The Flywheel and the Lightning Strike

There seems to be a bit of schizophrenia in B2B marketing these days. The excitement and interest in social media, and all it can do, is palpable. However, the number of companies that are making significant hard dollar investments in social media as a marketing initiative is not as large as one might expect. By “significant” I mean investments on the level of the other major marketing programs such as search or event marketing, with teams creating great content, engaging with audiences and finding creative ways to add value to potential buyers.

Most B2B marketing teams appear to be experimenting, rather than heavily investing. Sure, they have a Twitter account, and may have put up a blog and even a Facebook fan page, but the level of investment falls far shy of the amounts we invest in Google search campaigns, trade shows or sponsorships. Why is this?

Investment Dynamics: The Flywheel and the Lightning Strike

The most significant challenge in making comparable investments is in the way that investments are made and pay off. With most typical marketing investments, a “lightning strike” pattern is what is seen. A big investment is made, and a big payoff is realized. We run a large campaign, attend a major show or increase our investment in search ad spending, and we see the results immediately.

However, with social media, investments follow a “flywheel” pattern. Over time a steady pattern of investments builds more of a “presence” in social media, a community of interested participants and relationships with key influencers. The building of this “asset” takes significant time and effort – often years – but once it is built it pays off tremendously in terms of awareness, interest and lead flow.

Budgets and Planning

The challenge is that we, as marketing organizations, do not plan this way. Our planning and budgeting cycles are driven by an underlying assumption of a “lightning strike” pattern. Thus, when looking at which investments will drive leads and revenue this quarter or next quarter, a significant investment in social media does not generally make the top of the list.

Other departments have found ways to model, value, and plan for investments that pay off in the long run, but not in a short-term budget. Today’s CMOs must tackle this budgeting and planning challenge if they are to correctly prioritize the marketing investments we must make between those with short-term, “lightning strike” patterns of investment and long-term, “flywheel” patterns such as social media.

(this article first appeared as a guest post on ZoomInfo's "Follow the Lead" blog)

Event Marketing and the Information Concierge Concept

I was down at IMS in Atlanta recently, spending time with a lot of very interesting and creative marketers. The interesting thing about marketing events for the marketing field is that you see many interesting new ideas experimented with.

One of the techniques that caught my eye this time came from Jamie Turner and the team at BKV Digital. Rather than share the usual “promotional” content that we all see at these events, BKV took a different approach. Similar to the Information Concierge concept we discussed a few weeks back, they dropped topic-specific mini-cards on the tables. Each mini-card was essentially the title of a catchy blog post, and guided people to a specific landing page on the BKV website.



The audience at most events are in the early stages of awareness and education. They are looking for insights, ideas, and great content. The best marketing content should find a way to be relevant to audiences at this stage of their buying process, and buy focusing on mini-cards, rather than sales pitches, BKV allowed their audience to passively discover the content that they would find interesting.

It’s a simple technique, but very much inline with how buyers buy. Worth keeping in your back-pocket as you think about how to drive engagement at events you attend.

The Flywheel Effect

I'm back to blogging after a rather spontaneous, two-week hiatus. My wife were expecting our daughter to arrive at the end of April, but were surprised and thrilled to welcome a happy and healthy Sejal Anya Woods, to the world on April 2nd, a full four weeks early.

As I return to the world of work, now two weeks later, I realized that Sejal's surprising arrival gave me an accidental test-bed for one of the interesting aspects of social media, the fly-wheel effect. Normally, I've been very consistently active in social media, contributing two posts a week to the Digital Body Language blog, tweeting about each post, joining discussions on LinkedIn, and in general working to build awareness for the blog and its topics.

This is "pushing the flywheel" in order to get more traffic to the blog, and as everyone involved in social media knows, you push a lot before you begin to see real results in terms of awareness, traffic, and interest. After almost 18 months, I'm happy to report that the Digital Body Language blog is doing very well, but that leads to an interesting question:

What happens if you stop pushing the flywheel for a while?

Unlike typical marketing campaigns that really only generate results when they are "active", social media investments have a momentum that lasts for a long time as the articles are read, shared, discovered, searched for, and linked to.

I looked at the analysis of blog traffic for the two weeks that I was inactive, I saw an interesting result. (Eloqua users, here's how to track your own blogs this way). The chart shows blog traffic over the past few months, and you can see fairly steady numbers in terms of total, new, and existing visitors. I've eyeballed a red line at the top of the graph to give you a rough, non-scientific trend for total visitors, and a purple line for new visitors.

In the last two weeks, with no new posts, no tweets (by me), no discussions, on forums or on LinkedIn, you can see a drop in traffic - but only by a little bit. Interestingly, while the total traffic drops off by about 30%, the new visitors traffic only drops off by 10%, showing that the awareness, links, and search rankings that the blog has built up over time are just as effective at driving new visitors.

Investments in social media tend to have this "flywheel effect" where each effort gets things spinning just a little faster, but a well spinning flywheel can keep going on its own momentum for quite some time.

The Next Transition in Communication

Over time, the way in which communication happens has gone through some very interesting transitions. Each of them resulted in profound changes in information flow, and with that, significant changes in the discipline of marketing. We’re about to see the evolution of a fifth form of communication, and it will have an equally interesting effect on our lives.

1. One-to-One

The oldest form of communication is the one-to-one model. Face to face interactions and conversations were the main way in which messages were communicated. While very interactive, this was not a very scalable model at all. However, because it was the only way of conveying messages, it found an audience that was not overwhelmed with communication, and was likely much more receptive to new information.

2. Broadcast

The modern marketing industry was born with the advent of mass broadcast communications. Radio, print, or television enabled messages to be mass communicated to broad audiences. This was a highly scalable, but entirely non-interactive, as it was a one-way communication and allowed no way for the listener to engage with the communicator. Also, as broadcast grew, it reduced the attention span of audiences by overwhelming them with too many communications.

3. Email

The next interesting evolution in communication was with the advent of email. I’m not talking about email marketing, however, as that is much more similar to a broadcast model. Interpersonal email, however, added a very interesting element with the “Reply All” function. Now, the audience members in a communication group could easily respond to a discussion, and do so in a way that created ad hoc, topical group discussions. However, these discussions were closed to outsiders. A person who was not in the discussion would not see the discussion happening and could not join the discussion without explicitly being included by an insider.

4. Social Media

Solving this discovery problem, of course, was social media. Now, with the discussions happening in an open format, anyone can detect, read, or join existing discussions. The speed with which these communications happen has been well documented, and discussions on a particular topic can quickly grow to involve and influence hundreds of thousands of people. However, social media creates huge volumes of communications, most of which are not of interest. Filtering through this noise is a daunting challenge, and whereas most social media can be filtered by keywords or brand names, this still tends to result in an overwhelming volume of content.

5. Conversation Discovery

So what's next? As the major search engines apply their computing and analysis horsepower to understanding who is talking to whom about what, we may be on the verge of a fifth major shift in how information is communicated. Passive conversation discovery, guided by the algorithms of Google and Bing and their analysis of vast amounts of social media data, may be the way we discover what conversations are happening that may be of interest. Much like Amazon’s book recommendation systems which looks at “people like us” and sees what they are interested in, Google and Bing may soon be able to accurately detect and show specific conversations that are most likely to be of interest to each person. This finally allows the interactivity and openness of social media while not having the overwhelming volume of unfiltered social


Each of these evolutions in communication has changed how we interact with each other, how we learn, and how we market. This coming fifth transition promises to be as disruptive as any before it.

What are you doing to be ready?



(this article first appeared as a guest post on SavvyB2B)