B2B Marketing is about Find, Follow, Feed

Last week Guy Kawasaki posted an interesting article from Valeria Maltoni on how B2B companies can improve their use of content to market themselves. Valeria smartly attacks the notion of brochure style information delivery, which focuses on benchmarks that highlight similarities rather than the differentiating features that help close the sale and expand margins. She also criticizes B2B’s general lack of media integration in an age of exploding low cost media channels, B2B is stuck closing ranks and not using its extremely intelligent workforce as a marketing tool.

Valeria’s solution is to empower the voices of the organization beyond the c-suite. Her belief, and one supported by the success of organizations like Zappos, is that by opening up your workforce to the world, you will expose a latent culture of storytelling that can energize your organization and your customer relationships, ultimately resulting in higher sales.

I agree with all these points to this point in the article. However, I start to diverge at the point where Valeria suggests a methodology for exposing these voices. Valeria asks B2B to relinquish their dependence on fact dumps and instead tell the stories of product use that connect. I’m not sure if focusing on the story at this point is correct as I think employees get concerned about their ability to tell stories. I think the key is simply to get them talking. My interest is in thinking less about the story’s constitution and more about starting the conversation from an individual point of view.

My concern is: does a company wide focus on stickiness limit the upside of micro-scale world. If the focus is on large scale stickiness do we de-personalize. It’s my belief that it is much more powerful that John, Product Manager, talks to a group of 10 interested in a small function, than Laura, CEO, connects with a group of 5,000. This is Kevin Kelly’s 1,000 true fans finding it’s way into the corporate market, we have limits to our ability to connect in a human way.

However, a critique is not enough, I want to put forth a suggestion of how to harness this new notion of marketing as R&D. The rules I’m suggesting are not my own, but rather the ones that YouTube Product Managers, Hunter Walk and Brian Glick suggest: Find, Follow, Feed. YouTube has an enviable problem, too much content. Each minute 15 hours of new content is uploaded. That’s too much stuff and YouTube needs to find a way to surface the interesting content for an individual out of this massive ocean. That’s what is going to happen when B2B unleashes its workforce on the world, lots of opinions, different ideas and each of these may have an audience. The goal is to connect the individual to the audience and this methodology, in all its messiness, seems to be a framework to do so.

There is much more to flush out to operationalize the Find, Follow, Feed for B2B but it represents the reality of turning the firehose of employee content on. I also realize that the stickiness principles are important on the micro-scale. However, Read/Write marketing is very different from read only marketing and we can learn from read/write businesses how to best bubble up important information.

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Tagged as: bubble up, content pipe, firehose, Guy Kawasaki, Kevin Kelly, Marketing and Advertising, Valeria Maltoni