Texas Instruments E2E Community Blows Open the Case for B2B Social Media Investing

19 Dec 2009

Texas Instruments E2E social community is a brilliant success story

Devashish Saxena of Texas Instruments marketing team is something of a subversive—he and team and partners are subverting the traditional high technology marketing process.

Saxena led the development of the highly successful E2E community that Texas Instruments sponsors. This community is more than a year old and shows off some of the incredible possibilities of how B2B businesses will succeed at social media—and I believe show greater true return on investment than most B2C efforts.

To tell the story of E2E it’s first helpful to know that Texas Instruments is not a calculator company—not much anyway. This $32 billion company embeds its processor chips in a huge array of products—Blackberries, iPhones, microwave ovens, washers, dryers, automobiles, and on and on.

E2E is a community of about 10,000 engineers who communicate and comment on a wide range of subjects related to chips—the core of what Texas Instruments produces. There are tens of thousands of different chips and millions of ways to use them. E2E hosts discussions and puts client engineers in touch with TI engineers who are experts on how to use these chips.

Texas Instruments knew that as part of the marketing and sales process, many of the engineers in their client’s companies were communicating 1-to-1 with peer engineers inside TI, asking questions and asking for help with developing new products using TI chips. The communication was largely e-mail based, and occasionally someone would pick up a phone or even make a personal visit.

The brilliance of the E2E community is that it took this huge number of client engineers and moved their questions and dialogue with TI engineers into this community. Not only does this get more brains contributing ideas, and not only does it build the TI brand in the minds of those client engineers, but—here’s the true genius: instead of answering a question once, the answer gets indexed by the search engines and 100 engineers can find the answer when they begin their research.

There’s an exponential power to every answer. And when an engineer finds the answer on Google, it’s 10 times more effective than any ad could be because it deals with the specific issue that specific engineer is searching for, and because it comes from Google or Bing it carries an authenticity no ad could buy.

While a community of 10,000 may not seem like much, think of them instead as a massive high quality link generation system that is building millions upon millions of links about TI engineering across the Internet.

Devashish Saxena

Saxena shared this success story at this week’s Supergenius conference in Chicago, hosted by Gas Pedal. These gatherings are among my favorites (Blogwell is another series of conferences they sponsor) because they feature clients talking about their own case studies. Couple that with visits from marketing stars like John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing, and it was more than worth an extra day on the road and $750 to attend.

Saxena talked about another amazing aspect to the E2E success story, which had to do with prototyping and chip samples. When an engineer from a potential client begins work on a new product idea, one of the big design challenges is to build a working prototype of the product. Typically the engineer will request a “chip sample” from a company like Texas Instruments—or Intel or AMD or any other number of possible vendor/partners. The chip sample is sent to the engineer, offering a terrific opportunity to engage that engineer in a sales dialogue—“what problem are you trying to solve?” “how can we help support?” “Is there any other research we could provide?” and so on.

Saxena and his team discovered after a year that client engineers who registered on E2E were six times as likely to ask for a chip sample, and twice as likely among all who asked for samples to go ahead with TI on product development. That’s 12 times the return on investment in other channels of creating chip sample demand.

I asked Saxena afterwards if his boss, the head of marketing for TI John Szczsponik, was able to engage his peers in sales and even product development in integrating the discussions on E2E into the whole companies efforts.

“Absolutely that’s where we’re going and need to go in the future,” said Saxena, though he confessed, “We need to go slowly to build success. If we brought this to all the groups in the company now we’d have a hundred cooks in the kitchen when we need to be careful and understand how to make this authentic and helpful for the customer.”

So if you were in the same situation and Saxena and Texas Instruments and you had to think through where your marketing dollars went, how much more would you spend on a community like E2E than say, advertising in a computer magazine?

There’s an even bigger win coming for TI and the E2E community and that’s when this communications community is fully integrated into not only marketing but further down the transactional process into sales and then finally into product design and business strategy. That day is coming soon, and I think it will come in high profit niche B2B markets before it’s a mass success for B2C retailers.

The profits are there, and as technology companies constantly fight commoditization, a community like E2E is a piece of the best long-term strategy for leadership.