Is demand generation the clone army that can’t-hit-the-broadside-of-a-bantha when it comes to social media? That’s the question we tackle on this week’s Geek Whisperers. Demand Generation, in Enterprise-speak, is the practice of drumming up potential business — some of the cruder ways are scanning your badge at a conference or having you trade some personal information for access to a white paper. When bolted on to your social media strategy without judgment, demand gen can really make your social feeds very user-unfriendly.
Some of the links we talked about this week:
- Pixie Dust & The Mountain of Mediocrity from Kathy Sierra from whence we got the quote: “Just make people better at something they want to be better at.” Kathy is @SeriousPony on Twitter and I can’t recommend her work enough.
- Project VRM (See also Wikipedia on Vendor Relationship Management) from Doc Searls.
- Forrester Customer Life Cycle: see, it’s a circle, not a funnel.
Next week, we managed to find a Demand Gen Sith Lord – stay tuned to see if demand gen is in fact the dark side of the force, or if it can be used humanely to foster relationships and drive mutual success in business!
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
For some reason during this podcast I kept thinking about my own company…a small partner in the midwest that does pretty good business (at least from an EMC perspective). We do have a specialized marketing person and the rest of us who are interested contribute at least on the social media end of marketing. Is this podcast for us? What I mean by that… does geo-location matter? We care about qualifying prospects, we use Salesforce, we’re on Twitter, but can we take the same concepts you guys use/talk about and put them into action effectively? I’m seriously asking. How many others out there are in the same boat? The midwest may be a smaller pond with less money…but I’d like to see the stats on that. My guess is we have a lot of huge customers we’re dealing with, but they may not respond to social media the same way as the coasts. Is it on us to encourage that, should we be using social media ideas from 5 years ago because we’re 5 years behind, or should we just go at it in a different way? This is obviously a huge generalization…but stereotypes exist for a reason…said the most liberal person in the midwest ever. I’m really just curious about your thoughts on location and customer size. Great podcast!
Great question Lauren, and something we start to address in Ep 30. Geo matters, as does company size. I think many of the ideas are applicable, with some tweaks. Was thinking today we need to do a show for practiioners, with tips about how to engage that would bypass company size.
In a small company there are fewer voices but less barriers, reverse in a large company. Chris Emery brings up the great point in Ep 30 that we’re all responsible for lead gen and customer sat, but the larger a company is, the greater the risk of disconnect.
So use the latest ideas, tweak them to your particular business and need. It’s all about solving problems, and my problems might not be your problems. 🙂
Thanks Amy…looking forward to the next episode!
[…] lined up Demand Gen as the blaster-toting troopers of the social media world, but this week they have a powerful apprentice in the form of our guest. Chris Emery joins your […]