Not Just for Kids

First things first, thanks to all of the comments and thoughts that people sent about the first Blog.  A quick reminder that my focus in this Blog is partnering, and how to be more successful in this endeavor.  A broad review of social media is not part of my aim.  

Now to business, what does one do with this new found knowledge about social media.  The answer is lots of things, customer support and brand building are two of the most popular, however we are going to concern ourselves here what you can do to enhance the partner business, starting with the partner portal.

If you jump into the old time machine. remember the promise of Partner Portals.  Private secure islands in the wonderful world of the web.  They promised to replace binders, monthly mailers, banks of people on the phone.  Partners could get product information 24x7.  We all spent tons (“tons” is a technical term meaning way more than planned) money on our portals.  Then they grew from informational to active with deal registration, participate in contests, lead distribution, certification, yada, yada.

What happened?  They didn’t get used to the degree envisioned or by the people and partners we most wanted.  Partner portals are a good but not great tool.  The fatal flaw in my experience....too many.  Every vendor and each distributor developed one (sometimes more than one) and it overwhelmed the individual.  A mid sized VAR has 100 to 150 product lines which means for each sales person has an overwhelming number of passwords, all with different formats.  They can end up largely private library’s with few visitors. 

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place”

George Bernard Shaw

What to do?  Let Facebook or LinkedIn (or your favorite) host your portal and leverage their existing community, make it easy for individuals to use.  There are 250 million people with Facebook accounts, 45 million at LinkedIn, many partner employees will have existing accounts.  Any that don’t have accounts certainly have heard about the services and are likely to be open to joining.  This goes a long way toward solving the access challenge.  Monthly operating cost = 0.  

After you have set up an account for your business, next steps: populate with relevant content, invite individuals at partners, encourage questions and comments to establish a community, make announcements, keep the content relevant.  You are striving for active participation, relevance, a true Web 2.0 portal, not a yesterday’s web portal, which means that your team must be actively involved in the conversations.  To stay relevant you must answer the questions, deal with the controversial issues out in the open.  The process will allow greater transparency with your partners and help build trust, but it may be uncomfortable dealing with issues in the open, be ready.  Both LinkedIn and Facebook have security setting that will help you manage access, it appears to me that Facebook’s settings may be the better fit for this model.  

The next step is to leverage the API’s or interfaces provided by these platforms.  You can use the API’s to write applets to do deal registration, or manage coop funds or integrate into exiting applications.  LinkedIn’s Intelligent Applications platform is designed to get LinkedIn into your applications and the ability to get your applications into LinkedIn.  LinkedIn and others support Google’s OpenSocial set of API’s which promise more options.  Facebook started out open and extendable, heck there is even a “Building Facebook Applications for Dummies” book.  An ancillary benefit of the platforms is that they are already encompass the mobile user. 

After all this, get it used. Recruit your most engaged partners to use the platform, to start conversations, to tell other partners how cool and useful your partner “portal” is, get on the phone with editors to tell them what you are doing, give speeches about your creation, publicize successes, create a buzz.

There is an elephant in the room...Advertising.  Yes you will have to put up with advertising (not on the mobile side, today) but it is a small price to pay to leverage existing communities to ease the communications burden with your partners, build communities around your business at a fraction of the cost with easier access for your constituents than a “DIY”(Do It Yourself) portal.  Leveraging the technology is great however the true cost is building the community and these services give you a “leg up”.

Jeremiah Owyang, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research. “Extending useful business applications on top of existing business communities will bring a new opportunity for efficiency — business communities will be more productive.”

Become 3-dimensional in your partner interaction with Web 2.0.  Leverage the platforms and existing communities, build an applet to extend the platform if you need to, but concentrate your effort on keeping to the message fresh, establishing a dialog and electronically reaching out to your partners.  

If the Pentagon is Studying Social Networking Shouldn’t You?

WASHINGTON, Aug 5, 2009  The Pentagon has launched a study of the use of social networking sites designed to help craft new policies on how the military should use services such as Facebook and Twitter.  

Officials said they needed to craft rules that would allow the military to take advantage of the speedy communications without exposing sensitive information or opening computer networks to potential risks.

The answer is yes and yes, you should be studying social networking and should be integrating it into your channel/partnering business.  Why?  

Certainly not a surprise to get this advice, Facebook, Twitter are in your face all the time, who is buying who how does one or the other make money, yada yada yada.  And many of your firms have in fact already engaged in some type of Web 2.0 activity, 88% of marketers in a recent study (Michael Stelzner, March 2009).  However, 72% are new to social media in business and the vast majority have focused on generating exposure for the business.  Great, good, super, however I believe that a stronger value proposition is in cost effectively tightening and expanding business relationships.  Trust, transparency, frictionless access to information will lead to mutually beneficial relationships. The “life blood” of a successful channel, OEM relationship or a business development partnership. 

First “Yes”, study the various social media available.  It is time well spent to learn about the options and how they work, not just technically but etiquette and rituals of the community.  You’re not in Kansas anymore and these are not web sites.  Social media is a medium that can make you seem like a interloper at the cool people’s party in high school if you get it wrong.  Each of the services have established customs.  Run aground of them and your followers or friends or links, etc may turn against you.  Some are established by the provider and you see these in the terms of service or use page at each site.  LinkedIn prohibits you from using a cartoon as your profile picture, it is the “professional tool”, while in Facebook you will see offers to create a cartoon for you and Homer Simpson seems to have dozens of Facebook pages under many names.

The harder knowledge to gain are the codes of behavior that have grown up in the community.  At Twitter for example, there is a conflict inside the community with one side saying one should primarily tell the world what you are doing at that moment and a more liberal side that supports topical Twittering.  The best advice is to follow or listen to what is going on for awhile.  There are a number of good books that happily teach the ins and outs of these worlds.   There are many ways to have social media blow up on you and either waste your time or horror of horrors hurt your firm.  One absolute across all “E” media, social or otherwise anything that looks like SPAM is a no no.  When in doubt, adding value is the path to take.

What tools do you have in your bag of tricks?  Tons, hundreds, gallons....a bunch to be more accurate.  InsideCRM.com offers an article “50 Social Sites That Every Business Needs a Presence on” , Traffikd.com beats that with a categorized list of 400 social media sites.  Interesting references go to it if you want, visit them all, who needs family interaction.  However, I want to highlight a few of the sites with my opinions.

LinkedIn - This is the grand daddy of Web 2.0 professional networking sites.  It is a relationship based tool vs. connection based.  People must accept your invitation to join your network.  LinkedIn has extended itself to offer communities from Red Sox Nation to a CIO forum.

Facebook - It is hard to escape stories about Facebook, it is the social networking giant with 250 million active users.  Interesting twist here is that there are API’s that make it feasible to extend or integrate with Facebook.  

Twitter - Immediate and concise.  Your Tweets have to be 140 characters or less, so get to the point.  This is a great tool for immediate communication to your partners.  Firms can also extend and integrate Twitter.

YouTube - Video beats the heck out of power point slides and it is cheap.  Heck with the Flip video cameras you can upload direct to YouTube and your partners can watch the demo rather than read the script.

Content Circles - Gotcha! this is a new one.  This is an ad hoc document management system, set up a “circle”, invite partners, and develop documents together always knowing the most current version.  Disclaimer, I know the team and have done work with them.  

What do we do with this new Web 2.0 knowledge?  We will deal with shortly