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Our Clients in the Center of Our Expert Network

Social Media bildet Basis für ein erfolgreiches B2B-Netzwerk

March 18 2020Pamela Buchwald

An expert network for everything relating to customers

Our passion is be as close to customers as possible and b2b social media provides our teams an unique  opportunity to do just that. 
We work on building a network of our experts around our customer.  And the reactions of both customers and our employees have been overwhelmingly positive. We see new connections being made, new deals being forged.

A community of experts is worth its weight in gold

Bubbles with people and mobile devices rise above big city skylines and are connected with lines.

Have you ever heard the saying that ‘your network is your gold?’  Or, have you by chance heard the old saying that ‘people buy from people?’  In the course of the last 18 months we have discovered just how true and important both of these sayings are! How valuable a community can be. We are leveraging the knowledge and skills we have, did you know that every year our people acquire 25 thousand certificates? There is so much knowledge!

Our experts work as a nexus of communities – they share their knowledge about Connectivity, Digitalization, Cloud & Infrastructure, Security and their customers from across the industries react and respond, making everybody smarter in the process. 

Do you want to see for yourself?

Check out some of our experts who are very active on social media, and follow or connect with them. By clicking on their names below, you will get directly to their LinkedIn profiles:

  • Dirk Backofen, former Head of Telekom Security; Chairman of the Board of Cyber Security Cluster Bonn e.V 
  • Catrin Braun, Senior Market Development Manager Smart Cities & Regions
  • Hermann Hänle, Marketing Manager Automotive; Connected Mobility and Digitalization for Automotive and Manufacturing

By enabling our team to grow their collective network, we made those conversations with clients more meaningful and measurably grew their number.

How did we do it?

Man stands in front of blackboard and writes social media on chart.

Our social media presence: We let our people to show their expertise and value they can provide. As organization we have supported our teams with tools and content that put them effortlessly in the spotlight. The support helped them to be seen as experts worth connecting to and having conversations with. We gave the team a complete program focused on sharing valuable content in the areas of Digitalization, Cloud & Infrastructure, Security and Connectivity.

The program had four pillars to it: Personal Branding (how to be recognized as an expert), Posting (what and when to share with your community), Engaging Online (how to cultivate the conversation) and of course Growing the Network. In today’s blog we are focusing on Growing the Network.

Grow your network: We maximized the reach of our communities

To effectively grow an online network, today’s professional needs to be aware of how important social media is. Just entering your new contacts into the CRM or your Outlook contacts misses the important social dynamics. We emphasized and found ways to ensure that our team would almost always enter a contact into LinkedIn and Xing when they first made contact. With this one simple action we watched the networks of our teams increase massively. 

But there is another way to expand the network – sharing interesting content. Our experts share every week between 3-5 interesting articles from their field of expertise.  And one positive result of increased activity was that content sharing bumped up their status online and gave them access to new people in the market. By intelligently using hashtags, for example, our team had a much wider reach that then translated into a bigger network.

Getting the most out of events

Four people in business attire converse at the bar table.

Finally, we tried to increase the value we were getting from events by using social media to make those events gold mines for opportunity.  We put on and go to many events each year. Our teams always attended, but they didn’t always get a chance to talk to the right person. This is an area where social media can really help them shine, we thought.  We trained them on what they needed to do before during and after the events to get the most connections and network growth from the conference. It had a transformational effect on them. We got glowing reviews on these trainings and we continue to see their online networks grow. Some of these tactics also apply or can be slightly adapted in the current times where many events are getting cancelled or postponed.

During the entire program, we closely measured all these efforts to understand the impact of the actions we applied – it helped us to tweak and evolve the program (e.g. adding more content clients are really interested in is really easy when we know the hard data about clicks and engagements). 

If you want to know more please reach out to me. We want to help your company digitize and win in the new market that is growingly digital and we are ready to share our expertise with you. 

About the author
IM-Buchwald-Pamela

Pamela Buchwald

Senior Expert Digital & Content, T-Systems International GmbH

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