Vision from the Top 2013: Lou Guercia, Scribe Software
Is your company integrating social media into your business development and/or business-to-business communications?
At Scribe we have embraced social media for both business development and business-to-business communications and so far we are pleased with the results. We started slowly, learning how the different channels could impact our business and help us initiate new relationships and we’ve expanded from there. With presence on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Slideshare, Vimeo and YouTube, we’ve seen our brand recognition increase, we’ve established relationships with over 200+ influencers and we’ve initiated a significant number of new partnership opportunities.
For business development we use social media to identify technology influencers as well as possible strategic partners for our cloud-based integration platform, Scribe Online, and engage them in conversations. We monitor their blog coverage, Twitter and LinkedIn posts and we actively comment on them as well as share relevant posts with our followers. This has led to a number of meetings and new relationships for Scribe based on the exchange of ideas through social media.
In addition, we actively use social media for industry events, such as SIIA’s All About the Cloud, Microsoft Convergence and Salesforce Dreamforce. We monitor conference chatter before, during and after events to identify possible business development contacts, schedule meetings and engage in partnership discussions. It allows our team to engage in real time onsite with people that we otherwise may not have connected with at the event. Additionally, it allows us to share what is going on at the event with those unable to attend in person, often generating follow on opportunities. Social media at events has enabled us to broaden our reach and provided an opportunity for us to identify partners that are attempting to solve similar business problems.
We also ask our executives to contribute articles and industry points of view to relevant industry resources such as CustomerThink.com. In those articles we not only share industry relevant topics but we also acknowledge our partners, share benefits and call out their successes. For example, Peter Chase, EVP Business Development, and I have shared a number of blogs on CustomerThink including posts about the Importance of Making Integration Easy, SMB Integration Trends and how our partner Harvest Solutions helps customers achieve business success through integration. These posts educate but they also create the foundation for discussion among people with similar challenges and opportunities.
Social media is not just for business development, we have a number of initiatives around social media that impact our business-to-business communications as well. We actively use LinkedIn and Twitter user groups and channels to engage business analysts and IT professionals using the Scribe platform for integration. These groups generate conversation around solving business problems, opportunities for integration and resolving implementation challenges.
Our team provides integration insights and relevant industry information through our blogs – Tips & Tricks and CRM Trends and our industry reports, like our State of Data Integration, which are available on social channels such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Slideshare. We create industry relevant videos and make them available on Vimeo and YouTube. Through the exchange of information and ideas on social media channels, people are able to self-select in to the topics and conversations that interest them, allowing us to provide more relevant and targeted communications to them.
Social media has become an integral part of how Scribe communicates with the market, engages with influencers and builds relationships with partners. We, like many others, are now integrating that information with our overall customer data infrastructure to help us better respond to customer, partner and influencer needs in real time.
This interview was published in SIIA's Vision from the Top, a Software Division publication released at All About the Cloud 2013.