WHY ISN’T MIDDLE

EAST B2B COMPANIES

SOCIAL MEDIA

STRATEGY FIRING? ? ??

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Middle East – land of social wells…

Source: Go-gulf.com

In the Middle East, • 65% of online users are men & 35% are women • 36% of the online users are aged between 18 and 24 • 94% of Social Media Users are on Facebook Highest Social Media Penetration 2014: • UAE has penetration rate of 44% for Facebook • UAE has penetration rate of 45% for LinkedIn • UAE has penetration rate of 33% for Twitter

In 2012, LinkedIn grew 123% in the Middle East vs. 43% Worldwide. (Source: Arabnet.me)

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• Most users spend 30% of their time on social networks, 20% for services, 11% for entertainment and content, 9% spent readings news.

• 380 Million internet users, multiple tongues. 72 Million speak Arabic,42 million speak Persian and 46% speak Turkish. 57% of users are bilingual and 21% trilingual.

• Culturally” people centric business

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Social media exploration & extraction challenges

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Only 19% of business have online presence, huge opportunity for B2B social media marketing

51% of the companies using social media have no “strategy”

80% of the companies fear about inadvertent impact on “reputation”

In 2014, companies have increased social media spend by 40%

Major areas of spend email marketing (30%), social media marketing (linkedin, FB, Twitter ..27%), SMS marketing (11%), Apps and smartphone applications (10%).

Localization of content is the biggest challenge

Social media monetization absent in 87% companies

74% unsure of Managing Feedback

Sources: Bayt.com, Linkedin.com, Comscore,

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Fears and Phobia’s of engaging Social media

“Getting the tone of message right major challenge on content creation” “Keeping up-to-date with tools and technologies” “My biggest concern with participating in social media is that we’ll somehow provoke a crisis.” Marketing Manager, (B2C Company) “Connecting and creating relationships with customers is nice, but how does that translate to sales or customer relationship?” CEO, (Manufacturing company)

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Some smarter Brands that have mastered Social media

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What underlies their success: 6 principles

1. Integrated marketing and sales strategy with both offline and online contributing to reach, richness and engagement with customers

2. Proactive strategy of creating content, consumption analysis and improved customer service, serve with insights…..

3. Clear ownership to offline and online teams and outcome driven measurement

4. Emphasis is on listening, engaging, enticing and extending relationship

5. CRM integrated with social media

6. Social media aligned to sales strategy

Source: www.futurexploration.net

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B & M Social Media Strategy

Browne & Mohan suggests BTPCE framework described below go about designing their content, what communities to target, how to coordinate the content and guide the discussion and so on.

Branding Purpose

Target Customers

Platforms

Content Strategy Design

Employee User Engagement

Online User Behavior

Richness , Directed Visitor

Experience, Repeater

Enshrinement, community insider

Lock-in, Champion

Reach, Undirected Visitor

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B2B Social Media Process Follow

Online purpose: Brand as complement, or replica or experience. Shared understanding of social media amongst stake holders: employees, marketing, sales, etc Social media Expectations (Brand/revenue growth)

Target customer, geographies, communities of interest, communities of consumption Own or join the communities of interest Platform selection offerings: Blogs, tweets, Video’s and presentations etc.

Content Themes: Product, competition, industry evolution, customer pain areas, corporate positioning of best practices Content type: informative, referential, comparative and endorsement Content Map User & Employee engagement

People: followers, fans, influencers , leads, time of engagement RSS feeds, email registrations or event attendance, likes, dislikes, comments, trackbacks, forwards, completed profiles, brand mentions, sentiments. Review & Act

Vision Target Audience

& Platform Selection

Content & Engagement

Models

Metrics, Review & Act

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Visioning

Visioning fundamentally involves aligning all the stakeholders in an organization to the purpose of social media presence and objectively defining the purpose of social media presence. Clarity of what the social media is expected to be ensures the purpose, positioning and alignments are attained without much confusions amongst the actors involved.

An explicit understanding of the purpose of presence in social media, whether it is for branding or revenue growth would help define the focus and implementation of right activities.

Engagement Values at Company Level

Transparency Authentic content and conversations

Protection Respecting consumer privacy

Respect Respect for consumer views, opinions & suggestions

Responsibility Sense of ownership for the conversations, content and participations

Utilization Adopt the best practices in social media

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Target Audience & Platform Selection

In the second stage, target audience and platform selection decisions including who the target customers are, what geographies to target, what would be the communities of interest

Social Media Platforms

Blogs Company Information, insider & 3rd party branding, Employee Engagement & Interaction

Facebook No of users, youth connect, user experience sharing, product evaluation, user feedback, communities of interest, managed 3rd party promos, drive traffic, User engagement for new product, promotions, contests

Twitter Microblogging, status updates, celebrity branding, market announcements, Announcements, updates, senior management interviews/opinions, community of practice, CEO branding

Responsibility Hiring, professional networking, branding, information sharing

YouTube visual promotions, corporate video, expertise, customer experience

Flickr/Instagram Sharing of Photos, Albums, reinforcing celebration.

Google+ Personal Networking, drive traffic, youth connect, user experience sharing

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Content and Engagement Models

Social media content strategy design is a very innate aspect to drive any social media engine. The content connects and glues the members in a community. The content creation can be user generated content (UGC) or company generated content.

We find four content types Informative, Comparative, Referential and Endorsement most effective for b2b markets.

Engagement Values at Company Level

Informative Have released to new virtual personal assistant (VPA) that offers takes all the pain away from delegation and multitasking

Comparative While EMC, IBM and other vendors may be offering “price advantages only:, KREATIO stands out for value for money, high modularity, ease of deployment

Referential WCM roll out at IDG proves…

Endorse We are happy to share the business advantages we got from deploying effipay

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Metrics, Review & Act

Continuous evaluation of social branding exercise is needed so as have timely implementation of the needed change. while several measures could be used to measure the effectiveness of social media, we find some of the measures such as return on participation, return on involvement, return on attention, return on trust and return on conversation are rather cumbersome to capture and or at best some estimates.

Measure Periodically

Followers, Fans, Influencers Weekly, Monthly, quarter-wise

Sales Leads Monthly, quarter-wise

Site Engagement Monthly, quarter-wise

RSS Feeds Weekly, Monthly, quarter-wise

Email registration Event related

Likes & Shares Weekly, Monthly, quarter-wise

Brand Mentions / Hashtags Weekly, Monthly, quarter-wise

Sentiments (negative/positive) Weekly, Monthly, quarter-wise

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What must Middle East companies do

Define the very objective of social media engagement.

The objective can be to influence the prospects for a product purchase, increase the brand awareness or creating buzz. The content should always be brand values centric.

Identify the preferred content forms by target audience.

Content forms can be video, white papers, blogs and podcasts. For a sales centric engagement the preferred content form is video due to the marketing strength of viral video and prominent social networks. For an idea centric engagement the preferred form is company blogs and white papers available onsite.

Customize content to community & social media platforms.

It is very essential to understand user characteristics, their preferences and ensure the content is appropriate to that platform. If targeting a matured user identify the top industry issues, top bloggers, the thought leaders and the platforms used by them and structure the content right.

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Use insource/outsource resources.

Using both internal and external resources would benefit the company to portray neutrality and self-interest in tandem. Moreover, the content generation is de-risked as not just the quality of original content matters, but also the quantity.

Engagement cycle should be active and involve multiple levels in the organization & its ecosystem.

Social media engagement is a continuous process Involve many people from your organization and partners to benefit from scale. However, clearly define and control the content and its distribution. Referential and endorsements from external sources matters online.

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What must Middle East companies do

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Thank You

Browne & Mohan Board & CEO Advisors, Management Consultants

157/A, 2nd Floor, 10th 'A' Main, Jayanagar 1st Block

Bangalore-560 011 Ph: +91-80-26565164/40951170

www.browneandmohan.com

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