I do the same thing that I do for business-to-consumer or the government. I go and research and try and figure out everything I need to know beforehand, and that is the big element that companies are missing in a lot of this. Many are reluctant to study between the lines and do the research. We’ll use a monitoring tool to say, “Ok, there were 4,700 conversations on Twitter this last quarter, 600 blog posts with mentions and the sentiment was 80% negative, 20% positive, and 60% neutral.” That doesn’t tell you what your social network strategy should be, it just tells you what is. The idea is to pull the dashboard off, get under the hood and start to see what people are saying and feel it. What are those negative sentiments all about? Where are they coming from? How is this conversation segmented throughout your organization? Are they for sales, for customer service for lead generation? Is this for marketing, for product development? And then you can really get a lay of the land and start to emphasize what you see, what you read and what you hear, because it’s really that which should inspire what your program should be. So for business-to-business the only thing that changes is the answers to who, what, where, when, why and to what extent? That tells you where you need to focus.

I’ve been hired by B2B companies in some of the most verticalized industries, only to find that there is always some level of online activity that is worth at least paying attention to. It’s funny because the ones that are really gung-ho about socializing don’t want to hear that their activity isn’t warranted or merited on Facebook or Twitter. They’re hoping they can bring a personal touch to their brand, because they are on the same platforms as individuals. Many times though, I have to tell them that they have no business being on Facebook or Twitter right now.

Darcy & Hannah: We find that reaching engineers (our customers) through social media to be very challenging. It seems like many have not adopted the use of popular social networking sites. Can the Conversation Prism be more specifically applied as a road map on how to communicate with engineers?

Brian Solis: It’s true for a lot of B2B companies, and even some B2C companies, it’s just too early. You know they’re going to be there, but why spend the time and resources cultivating a community that isn’t there. Time is finite. Money is finite. You need to focus where attention is focused, and in some cases that is in user groups and forums, and in the Conversation Prism there’s a section for those. There are master search engines in forums and groups that at least show you if anybody is talking about the space or the market. But in all reality, you see a lot of business-to-business companies, and even some on the business-to-consumer side, who are not using social media, are starting to leverage their email and newsletters to promote their presence and to start to attract audiences in order to force them into using specific domains which, in some cases, is working. At the same time it’s like fishing, you don’t necessarily know if you’re in the right spot, or if you’re going to catch anything with the right bait, so sometimes it’s just paying attention to where the early adopters are, and those early adopters are usually in the blogosphere.

Darcy & Hannah: Do you think for things to change, that it’s going to take Generation Y moving into more decision making roles?

Brian Solis: I think so. I think it’s a little bit of many different things, for example, this is not unlike the challenge that the art industry is facing. If you look at the local ballet company in your city, you know they live off of ticket sales and donations. Their whole business infrastructure is around emails, newsletters and events to try get people to donate and attend events, and those who do have generally been an older demographic. The organizations in this industry are freaking out because their target market is getting older, and organizations are saying, “wow, what do we do? We’re losing our source of income.” So, simultaneously they have to create a second augmented strategy to go after the younger individual so that they can start to cultivate their interests in the arts. In this case your hybrid is the blogosphere, because people are being sent links to posts that might be worth their time via email, so you’re still getting eyeballs outside of traditional media into this gray zone that helps people start to figure out what social media is all about. Usually at this level people are connecting through interests, not relationships, and interests would be around whatever industry you’re in. Now the second thing that I’ve learned about what inspires people in this direction is the social object, you have to give them some reason to pay attention, and that social object in many cases is a blog post. Another is video, for instance, a YouTube video is a social object. We did a project with a B2B robotic arm manufacturer whose customers were looking for automation solutions for workflow and work-lines. The company would create these videos to show what the robotic arms were capable of doing in a real life setting, which were just short snippets of things that were remarkable, and they would put them on their YouTube channel. Then, they would optimize the videos for social media with keywords, descriptions and links. More importantly they would take those social objects and reach out to bloggers, not A-list bloggers, but peer engineers that were sharing their thoughts and looking for solutions, and say, “I was reading some of your posts and decided to create this video that we thought addressed XYZ, here you go, feel free to share it if you like.” We would start to see these videos get 70,000 to 80,000 views because bloggers were taking the embed code of the videos and writing a post around it. That got this particular industry and other industries that I’ve done the exact same thing with, moving in the direction of engaging online, and some are still not on things like Twitter, but it got the conversation started.

Darcy & Hannah: On a slightly different note, where do you see social/new media in the future, say five years down the road?

Brian Solis: I realize that I don’t know that I have an answer to this generally or conceptually, and I really try to stop thinking about it that way. I’ll tell you where I am thinking about it though. Five years from now, the way people are connected to one another will change, today it’s about relationships. How you social network today is nothing like how you network in real life. In fact, you as an individual maintain maybe six to ten life groups; there’s your professional group, your family, your tennis club, your church, your best friends, but you don’t network the same way online. In fact, the way you network online today is exactly what we have accused media properties of doing wrong for so many years; broadcasting one to many, to one audience, and that’s exactly how we’re using social networks now. Five years from now, we’ll be far more sophisticated in what we share, where we share it and why we share it. Understanding at some level that this contributes to a digital persona that we will define online intentionally, it’s not what we’re doing today, but a few years from now it will be intentional, and that intentional persona that we create is going to affect us in the real world too. It’s going to have an impact on the way we see ourselves and act. Now on the business side, businesses are also going to mature as they understand the idea of how influence plays a part in information consumption and sharing, and they’re going to, as individuals are, be much more cognoscente about their role in all of this. They have to understand this in order to earn a position of authority, rather than trying to woe people all the time. It’s not scalable that way. You’ve got to make people want to come to you. Those two concepts working together will create a more enriched and complicated experience, but one where we are in control of the findings. That’s what the end goals look like, but I don’t know what that visually looks like five years from now.

Darcy & Hannah: What do you believe will happen to the skeptics of social media who are holding on to the idea that it is a useless trend that will eventually go away?

Brian Solis: The market for skepticism is finite, and one of the reasons I talk about Digital Darwinism quite a bit is in this exact example. The skeptic will become extinct before they ever realize that they were wrong.

Quotes & Summaries

We’d like to thank Solis, for lending us his time and brilliant professional insights. Looking back through the contents of this interview, we’d like to highlight some key takeaways:

• The Conversation  Prism is a map designed to get you answers by pointing you in the right direction to help you find the what, when, where, how, why and to what extent, but you have to jump on the research road
• “The answer for B2B is the same as it is for B2C. . .”
• “I go and research and try and figure out everything I need to know beforehand, and that is the big element that companies are missing in a lot of this. Many are reluctant to study between the lines and do the research.”
• You can’t just look at the quantitative aspects that come out of your social media efforts, you need to dig deeper and figure out, “What is it that you want to know? What is the outcome? Where is this activity taking place? Who is leading that activity? Who are the influencers? Really, what you do to figure this out is you start to reverse engineer.”
• “You need to focus where attention is focused”
• “You need to figure out who the influencers and early adopters are”
• “The skeptic will become extinct before they ever realize that they were wrong.”

Have you used Brian’s Conversation Prism in a B2B setting? Share with us!

Are you a B2B employee who hates all those B2C ads on Facebook? Or do you just dislike Facebook Ads in general?

If your answer to either of these questions is, “yes”, we’re here to tell you that you can make some of those annoying Facebook Ads magically disappear. If you answer is “no”, please keep reading because you will learn something that you probably didn’t know about Facebook Ads and how they target you personally.

Some of you may have noticed in Hannah’s bio, in the right hand margin, that she confesses to spending up to an hour clicking on Facebook Ads on her profile to figure out why they are targeting her, and then she enters keywords into her profile in an attempt to capture ads that she’s genuinely attracted to.

We’re here today to teach you how to do this.

Many people hate Facebook Ads. Some have even gone to such lengths to create groups and fan pages to express their feelings.  An “I hate Facebook Ads” search on Facebook brought up pages upon pages of groups to join.

Now let’s all just fess up and admit that no one really like ads. Ok, cool. Now that we all have that off our shoulders, ask yourself, “why is this?” For Hannah, it was because she found most all Facebook Ads to be completely irrelevant to her as an individual.

Hannah has both a professional and personal Facebook account. She has not personalized her professional account as much, so it has some perfect examples of ads that are simply irrelevant. Check out what Hannah has to say about these ads:

(Clockwise starting top left)

Ad #1: First, I’m 22 years old and fresh out of college, and am therefore not in the market to buy a house. Second, I don’t live in Irvine.

Ad #2: Diapers? Infant formula? Last time I checked, I don’t have a baby.

Ad #3: Some of you may disagree with this one, but I already have enough problems controlling my sweet intake by just opening my fridge, please don’t tempt me online.

Ad #4: ……..I’ll pass.

Now, before we show you ads from Hannah’s personal Facebook account, allow us teach you how to get ads with content that you might actually be interested in.

1. Go to your Facebook profile
2. Click on the “Info” section of your profile
3. Scroll down until you reach your “Activities and Interests” and click “Edit”
4. Go down to “Interests”
5. Start typing in any interest you have, and we mean ANY: Running, Electronics, Gadgets, Engineering, Microchips, My Children, Traveling, American Airlines, Chinese Food, etc.
6. From the drop-down menu that appears, select an interest  (the first one is usually the best)
7. Repeat until every single one of your interests has been entered
8. Click “Save Changes”

So what did all that just get you? When a company creates a Facebook Ad, they enter a set of interests and keywords that they think their target audience will have. Now that you have entered your own set of interests, Facebook will display ads that are more aligned with your interests. In a couple of days, you will start noticing ads related to the interests you just added.

Hannah’s interest list on Facebook use to be small. She had “Tap Dancing”, “The Beach” and a couple of other things.  But once she learned how Facebook ads work, she started entering in interests that may seem odd to some, such as “Sweatshirts”, “Shoes”, “Purses”, etc., but these are things that Hannah is actually interested in buying. She enjoys the ads that tell her about a new clothing boutique or that advertise a 20% off coupon for a trendy purse.

Let‘s use Hannah’s personal Facebook page to demonstrate this:

Of course you will still get some ads that don’t interest you, but you can do something to even further minimize the amount of these ads.

You’ll notice in the corner of each Facebook Ad, a little “X”. When you click the “X”, this comes up:

It’s probably best to choose “Uninteresting” or  “Other”. Once you make your selection, you’ll see this:

Did you read that last sentence? You can teach Facebook what you like and what you don’t like.

Pretty cool eh?

Are advertisers going to be mad at us us for teaching you the secrets to Facebook Ads? Absolutely not. In fact they should be thanking us, because if more people expand their interests section on their Facebook, advertisers will be able to target more people and receive more clicks. And what does that get you? Perhaps 20% off that little (or big) something that you’ve been wanting

We have come to the final post featuring our interview with Professor Buford Barr. As past students of Professor Barr, we both remember the lecture that he gave us on creating a personal brand. This lecture may seem irrelevant to some, but it has turned out to be one of the most valuable things we learned in college. Professor Barr is very passionate about this topic and did not disappoint us in this section of the interview.

Darcy & Hannah: One of the things that we really appreciated you teaching us was the importance of creating a personal brand. How would you advice an individual working in a B2B (specifically with engineers) on how to form their personal brand?

Professor Barr: When I started my career, I joined, what at the time, was probably the finest engineering company ever, General Electric. Not only did GE have a strong engineering tradition, but they also conducted their own research and development. Everybody in sales and most people in marketing were engineers, so I very quickly had to learn how to communicate credibly with engineers and I had to learn how to take technical information and turn it into advertising, public relations and brochures. You’ll hear companies today say, “You need to take the technological information and translate it down to your target audience,” but this was not the case for me. My target audience was brilliant engineers! They didn’t need anything toned down. They needed the right information that they could see would meet their needs and their wants. So my challenge was, “How do I understand what that is?” I learned to communicate with engineers. I had a little technique that worked quite well for me which was that everywhere I worked, I would go find an engineer that could speak English (something besides engineering), and I befriended them. I would take them out to lunch, I would take them out to drinks, whatever it would take, and they were my source. I could go to them and say, “Joe, what are the primary benefits of this device? Talk to me about this. Why would somebody want this product?” and they would tell me, and then I would be able to talk about it intelligently. Then I took some engineering type courses and tried to learn more about it. If you can’t speak engineering, you are not credible. You will not be respected if you are not credible and do not understand, and therefore will not have a strong personal brand. I think going into high-tech scares a lot of students off because you do need to learn a little bit of something about technology so that you can have some kind of value added.

Everything about positioning and branding a company also applies to an individual. When people hear, “Darcy” or “Hannah”, what comes to mind? Is that what you want to come to mind? What can you do about it? If you don’t brand yourself, the market will. You have to position yourself, and you have to build your own personal brand. You do it by how you look, how you act, how you interact with people. That’s why personal branding is so important. They have to know who you are, and it has to mean something. It’s not just awareness. Awareness just gets you into the game. One of the failures of the dot-com era was that everybody thought that name awareness was all that you needed, but you have to have an immediate perception to go along with that. When you hear a name like, Nike or Toyota, what’s the word that pops in your mind? How pervasive is that word? Is it the right word? “Unreliable” is probably not a word you would be looking for. In building a personal brand, what are the properties that go into the one word that you want people to think when they hear your name, and those are the characteristics that you adopt. Remember that you’ve got hard skills, but I was reading the other day that soft skills are really what people want today, and it’s what differentiates you from everyone else. Your personal brand needs to be managed, you can’t just let it lie along on the ground as you go. The bottom line is that personal branding is exactly the same as corporate branding. It’s the same effect, it’s the same strategy, same process, same everything. You need to sit down and figure out your personal brand strategy and write it down. You need to go through the same exercise of positioning yourself as you would for your corporation. Then you have to deliver on that brand promise.

This post concludes our three part interview with Professor Barr. He has really helped both of us to form our personal brands, and if you have not given your own personal brand consideration, we hope that this post will inspire you to start now!

For those who have worked on creating your personal brand, what has been your strategy and what efforts have you made?

With so much emphasis put on B2C in universities, are students prepared to work in a B2B? As far as Santa Clara University students, Professor Barr says, “Yes”. Read his take on what a graduating student needs to know to succeed in any business environment, especially a B2B.

Darcy & Hannah: How does SCU prepare its students to be successful in a B2B? What are the main things you hope students walk away with upon graduation?

Professor Barr: When you focus on just B2B the answer changes drastically because Santa Clara, and most universities and most academia, are very strong in B2C. SCU students are prepared for any career be it B2B, B2C or innovation etc. We teach the competencies of how to do the job and how to think, as well as how to look at everything they are doing through compassionate eyes and with a conscience of how it’s going to affect the world. We’ve got to get integrity and common good back into our world. We have lost this, and I believe competence, compassion and conscience is what we teach our students to practice wherever they may go. Over 50 percent of our business faculty is non-tenured track, and many have had strong experience in B2B companies, so students get a good look at B2B across the board. We call ourselves the Jesuit University in Silicon Valley. When I think Silicon Valley, I think business to business, because that’s what’s here, that’s where most of our students are going to get their jobs. The competence that students leave here with can be applied to any business, including B2B.

Darcy & Hannah: As the Professor of the Leavey School of Business’ B2B Marketing course, what do you hope your students learn from your class that will help them in a B2B environment?

Professor Barr: I want them to understand the vast difference between the relationship with a B2B customer versus the transactional relationship of a B2C customer. I want them to understand that they are going to have to learn an awful lot more about their customer’s company: their technology, their value added. It’s much more than just selling an item. The buying process is more formal, it’s more complex, there are a lot more people involved, and so you have to learn to work with a company over an extended period of time. You have to learn to help your customers do their jobs, and that’s what they are going to be looking for. Today, it’s no longer them waiting for us to come in and take them to lunch, it’s the fact that we want to be their source. John Chambers has done this very well with Cisco, he talks about the industry. Jonathan Schwartz, Sun’s former CEO did that very well with one of the first really successful corporate blogs. He talked about the industry not just their products. So if someone wanted to know what was happening across the board they would go to that site. Students must understand B2B, how it is different and how it’s going to influence not only your message, but also the delivery of that message if they are going to succeed.

Please tune in next week to discover Professor Barr’s opinion on how to develop your personal brand, especially when you work with engineers.

How did your university prepare you to be successful in a B2B? What was most valuable to you? Is there anything you wished you had learned that you’d like to pass on to new graduates? Please share with us!

We both had the privilege of taking a course from Professor Buford Barr during our time as students at Santa Clara University. In our opinion, Professor Barr is by far one of the best professors at SCU. His professional experiences and teaching methods are exceptional. Perhaps what leads to this is that he truly loves his students. The level of care he holds for each and every one of his students, past, present and future, is very evident.  As a professor, mentor, and friend, Professor Barr played a huge role in our success as students at SCU and now in our careers at Synopsys. We knew an interview with Professor Barr would give an excellent insight to communicating with engineers from both a professional and academic standpoint.

H. Buford Barr is a Lecturer in Marketing for the Leavey School of Business as well as a Lecturer in Communication for the College of Arts & Sciences at Santa Clara University. Professor Barr currently teaches undergraduate and MBA courses in marketing, marketing communications, and public relations at Santa Clara University where he has been associated since 1989. In 2008 he received the Extraordinary Achievement in Teaching and Service Award from the Leavey School of Business. This was Professor Barr’s second recognition in Extraordinary Achievement as he received the award in 2006. He was recognized by the students of SCU’s Accelerated Co-operative Education Program (ACE) with its ACE 2006 Outstanding Faculty Award and named faculty advisor in ’08. Barr’s professional career includes senior marketing positions at Actel Company, Sunnyvale, CA; Signetics (now NXP Semiconductors), a division of N.V. Philips; McCann-Erickson Advertising/Dallas where he established the office and was responsible for the worldwide marketing communications for Texas Instruments; and prior to that he spent fifteen years with the General Electric Company in New York and Connecticut. He was graduated from The University of Texas at Austin with a BBA in Marketing and completed graduate studies in Communication.

(Our interview with Professor Barr consisted of three topics, which we will feature in a three-part-post over the next three weeks)

Darcy & Hannah: As an individual who worked in corporate marketing and communications for over 30 years, how have things changed and how are they still changing in your perspective? More specifically, what are some things that college graduates today, who only know the technology era, may not realize about how corporate communications was carried out in the past?

Professor Barr: Long before President Obama’s campaign, change has been a major part of this country and our business life. It’s happening faster, and more significantly than ever before, especially in communication technology.  The key understandings in corporate communications and marketing (what we are trying to do and what we are trying to achieve) has not changed at all. How we execute it, and the tools and techniques we have are changing by the hour! They have changed significantly since the mid-1990s, and the growth of the internet, Web 2.0 and social media. The role that the internet has played has put the power and control in the hands of the consumer.

When I was running the McCann-Erickson office in Dallas, working with Texas Instruments, we controlled all of the information about Texas Instruments. We allowed information to go out when we wanted it to, we sent it to certain people when we wanted to, through advertising, through press releases, through direct mail, through brochures, through tradeshows. We controlled the information. Today, the consumer, the engineer, controls all information and all access. They control when they look at it, where they look at it, how long they look at it and who they value the most. So now, our job has moved from really almost trying to manipulate a target audience to now providing meaningful, interesting, relevant, up to date, transparent, accurate content that is valuable to our target audience.

Darcy & Hannah: Do you see a lot of pros and cons to the changes?

Professor Barr: It’s reality! I think there are going to be a large number of unforeseen consequences coming out of the internet, Web 2.0 and social media, I really do. How are we using these tools? I think as far as using the internet today, we are using it for personal entertainment most of the time. Facebook has people spending 700 billion minutes a month on their site (Source: http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics). Now I say to myself, “What if all that time was used for something productive, what if that time was used to save our cities, our states, our nations, our world’s problems?” The number of hits some kid gets falling down the stairs on YouTube is sad. I believe the internet and social media have so much potential, but I don’t think the internet and how it’s being used is leading us to more innovation.  I think its leading us to having fun with information we already know, rather than generating new information. Right now does it matter? Maybe not, but I think long term it will.

The big thing is that the consumer rules. So you have to determine how they prefer to get their information, what information they want, how to make it available to them and how to develop yourself into the source people will go to for that information. That’s the trick. We used to control that by running ten ads instead of five ads and that’s the way we measured our media, who was the biggest advertiser, and who created the best read ads. Today, in one of my classes, one out of 45 students knew the value of Facebook ($50 billion). Students do not read anything in print, and it’s getting worse and worse. To me, that has been the biggest change, but we are still trying to understand the customer, we’re trying to deliver value that is profitable for the company and is hopefully done in an ethical and socially responsible way.

Please tune in next week to see what Professor Barr thinks college graduates must know to be successful in a B2B!

What do you think about the changes that have occurred in marketing and communications? We’d love to hear from you!

B2C companies have it easy when it comes to spreading the joy of the season and wishing their customers Happy Holidays this time of year. Many are very creative!

As seen on their facebook page, iTunes offered a few free downloads of holiday classics.

Verizon Wireless offered Facebook and Twitter followers a daily “Seasonal Surprise”, giving each fan who “unwrapped their gift” with a Tweet or Facebook share, some kind of online deal.

Walmart featured a “Holiday Table” tab on their Facebook page where they shared recipes for affordable holidays meals.

But what about B2B and G2G companies? Fans of B2Bs and G2Gs tend to be employees of companies who already use and are familiar with our products. For us, holiday giveaways of products are not only unrealistic but pointless.

Can you imagine landing on the Synopsys Facebook page during the holidays and seeing this:

“Hello Synopsys Facebook fan (whose company probably already pays to use our software), we are giving one Synopsys product away each day during the month of December. Perfect for all of your personal spare-time-microchip-designing needs. Just share this post and you’ll be entered to win!”

Ok, so that was over exaggerated, but you get the idea. B2B and G2G companies simply can’t do the same things as B2C companies during the holidays.

We spent some time exploring  what various B2B companies did to get into the 2010 holiday spirit.  Compared to the vast expansion of B2C examples, B2Bs are far and in between. Although creating holiday interaction is slowly emerging in the B2B world, it appears to be something that will take slow experimentation. We could probably count the examples we found on one hand and here are four:

Adobe asked its followers on Facebook what inspires them this holiday season. For every shared inspiration, Adobe donated $1 to the Mercy Corps, showing a great way to interact with your current community and show the importance of giving back during this time of year.

BASF, the world’s leading chemical company, thanked their Facebook fans and Twitter followers for following them and wished everyone happy holidays. Cisco had a similar strategy but took it a step further by attaching a link on their post to one of their blogs with highlights from 2010 and a video rap with various employees saying happy holidays and happy new year.

HubSpot, is one of our favorite examples.  Being  a very progressive company, especially when it comes to social media, they created a “Happy Holidays Video Card from Hubspot!“,  which they posted on their blog and linked to their Facebook and Twitter pages.

As you can see, B2Bs using the holidays as an opportunity to build community and interact with customers  is emerging, and will have a definite bearing on our future for us as a G2G.  What will G2G look like around the holidays? Here is what we think is coming:

Holidays are a special time to make an extra effort to humanize your company, as well as thank those that have aided in your success. A lot of people make the mistake of forgetting that a B2B/G2G company is not just a robot that automatically produces products and services, but there are actually real people behind it. This is your chance to show your followers that you…

• Have a warm heart: Post examples of what your company has done to give back to the community.
• Can have fun: Videos are a great way to express the “personality” of the company and build a stronger relationship with customers.
• Are thinking of them during the Holidays: If you have an email list, send a holiday themed email.
• Are real people: Take a “family picture” of your team and send to clients in holiday card and/or upload it to Facebook and Twitter.

Of course, a lot of these ideas cannot be strictly reserved for the holiday season, but it’s a good time to do a little more than usual.

Are there any examples of what B2B or G2G companies did during the holidays that really impressed you? We would love to hear your feedback!

From both of us, we hope that you had a wonderful 2010 and we wish you a very happy New Year!

This post is on the shorter side, but we wish to take the time to explain to you what we mean by the term “G2G”.

Synopsys users/customers are engineers who we endearingly refer to as, “geeks”. At Synopsys, we realized that referring to our company as a B2B did not properly define how we listen to and communicate with our customers. Here, it’s not just B2B, it is much more complicated than that. To try to describe how B2B communication works at our company, Synopsys gave birth to the term and concept of “G2G”.

“G2G” stands for geek-to-geek. “What does that even mean?” you ask.  In the electronic design automation industry, our target market is not the normal consumer. We have the interesting task of communicating with engineers, who by nature dislike most language geared towards persuading you to buy a product or that is infused with typical marketing jargon. Our solution to this problem is delivering what ‘geeks’ want: straight forward  information from someone they trust, a fellow geek. This information will help them do what they love: design amazing microchips to bring us the coolest new gadgets.

G2G is new and still evolving. Through this blog, you will see how we and others work through the challenges and successes of communicating with engineers, and how we further develop the concept.

So you’re probably wondering what is wrong with your browser, because not only is Rick’s face gone, but it has been replaced by those of two young women.  Well, we are happy to inform you that you are still at The Listening Post where you can get insights into the G2G industry. Yet a new perspective is upon you.  Please allow us to introduce ourselves: Darcy Pierce and Hannah Watanabe. We are both recent Santa Clara University marketing graduates and new additions to the Synopsys team.  Having been born and raised in the Silicon Valley and grown up in the technology era, for us social media has forever been the norm.  It is our desire to take this unique perspective, educational background, and creative spark to benefit our customers and partners who enjoy reading The Listening Post.

Hannah Watanabe & Darcy Pierce (Photo by Leah Watanabe)

When you get a new job, it is not unusual to walk in on your first day and not know a single one of your co-workers, let alone your teammates.  Perhaps it is destiny, a small world, or just good old networking, but we are not two random gals arbitrarily teamed together to continue the success of The Listening Post when Rick passed us the torch.  On the contrary, we actually met in a social media class while attending Santa Clara University. In this class, we worked with two other team members to create a social media program for a local business. The success of our efforts ignited a passion within us of the power of social media.

Hannah participated in an internship with Synopsys over the summer, and after being offered a full-time position, she was informed that a counterpart to her role was needed. So here we are, living the dream, doing the exact work we always hoped for and collaborating together.

What’s the future of the Listening Post? As the founding father of this blog, Rick Jamison said, “A conversation, of course, is never one-way (that would be a monolog, aka traditional marketing). Whether a conversation includes two or many, listening is half the equation – the part where learning happens as new insights are heard and understood… At Synopsys, listening G2G (geek-to-geek) is an essential part of the mission as we use the Internet to build online communities around shared interests.”  With these wise words as our foundation, we will continue to interview experts in the field as well as offer you insights into the trends and strategies being used today, with a specific focus on G2G (geek-to-geek) communication.

We both look forward to having you read our blog and to receiving your feedback. Which guests and topics would you like to see on the Listening Post? We would love to hear your ideas! Please feel free to send us your suggestions to TheListeningPost@synopsys.com or add a comment below.

Ed Lee is the founder of Lee Public Relations, a firm that has provided executive communications, new company introductions, product rollouts, etc. for a significant number of EDA vendors. Ed took  a “temporary” job at American Microsystems back when that chip company was independent and never left the ASIC/EDA world (and never looked for that college teaching job again!). He founded Lee PR in 1991, after stints at Cadence and VLSI Technology and working with clients that go as far back as Valid Logic Systems.  After all these years, Ed continues to find EDA topics, technology and issues completely fascinating.

Rick: Synopsys recently hosted our second iteration of Conversation Central at DAC. What are your thoughts about how this type of engagement compares with the traditional trade show press room of years past?

Ed: Wow, you want to get me started on this?

OK… well… I think that the Conversation Central model ushers in a new, active, fully-engaged type of media participation at DAC. That’s in stark contrast to the traditional DAC press room presence that we all grew up with and got used to.

Not to use the old press room as a whipping boy… but! That press room served as a sanctuary for the press from the rigors of the conference.  It always was situated away from the conference itself, as if the conference was a little too much to bear. Not to be cynical, but it probably served a legitimate purpose when the press had PR folks constantly hounding them, although you have to wonder why they needed a break from the conference action when no one else did. Of course, now, you wonder how many press are left to use the press room. And judging by the paucity of traditional press material exhibiting companies left at the press room, it appears that the press room’s function as a place to keep the press informed about company activities is headed for oblivion as well.

Granted, traditional press started holding meetings next door starting about 10 or 15 years ago,  but let’s focus just on the closed off press room itself, where the press kits were.

So the press room was, in essence, a place of intentional non-activity.  It didn’t serve a function as part of DAC. It still doesn’t.

Rick: Why do you think introducing Conversation Central into this landscape was significant?

Ed: Conversation Central upended this privileged presence by bringing an active, vibrant program on the role of communications to DAC. What an idea! That communications people might want to talk with one another and EDA’s media/new media people about how best to convey and exchange information. Of course, last year’s focus on how to use social media in the EDA world was a perfect thematic christening for a new type of media gathering place.

And Conversation Central welcomed anyone and everyone who was interested in the program! Put another way, Conversation Central was inclusive, the press room, exclusive, to the point of being exclusionary. Conversation Central is located right in the middle of the exhibit floor. It wants to be part of the DAC action and doesn’t give any sanctuary space.  There’s something, a lot, happening at Conversation Central… as an intrinsic part of DAC.

I’m still amazed at last year’s press room rules that refused press badges to bloggers. As we all saw with the creation of Conversation Central, turns out the bloggers didn’t need the press room.  Still don’t. Although the press room apparently did welcome bloggers this year and had an on-the-floor bloggers space. Funny, I never saw a single blogger in it.

Seems to me that the best thing the press room could do is to morph into a Conversation Central- like presence, with an active program on the techniques, protocols, likes and dislikes of members of the new media and PR types. I’d sure like to hear other opinions, but in my mind, the press room, as we’ve known it, is dead.

Rick: From a PR perspective, what effect is social media having on how companies communicate with their customers and other core constituencies?

Ed: A lot of curiosity, a little bit of fear, an acknowledgement that they have to use it to reach out to customers as well as new media such as bloggers. Clients want to know how to use social media to get their stories out to the new media. But it’s a little like any of us when learning a new thing. Sometimes, I get the feeling that they worry about employing social media in some wrong way and that they’ll damage themselves.  So they’re a little timid.  

I think there’s also an under-estimation about the amount of time and effort it takes to get social media to work for them.  That it’s active and ongoing… that it’s NOT a one time delivery of the message, as before, with traditional press.  That blog or article comments require responses and constant monitoring.

Rick: Yep, I agree. Social media is way more about building relationships, networks and communities than just another way to distribute marketing messages.

Thanks, Ed, for your perspective on all the above.  Thoughts and opinions — always welcome!

Day One of Synopsys’ Conversation Central at DAC was packed with so many interesting guests and compelling perspectives that I’m glad somebody had the foresight to record and post it all on the Web.

Take The New Publishing Paradigm for example.  John Reardon (seated to my right in the photo below), John Donovan (right side of the photo) and I covered so much territory in our half hour together that I missed some of the nuances the first time around — and I was sitting right there in the middle asking the questions.

Here’s the link to that session www.blogtalkradio.com/synopsys/2010/06/14/the-new-publishing-paradigm-2

(Photo by Aaron Foellmi)

All nine of today’s sessions are now available online at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/synopsys

Many thanks to the excellent guests (Peggy Aycinena, Brian Bailey, Ron Wilson, John Donovan, John Reardon, Mike Santarini, Ed Sperling, John Blyler, and Kevin Morris), inspiring hosts (Yvette Huygen, Ron Ploof, Harry Gries, Lori Kate Smith, and Sheryl Gulizia) and awesome Synopsys team (Rich Goldman, Karen Bartleson, Roy Stahl, and Richard Paw to name but a few) who made it all possible.

But wait, there’s more! For details about the remaining sessions this week at #47DAC, visit the Conversation Central website.