My corporate communications experience in Social Media

I have long been engaged in SMM, with the filing of Anton Popov . Since then, my friendship with social networks has been strong, I am pleased with all the tasks that have been set for me - I have learned a lot. Then he decided that he needed to compress his experience. I somehow sat down to write an article about SMM - and as I started - I could not stop, I set up such a grafomansky post. But I am sure that I said everything in the case. P.S. I think habrovchane will forgive me for telling about habr (I wrote this article not for habr, but in general for everyone).

What is SMM in B2B IT? By and large, this is another channel of communication companies with partners. The task of marketing in the affiliate business boils down to two things: a) making contacts - lead generation, b) supporting old connections. Another way to remind partners of their existence. Of course, the company used standard media tools: mailing, advertising layouts in the IT press, etc. But all these channels of communication were used mainly in the old manner. For example, in the affiliate list there was no built-in statistics, i.e. it was not visible: how many open letters, how many got into spam, etc., i.e. regarding mailing, it was completely incomprehensible - what partners like and what they don't like. What letters they read, and what they send to the basket.
')
It's clear that these are not sales. This indirectly contributes to sales. I do not sell anything, those guys sell that every day in battle - that's why everything is for them. Those. if you want a review, please; if you want a webinar, let's do it; if you want to shoot a video, we'll take it off. But first things first.
My main task is to remind partners about the MUK company and to generate high-quality content. It was necessary to find high-quality informational occasions. Usually, the old approach is only one infoprovod - we are the best company, we have been on the market for so many years and so on. Obviously, no one except the company itself is interested. What matters is what the company brings to the market? The company shows and keeps the brand in competence. But you will not just talk like that and boast about yourself, for this you need a reason - this is work experience - a very good information occasion.

It all started with the fact that the president of the company decided that he needed to keep up with the times, and that he needed to have such a position as a “social network manager”. Of course, few supported him, but then, after a year of my work, everyone on the board of the company realized that this was still necessary. This is another way for a company to say something to the world, partners, and my task is to follow what the company says and how it says. But at the same time, I was told that, say, you do not forget, we are a closed company, and all of us are only semi-official, “face moral”, official releases, no step left-right.

It was in such difficult conditions that I had to start from scratch unofficial communications in the company. I was assigned to lead several projects. Which included: e-books, the MUK training center, the MUK group of companies themselves - for the most part, project distribution, and box distribution. At that time, the company MUK still released its e-books ABC and Lbuk. In this direction there was a certain decline. I thought and thought, and wrote a review of the newly-built model of the reader ABC 618. And hung up the review, without anyone asserting it, without going through all the circles of hell with approvals and statements. After when 25 thousand people read the review in one weekend, no one even had any questions: do you need to write something in Habr. But if I went the standard way to happen? The review would have been castrated, removing all life from there, so that God forbid something someone did not understand, and, naturally, this review would have been tricky in Habré, and no one would have kept the corporate blog of the MUK in Habré.

We are gradually moving to the tool resources themselves.

Having got acquainted with Habr, we bought a corporate account on Habré and started blogging of the MUK. There was a question: where to get the content? After all, Habr is something like a specific Facebook. He has his own internal mechanism for screening out trash and material of dubious quality. Here the user has a cudgel, which he can hit back if you wrote nonsense. Voting for the post - if you wrote well, then your post is plus - your publication takes off to the skies. As was the case with the reader.

We began to write reviews and articles on complex software and hardware solutions. The optimal frequency of writing articles on Habr - 1 article per week. I did not have time for everything, so I had a lot of work to convince the authorities in such an initiative that the employees themselves would write articles for Habr. Prior to this, all the articles on Habr if someone wanted to write - everything was from under the stick. Well, it is clear that this could not lead to anything good. I convinced the management that writing an article is a lot of work, and it should be paid for. Now, if an employee writes an article for Habr - he gets a bonus, and if his article is gaining 100+ - he gets a double award.

Next, we determined that most of the Central Asian training center is in Habré. Therefore, we started doing promotion UTs of torments through Habr. I will give a recent example illustrating all the power and power of the Habr. I posted a free webinar ad in our Learning Center.

Literally 30 minutes later, Nikolai calls me, commer. Deer CA and says, - close, already 300 people have registered! What will I do with them ?! And I tell him, those who did not have time to get on the webinar, write that, they say, the number of places is limited, but we will send you a webinar recording (it’s free), but you already have 300 potential buyers. As a result, 500 people registered for the webinar within 24 hours.

Then we began to think how else to say about our training center. We shot a few video reports with reviews of the seminars TC. But if they just put it out like that, they will spit it with the words “advertisement”! I thought, I thought, and I thought up - I sat down and wrote a guide on how to make video reviews about IT seminars, well, and as an example, I, of course, cited those videos that we shot in TC. As a result, I received several thousand views of these videos that I needed so that they would be taken into indexing on YouTube. According to the results of watching videos. At the time of publication there was a surge of views, we completed the task: we advanced the topic ITIL-HP. Until now, the links are placed in the descriptions of these videos in the CA people come.

And now the work on the training center is also continuing. What is the subject to declare yourself to the training center: 1. All free seminars and presentations - shamelessly fast on the same habr - they love freebies everywhere. That's what you can not do in Habré - it is to post a commercial offer or a direct advertising message (they don’t like it anywhere) - for this they just zaminusyut and lowered the post far down where no one will see it. 2. We publish videos, excerpts of seminars and webinars.

A few words about Habré. Habr - is its own social network, such a pool of blogs on IT topics. This is a social network - the Russian-speaking IT community, which is read not only in the CIS, but also abroad. Scales of Habr are impressive: 15 million unique visitors per month, 1.5 million of them from Ukraine. Habr is read because it is popular because it has an internal screening mode for unique, and the best content. In regular blogs, what is the tool of exposure of the reader to the publication? Well, the maximum express your “fe” author in the comments. And then if you wrote nonsense - your article and you will be warned, and you will not soon (the system will not allow you) to be able to write something else. Those. the next time you think a lot of times before you say something. It was like in the Athens parliament there was such a rule: if you put forward a bill, and you don’t accept it, you are entitled to 50 blows with sticks (here we would have such a thing - how much less stupid laws !?) Because of such a rigid mechanism very high quality content selection. But if you get to the point - you take off all the cream of attention - as mentioned above, - 25 thousand readings per day is far from the limit. Another important point: Google likes to habr index - because there is a constant increase in unique content, within 1 hour after the publication of the article - it will be in search. For example, there are not very well-known telephony solutions in Ukraine for one vendor. With the brand manager, we wrote a series of reviews (specially written for HABR) and now, by the necessary key request, we get a dozen of our reviews from Habr.

Habr widgets

In Russian, these are banners that we can put in our blog. I haven’t yet checked about dynamic hyphae - most likely not. But for sure the banner can be hung static. Well, who among the managers wants, can hang up his banner: I only need a picture of the desired size and a link.

As for the distribution of the MUK, which I have already partially mentioned, then it took some time to determine where it was not necessary to go and what it wasn’t necessary to talk about.

The main thing: the practice has shown that all kinds of contacts, live magazines and Google-pluses are completely unnecessary. Who is our audience? Business people who go to Facebook often or not often. It is for their attention that we will fight. I came to the company when the peak of hobby for social networks began to subside. Therefore, it was necessary to concentrate on the main thing. We regularly conducted surveys and surveys among partners, and saw that the most popular with IT business audience is Habr, Facebook and Linkedin, and another slideshow with its own features - but about her a separate conversation below. Accordingly, we focused only on these social networks. In all the others, only RSS-news flows left instead of themselves, since these resources brought some kind of traffic. In the end, I made a bet only on these three social networks: facebook, linkedin and habr, and I also had twitter just in case. And he began to work with them.

Facebook is in the first place. What is the logic of publishing in social networks? And on Facebook in particular. Here there is a newsletter: we created an information service - we wrote a good review or article or shot a video, send a letter to the partners on our affiliate newsletter. But it is clear that it can work out differently: the person did not see, it wasn’t before that, the letter got into spam by chance, he thought to open it later, but forgot, etc. (especially when sending letters on which day, at what time, how to write headlines is a topic for a separate review). Then, we put a post on Facebook, where we tell that we wrote such a review about that. Sure, for facebook which format is best. There are 3 types of Facebook entries: brief notes - from several sentences, of different volume and content. The main inconvenience - they can not be edited (at the time of publication it was impossible - it is already possible).

The second version of Facebook entries - notes, Facebook notes is a separate application, with its functionality, until the recent release of Facebook, the notes looked very poor, large photos could not be put there, respectively, it was almost impossible to place a normal review with photos there, Facebook I reduced the photos to miniature sizes, and everything was also inconvenient as messages on the forum since the beginning of the Internet. Now the notes, their Facebook interface has been finished - they have become at least similar. But I usually use a verified format: thematic photo + eyeliner from 3-4 sentences + link to our review (usually on Habré). Why this format is better: the picture attracts attention, eyeliner picks up attention and leads to the desire to click on a full-fledged review, where the intrigue is revealed.

In total, what we get, the person saw our letter with the correct title opened / did not open it, then went to Facebook in the evening and saw a side advertisement with a review that he could not open in business mail. Thus, we created a good information center, brought it to our partner, and did the most important thing - we reminded our partner about ourselves. What is actually the task of the distributor - to be always on the hearing of partners, so that your partner does not forget about you. Also, a post about a new review appeared on Twitter and Linkeddin's tape for support.

Facebook has such an opportunity - to create target audiences. For example, you need your Facebook post to be shown only to certain people. To do this, a list of emails is uploaded to Facebook, Facebook keeps track of these people and shows a banner / message only to them (of course not for free). An example of creating such a target on Facebook:

This is an illustration of how you can correctly mention the vendor company in your post. If you write a post on Facebook. When typing the name put the dog, and select the desired link.

In this section, you can logically distribute lists of your contacts in Facebook. To your online communication was divided by areas. After all, there are topics and people, well, not intersecting. That's for this to ensure that everything does not fall into one pile into your tape for those people who do not need to see some kind of your message. Also with the help of these lists you can manage your tape so that there is no unnecessary spam.

A few words about Linkeddin

This is a huge business social network, especially she fell in love with our employees in our open spaces, especially for finding work.

What is there for corporate communications. You can keep a campaign card where you fill out a company profile, make out all the photos, videos and other media. In the company's card there is a tab “services and products” - there you write everything, or the main directions of what the company does. In addition, in each direction you can add a direction manager so that people immediately know who to write and on what matter.

Here is the page of the MUK company in Linkeddin:

Decrypt the page. Shows company employees in the social network, shows what connections (through whom and how) you are connected with the company.
Above it is shown that 614 people are tracking the company. Accordingly, if you share the update on behalf of the company, this update will appear in the tape of all 614 people (this includes both employees and non-employees of the company - in this case, partners).

Tab "services and products" of the company MUK

What can be done in this contribution? Statistics is shown at the bottom of each item (it is visible only to the admins of the pages). On the right, you can add some kind of promotional video about the company. In this case, a video from YouTube is hanging (they pull up without problems) of the video report on the partner event MUK-November 2007. At the very beginning of the “products and services” you can hang up to 3 promo banners - you can create your own audience for each banner (more on that later) . Recommendation: select no more than 10 products and services of your company, since if you add them more than 10, they will go to 2 pages - and, accordingly, will not be visible.

Company Product Card

When we go into some service of the company, we see information about the service, we see who recommended this service to the company, and who can be contacted for this service (the block on the right).

How is Lincaddin now considered by the IT audience? - as a collection of resumes, IT headhunters often graze there, in search of the right candidate. Our employees look for work abroad, work at outsourcing, etc. Regarding Weights, Facebook vs Linkdeen. Linkdein did not become the main social-business resource in our space, most of our business contacts go through Facebook. Here our IT company has an account both on Facebook and Linkedin, it’s just a matter of taste where people come in more often.

In linkedin there is a banner ad on linked-emf www.linkedin.com/ads . There is a very good audience choice. You can choose: company, position, salary level and much more.

For example, here is the campaign of our exhibition MUK-Expo 2013:

When setting up a campaign there are a huge number of additional options for choosing an audience.

Excellent tools for accurate audience selection, for example:

In this case, there was a small audience, as there is an intersection on the position - there are not so many top managers, but if you need, for example, all IT employees of Privatbank, you can easily select them into a separate central office and only show them your advertisements.

Everything is good with the selection of the audience, but what's bad is the advertising is very expensive, they now included the price for the impressions, and earlier the auction for clicks-shows started from 2 dollars per click. For Western IT companies this is not much, for ours it is expensive. Lynkeddin even started a Russian-speaking department for expansion in the corporate segment in the CIS, but something will come out of it or not - it is not clear yet. Once again, many are discouraged by the cost of advertising.

Slideshare

This is a great resource for downloading presentations. Very common in the west.
What tools are there and how can it be used in our conditions.
There are 2 types of accounts: free and paid. Free gives limited functionality only on loading presentations. But the paid service option is very interesting. He is not expensive - 20 dollars. per month.

What does he give? The most important thing is the collection of leads. T.N. lead generation. For example, you upload a presentation, the user sees the slides, but does not hear your voice, where you comment on the information on the slides. Slides in this case play the role of the scheme / summary of the performance. And you can talk to a person with pop-up windows exactly where most likely they will inevitably have questions: do you tell the viewer of your presentation online: colleague, do you want to know more about this? Please leave your email and I will answer all your questions! Those. the point of this presentation is to reach out to personal contact - thus the task of partner communications will be completed.

In the slideshow, you can put an audio track under your slides - here is a very convenient recording panel, or you can immediately read the presentation, record the voice, and scroll through the slides in the right places. You can also upload a video from YouTube as a presentation.

It is easy to use a slideshow as a platform for webinars - you can add only certain listeners, for / share any webinars / presentations / videos, etc. Well, the standard functionality for sharing and re-embedding any updates in social networks is also present.

In addition to lead generation, you need to say that there is a tick in the settings for each presentation - to allow the presentation to be downloaded, and if a person wants to download, they will be asked for a mail, and this email will be sent to you, as the author of the presentation, say such and such, interested in your prezoy - and it makes sense to talk with him.

Of course, this resource is more popular in the west. He works with us in conjunction with other social resources, facebook, linkeddin (by the way, likeddine is fully integrated with the slideshow, and if integrated into your profile, a separate page with all your presentations will appear in linkedin). Slideshow presentations can easily be embedded in articles on the browser.

Here is an example of such integration. It was necessary that our presentation got a lot of views, and thus became popular not only among partners already familiar, but also told about the company to other potential partners. We built these presentations on switches in a post on Habré - in 2 days there are more than 40,000 views.

Pay attention to the views of the presentations

In dogonku about Habré

I talked with many PR-managers of IT companies, asked about habr, they said that yes, they know well about habr, but they are stopped by the fact that readers have weapons, and they can very well ride through the image of the company. Well, firstly, you need to look for high-quality informational directories, and in spite of any image, if a company speaks out on business, and says useful things, then this is a big plus for it in karma, not only in Habré. And secondly, I set up an experiment, read Habr, commented, wrote, something was successful, something was unsuccessful, and after a while I was able to write to Habr about anything: about why to write to Habr, about that how to rent an apartment correctly - everything went very well, no one thought of anything. For this reason, that Habr has long been from an IT resource, has become a good resource on PR, design, advertising, marketing, and many other useful things in work, life and life, things the administration has begun to cut such posts. But again, the fact that it is impossible for a mere mortal can be a company on a corporate blog, because a habrovan does not pay Habra, but a company does, so the company may publish some nonsense, but you will understand everything in the first comment. Yes, the audience Habr picky, but if you try for it, it will be very grateful. For example, we published a review of the KUB telecommunication cabinets, which are being made in Ukraine, an article without any agreements reprinted by many Ukrainian online media.

Screen publication of cabinets:

Now you can look at the MUK company profile on Habré: habrahabr.ru/company/muk/profile , you will not see a transcendental rating there, and thousands of subscribers. (Yes, now the blog is turned off, since we are preparing a different format for the presence in Habré - what is the right time for everything). We don’t compare us with the Yandex rating, but I’m sure that for one blog on Yandex, it’s not a small amount.We do not have a client business - we do not need a mass scale, we need less and better. Habr in this case performs a dual mission - it was chosen as a platform for publishing some informational presentations and reviews from the company - because on the one hand: it is a public place, an IT forum, where it’s not a shame to say something even to such a respected company a giant like Google, i.e. everyone will see you, on the other hand, we should not long and tediously promote such a personal blog on our site. Here only high-quality work with affiliate mailing is turned on and that’s it, Habr will also raise the material, and the expensive advertising itself isn’t necessary for the material itself. Thus, the scheme emerges as follows: we publish our materials in a public place, and through the newsletter we bring partners there, making high-quality information channels for them. If at the publication of reviews,Someone else will read them, and will be interested - our partner-client channel has the opportunity to expand.

Youtube

Since I was tasked with the production and positioning of video content, the very first first question was: YouTube or Vimeo that is the question? Two different video hosting sites are differently sharpened, for different video content. In those days, Youtube has not yet finished playing video in HD. But due to the prevalence and penetration, the choice fell on YouTube, Vimeo - this is more for connoisseurs.

So, what have we started to post on YouTube?
- Video reports after events,
- reviews of product solutions that we want to tell our partners,
- seminars, webinars, live broadcasts, lectures
- about products and solutions that we sell
— , , , , .

? , , , . -, , : , …

, , 100-200 , 2000 .

: , - , . , -, . : , , : , , , ?..

, , .. — , , - . , .

: — 2 , . : , , , .. . . . :

: www.youtube.com/editor . , , , , - . — , (. ), .

When you choose music for a video in YouTube, select music that is free from copyright, so-called. free copyright music, in this case you will not get on the copyright infringement. Youtube faithfully observes copyright rights, so it’s better not to joke with this - banned the account to hell. But if it’s usually in the “Copyright” section of the control panel, then you don’t need to be scared either, I had cases of eclaimes, this is all solvable, usually even correspondence with the copyright holder was enough that they did not mind. If it happens that Linkin Park is very suitable for your video, then of course, do not take the original track, take the cover version - this will not be a violation of copyright. Even as a way out, there can be a minus one - music without a voice, i.e. A unique human voice is the carrier of originality, and if not,then you can say that the guys I know the same thing in the garage played ...

It is also possible in YouTube to organize live broadcasts of any events: from seminars to webinars. This can be used if there is a topic that needs to be popularized / promoted to the masses. Or, if the topic needs to be revealed to a limited number of people. Closed topics can only be accessed by those who have a link. For example, we want only partners to see a certain broadcast - the link is given only to them. You can use this opportunity yourself, as well as offer it to vendors.

Here is another example of affiliate communication. One of our partners sends out a paper version of his calendar to all his partners and distributor. Yes, one can argue about the nude aspects. But you need to take into account a few points: a) the main audience of partner companies is men, b) memorability is 100%. Do you think these calendars are thrown away? As if not so.They are sacredly kept and hung in a row by year: 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014. And here they do as I have already said: the idea of integration. Not only was the calendar filmed, printed, sent out. Another site was created with the service-calendar.com calendar , the Facebook page of www.facebook.com/ServiceKalendar - where they post videos with a separate girl Miss February, March, etc. every month. - The excitement is colossal.

Habrarebad

For the first time I went to a habra meet, because I really wanted to write something more actively on the habr, but because of the toothy and angry audience, I was naturally afraid. I talked with already experienced habrovchanami, and with ordinary readers of Habr. And he pestered everyone with a question - what and how to write in a habr. And I found out the following: even eminent habrovans, with transcendental karma, are welcome if they are sent articles for review - a la suits / does not suit habr. I made some acquaintances and sent them articles for reviews - their advice helped me a lot - thanks for that.
Then, the chief called me and asked me about these habrahstrends, I told him, and offered MUK to become a technical partner of habrahstrips. As a result, we got from habrakstrech:

) - , .

) -, .. - , , -

)

“ ”. , , : -? , ( ), . — , — .

, — , . , “” , . “ ” — , - . , : ) 100 -, ) , , , ) . , , , .