Brave New Media World

Modified from portrait of Christopher Columbus by Ridolfo Ghirlandaio.

When I first took on the role of Community Manager and Social Media Strategist at National Instruments, I felt like an electronic Christopher Columbus, navigating and exploring the Brave New Media World.   Then, I quickly began my own revolutionary war — preaching the ways of new media.  I identified social media foot soldiers in places like advertising, events, corporate communications, and design.  Their job was to influtrate the current governing body and find ways to utlizile the wonderful user-generated content that exists in places like blogs, forums and online communities in the more traditional forms of marketing communication.  Luckily, we had the support of corporate leadership (just another reason I love working for NI!).  

Our methodology has paid off.  Recently, Forrester Analyst Josh Bernoff made the folowing statement in a Groundswell blog post:

 ”National Instruments makes technical content from its customer community central in its marketing activity -  this is a model other B2B sellers should follow.” 

Thanks, Josh!  

Part of this recommendation stems from Forrester research that shows B2B buyers have very high social participation for both work and business — which just makes sense.  When I’m evaluating a new product for work, like a social media monitoring platform, I’m highly likely to turn to my network on Twitter, read relevant blog posts and create reviews based on my trail version.  

While this all “sounds great,” I’m sure many of you are wondering what does that actually mean.  Here are some specifics: 

National Instruments encourages users to participate in discussion forums, exchange example code, contribute technical tutorial and videos, and even blog right on our domain.  This helps ensure the success of our users.  Since no one idustry represents more than 10 percent of our revenue, it is key for NI to connect like-minded customers and get information from subject-matter experts.  Additioanlly, it is good for Web traffic.  Currently, 40 percent of all visitors come into user-generated and technical content on the site.  

Managing this content and the users is the “communiy manager” part of my job, while the social media strategist side works with the  ”foot soldiers” to utilize this great UGC throughout marketing.  For example, in our award wining online and print newsletters,  NI News and Instrumentation Newsletter, we have dedicated sections in each issue that highlight user-generated content as well as innovative community members.  This helps encourage repeat participation, adds third-party credibility to our story, and helps domain experts looking for specifics on a given topic. 

Someone recently asked me — should social media be integrated into marketing or be its own department?  And I think right now it’s a bit of both.  Just because your on Facebook, doesn’t mean you are Facebook strategist; however, if your social media program does not have a clear handshake with the rest of marketing it will not be successful.  Ashley Brown, at Brilliant Magazine, got me thinking that pretty soon New Media Managers will just become Media Managers.  Unless, we all jump on the semantic Web bandwagon.  :) 

For B2B companies, considering testing out “new media,” don’t be afraid.  If you have clear goals and integration with the rest of your marketing efforts, it will be a great success.  

 

 

Purpose Driven Marketing

The most basic questions that everyone faces in life are “why am I here?” and “what is my purpose?,” according to Rick Warren’s book A Purpose Driven Life.  With the dawn of the new year, I’ve been asking the same questions about my role at National Instruments as well as its entire community marketing program.  When I began this professional soul search, I revisited Jim Collins and Jerry I. Porras’ book Built to Last.  This staple in the business world clearly outlines why some coporations struggle to last or fade away in a short period of time, while others in the same market, thrive.  One of the rules discussed is “Preserve Your ‘Core Ideology”….or preserve your purpose.

According to an article in AdWeek, GSD&M Co-Founder Roy Spence said, “I sensed that everyone was selling the same thing. We started believing that the values of the organization would drive the business beyond the need for good product, good pricing, good people. It was powerful.”  This was the birth of the ad agency’s Purpose Insitute.

A few months ago, I got to hear more about GSDM’s purpose at SWOMFest (see my notes hosted on Twine here) from Haley Rushing, founder of the institute.  She explained that her team of social scientists “dig deep into a company’s historical psyche to understand then define its purpose. The benefit of that exam work: companies with a well-defined purpose tend to have stronger levels of word of mouth and customer evangelism.”  Haley nailed it.  I wanted to ensure that I use the NI purpose to increase customer evangelism.

So, I took a step up and looked at National Instruments as a whole.  I’m lucky enough to work at a place where the strong leadership drives the entire organization with this purpose:

I’m not saying that NI is a utopia where nobody has a bad day, but it is a place that even when I come home from the office exhausted or upset that a meeting didn’t go “my way,” I know that the products and services I market enable the amazing community of LabVIEW developers to change the world.

And it’s more than just a tagline – I’ve seen it first hand when kids get excited about engineering while playing with LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT at a First LEGO League competition, and when I met Paul Sullivan at NIWeek and learned about his image processing projects, or even more recently when I read about a customer who built a life-saving spider robot. Yes, you read that correctly!

I’ve also seen that “cult-like cultures,” which are also discussed in the Built to Last book, can inspire, or even more apparent, be fueled by a rabid fan-base.  And I’m not talking about the Facebook Fan, I mean true evangelists.  Daily, the awesome LabVIEW Champions,  are using “innovative NI tools to engineer a better world” and because of their success they are able to evangelize NI products.  This is more valuable than many traditional forms of marketing.

Some social media folks say, “I’ll take a customer quote over a pricey ad any day.”  The approach I take at NI is take that quote and turn it into an ad that people can actually relate to and share.  It’s the best of both worlds.

Does your company’s purpose inspire word-of-mouth marketing?

Screw Virtual Happy Hour!

Thanks to my superstar intern, Blake Sunshine (yes, she has the coolest name EVER), I’ve re-energized my focus on Facebook.

One thing I’ve struggled with is the 1010101 random applications poking me, super poking me, biting me,  or my personal favorite – hitting me in the face with a snowball. It’s bad enough that I toil over the friend requests from the “mean girls” at my no-boys-allowed high school.  I don’t want to get virtually beat-up as well.

Anyway, while I admit that I’m slightly addicted to the “Pieces of Flair” app and have even created my own button for LabVIEW,  I’ve failed to really connect with the majority of the applications that are not associated with my profile on popular music sites like Pandora or Last.FM.

However, last week, Give Real changed that with the launch of its “Real Drinks” Facebook Application.  This delicious goody allows people to buy REAL drinks for their friends online.  Finally, a mix of the virtual world and real one I can toast.

According to the site, “friends buy each other drink credits on the Give Real website or through Facebook. Once accepted, the drink can be redeemed by using any major credit card at over 500,000 bars and restaurants. It’s the first online service to break the boundaries of ‘virtual drinks’ by delivering real drinks and making them available all over the country.”

This beats the hell out of martini icons and clip art bud bottles.

Cheers!!!

How the Golden Girls will Revolutionize Online Business

Today, I attended a brainstorming session on how to best integrate social media with multimedia to provide real business value.  Already, National Instruments has a successful viral video campaign, An Engineering Mind, more than 600 on-demand technical webcasts that generate leads and help our users become more successful with our products, and a very successful virtual user group program for our flagship product LabVIEW.

Today, however, I was trying to think outside the YouTube box.

As I started researching to get my brain warmed up, I stumbled across the Video Gift Guide, “an innovative new site that features great gifts, an opportunity to see them in action, a quick click to purchase and great savings — all in one place.”  So, I decided to test it out and felt this description didn’t even do the service justice.  Check out my step-by-step experience.

Step 1: Watch targeted video that helps with your gift-buying decision.  I selected “Save Big on 80s DVDs.”

Step 2: Choose the product featured in the video that interests you. For me, that was the 1985 classic show, Golden Girls Season 1 (in honor of my BFF Kirby).

Step 3: Click on the product and get an automatic savings like free shipping, rebates, or even cost-saving promo-codes.  In my case, I got a GREAT upsell offer for $4 off season 2 of the show!!

Step 4: Purchase Item.  I was automatically taken to the corresponding page on buy.com for the DVD set, making shopping for my friend as easy as 1, 2, 3, 4. The only draw back was that it automatically took me to the second season since that was the upsell offer.  A minor kink in this awesome application.

Video Gift Guide uses the ConciseClick technology built by Clear-Media to allow users to rollover and click on the objects within the video and takes directly to the product to purchase.  This technology will revolutionize not only video but online business.  I would love to see NI prospects have the ability to directly purchase the NI graphical programming software LabVIEW or the ruggedded CompactRIO controller after watching one of our technical training or application videos.

Watch out YouTube (er, Google)….or purchase the technology ASAP.

Look, Mom…I’m on YouTube!

Check out this video of the 2008 Forrester Groundswell Award winners (including yours truly) sharing their expertise on how to use social technologies to accomplish business goals. Try to ignore my passionate hand gestures. 

Note on Dec 17th: Unfortunately, Forrester took down the YouTube video.  You can find it on Facebook here.