This week Neal Schaffer introduces you to Oktopost and the man behind it, CEO and Founder Daniel Kushner. Oktopost is another great social media management tool that specializes in B2B services, tracking relationships and helping you target your marketing. Theyâll soon be launching an employee advocacy program as well, helping companies simplify the advocacy process. Learn more about Oktopost, and where Daniel sees social media being used in the sales process in this weekâs episode.
Key Highlights
[00:41] Introduction to Podcast Guest, Daniel Kushner
[01:26] Difference Between B2bB, Social Media and Consumer-Facing Social Media
[03:03] Top 5 Things That B2B, and Social Media Marketers Should be Measuring
[05:28] The Problem With Attribution
[07:11] The Different Integrations Oktopost Currently Supports
[10:01] Daniel's Experience with Marketing Automation from their Customers
[11:43] Case Studies
[12:25] Daniel's Vision on the Market for the Next 6-1 Months and on their Product
[16:31] Final Thoughts
Notable Quotes
- In every company, the lead is something which is, is different. And maybe it's the same name, but every company has a different meaning of that name, right? The most basic is somebody leaving their information in the system, at minimum, the email, and that becomes a lead.
- Where do we get this lead from? I think one of these metrics is one of the hardest today for marketers to measure. Because it's a very vague question, where are my leads coming from?
- So it's very hard for the marketer exactly understand where the leads are coming from, although it's one of the most critical things that we need to measure, especially because it's not all linear. It's not all a single point of contact.
- I think we, if you're looking at the marketing funnel, social media is used in two places. One, it's used for traffic generation. So to the very top of the funnel, we might say that the first touch point, and it's also used in the middle of the funnel to engage with prospects and into an even customers to push them through the funnel itself.
- As a marketer, you can now see which social content is now not only generating traffic to third party websites, like Wall Street Journal, in this case, but also ending up as, as good lead generators on your website.
- We definitely very strongly recommend that even if you're using a platform like OB supposed to run your advocacy, that you find somebody who can help you run the program, if it's not something that you have the knowledge and expertise in house, because doing it right, because, you know, when you're testing tools, and you know, marketers, they're like testing new technology and testing things out. And if things fail, that's okay marketing, but we're we're we're taking our technology and our new ways of doing things and expanding this across different employees, they might be less tolerant to things going wrong, and things are working smoothly. So creating a very vigorous and thought out program is not less important than just picking the right technology.
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Okay. Welcome to maximize your social actionable advice on how your business can maximize your social media presence. Now, the host of maximize your social, social media author, speaker, consultant, founder of maximize social business through social media center of excellence, and the social tools Summit, Neal Schaffer. Everybody this is Neal Schaffer. And welcome to another episode of maximize your social. Today, I am very excited to present you have special guests, a guest that through the magic of technology is actually calling in from Israel. For this interview, his name is Daniel Kushner, and he is the CEO and founder of octopus. Daniel, welcome to the podcast.
Daniel Kushner:Thank you very much, Neal. It's a pleasure to be here. And I'm very excited. And thank you very much for the invitation. Well, thank
Neal Schaffer:you, Daniel. Daniel is going to be one of the amazing speakers that is going to be at the upcoming social tools summit in Boston and may 12. And I wanted to use his podcast really to begin the conversation that we're going to be continuing on that day. Now, Daniel, I am a user of octopus myself. And I know that a lot of the people who use octopus tend to be using it for a b2b perspective. So why don't we start with sort of the difference between, you know, b2b, social media and consumer facing social media? Yeah,
Daniel Kushner:I think that's a great place to start. Because then what what I have found in IT experience in running Worldwide Marketing teams for for b2b companies, is that social media has done very differently. And one of the main aspects is what are you measuring? Now when we look at the what a b2b marketer does, it's mostly around lead generation. That's like the number one objective that a b2b marketer has, and all the KPIs around this lead generation. So when you go into a tradeshow, for example, you know, how many business cards you collected? Or if you're running a webinar, you know, how many registrants and how many attendees? You know, even if you're doing online activities, like Google AdWords, so there are systems in place, that you can see how much you're spending and how many clicks and how many leads you're generating from these ads. But when it comes to social, what we see is that most of the metrics around social are very different. It's more around the consumer metrics, how many likes how many followers how many retweets and the comments. And if you can't correlate those metrics to the number of leads that you're generating from from social, for the b2b market, it's not really worth that much. So I think the main difference in b2b and b2c is what we're measuring, as the effectiveness of our social media activities.
Neal Schaffer:You know, it's a great point, because I think everybody in social media marketing is looking for ROI. And obviously, the ROI comes from the measurement. So I guess what you're saying is that b2b marketers have always been doing this. And therefore, if they're going to engage in social, they need to be able to measure right? So what are the different things that I mean, you mentioned some of them, but if you had to throw out, you know, the top five things that b2b Social media, marketers should be measuring. And in fact, their their tool or their dashboard should be helping to measure what would those few things be?
Daniel Kushner:So the top five, you know, one is definitely the leads, the number of leads I'm generating, in every company, the lead is something which is, is different. And maybe it's the same name, but every company has a different meaning of that name, right? The most basic is somebody leaving their information in the system, at minimum, the email, and that becomes a lead. The second is the quality of the lead. Because if you have 1000 leads, what does that mean if these 1000 leads are from, let's say, the UK, but my market is in is in the US? So it's the quality of the lead after they go through qualification? And then you know, every company they have different names, if it's marketing, qualified, leads, sales, qualified, lead, etc, we need to need the need to know the lead attribution. Okay, where do we get this lead from? I think one of this metric is one of the hardest today for marketers to measure. Because it's a very vague question, where are my leads coming from? So I've tried to give you an example just to show the complexity of the question. So let's say we're running a webinar. So I have a webinar landing page, and somebody registered to that webinar. So is that webinar, the source of the content that got my lead? Maybe? How did they hear about the webinar if they heard about the webinar from a tweet? Maybe the tweet is the lead attribution if they heard about the webinar from a blog post, maybe the blog post is an attribution. So it's very hard for the marketer exactly understand where the leads are coming from, although it's one of the most critical things that we need to measure, especially because it's not all linear. It's not all a single point of contact. You might tweet about a blog post, or on the blog post, you mentioned the webinar. So when from Need to block a webinar? Which one do I give credit for bringing in a specific lead. So although it's a very hard thing to measure, it's something which is extremely important. And what we're finding is that the most advanced or the more advanced marketers, they're using marketing automation tools like axon or Marketo, Eloqua, to try to understand the lead journey in the lead cycle, and how to attribute these content sources and the channels towards the towards the leads,
Neal Schaffer:or that was going to be another question I was going to ask you. So we're finding along the, you know, the customer journey that we have these multiple touchpoints. And you know, some of them may even be offline, right. And that's the problem with attribution. So what you're saying is that right now, the tools that are really focusing on providing more in depth analysis as to where that journey is taking place, are still at the marketing automation level, you don't see this functionality and specific social media tool per se right now. Correct.
Daniel Kushner:So I think we, if you're looking at the marketing funnel, social media is used in two places. One, it's, it's used for traffic generation. So to the very top of the funnel, we might say that the first touch point, and it's also used in the middle of the funnel to engage with prospects and into an even customers to push them through the funnel itself. So and because social doesn't live in a silo, but as we say, we have trade shows and webinars and blogs and other content sources and other marketing channels. The actual social media tools is not the honestly is not the correct place to be your lead source information, because not all leads are coming from social. But what we find that the social media is definitely an input. So other marketing platforms, where it should share the data with the marketers of the world with actions of the world to help get a bigger picture of the journey itself.
Neal Schaffer:So I guess this, this really leads into, you know, I know that your platform is very strong at integrating with other platforms like those that you just you just mentioned, right, and I and I guess that's one of the critical things about measurement is one tool alone, and social media can't do it alone. And you need to have those integration points. So tell the listeners about the different integrations that octopus currently supports.
Daniel Kushner:Yeah, with octopus, the integrations that we have with marketing automation is basically what we enable to do is every single time as a social interaction, if it's Sunday, clicks on one of your social links, or somebody fills out a form on your website, and they came from social media, we have that information, we know exactly what message, they're clicking on, who wrote the message, what social campaigner belongs to, and we feed that information into marketing automation. Now, the premise of this data is that within marketing automation, we're more data that you have around the leads, the better you can nurture those leads, and the better you can score those leads. So let me give you a couple of examples, what I what I mean about nurturing and scoring. So let's say for example, that I have inside my Oxford post different campaigns, and each campaign has social content, if it's a tweet or Facebook updates or LinkedIn updates, it each campaign has a different social content around a certain topic. So one campaign talks about ROI. And other campaign we'll talk about, let's see security. Now, when my audience is clicking on those social links, because this link went through the post, we know the exact campaign and the tweet came from the exact campaign, the LinkedIn page update came from. And this information is now fit into, into, let's say, for example, Marketo. So Marketo, your marketing automation platform is now aware, because of a social click of the interest of that person, just because that person clicked on a tweet that was in my ROI campaign, I can now assume that that person is interested in ROI. So when I come and program my multiple automation platform, let's say for example, to send the monthly newsletter, I can then do a diversion and say, Okay, if this lead, showed interest in ROI, because they clicked on my ROI tweets, my newsletter is going to be ROI tailored, if this person is interested in security, and I tailor my monthly newsletter around security. So now we're providing better context to our to our readers based on their interest that we learned from their social media activity. So in the end, we're closing the loop between what's happening on social and what we can do with this information and data inside the marketing automation platforms.
Neal Schaffer:So it sounds like I mean, from the way you describe that octopus is really extending the functionality of those marketing automation platforms, which weren't built for social into the realm of social right. I guess on the other hand, I'm curious as to maybe smaller businesses have never invested in marketing automation. And once they start seeing the ROI from using your platform, they want to go the other way and then add that marketing automation. Have you seen both of those types of customers? Your experience?
Daniel Kushner:Yeah, definitely. So for another from the smaller businesses that we sell to, they can use what we call our lead capture technology. So whatever webform they have on their website, if it's a static webform, if it's something that they wrote in PHP, or put on a WordPress, whatever, we can still capture the information of the person who filled out that that that form, the lifter email, the name of the company, if that person came from social, we can show the connection. And we show that data inside of auto post instead of inside the box automation platform. And just to kind of express the strength of that connection. We can even follow cases where let's say you tweet about an article that was in Wall Street Journal that mentioned your company name. So somebody comes along, they click on that tweet, they get the Wall Street Journal, they read the article, and they see the company name or the product name, and they do a Google search, they get your website, and they fill out a contact us form that feeds that information into your MailChimp. Because that person originated from the tweet, we can still do the connection. So as a marketer, you can now see which social content is now not only generating traffic to third party websites, like Wall Street Journal, in this case, but also ending up as, as good lead generators on your website.
Neal Schaffer:So clearly those especially in b2b industries that are still questioning the ROI of social, obviously haven't been using octopus. So that's the first step. I'm also curious, you know, and I do believe that, you know, even tools that are meant for b2b brands can be used for consumer facing brands. I'm wondering if, if you've had customers, and even b2b, these, you know, or even consumer facing brands have b2b aspects as well. Right? Do you have any, you know, case studies or experience working with consumer facing brands and how they've used your tool to achieve, you know, similar results in that different type of industry? Yeah, so
Daniel Kushner:because we market to the b2b area, the very vast majority of our customers are b2b, we do have large enterprises that have both b2c and b2b divisions, right companies like Panasonic, for example. But so the major use cases is using because of the way that we track social data, and more about the leads and integrations with multiple automation platforms, we tend to attract the b2b type companies more than b2c.
Neal Schaffer:Gotcha. Okay. Well, you know, we're near the end of our podcast, and is there anything else you want to share about, you know, your vision for your product, or the direction that you see the market going over the next six to 12 months that our listeners should be aware of?
Daniel Kushner:Yeah, well, one of the things that we've seen in the market, and this has been happening for many, many years also, since socials existed in the in the b2b area, is around advocacy. It's the dream of every company, especially the larger ones, to have their employees start sharing the social data. So if I manufacture hard drives, and we have this new, amazing technology to get gazillion geger and one hard drive, and maybe I want the employees to share that that information on social, but we haven't seen it take off, we don't see many b2b companies have large and successful advocacy programs. And then we started the market a bit. And what we found is that there are only a handful of companies that have dedicated products and software technologies to support these employee advocacy programs. And one of the major issues after speaking with our customers, is that they don't want to have a second product where they have to create an enter content for their employees to share. And then what occurred to us is that, hey, we have the b2b marketers creating social content within Octa post, why not use the same content and create a different platform that will basically distribute this already generated content to the employees and allow the employees to share the content onto their social profiles. So we're coming out now with a new product, called the employee advocacy board, which allows to do this exact thing and employees to share content has been created and approved by the corporate marketing. And the nice thing will the added bonus is because everything is now funneled through the octopus platform, if your employees are sharing content, and that content is getting clicks and leads will have all this information. So now your Salesforce your Marketo your axon. An octopus can show you the value of the employee advocacy program, not only how many shares they're doing and the outreach, but if you're generating leads in your business from that
Neal Schaffer:activity. Daniel, when do you plan to release that product?
Daniel Kushner:So the product has been released. It's version one, we're releasing a new version in the middle of April right in a week or two or just before the summit, we had some very interesting case studies. And of course, because it's a product that just started out, we have a very enriched and interesting roadmap that will be moving forward that will include gamification and very exciting things that we can add to the social board.
Neal Schaffer:That's great, Daniel, and, you know, well, for some of you, you may have heard it first here on the Maximizer social podcast, but it's really these conversations and getting to know more about the vision of each platform, that I think is the value that that I want to bring, not only with this podcast, but obviously with the social tools Summit. So you have as Daniel said, there are standalone advocacy platforms. And then you have a solution, like an octopus, which was built very well to do something that now is adding that advocacy functionality into it. And when it comes all the other benefits that the platform originally provided, such as those integrations, you know, being able to do the granular measurement, what have you. So there's many, many different approaches to the same problem, right. And you know, before investing in a tool, you really should be looking around at what's out there. And I'm really glad for those of you listening to hopefully get a little bit of a competitive advantage by understanding more about octopus and the direction. And the good news is, if you've been already using them, you know, adding that advocacy component is, is I'm assuming it'd be very easy and integrated throughout your dashboard. Correct, Daniel? Yeah, that's exactly correct. Great. Well, this concludes it. Any other one final last? Last statement? Daniel, before we sign off,
Daniel Kushner:once again, thank you very much for for having me. We're lucky, we're very excited to be attending the social Summit in May, you know, we're flying our team over from Israel. Right. You know, if anybody of your audience would like to meet us personally there, you know, we would love to set up meetings. And just one last tip for the advocacy. Because, you know, I think there's, there's a big difference between technology and and the program itself. Indeed, we we definitely very strongly recommend that even if you're using a platform like OB supposed to run your advocacy, that you find somebody who can help you run the program, if it's not something that you have the knowledge and expertise in house, because doing it right, because, you know, when you're testing tools, and you know, marketers, they're like testing new technology and testing things out. And if things fail, that's okay marketing, but we're we're we're taking our technology and our new ways of doing things and expanding this across different employees, they might be less tolerant to things going wrong, and things are working smoothly. So creating a very vigorous and thought out program is not less important than just picking the right technology.
Neal Schaffer:Well said, Daniel, thank you so much for being on the show, are really looking forward to meeting you in person at the social tools Summit. And I encourage those of you listening that plan on attending the social tool Summit, reach out to octopus reach out to Daniel schedule some time together, you know, the presentations and the speed dating where you get to see the demonstrations, the platforms are all going to be great, but it's also making those one to one connections, I think is really going to help your business. So this ends another episode of maximize your social wherever you are in the world. Make it a great social Day. Bye Bye, everybody. Thanks for listening to maximize your social. We appreciate all of your iTunes subscriptions, ratings and comments. If you would like to appear on the show or recommend content, please contact Neal Schaffer at Neal at maximize your social.com Please also make sure to check out Neil's new community this Social Media Center of Excellence at social media ce o e.com. As well as Neil's first social media event, this social tool Summit, which will be in Boston on May 12. And in the Bay Area this fall. Thanks again and make it a social day.