- by Alena Hitzemann, Associate Web Editor

I attended a HubSpot webinar yesterday about how to use social media for business. It was pretty good- they made the usual points about social media as inbound marketing, the importance of measurement, Twitter best practices (link, link, link!), etc. in an engaging way. But I thought the highlight of the hour was the discussion about distribution and conversation.

If you think about it, distribution and conversation are the two main drivers behind all social media. People share stuff- distribute it- and talk about stuff- converse about it. Among friends, this is normal. One of my friends posts a funny picture or video to their Facebook status, I converse with them by commenting on it or "liking" it, then maybe post it to my own status to continue the distribution pattern (now I can even tag the referring friend in my status- sweet.)

In the business world, however, it seems that we sometimes forget the importance of completely integrating these two actions.

We're certainly good at distributing. Traditionally, we sent out press releases, mail out brochures, launch email campaigns and send newsletters. Nowadays we're encouraging RSS feeds, posting content to Facebook fan pages and tweeting out links.

We do ok with the conversation part as well. We host webinars with Q&As, attend tradeshows, sponsor live chats and participate in online communities. This is all great stuff. But frequently, the distribution and conversation go on independently of each other. And that's where we miss opportunities.

Distributing content is a great way to spread the word about your business. It generally builds awareness, and if it's valuable content, also builds a strong reputation. Same goes for conversation. Whether it's a helpful support experience over live chat or a friendly exchange at a tradeshow booth, a positive interaction will reflect positively on your company. And again: great stuff. But the kicker is that other people are doing that, too. What they're not doing is combining the distribution and conversation into a fluid process that enhances and bolsters both objectives.

Example #1: Twitter. Instead of just tweeting links to your own stuff, or just using it as a tool to chat, integrate. Retweet. Retweet with your own commentary, or a response to someone else's commentary. Ask questions. Point to collateral while asking for feedback, responses, comments, opinions. Thank others for RTing your stuff. Direct message brand champions. All of these things make you stand out from the crowd, make your links stand out from the crowd, and make people like you- which will make them much more inclined to engage with the content that you distribute.

Example #2: Blogging. Blogging can be a great tool for two-way communication. Use your own voice to talk about company content (that you've linked to, of course.) Add your personal opinion to a white paper, discuss a recent event, shout out to the great people you met at your last conference. Pose questions, beg for comments, be controversial- do whatever it takes to get the conversation going around the collateral that you want to deliver.

Example #3: Online communities. The Company Presence in online communities often sways one of two ways: answers every question with a link back to some database, or answers every question with an involved, individually written response. But serious impact comes from combining these methods. "Hey Bob, thanks for the question. It sounds like solutions X, Y and Z might help. You can get started by doing _____, but also check out these resources in our database (link, link, link.) Jim also had a similar question in Forum X, you might be able to find some information there. Have you tried ____?" This method makes it personal, offers specialized suggestions, but also points to distributed collateral... which saves The Company Presence time and grows the general awareness of all the company's great content.

These examples may seem obvious, but they bring us back to "easier said than done." It isn't simple to combine distribution and conversation in a thoughtful way- if it was, everyone would be doing it. But it certainly is worth it, which makes it worth keeping both strategies in mind.

- by Alena Hitzemann, Associate Web Editor

Today, Twitter posted "A Special Guide" to using Twitter for business. This is interesting for a variety of reasons: is it prefacing a change in Twitter's business model? Does it mean they are directly targeting businesses, and how will that affect Twitter's use? Will this information increase Twitter's adoption by businesses? Are they just trying to be helpful?

I'm not sure. But reading the article reminded me of my early days in "professional" social media (ie, not just facebooking for fun.) When I joined BMC's Web Strategy team last summer, I wanted to get up to speed as quickly as possible. I spent significant amounts of time Googling around for resources on social media for B2B, and surprisingly, didn't find all that much. The variety of information has grown quite a bit since then, but I find that compared to B2C, the less-sexy B2B still frequently gets the short end of the stick.

So, for this week's Friday Round-Up, I decided to pull together some of the resources that I did find. This list specifically addresses B2B case studies, which I think are particularly interesting and helpful. They're out there... it just took some digging to find them.

Big, comprehensive lists:

MarketingProfs list of Social Media Case Studies – these are largely B2C, but some good B2B examples are thrown in as well.

A List of Social Media Marketing Examples – Peter Kim’s extensive list of companies using social media (includes some B2B.)

Case studies from Social Media B2B (great general resource for, well, Social Media B2B):

B2B Social Media Example: Siemens

B2B Social Media Example: ArcelorMittal

B2B Social Media Example: Boeing

B2B Social Media Newsroom Example: Scania

Additional specific case studies:

Business.com Case Study – first-person account of how Business.com implemented social media tactics.

B2B Case Study: ShipServ – concise account of ShipServ’s goals, challenges, strategy and tactics.

SAP: A Company Transforms Itself Through Social Media – in-depth, detailed look at SAP’s social media program.

Case Study: CME Group – links to Allan Schoenberg’s experience with social media in the financial services sector of B2B.

B2B Social Media Marketing Benefits in the Eye of the Beholder – first-hand look at social media efforts by a small business, Winning Workplaces.

Social Media for B2B – includes high level look at HP’s use of social media.

Lured in by Social Media: An Unofficial B2B Case Study – Beth Harte recounts her experience with HubSpot; an interesting perspective for a social media case study.

Inside the Grasshopper Invasion: Social Media Lessons from a Bug – look at Grasshopper’s successful social media campaign.

How to use social media for lead generation – Brian Carroll’s B@B Lead Generation blog; effective summary of Marketing Sherpa case study only

available to members.

B2B’s Social Media Superstars – top five B2B companies making a splash in social media (and for good measure, check out the five worst B2B social media screw-ups.)

Twitter for Business Case Study Series:

@B2BOnlineMktg  at 30 days

@B2BOnlineMktg  at 60 days

@B2BOnlineMktg  at 90 days

@B2BOnlineMktg  at 120 days

What did I miss? Any other B2B examples of successful social media programs? Please share!

- by Alena Hitzemann, Associate Web Editor

Two weeks ago, a fifteen year old Londoner named Matthew Robson began a fortnight-long work experience program at Morgan Stanley. He was placed in the media and internet research team, given a list of tasks, and told to go get 'em. One of those tasks was to compile a report on how teenagers, his peers, consume media. He wrote it in a day. Less than a week later, the press, the twitterverse and the blogosphere are all abuzz with the implications of the "revelations" contained in Matthew's report, How Teenagers Consumer Media.

The UK Guardian trumpets the "flurry of interest from media executives and investors" caused by the report.

The Times calls Robson "the talk of Tokyo, Wall Street and the City," and claims that "Fund managers, CEOs  and analysts are poring over his report."

According to CNBC, the report's "striking claims" are "making waves among media executives and investors."

Bloomberg.com quotes "the analysts" as claiming the report contained the “clearest and most thought-provoking insights we have seen.”

I find this all slightly ridiculous. I tend to agree with Time's Dan Fletcher, who summed up his opinion of the hubbub over the report in one word: toss.

Maybe that's a bit harsh. I don't literally think that the report is garbage. I think Mr. Robson (do you call a 15 yr old "Mr."?) deserves serious props for getting a good internship and taking advantage of it. He clearly did his job well, contacted a wealth of primary sources and put together a not-too-terribly written report (although, as an English major, I have a hard time with all of the members of the press out there- writers, no less!- who seem to be implying that it's equivalent to a professionally created document. I mean, come on. He used the word "release" instead of "realize" in one of the most frequently quoted passages. Let's not make this out to be more than it is. *takes off Grammar Police hat.* )

His content is mildly interesting. Turns out that teenagers have short attention spans, enjoy video games, won't pay for music, love their cell phones, and - this is the biggie, apparently - couldn't care less about Twitter. It's a good snapshot into the youth psyche. But here is my big question: why is this news? Isn't this all completely, blatantly obvious? Don't any of these investors, analysts, fund managers, CEOs and the rest HAVE teenagers? Haven't they noticed all the advertising directed at teens that is predicated on this very information?

And more importantly, why do they care? Is Morgan Stanley selling financial packages to sophomores in high school? If teens aren't your target audience, as is the case with many of the marketers so hungrily devouring this report, then who cares that they prefer Limewire to iTunes and think tweeting is for old farts?

The answer is, they think the teens are trendsetters. They seem to believe that (a) what this demographic is doing now, they will also be doing in ten years when they are old enough to spend serious bucks, and/or, (b) what is cool to teenagers will soon become cool to adults, changing the adult consciousness towards media consumption.

And that's where I disagree. That's where this whole hoopla gets really silly to me.

For instance, let's look at Gen Y ten years ago, when we were Matthew's age. I think I was pretty typical of my generation. I hung out on my parents' computer, the family computer, because my friends and I didn't have our own laptops. Internet was painfully slow. It was the heyday of Napster, and like today's teens, we did not pay for music... of course, it took somewhere around 10 minutes to download one song, so our pirating was probably quite a bit slower than our modern counterparts. I was given a Zack Morris-style cell phone for my 15th birthday, and I think it had somewhere around 200 minutes/month on it. I used it exclusively to make calls, and not very long ones- more along the lines of "Mom, I'm sleeping over at Lucy's, see you tomorrow, bye," than protracted conversations. There was no Facebook, there was no Twitter. We did instant message; first it was ICQ, then AIM. That too was slow. All in all, technology played a role in my life, but not a particularly huge or important one.

Clearly times have changed. But I changed with them. So did the rest of Gen Y. As we grew up, our actions evolved along with technology, trends and personal maturity. I no longer use AIM because I now chat on Facebook. I no longer download music illegally because I'm conscious of the implications to the industry and the artist. My cell phone- probably a quarter of the size of that first one- is now my primary means of communication and I couldn't use up my minutes if I tried. This picture looks nothing like it did when I was fifteen.

Furthermore, I really don't think that teenage trends will significantly affect adult actions. Fifteen year olds are coming from an entirely different place. Things become cool for different reasons: because they're free, and when you're in high school, you have no money; because you have an abundance of free time in which to play video games; because it's easy to circumvent and avoid adults. These reasons don't translate to adult coolness, at least in my book.The fact that teens aren't on Twitter has nothing to do with my efforts to use that particular tool to gather and disseminate knowledge or to promote my work and my company.

The information that Matthew Robson presented is certainly relevant to anyone marketing to teens. But I really think the buck stops there. Who knows where they'll be by the time they're buying into hedge funds and enterprise software- somehow, I don't think it will involve Twitter.

- by Anirban Dutta, Web Producer

Tidal wave?

The concept that has sent a Wave of excitement through the tech and non tech community alike comes from the innovative giant on the web – Google.

They’ve named it Google Wave.

Founders of the Google wave are Lars Rasmussen, Jens Rasmussen (brothers) and Stephanie Hannon - the same team that came up with the Google Maps application.

As Lars Rasmussen, co-founder of Google Wave highlights, email was created some 40 years ago, before the creation of the Internet its self and it was done without the experience and knowledge we now have of things such as wikis, social networks, sms, instant messaging and so on. He introduces the Wave as “Google Wave is what email would look like if it was created today”. He says as opposed to emails which try to instantiate a point to point conversation, the Google Wave is "one metaphor for hosted conversations" object hosted on a server somewhere.

The Wave concept typifies an utopian Web 3.0 world where we have all the caliber of Web 2.0 ie emails, IMs, wikis, blogs, bulletin boards, Social networking, sharing and collaboration merged with a much more real time focus; so we have all of the cool stuff happening in a single browser session in a single pane with more enhanced features like we never imagined!

So how does this Sci-Fi set look?

Features like real time translation in 40 languages, contextual spell check, grammar checking and all in one drag drop file sharing, document creation, sharing and editing, starting forums. It certainly packs the thrills of a Spielberg flick!

Plus a very cool feature is its Playback option which lets you refer back to a conversation trail and see which participant added what and at which time and locate the origin of the Wave - each conversation is a wave.

Open Source and the Wave

Google shared its baby with the world at Google's Developer Preview forum Google I/O May 2009

Watch the launch video

Google has actually invited the developer community to participate in the Google Wave program by throwing open a forum to contribute to its features. Majority of the Wave's code is open source and the developers would be given accounts in a sandbox within Google's system  to start developing add on features and extensions to coincide with the launch. This is way too cool.

There is also a feedback capturing mechanism if you wish to be updated on whats going on - Fill up the form

I think I can definitely suggest some cool aliens in this movie on the semi technical side straight to the directorial suit.

The Wave is a platform in iself and it supports robots to automate tasks and functions, embed Waves into external blogs and web sites, “talk” to popular web services such as Twitter collaborate across different platforms, merge other Google tools and gadgets in short Google calls it a "Game changer".

I enhanced my open source knowledge from whurley's podcasts.

I'm not walking the technical line on this red hot topic - there's enough out there on the internet, a particularly good read is the Google Wave guide.

Concerns, resistance to change?

Does this mean the end of the world of CCing and BCCing and SMTP mails and the very recent blogging? How would it impact my business/ Do I have to resort to cloud computing? Would the corporate world accept the wave? Would the concept be scalable enough? These are some of the initial questions that make the tag cloud of this mega project but coming from an organization like Google I have full faith on their to realizing abilities.

My part of the shock was when I realized the concept of the Google Wave was so massive and yet so simple that Social Media would be turned into a subset of this giant - where I always thought Social networking encompasses all - I feel this Tide has a magnitude of possibly redefining Tim Berners Lee's www into World Wide Wave.

Cant wait for the tide to come sweep us over!

- by Alena Hitzemann, Associate Web Editor

Green IT is a hot topic here at BMC. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure what it means in the context of our products and solutions... but I think it has something to do with consolidating servers, virtualization, automating systems, using less energy and generally making things more efficient (plus saving some money, of course.) Which is great. I'm all about reducing resources and doing right by good old Mother Earth, and for a lot of our enterprise customers, those changes may be an excellent way to do so.

The thing is, though, those are all pretty high level initiatives. Kind of like saying, "if you want to live green, you need to put an entirely new sustainable energy system into your house." It would be awesome to have everything run off of solar and wind, but what can I do in the meantime? What are the little steps in Green IT, the ones equivalent to switching off lights, taking shorter showers, and just putting on a goshdarn sweater in the winter instead of cranking the heat? (That last one is for you, Dad. I've finally learned.)

I think social media provides a platform for taking some of those smaller steps. It may not be direct, in the sense that turning off a light turns down your electric bill, but I believe it's relevant all the same. More and more organizations are using social media to drive campaigns that ultimately address the same goals as BMC's Green IT: using less energy and being smarter with our resources.

This article offers some great examples. A recent Twitter push by the United Nations Environmental Programme, for instance, resulted in the planting of over 10,000 new trees... one for every tweet that their Twitter account received during a one week period. What an awesome program, right? Talk about easy... shooting off one tweet is definitely easier than cutting short a nice hot shower. The article also mentions Dell's use of Twitter, blog posts and banner ads to promote their World Environment Day contest. The respondent with the best tweet on combatting climate change won $1000 to donate to the NGO of their choice... again, all for taking a few minutes to craft an answer in 140 characters or less.

But I believe the biggest impact that social media can have on the Green movement is increasing awareness. Through this new, global conversation, it becomes So Much Easier to learn about the issues and what you can do to help. Even if the results aren't tangible, like a thousand bucks or a new tree in the ground, every tweet, blog or forum discussion that addresses envrionmental issues raises the volume on the conversation. The conversation then acts as the precursor, the antecedent to the small steps. By reading how others are incorporating Green values into their daily lives- including IT- we can all get ideas and inspiration on making changes ourselves. And those changes, the ones that seem tiny and insignificant, lead to big changes. Enter Green IT in the enterprise.

Ok, I'm off my environmental soapbox. What do you think defines "Green IT"? How will social media help shape that definition? How will Green IT continue to evolve?

Oh yeah, and if you are interested in the whole Green conversation, check out these guys. Serious enviro-buzz.