Labcast: Can Social Media Help You Go Public?

By now, the potential brand marketing benefits of social media have been well documented. But according to Tom Johansmeyer, Group Marketing Director with The Cross Border Group, social media and content marketing can actually help with your IPO roadshow as well.

In this episode of Labcast, Tom chats about his new site, InsideIPO.com, and how companies can use content and social media data when the time is right to go public.

Can Social Media Help You Go Public?

For more from Tom, check out our previous podcast on the ROI of social media marketing and follow him on Twitter @tjohansmeyer.

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Brendan Cournoyer: Hello again, everyone, and welcome to this episode of Labcast. I’m Brendan Cournoyer, and today we’re joined once again by Tom Johansmeyer, Group Marketing Director at Cross Border, an international financial publisher and events organizer.

Tom, how are you doing?

Tom Johansmeyer: Doing well. Yourself?

Brendan: I’m doing pretty good. So, today we’re going to talk a little bit about IPOs, the IPO market. Now I understand you just recently launched a site, InsideIPO.com. Is that correct?

Tom: That is correct.

Brendan: And what can you tell us a little about that site, from I guess from a marketer’s perspective, a business perspective, and from our audience being startup and expansion-stage technology companies?

Tom: Part of what we’re looking to do is create a central resource for understanding and monitoring and tracking the IPO market, because right now bits and pieces of it are in different place. You’ve got VentureBeat, which cover venture capital. You’ve got the various news outlet that will talk about who’s pricing, and they will write about the market conditions and broad trends. But for expansion stage and late stage, there’s nowhere really to go for more information. So what we’re doing is using basic IPO news as a starting point, and then slowly we’re starting to layer in thought or insight pieces from investors relations agencies, stock exchanges, designated market makers, who can provide more insight into how the process happens.

It’s interesting, I ran into a video with “On All Things D” with LinkedIn CEO Reid Hoffman. It’s funny, he was saying that he was still learning about important parts of the IPO process the day of. He mentioned something about learning what a market maker was, and if you are listed on the New York Stock Exchange, the market maker plays a pretty important role.

Brendan: So speaking of videos too, you been in some videos as well for us on OpenView Labs, and you did one video in a series on corporate blogging and social media about how it can help in regards to kind of testing out the IPO market and seeing what is going on. What are some ways that social media can be used to sort of gain that IPO intelligence and kind of see who’s looking at you?

Tom: Glad you ask that, because it’s pretty interesting. You hear most people talk about social media in a corporate context, be it marketing or customer support. There’s so much value put on listening to the market. But usually that’s stuck to monitoring your brand or your customers, listening to what people are saying about you, listening to how they are using your products, listening to what problems they are having, or what unprompted testimonials they are offering.

What it misses though is probably the most important way to listen to your market, and that’s the click stream, going into Google Analytics and seeing which blog posts people are clicking on, what companies they are coming from, how you can learn what interests them, by the different posts they’re are clicking on. As a marketer, as a customer support leader, this is valuable information.

It turns out it’s also valuable information if you are looking to take the big step towards going public, because be it your blog or your corporate website, people are clicking on different areas about your company, be it a department or a product page or a blog post. You can look at companies that are on your road show and get a sense of what they are really interested in by seeing what they are clicking on. That can help you prepare for those important investor meetings.

Brendan: Now what are some other ways, I guess, that you can use that information? Can you give us some more specific examples, as far as the information you can gain, not just from social media, but from your corporate blogging and content marketing strategies? What are some specific examples that you can use that information to really help you as you start to look towards going public with your company?

Tom: If you’re in a competitive market and you’ve got blog posts up about market conditions, if a potential investor who is on your road show list starts clicking around at stories about the competitive landscape or how you’re responding to market conditions with new products in order to get a leading edge, they might be looking for an indication that your product is a commodity or that is differentiated. You can take a look at different blog posts that speak to these areas, see who’s looking at them, and it gives you a sense of exactly what’s on that person’s mind.

Brendan: Well, it’s interesting the last time we talked, we talked a lot about the return on investment of social media marketing and content marketing. This seems like very much in that vein. Not the traditional sort of benefits that people would think from really investing in a content strategy or a social media marketing strategy. But just a different way of looking at the value that you can get from your business through some of these efforts, that I know, I’m sure that most people don’t really consider when they get started.

Tom: Absolutely. What’s interesting is these are probably easier and less expensive to pull off. When you think of traditional social media, marketing initiatives, something like a branded Facebook presence with some viral apps or trying to drive revenue via Twitter, you’re looking at some upfront investment, especially if you’re looking at an interactive Facebook environment, like an app. It’s to harvest customer information or drive sales. With something like Twitter or blogging, you’re looking at an incredible amount of soft dollar investment in content development and traffic and financial monitoring.

It’s not cheap and easy, and on top of that you’re still likely to have to invest in non-social media activities in order to get people to your social environment. You can’t build a Facebook app and expect people to show up and make it viral. That might happen in a few cases, but the reality is you’ve got to invest in marketing your social presence.

What’s interesting about something like a corporate blog for other purposes, in this case for watching pre-IPO road show activity, is that chances are people are going to be researching you. So you don’t have to invest in that outbound marketing effort to pull people into your social media presence. When you’re looking to make a move like that, you’ve already got an audience that’s pretty interested in you, when you’ve got your road shows set up.

So now, it’s a matter of looking at what they are looking at, how they are looking at it, and understanding the activity on your corporate blog, for example, in order to gain intelligence that can make you sound smarter, more in control, and more prepared when you’re talking to investors at those crucial moments.

Brendan: It’s a very interesting take, because I was at a content marketing conference recently, and there is a lot of talk about, obviously, the true value and where to find the true value and the different places that people can look. There is certainly an aspect of sort of creating this sort of social presence and content presence as a means of selling yourself. But when they speak about that it’s really in regards to selling yourself to build your brand or to inform your customer, your potential customers, to make it easier to sell them in that sort of perspective.

Really, this is the first time that I’ve really had a discussion with someone about selling yourself, really quite literally, through this content marketing and social media marketing efforts, putting yourself out there and getting this information and really grabbing some value out of that, that you can use to quite literally sell yourself and improve your business and help yourself go public with potential investors.

Tom: I’ve got to tell you, even as a marketer in a traditional marketing role where I’m out there engaging potential customers, strengthening the brand and trying to drive the transaction, I’ve always been heavily biased towards getting directly to the exchange of information or cash, that drives some real value in social media. So I always been inclined, for example, to push content out, rather than build a community.

I always been inclined to shut off comments, because I’d rather keep people email my sales force. For me, it’s always been a priority to look at blog analytics in order to see what potential or existing clients are coming to my corporate blog that I can then send to my sales force with a little bit of intel ahead of their next meeting.

As a B2B guy, I have to admit, it’s a lot easier. My friends in consumer marketing give me a hard time routinely, joking that I not only know all my clients but I know when their kids’ birthdays are. My market is of that size, and that’s where I’ve always been, either as a consultant in the big four or working in the re-insurance industry or where I’m now, in the investor relations space. I have not been dealing with markets that have tens of millions of people in them.

In the social media space, what’s pretty interesting is a smaller market allows you to gain much more intelligence that’s much more meaningful. If I were selling beer, I’d have tens of millions of people, and if I opened up Google analytics, I would have no idea what any one of those visitor records truly means in terms of completing a sale. Obviously, I would never be able to go through a market of 10 million one by one. But that’s in an attempt to drive a $10 or a $12 purchase of six pack of beer.

In the environments I have worked in the past ten years or so now, it’s been a lot different, because we’re looking for a big ticket B2B sale on a long-term relationship. So gathering intelligence off a corporate blog becomes not just realistic but incredibly useful, and probably the best source of sales intelligence that doesn’t involve an account executive sitting face to face with a client.

Brendan: Now, before we wrap up, I did want to shift the focus just a little bit, if you didn’t mind. Seeing as you’ve been working on the new site, Inside IPO.com, have you picked up any tips, any ideas that you could pass along to our audience or technology companies? Things they really need to know or should know, as they’re start to shift their focus towards the IPO market?

Tom: Absolutely. As you shifting your mind towards go public, I’d say the first thing you should think about is whether you really want to go public. Think about what you want to accomplish. Are you looking for more capital to fuel growth? Are you looking for an exit? Are you looking for the prestige and excitement?

The first step really is to decide, if you’re ready for an exit, and then what your best exit is, because sometimes the right merger or acquisition can be a lot better for a company and its investors than an IPO is.

Then, when looking to go public, I would say and this is something I’ve heard a lot about from the market makers exchanges and investors relations agencies all over the market, is don’t cut corners. Really look at each of those big decisions you have to make, weigh all the alternatives, and make smart, informed decisions, because they’re going to make a big difference down the road in terms of your share price, in terms of the nature of your investor constituency, the liquidity in your company’s stock. I mean these are big decisions, which means changing your mind later doesn’t come easily or inexpensively.

Brendan: Well, Tom, thanks very much. I appreciate you taking the time. Once again, the site is InsideIPO.com. People can also check you out on Twitter as well. Right?

Tom:  Absolutely. @TJohansmeyer.

Brendan: Excellent. Well, thanks very much, and hopefully we can do this again sometime soon.

Tom: Excellent. Thank you.