Working out The Company’s social strategy requires a bit of… spycraft.
Your team needs a medley of expertise. Empathy. Analytics. And a bit of fearlessness, too.
Does your den of marketing spies have what it takes to gather the proper intel on your competition?
Find out in this clandestine clip from social media strategist Dorien Morin-van Dam’s presentation at B2B Forum 2024, or read the transcript below.
And once you’ve assembled your spy ring, assign the team a new task: infiltrate B2B Forum 2025, live in Boston this November 17-19. You’ll find all the necessary info in the brief here.
I’m going to show you some fictional spies with some different skills.
Now, here’s what I want you to do.
When I talk about these spies… if they have skills that you have, write ’em down.
You might not know that you have these skills, or you might not think that they’re really good for competitor analysis.
But when you’re doing strategy, you need all these different skills.
You need to be able to look at data, but you also need to be able to make decisions.
So we’re going to kind of come up with your own spy character. Who would you be? It’s kind of fun. At the end of the session, I will show you who I am as a spy.
So here are some of the fictional spies that you might or might not know.
Well, of course we all know James Bond.
Who is he? He’s a suave operator. One of the things that we know about James Bond, he’s charismatic, right? He could talk his way in and out of any situation.
He is a trusted expert.
You need somebody like that on your team. Why? He might be the liaison between your marketing team and your C-suite, or between your marketing team and your most difficult client.
Somebody like James Bond might also have some instinct and intuition to do some inferencing. When we get all this data, what does it mean? So he is the suave operator.
Another fictional spy that I want to highlight is Claire Bishop.
She’s an empathetic people person. She was in a novel. She has high ethics. You always need somebody on the team that says, “wait a minute, just because we can run this campaign, should we do this?”
There’s some ethical issues sometimes. “Do we really want to?” If this is you, if you are that people person, if you’re the empath, write that down.
Are you relatable? Are you approachable as a team member? Are you approachable as a marketer? Do you connect on a personal level with your teammates? Do you connect on a personal level with your clients? Are you a quick-thinking problem solver?
Write some of these attributes down, if that is you.
Jason Bourne. Who doesn’t know him?
Bold decisions. Agile and fearless. He is reactive, however, so if something happens, boom, he’s got the next move ready. He improvises without hesitation… He’s the agile improviser.
All the next one we have: Lizbeth Salander.
She’s also a spy from a book. Anybody read the books that Lizbeth Salander’s in? Oh my gosh, that was crazy.
Yeah, she is that Digital Ghost, right? She is the one that, if you need data, you go to that person on your team and go, “I need X, Y, Z.”
I have a daughter who’s a data analyst. That is not how my brain works. She’s 24 years old and she is into AI and she can do data, and I’m like, “mom needs this or that,” and she’s on it. So I love having her on my team and helping me get that data.
Okay, awesome.
So if you have any of these skills, write ’em down.
The last one is, every team needs a leader, right? They need somebody who can assess the risks. Is it worth it? Should we just go ahead and do it? Or maybe not. Hold back, or not. Global authority.
She is kind of M, the invisible leader.
So what do you think? Do you know yet what kind of analyst or what kind of spy you would be, or you will be, as you look at your competitors?
Kind of exciting, right?
So let’s get to the rest of the briefing. The targets that we’re going to look at are Zoom, Skype, Google Meet, WebEx, GoToWebinar, and FireFlies. Now of course, these are big ones. Lupe again, is a completely fictional company that doesn’t exist that I made up, but these companies do exist.
And for the purpose of today, I did pool data with Social Insider. It’s going to not be that easy to read. I just kind of want to show you what it looks like when you pull data and there’s so much data to be had and for you to understand some of the things you could be looking at that might be important to the brand that you represent.
We’re not going to be able to do all of it.
But I want to kind of walk you through it and if you have questions, this is available. All this data is available and I’m available for questions too. So we’re going to analyze it after we go through it. But just bear with me. I would’ve given you a data packet, but it wouldn’t do anything. We don’t have enough time. So let’s look at it.
All right, let’s do some spying here. It’s going to be about 10 minutes, maybe a little bit less even.
So in Social Insider, in the tool that I use to pull some of this data, you can pick your KPIs.
Does everybody have their KPI set for their business, their brand?
No.
Do you know how you should choose your KPIs?
No.
You should choose them based on your goals, right? Alright, I have another question. This is really basic guys.
Basic question:
As a marketer, do you know the business goal of the brand that you work for? You do? Raise your hand if you do. Okay, that’s very good.
There are quite a few marketers that are purposely, I think purposely, left in the dark.
If you’re only given marketing goals, it’s really hard to make those marketing goals work if you dunno what the business goals are.
Part of a social media strategy is knowing the business goals.
When I do a social media strategy, I want access to the C-suite, to stakeholders.
I don’t want to do a social media strategy just with the marketing team, because I don’t know what’s happening next year. I don’t know what’s coming down the pipeline.
I need to know what your business goals are in order to use marketing to help attain those business goals. Does that make sense?
Once you know the goals, you can kind of select some of these KPIs. There’s a lot. You don’t need or want all of that.
Again, you need to filter through and figure out what you need to know.
So what I did on here… I selected just a few: follower growth, engagement posts.
This is over a 30 day period.
When you look at this, immediately you see Skype isn’t doing anything on social.
Boom, first data point that we figure out, right?
FireFliesApp, they’re not that active. They’re probably a little smaller.
Who has the most posts? We can see that that’s WebEx. They post the most.
Actually, Zoom only has one post in 30 days, so we can get some data already when we look at this.
Published October 10, 2025
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