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From Netvibes to Facebook, Oracle Cracks Code for Successful B2B Social Marketing
Oracle has recently completed a rapid expansion of its own portfolio of social marketing tools to enhance its own campaigns and to demonstrate the potential power of B2B social marketing tools.
Moving beyond its presence in blogs and on Twitter, the Oracle CRM team is now actively harnessing a range of Web 2.0 technologies, including Netvibes, Delicious, YouTube, and Facebook.
"We're showing how these social tools can be used as living, breathing forms of content and interaction," says Ken Pulverman, senior director of CRM product marketing. "At the same time, we are arming our team with new assets to surround their sales and marketing efforts."
For example, the Oracle CRM team harnessed social bookmarking site Delicious.com to create an easily accessible library of almost 50 recent links to articles and blog posts.
Now, Oracle salespeople can point prospects and customers to a large volume of third-party content that validates both individual products and overall strategic direction, explains Pulverman.
Low Impact, High Yield
Concerned that it will require a significant investment, many companies have been slow to embrace social marketing. But according to Pulverman, the Oracle CRM team has achieved its objectives without adding any headcount.
"By leveraging automation and new productivity tools, we have been able to contain our social marketing efforts to a small part of people’s everyday jobs," says Pulverman.
The CRM team estimates that the ongoing care of these channels will consume less than 5 percent of their efforts. Yet the efforts are already yielding significant results.
During a small product launch in April, for example, the Oracle CRM team posted a video to YouTube, embedded the video in an Oracle CRM blog, and tweeted about the new asset. The result: nearly 2,300 views to date.
"This is a really remarkable response, especially for a niche product," says Pulverman.
Transforming Product Marketing
According to Divya Malik, senior principal CRM product marketing manager, social marketing tools are transforming the job of product marketers.
"You get immediate feedback," explains Malik. "You can see what is catching people's attention—and do more of it."
"I think the logical next phase will be to work with corporate marketing to embed the traditional lead-generation methods directly into social properties to help improve response rates," adds Pulverman.
Check out Oracle’s social marketing campaign at twitter.com/OracleCRM.
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