Connie Bensen

This week at Marketing Prof’s Digital virtual marketing conference, I presented a case study of Techrigy’s use of Twitter for lead generation. Many question the value of spending time on Twitter, but it has proven to be invaluable for the growth of our startup! Here’s our story. I started with the numbers first.

Here’s some additional commentary to go with the slides:

One year ago I was contracted for a few hours a week. Two months later I went full time. As a community manager, I relied on social media marketing. We had an ambitious team of 5 and no marketing budget. (I learned new words like ‘boot strapping’).

When I started demo’ing SM2 there was a huge learning curve if the attendee didn’t know about wikis, twitter, etc. So, after doing some ‘listening’ I realized that people on Twitter were early adopters and had achieved a certain level. In addition many were asking, ‘What should we be using for social media monitoring?’, How do you do it?, and the pro’s and con’s are debated.

Twitter was ideal because users are:

• early adopters & understand the basics of social media
• actively seeking information and options
• specifically interested in our service
• happy to share information with others which builds word of mouth
• very happy to see a listening tool actively engaged

To use Twitter for lead generation, listen for people expressing a need for your product or service. In our case I monitor for the phrase “social media monitoring”. If you’re a financial institution, then you may want to monitor for “mortgage calculator”. And a photography software company may monitor for “taking photos” and join the conversation.

After the presentation I hung out on Twitter and chatted. I saw my colleague, Jim Reynolds, confirm that we quit cold calling. He joined Techrigy two weeks after I did and is avidly involved in the conversation on Twitter.

And I caught this testimonial by @GavinThomas. Our goal is to provide value and we’ve made a lot of friends there. This underlines the idea that people don’t mind the connection on Twitter.

The whole Marketing Prof’s conference is available for 90 days. Enjoy!

At the end of the presentation I listed a number of business objectives that can be realized using Twitter. What have you found effective?

Taking a break from work always causes me to reflect. On Thursday evening the word “exhilarating” came to mind. We had just wrapped up a celebratory party at work via video conference. They were teasing the person who had bought beer because he had only bought a 6 pack & there were 7 of us. (I am 1500 miles away in Minnesota …but that gives you a sense of how connected we are.) It was suggested that Aaron Newman write a program so they could share their libations with me virtually. That would take Emeril Legasse’s concept of ‘smell-o-vision’ to a new level! (He has a great new show on Planet Green by the way. I have cooking shows on while I work).

One of my goals of this blog is to help people understand the role of a community manager. There is much interest in how companies are utilizing the position & how it can help their company.

Why do I find my work exhilarating?

That can be answered in one sentence: I work in a transparent and flat company that embraces Web 2.0 and allows me to grow & learn on an on-going basis.

Merriam-Webster defines ‘exhilarating’ as:

1 : to make cheerful and excited : enliven, elate

2 : refresh, stimulate

It really isn’t work to me. I love what I do & I do what I love. I recommend that you strive for that too! And if the economic situation has you searching for a new job, this is the perfect opportunity to make that commitment to yourself. Last summer I listened to an interview that Anna Farmery did with Tom Nixon of Nixon McInnes a social media agency with an amazing internal culture. It moved me so much that I had the impulse to contact Tom and tell him that I wanted to work there! But they were in the UK… It gave me the idea though.

Techrigy has an amazing internal culture

Last fall Aaron Newman asked if I’d like to work with him. Many people ask for help & I do what I can. It was apparent fairly quickly that we shared similar values (and are both workaholics). It’s been almost seven months and Thursday found our company celebrating some huge milestones. We are growing at an amazing rate. If you’re going to be at NewComm Forum next week you’ll be the first to hear about the case study of Techrigy & community building for a B2B.

About Techrigy: we’re a B2B (business to business) company & the majority of our customers are agencies that have clients. We live & breathe Web 2.0. Ninety nine percent of our demo’s, training, customer support, marketing, lead generation, etc is all done online through social media. What makes us unique from our competitors is that we offer a free version of our social media monitoring tool for an unlimited time.

Our team has an incredible synergy. Our sales team came from the traditional sales world. I’m impressed with how quickly they immersed themselves in the social media world. And on the flip side they have been teaching me about sales. A customer that I sold to asked me, ‘How does your role fit into sales?’. It’s a fit that’s powerful due to our company’s culture. I’ll be doing a future blog post on how my role fits in the sales funnel. (yes, I’ve been learning new terms)

The joy of flat and transparent

Aaron frequently says this is ‘your company’. If you listen to the interview you’ll hear Tom talk about how employees are informed of everything including the financial state of affairs. That is very empowering in building trust and loyalty. It’s very easy to work in a company that doesn’t have silos and there’s transparency. We practice that within our team and most importantly in our work with our customers. Customer service is our first priority and everyone pulls together to accomplish that. We surprise & delight our customers with support on the weekend. There are many agencies that are working on weekends!

We are adding more staff to accommodate our growth. This will require more processes as we scale to ensure smooth delivery of service. But it doesn’t mean that we need silos or control. We will be adding tools to help us grow. Some companies go in the other direction. A friend emailed me this week saying that his company had blocked Facebook & chat. He thought that Twitter would be next. (He called them ‘corporate Nazis’). In all fairness to him he only chatted infrequently & would say, ‘my break is over I need to get back to work’. So that saddens me that companies don’t trust their employees & recognize the value of social networking. How can they expect trust & loyalty back if they don’t practice it?

Working remote

I feel this obligation to continually repeat that employers consider allowing staff to work remotely. We are knowledge workers and as Chris Brogan suggests: We can work from coffee shops. Our demo with his team was a bit noisy But he walks his talk!

Quick repeat: Techrigy is located in Rochester, NY. I’m located in northern Minnesota. One of our sales guys works from the Buffalo office (his house) We have customers around the world & time zones need accommodating. (I never can tell when he’s working from home.)

I am so pleased that we have hired two more that will be working remotely! I look forward to meeting them in person next week when I’m in San Francisco, but their training has already started. Web 2.0 truly breaks down the geographical barriers.

I am really thankful to have the opportunity to help shape Techrigy’s future. And I believe that as a team we’re all contributing in our unique ways to achieve a shared vision. It is refreshing to work with people who love what they do.

If you’re in between jobs or seeking a new direction I hope that you can find a cultural fit so that you don’t feel like it’s work. And if your company is embracing social media then I encourage you to join in the internal cultural shift (with little steps) to create an environment where you love going to work.

This is the first step in Nattergalen’s strategy to re-energize the FohBoh community. You can read about the entire project here.

FohBoh News Section

This is the first stage of the plan and will be the first section accessible to the community members. The template for this section is based on the web page called the Drudge Report. It’s basically a news aggregator. It is not member generated, the Drudge Reports site managers scan dozens of online news sites daily for stories they feel will be of particular interest and they post hyperlinks to those stories on their site. The hyperlinks appear on their site as simple typed headlines. It’s a really popular site because it’s simple, easy to navigate, and it saves time, people can scan multiple news properties by viewing easy to read and understand headlines, and they can navigate quickly to the articles they are most interested in from a single point.

The FohBoh version is very similar in form and function. The main difference is the community aspect, unlike Drudge Fohboh has members and their feedback will be instrumental in determining which links we post. Another example of this type of aggregation is SocialMediaToday.com and it’s sister sites. In their case the members of the community feed in their blog’s RSS & an editor chooses which articles will be published on the site.

How to set it up

Setting up the page is simple. It’s a separate page on the site, accessed from the main toolbar. The page itself is simple and clean (like the original Drudge page). Loading information is also simple, the headlines are simple hyperlinks in a typeface font, no graphics. Selecting the online blogs and publications to link to is a combination of research and asking the community members what they like to read. Once a good initial list was generated the stakeholders of the online publications and the blog writers were contacted. This isn’t required to do, you can link to a web site without permission and most of these sites have RSS feed setups on their pages already. This step goes back to the fourth section of our overall plan for FohBoh: transitioning FohBoh from a static point on the web to an anchor of a greater web presence. The goal is to introduce FohBoh to community at large. The goal is to have the online publications and blogs aware that they are being linked to in the news section because that awareness will make them realize what FohBoh’s vision is towards collaboration. This is a networking operation, it’s more than just linking to their content. It’s creating a bridge between the sites and offering an enhanced experience to a member base that is shared. The goal is for the site to be located at a busy intersection, not the end of a dead end street, and the purpose of this news section is to create 2 way traffic, and make FohBoh an intersection between multiple websites that have real relevance to it’s membership.

It is already known from member feedback that the restaurant industry professionals on FohBoh read A LOT. The restaurant biz is a lot like the social media biz: it isn’t just a job, its a lifestyle, and people really immerse themselves in it. By creating a single point of access to lots and lots of relevant information, one that is easy to scan and navigate, the goal is to create an opportunity for FohBoh to grow from a place to discuss issues to one that is part of the members morning newspaper and cup of coffee routine. This will increase page views and time on site, and increase value to members by giving them the information they crave in a “one stop shopping” type format, in an environment (the FohBoh community) that lends itself to deeper discussion of issues raised in news articles and blogs with other like minded professionals.

Scott’s excited about this first step. He said,

We expect to see some real results quickly. I’m looking forward to seeing your take on your blog, and like I said, I will be watching for your readers comments and hopefully some of them will look into creating a similar news section on their own sites. It’s a big project at startup, but one that is fairly simple to maintain and offers tremendous value to community members.

After talking with Scott about this I had a few thoughts:

• it’s going to provide a lot of value to the readers
• it’s a great reason to research who your extended community is & network with them
• my suggestion is to pull content from inside the community and also put that on the ‘news page’. Then it will direct readers into the community too.
• creating this news page has the potential to establish FohBoh has a leader & in the niche online – aggregating has that powerful effect
• adding a voting component would add the ability for readers to choose their favorite content

Not too long ago someone had expressed concern about offering inks that take your readers away. This plan will do that initially, but it’s a good example of the big picture in that you want to establish relationships & awareness of your community. One they start linking back to your community, traffic will be going in both directions.

Check out the page here. What are your thoughts?

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Building a community is exciting. You start with a fresh new platform and invite your supporters. The community grows to a certain point then plateaus. What to do then?

Scott Hammond is a frequent commenter on my blog & he offered to share the work that his company Nattergalen is doing. He hopes that it will give you ideas for your own community building practice.

Some quick facts on Nattergalen. They offer community moderation services. It’s a white label service so their work isn’t easily attributed to them. Scott & Marguerite from Nattergalen are supportive of my work. Scott put the following comment in a

Facebook group:

I can’t think of any places better to look than the blogs of Jeremiah Owyang (Web Strategy by Jeremiah), Connie Benson (Community Strategist), Jake McKee (The Community Guy), and Dion Hinchcliffe (Enterprise Web 2.0).
These blogs are so informative and insightful that my company, Nattergalen, a community management outsourcer, uses them as training tools and reading them is considered tacitly obligatory by our employees.

Finally, as a disclaimer: Nattergalen’s client has agreed to allow me to report on the benchmarks and progress of Nattegalen’s strategy & implementation. I appreciate Scott’s willingness to share their work because if you’ve worked in community you know that decisions are based on experience, but there are no guarantees that they will work.

The Community:

FohBoh.com is for professionals working in the restaurant industry meaning:

• owner/operators or managers of restaurants
• people who work for companies that supply restaurants
• manufacture restaurant equipment
• run franchise chains, etc.

The membership focus is very much B2B for these professionals, and the site is an independant property. FohBoh is an independent startup, not a site run by a brick and mortar company. (FohBoh stands for Front of House, Back of House meaning the dining area & the kitchen area – both important places in a restaurant).

Basic Facts:

• FohBoh opened at beginning of 2008 & has had steady growth.
• Membership is around 10,000 to date
• Stat’s plateaued after the fist 6 month wave, namely uniques and total page views
  • So members aren’t actively involved
  • And they aren’t returning to generate new activity

The Plan:

The initial plan consists of 3 main initiatives;

1. To set up a FohBoh news section on the site with links to relevant e-zines and bloggers
2. To set up weekly moderated chats with high level restaurant industry insiders talking about topics relevant to restaurant operations.
3. To help restaurant operators set up private groups in FohBoh, sort of like company intranet style social networks.

And there is a fourth section of our plan: to transition FohBoh from a static property to a broader based community, with the FohBoh site as the anchor point for a greater web presence, connected to multiple properties by linking to them (as in the FohBoh news section) or by making FohBoh information portable, for instance by turning the weekly moderated chat windows into transportable widgets members can put on their own blogs or social networking homepages.

The next post will outline the FohBoh news section. I would like you to join in this case study & make it interactive. Take a look at the site & offer suggestions that you have for increasing membership & activity.