One of the best examples I have personally seen of a B2B company successfully leverage social media is National Instruments (NI). NI offers sells hardware and software products to businesses and academic organizations globally. Recognizing that the end users of their products are engineers and scientists, NI uses social media platforms to engage them in co-innovation that results in a win-win situation for the customers and NI’s business. NI customers are members of an online community where they actively engage in giving feedback on the products they use and brainstorming new ideas for future product features. The community platform gives customers a voice and makes them feel involved in the process of creating products that will ultimately benefit them by helping them do their jobs better. They consider themselves ‘geeks’ and enjoy conversing with other fellow geeks around the world as they share their knowledge an strive to be recognized within their “community of practice” as the knowledge expert. One active user spent as much time on the community answering questions and helping fellow members as seven NI support staff combined. NI nurtures and encourages their participation by recognizing the most active users publicly as “superfans” and bestows upon them the coveted title of “Knights of NI” at an annual conference hosted by NI. Some superfans have been known to attend the conference dressed up in knights costumes! NI has been successful in creating a valuable experience for their end users by providing a public forum for customers to give voice to their needs and connect with other fellow users. NI builds and maintains the high level of trust and loyalty that their customer community gives them by actively listening to customer conversations and incorporating their feedback into every product upgrade or release. You can read more about the NI case study here.
While there are several B2B companies like National Instruments that have succeeded in using social media to build active and engaged communities (see more examples here), most companies struggle with doing this. When I interned at BMC Software, which sells system management software to other businesses, I conducted a customer survey to gather information about their pain points and social media habits. What I learned was that end users’ biggest pain point was not getting prompt, helpful support for questions they had with BMC’s products. Their solution was to create independent mailing lists for different products where users could collaborate in helping each other with answers. Even though BMC has an online community forum(similar to what NI has), BMC’s customers preferred to go to independent sites because they felt that BMC would use their own site to market sales messages to them. The users had a strong perception that BMC only uses social media as a marketing tool to try to sell them more business. This negative perception has made it difficult for BMC to create engagement on their forum. In order to combat this issue, BMC is working with NI to learn from their experiences and try to replicate their success. One of the first actions BMC took towards their social journey was to take steps to change the internal company culture first by encouraging employees to engage with each other using social media. The thought behind this strategey was that once employees get comfortable in various media they will be better equipped to "play where the customers want to play" and to be able to engage appropriately.
Since I am currently interviewing with HomeAway for a post-graduation job, I decided to analyze their use of social media. I was surprised to find that on HomeAway’s main site there is a link to Facebook but their links to other sites such as Twitter, Pinterest and YouTube are buried under a link at the bottom of the page titled Media Center. I would advise them to make the popular sites more easily accessible. HomeAway also hosts an online community which has moderately active engagement but the overall sentiment seems to be quite negative as most members use the forum to complain about issues and chat about how the competitors are better. There are some members who are more helpful than most in answering questions and HomeAway launched an Ambassdor program in 2012 to recognize key contributors but there doesn’t seem to be much support from HomeAway experts. I would advise HomeAway management to invest some resources into making the forum a more valuable platform for customers. They could involve customers in the R&D process by giving them specific opportunities to co-create and contribute their feedback on the forum by suggesting new features or voting on them. They could create an exchange program where HomeAway property owners can stay in each others’ properties and get to know each other personally. HomeAway can help create valuable experiences for travelers by giving them additional ways to enhance their vacation stay – they could give travelers a convenient way to plan, track and share their entire journey. For example, if a group of friends are planning a trip, HomeAway can give them tools online to share their plans with each other before they travel, to track each others itineraries during their travel, to share pictures and videos with each other and optionally with others. By giving travelers a way to create and share memories of their wonderful stay, HomeAway can create valuable experiences that will delight their users.
Reading the Groundswell chapter 3 made me reflect on my own reasons for joining the groundswell and I discovered that my main reason for joining was “Succumbing to social pressure from existing friends” but my reason for staying is “Keeping up friendships” although I must admit it has been turning to the “Prurient Impulse” of late. I observed that the likely primary reason social business users at NI, BMC and HomeAway engage in the groundswell is “Validation” and perhaps “Paying it forward”.
