Organization: Kinaxis Corp., Ottawa Canada
Industry: Supply Chain Management
Web Reference: http://www.business.com/b2bmarketing/b2b-social-media-case-study-kinaxis/
http://www.kinaxis.com/
YouTube.com >> Kinaxiscorporate
Description of how Social Media is used for Business Performance:
Kinaxis brings in supply chain experts with comedy
The company won an award for best integrated social media campaign from B2B Magazine, and, more important, Kinaxis says it has seen a 2.7x increase in traffic to its domain and a 3.2x increase in leads generated online since adding social media to its marketing mix.
Social media channels they support:
• The 21st Century Supply Chain blog – 21 contributors write nearly daily about everything from case studies to customers’ stories to industry events and trade shows
• The Supply Chain Expert Community – a year-old proprietary owned community for supply chain folks, with about 2,500 registered members, 75 percent of whom are prospects (not customers)
• An “expert bloggers” widget that aggregates the voices of supply chain experts and promotes them under the Kinaxis brand
• Extensive use of relevant LinkedIn Groups – Watson’s team identified 46 active supply chain groups in which they participate actively and monitor conversations
• Video interviews with Kinaxis in-house supply chain experts on YouTube
• Watson uses Twitter (@kinaxis) but confesses that she doesn’t quite get it yet. (Hint: If you’ve got Twitter advice for Kinaxis, sounds like Watson would be all ears.)
Lessons for Others:
• They went into it armed with data. Before starting most of the activities outlined above, Kinaxis hired Forrester Research to poll its market. Forrester interviewed some 250 supply chain management execs about how they connected with peers and found information online and concluded that Kinaxis would likely have a significant first-mover advantage in the supply chain space by building its own online community.
• They syndicate like crazy. Every piece of content they produce gets pushed out via all the other social media channels. Blog posts show up in the community, in the LinkedIn Groups in which they’re active, and on Twitter. The audio track from webinars and videos gets repurposed for podcasts. And more.
• The top dog is a believer. Watson said their CEO (she didn’t name names, but I’m assuming she means current CEO Douglas Colbeth) pushed her group to explore social media channels, even though there were few companies modeling social media success in B2B.
Submitted By: Cassandra Baccardax
To contact the author of this entry please email at: cbaccard@uwaterloo.ca
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