Kinaxis Corp uses comedy on YouTube to Improve Supply Chain Management

cbaccard    February 19, 2012

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
If you have concerns as to the accuracy of anything posted on this site please send your concerns to Peter Carr, Programme Director, Social Media for Business Performance

One thought on “Kinaxis Corp uses comedy on YouTube to Improve Supply Chain Management”

  1. Lauren Bossers

    Thanks so much for featuring Kinaxis. As the social media manager for the company, I’d like to provide a few updates to this information, which is about 18 months old.

    We now have nearly 6,000 members on the Supply Chain Expert Community, which was launched in August 2009: https://community.kinaxis.com/

    We have become very active on Twitter, and have made a great many important contacts there (some of whom have gone on to blog for the aforementioned community). We have nearly 3,000 Twitter followers, and have published nearly 3,000 tweets, which have driven significant traffic to our websites and social media properties.

    In the past year and a half, we’ve also added quite a few videos to our “Just for Laughs” section of the Supply Chain Expert Community: https://community.kinaxis.com/community/supply_chain_entertainment/

    Our use of “supply chain comedy” represents a unique differentiator for us in our industry, and brings in many new and repeat visitors.

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