B2B Social Media – Moving Beyond the Hype
Several of our team members were in London for the annual Internet World Exhibition held at Earls Court between April 27th and April 29th. As one of the few exhibitors and speakers in the B2B Social Media Industry at the show, we noticed a lot of confusion about using social media and what social media could do for a B2B focused organization.
For example, we noticed a large number of email vendors selling the idea that email is social media (it’s not). The idea of renting a list of unknown people to send your message to was presented as social media (it’s not). Lastly, there is so much confusion over using social media applications like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn for business that we spent much of our time helping people learn the basics of the applications and why they might want to consider using them.
But just as important to us, there were many people who were disappointed using social media as they didn’t get the results they wanted or thought that they would. Why? Because in most cases, their companies were using B2C techniques to engage with the B2B audience for their services. Many were following the common theme of retweeting others, constantly updating their Facebook pages with product information, building a network of as many followers as possible, and joining as many groups as they could on LinkedIn. And most of it was a gigantic waste of time.
The crowd comes into the theatre for my standing room only talk on B2B Social Media
At Internet World, I presented a short case for why B2B Social Media is very different from B2C. The presentation covered the idea that most people are focused on the tactics at the expense of their strategy by following the common wisdom of social media experts and gurus who only understand B2C marketing. B2C is concerned with building awareness, then trial. That’s why couponing is so effective for B2C. B2B is concerned with building relationships. It’s harder and takes much more time than B2C social media tactics. But in the end, it leads to tremendous value when executed properly.
You can download the presentation’s slides here: B2B Social Media – What Works 2010. The slides are helpful when viewing the actual presentation below: (Quick Note, the edited video below is courtesy of Seminar Streams, so you’ll have to register or log in to see the video. Or enter our username Impact and our password impact. The video will play right away and you won’t have to search for it.)
If you’d like to learn more about using B2B Social Media for lead generation, customer support, training, channel or partner management, or another specific purpose, please contact us.
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This entry was posted on Monday, May 10th, 2010 at 3:11 pm and is filed under Best Practices, Impact Interactions clients, Social Media Trends. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
4 Responses to “B2B Social Media – Moving Beyond the Hype”
MRowland says: Just a reminder, to view the video you must either register with Seminar Streams or use our log in (Username: Impact, Password: impact). We hope you find the video useful and look forward to your comments.
Important message from this for me is – while social media changes the way a business goes about the work of attracting and engaging customers, it does not change the foundational tenet of having a compelling value proposition. Very well delivered. Thanks.
[...] partners to sell SAP software to the small and midsize enterprise (SME) market. Because there is a lot of confusion over using social media in a B2B setting, we’ve built a training methodology which takes the best practices from our ten years of [...]
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Impact Interactions, MRowland602. MRowland602 said: RT @ImpactInteract: B2B Social Media – Moving past the hype to what works #IWexpo presentation is live (slides too!) http://bit.ly/aY7pMM [...]