In case you haven’t figured it out yet – this makes SlideShare an ideal platform for B2B companies.  B2B businesses tend to be chock full of presentations. For the most part, these are presentations that can easily be repurposed for marketing purposes.  

And if you think no one’s interested in presentations – think again.  SlideShare received some 60 million visitors per month in 2011, up from just 1.5 million per month in 2007.  It’s not ‘Old Spice Guy’ kind of traffic, but it’s impressive nonetheless.  SlideShare’s also one of the top 150 sites on the web and displays around 3 billion slide views a month. If you thought your last presentation was rushed that’s around 1,140 per second.

The gradual increase of B2B businesses on social media and intrinsically good SEO in presentations (if you’re not using keywords in your slide titles then what are you using?) likely have something to do with the platform’s phenomenal growth.

Fortunately we can also use all of these presentations to guide the development of our own future decks.

An infographic from ColumnFiveMedia (which can be seen in all it’s glory here) does show us some interesting facts about the “optimal presentation.” Among the most interesting:

• Brevity is key: 78% of decks have 30 or fewer slides and the average number of slides per deck is 19.
• Go Visual: There’s an average of 19 graphics per deck (the same as the number of average slides per deck).
• Don’t hidetheball: The average number of words per slide? Only 24.

This does lead to a somewhat interesting discussion regarding deck design.  Upon designing a presentation the author needs to consider – will this presentation be “presented” or will it live on its own, i.e. will it not have the benefit of a speaker to actually deliver the message.

With a live presentation the host would want to be the attention hog, and rightfully so.  The deck is created to more illuminate points being spoken about. Consider any good TED video you’ve seen – the “speech” could live on its own, but the points raised are magnified by the accompanying presentation.

On the other hand, standalone presentations need to deliver their message completely within the presentation itself – likely resulting in more than 24 words per slide.

So then, how do we design a presentation that can both be presented effectively and can live on its own, assuming we want to repurpose the content?

It seems there are two main options:

• Try to strike a middle ground – Draft the presentation with both goals in mind: provide as little enough information as needed to keep it interesting but enough to cover the topic.  A college professor of mine called this the ‘skirt’ rule for essay length to his freshman level philosophy students.
• Do it twice, or more accurately, make two versions.  One that’s presented, and then a second, expanded, version (potentially starting with the short version) that fully expounds on the points brought up in the smaller version.  This one really allows the author to capitalize on their keyword research for full SEO benefit.

What have your experiences been with SlideShare?  Have you changed your own presentation style based on the ability to share the presentations with the world at large?

Photo courtesy flickr user Engin Erdogan.

On Wednesday, October 5^th, my colleagues Siobhan Ford, Katherine Kilpatrick and I were fortunate to attend an event hosted by IBM Global Business Services entitled “Social Business is Driving the Bottom Line.” We were joined by a virtual audience via IBM’s Livestream channel and the Twitter hashtag #IBMbanking. The event included several presentations and a panel discussion revolving around the opportunities and challenges that social media represents for financial services companies. Here are some of the highlights that we took away from the morning’s informative discussions:

1. Rehearse your disasters

Leslie Klein from Citi’s Global Transaction Services offered up a number of useful insights from her firm’s experiences with social media, but one piece of advice that struck me was her suggestion to always plan an exit strategy. In financial services firms, social media activities are largely still experiments – in fact, she cited a study by Oxford Economics which found that only 17% of financial services executives are currently planning to make a significant investment in social media. As companies continue to take a test-and-learn approach, some will not be successful – and nothing screams “#FAIL” like an abandoned blog displaying a months-old post as its most recent update. Be optimistic and plan for growth, but also prepare for a graceful exit (just in case).

2. Video, video, video!

One of the most persistent themes of the morning’s discussion was that audiences crave video content – yes, even in B2B. In fact, Klein remarked that a video posted on YouTube by one of Citi’s Global Transaction Services local professionals following political turmoil in Egypt earlier this year surpassed their consumer-focused content in terms of viewership. IBM’s Boxley Llewellyn also emphasized the opportunity that video creates for financial institutions to “put a face on banking” (see more of his insights in this article for Bank Systems & Technology).

3. Leverage the wisdom of the crowd

Did you know that Sametime, IBM’s ubiquitous workplace instant messaging platform, was the product of an internal social networking exercise designed to encourage innovation? Many businesses approach social media as another channel via which to disseminate their message to their target audience – but that’s only half the story. An engaged community is an invaluable resource for ideas on how to develop better products, improve service offerings, or identify unmet needs. If you’re a bank looking to grow your Gen Y customer base, listen to their money-related pain points (credit card debt? Student loans?  Desire for mobile banking options?) before you tell them about your products. Whether you overtly solicit feedback from a community, or just monitor the chatter for nuggets of wisdom, you’re likely to learn something about your audience that could strengthen your business offerings – and your bottom line.

What would you have added to the conversation? Or, for any that tuned into the webcast and Twitter dialogue, what did we miss?

To connect with Kelly:

Phone: 212.840.1661
Email: kellyd@blisspr.com
Twitter: @kellydavis226
LinkedIn: Kelly Davis

Most properly staffed agencies have people with general crisis experience but, when it comes to digital platforms … not so much.  It’s a new field, so there’s been less time to gain experience, particularly among junior staff.  But clearly, there is a growing need for knowledge here.

Our firm’s answer was to develop a hands-on training session for all professional staff.  We share its highlights below and hope you find them useful.

“All these claimants bitch & moan about their f—ing forms.”

Our training flowed from a now-famous slip on Twitter that we adapted to our purposes.  We gave our competing internal teams the following scenario:

• The tweet was sent out from the personal Twitter account of an auto insurance agent. His bio identified him as an employee of the company.
• The tweet had been sent out 90 minutes earlier, and quickly deleted, but seen (and captured) by a sufficient number of people to cause a problem.  That group included so-called ‘mommy bloggers,’ trade press, as well as other employees.
• The mommy bloggers agreed with the sentiment regarding forms, but did not expect to see such language from their insurance company.  Employees were shocked and unclear about what would happen to the agent (there’s no SM policy in place, though his actions may fall under the regular conduct policy).

To make it a bit more fun, we added some other questions for our staff to consider:

• What happens to the employee?  He’s been with the company for three years, has good performance reviews and this is his first real problem.
• Should the company publicly discuss what will happen to the employee?  Should the company encourage him to make a ‘statement’ on Twitter?
• While there have been no cancelled policies yet, some of those involved in the discussion are urging others to change carriers.
• How does the company handle the ‘trust’ issue it now has with its customers?
• How should the crisis be handled over the next hour, until the end of the business day, and the following day?

As an added bonus – and to make this as hands-on as possible – we recruited senior staff members to personify the following the key players:

• Our employee – who felt horrible for what had happened.  Mid-‘crisis’ he started tweeting again…unbeknownst to the agency until someone alerted them (and yes, he made a temporary, fake twitter account that had to be monitored).
• The employee’s boss – who was not part of the Marcom department and didn’t quite get the gravity of the situation.
• The primary in-house PR contact, who now had to deal with HR and customer service issues.
• A mommy blogger who was very difficult to satisfy and who started tweeting the employee directly mid-crisis.
• A trade journalist whose publication had partnered with the company on a number of surveys and projects in the past.  His editor and publisher were not particularly thrilled with the tweet.

So, how did it turn out?  As with any crisis situation – could’ve been better but also could have been much much worse.  The teams had different answers to the questions, but good ideas and solid logic underpinning them.  Best of all – everyone enjoyed themselves and felt they learned a lot.

How do you train your staff for the unpredictable?

Creative Commons image courtesy cathyse97

Do

Measure “the right stuff”: it’s easy to track (and trumpet) an increase in Twitter followers or Facebook “likes” – but do they represent behavior that benefits your business? Whether it’s clicking a link for more information about a product or service, or submitting a form that amounts to a sales lead, the metrics that prove social media’s ROI are the ones that serve as indicators of behavior that supports business goals. Hint: identifying these metrics often requires offline research, like talking to customers at the point of sale.

Separate the “doing” from the tracking: charging the same person or team who conducts social media activities with measuring their success might seem convenient, but it also invites biased reporting. Someone who’s emotionally or professionally invested in a particular tactic or platform is more likely to overstate the value of that initiative and potentially overlook “the right stuff” (see above) in favor of focusing attention on his or her own work. To get a really objective look at your progress, delegate these responsibilities independently of one another.

Don’t

Overdo it: once metrics are established, the actual tracking is often simple. Tools for counting clicks and tweets, tracking repeat visits and identifying referrer sites are readily available (here’s a staggering list of almost 200) and in many cases, free. That being said, the time and resources it takes to effectively aggregate and analyze these data aren’t free – so stick with the metrics that are really important and resist the temptation to overdose on the quant.

Get there first: As Jason stated during the Hubspot Q&A, “there’s no advantage to beating your customers to the punch in social media.” If your metrics reveal a lack of customer activity on a given social media outpost, that’s valuable data, and might indicate that your customers aren’t ready to be there – so modify your approach accordingly.

What other dos and don’ts would you share related to social media measurement?

To reach Kelly:

Phone: 212.840.1661
Email: kellyd@blisspr.com
Twitter: @kellydavis226
LinkedIn: Kelly Davis

While you can certainly setup two accounts it can become burdensome to deal with the overlap, friends who are unsure which account is the “professional” one and which is the “personal” one, and making sure both are engaging.  Thankfully there’s a simple way around this – use Facebook’s built in Friends list feature.

The first step in setting up your lists is deciding if your lists will be inclusive, exclusive or both.  That is – are you building lists to make sure an update (or album, information, etc.) is visible to certain individuals and groups, will not be visible to certain people, or some combination of the two.

For example, if most of your updates or connections are not work related you may want to build a list of professional colleagues to exclude them from updates about school bake sales.  Alternatively, you could also build a list that only includes members of the PTA and your relatives to include only them in the personal updates.

How you divvy up your list will be based primarily on a) What you’ll be posting and b) What the sub-groups of friends look like (and how large they are).

To setup your lists:

1) Login to Facebook.

2) Go to Account → Edit Friends in the upper right hand corner

3) Click on Create a List

4) Type in a list name and begin selecting individuals to put on the list.

5) Click Create List when you’re done.

6) Mission accomplished, your list is now created.

To make a status update that’s visible only to (or invisible to) a specific list:

1) Click on the padlock in the status update window and click customize.

2) Decide who (individuals), or which lists, you’d like to include or exclude and enter in that information in the appropriate fields.  For the “Make this visible to” field, select “Specific people” and enter in the list name and click on it.  For the “Hide this from” list you can just enter the list name and click on it.

3) If this is going to be your most frequent setting, tick the “Make this my default setting” checkbox and click “Save Setting.”

4) Finish sending your update.  You can hover over the padlock to preview the current settings for any update you’ve created.

The same method applies to any of Facebook’s information settings as well as photo albums (even ones already created, just click on “Edit Album Info” in the Photo view

What are the best practices in digital marketing for financial services? This is the question that Bill Wreaks of the Gramercy Institute and Frank Dudley of Brand New Media set out to answer when they undertook a year long research project that surveyed senior-level marketers at Bank of America, UBS, Prudential and MetLife.

Overall, it’s clear that financial marketers are shifting more money than ever into digital marketing – according to Frank, this increase in dollars is at a “tipping point.” Perhaps because of this larger spend, marketers are very focused on rationalizing their investment; they all want better metrics, analytics and strategy. And while today marketers appear to be focused on driving traffic to their website with banner ads and search engine optimization, they think that by 2015 social networks and mobile strategies will top their list in importance (I’ll blog about those findings in a later post).

So what are the lessons that digital PR agencies can learn from the research?

1) Provide education

Two-thirds of respondents believe that it is extremely or very important for senior marketers to have digital marketing experience, and 89% say that it will be important in 2015. This means that clients both need and want education about best practices, trends and new technologies so they can be at their top of the game. This education need is particularly true for marketers responsible for individual product lines (whereas those focused on overall brand marketing are slightly ahead of the curve).

2) Show your strategy brain power

This is a bit of a no brainer, but one finding from the research that surprised me was that many companies are moving their digital marketing capabilities in-house, as opposed to using an agency – and this is especially true for planning, strategy and analytics. For digital PR agencies, this means that there is a big opportunity to show marketing partners your institutionalized metric systems, wow them with strategic thinking, and demonstrate how digital strategies can move the needle in their business. Help them make the case to their boss that digital marketing investments make sense for their (unique) company.

3) Push for content creation

One of best practices that Bill and Frank shared from the research was to “develop relevant and timely content,” and ideally that responsibility would fall to the line of business. While I 100% agree that this model would be supreme, I also believe that it may be somewhat unrealistic in terms of timing. But financial services public relations firms have real expertise in “pulling” ideas, stories and thought leadership from business leaders to develop content – often to bring to the media. However, this expertise can be used to fuel digital marketing projects as well (which can also help to save the line of business’ time!)

What do you think? Do you think that the increased spend by financial service marketers opens a door for digital PR agencies?

To reach Katherine:

Phone: 212.584.5475
Email: katherine@blisspr.com
Twitter: @kilpatrickk
Linked In: Katherine Kilpatrick

When it comes to events like Social Media Week, as a B2B public relations professional, I have often felt like a diabetic kid in a candy store. All of those sweet consumer marketing social media success stories look delectable, but where are the treats for me? That’s why I was excited to attend ABI’s social media panel discussion, “Integrating Social Media into B-to-B.”  The ABI team welcomed B2B marketers into their downtown office (which has a very cool industrial vibe) to hear from a group of professionals whose job it is to explore social media’s opportunities and implications for those of us who target businesses, not individual consumers. Here are my favorite pieces of B2B “candy” from Tuesday evening’s discussion:

“Your voice is your people.” This came from Dale Durret of LinkedIn. One of the big challenges that B2B companies face in social media is finding the right voice, particularly when working with content that’s highly technical or (let’s face it) a little dry at times. Durret cited IBM as a prime example of a B2B company whose employees are its best social media marketers: IBMers who are out there interacting via social media are smart, enthusiastic and tech-savvy – which resonates in their communities AND fits with the brand image the company strives to project.

“The bottom line is: are you showing up?” Kodak’s Brian Nizinsky arrived here in response to a question about how social media influences SEO. He went on to explain that search is ubiquitous, and the functionality of the search box is essentially the same whether you’re on Google or Twitter or any other platform – which is why it’s so important for companies to know what keywords their prospects and stakeholders associate with their particular products or services.

“Measurement is our justification to upper management as to why we’re spending so much time playing on the computer.” This was also from Nizinsky, and while slightly cheeky, speaks to a challenge that both B2B and B2C marketers are still figuring out:  how do we tie social media to ROI, leads, profits, or whatever other business goals the C-suite expects marketing to accomplish? Most of the panelists (which also included Jessica Tuquero of the International Trademark Association and PRSA’s Keith Trivitt) admitted that their organizations are still fine-tuning their approaches to measurement. For some, that entails experimenting with tools like Radian6; for others, it means tying social media data back to traditional PR metrics like share of voice.

Thanks to Amy Epstein and the ABI team for hosting an informative and interesting discussion. Did these insights satisfy your B2B social media sweet tooth? Who do you see as leaders in this space?

To reach Kelly:

Phone: 212.840.1661
Email: kellyd@blisspr.com
Twitter: @kellydavis226
LinkedIn: Kelly Davis

Now let’s take a look to see how these (and other parts) all play together.  In addition to an organization’s thought leaders and an agency’s account and support staff, there are 4 major roles (which may be split among as many folks as necessary) that need to be filled when setting up and planning for the Bouncing Baby Blog. Two each on the client and agency side:

The Inside Marketing Person – To ensure there’s complete company buy-in and to break down doors if there’s any slacking on the company side, either from the thought leaders or the support staff. It helps if the project is blessed by the C-Suite.

The Internal Techie Person – To handle setting up the blog from a technical standpoint, including dealing with any disclaimers/compliance issues that they’d normally have to deal with and all the internal technical matters (domain name registration, subdomain setup, ensuring a backup system is in place, etc.).

The Agency Account Person(s) – The person (or people) who know the account on a day-to-day basis.  They’ll figure out who will do what, what content can be repurposed, and they have an organic knowledge of what the account is all about and can coordinate directly with The Inside Marketing Person but leave the internal politics to them.

The Agency Techie – Who doesn’t require as much technical skills as The Internal Techie Person but is also an account person at heart and understands the agency goals. They can’t do the hands on stuff because of time, compliance or access issues.  They also need to be able to “call out” any claim that something can’t happen technologically and coordinate with The Internal Techie Person.

As mentioned, each of these folks will rely on their support staffs and the thought leaders within their organization.  However, a team composed this way, who understands each of their responsibilities can work together to birth the Bouncing Baby Blog.

Thankfully we’ve come full circle from the days of manually inserting coding into pages and most of the tags anyone would need to know for basic commenting or any manual edits are those that we used way back when. There’s no real need, at this level, for fancy scripts, tables, or anything else. Just the basics – links, images, underlining text, hyperlinking and similar – just want you need to get your content out there.

We’ve created a basic HyperText Markup Language (HTML) cheat sheet covering the basics of text formatting and the insertion of graphics on various blogging and commenting platforms.  Download & open it here and feel free to share with your peers (provided, of course, attribution remains intact). 

These few bits of code should get you off to a running start when it comes to formatting for the web.  Let us know – what other formatting commands would interest you, or other Nitty Gritty tutorials would you find handy?

Image courtesy Marjan Krebelj

Recently, the idea was put forward that there might be others outside our immediate staff and client community who would find great value in these types of instructional documents.  After some thought and a brief internal discussion, we decided he might just be right and so decided to launch The Nitty Gritty series to address the actual hands-on issues of using the tools technology give us.

In this first post, we’ll address adding a blog’s feed (presumably your own to flex your thought leadership muscles for the crowd) to your LinkedIn profile using the BlogLink LinkedIn application.  I do use my own profile in the below screenshots, your exact layout may vary.

How to add a Blog / RSS Feed to a LinkedIn Profile

1)      Login to LinkedIn

2)      Click on application directory under the “More” title menu option.

3)       Click Blog Link (for me it appears as the third entry in the first column)

4)      Click Add application.  Ensure both “Display on my profile” and “Display on LinkedIn Homepage” boxes are checked

5)      Click on the By Me Tab

6)      Click on Edit Profile

7)      The Blog Link box should show that you do not have a blog in your profile.

8)      Click on the Edit Profile Tab

9)      Click on Add a Website

10)   Select RSS Feed from the drop down box

11)   Paste in the appropriate Feed address

12)   Click save changes:

13)   Success:

14)   Click View profile and confirm the Blog Link has linked items properly

With that your blog should now be linked to your LinkedIn profile.

As a best practice you should, of course, update your status (the “What’s on your mind” prompt) with new blog posts and links so they appear in your colleague’s Network Activity as well as on your profile page through BlogLink.

Let us know, in the comments below, if you found this useful and any other future topics you’d like to see us address in The Nitty Gritty.