We’ve had quite a few requests these past few weeks for our perspective on Social Media for B-to-B brands. We field a lot of web 2.0 technology questions, but the dialog inevitably comes back to the value of social media. A recent Aberdeen Group report (free through 8/29/08 – chock full of interesting stats you can use), examines the social media practices of 360 companies. Those considered best-in-class for social media experienced an average 11% increase in Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI), improved customer retention and year-over-year improvements in product development, blowing the rest of the field out of the water.

For technology companies, the need to “communify” the digital experience is even more apparent. No sector has been more impacted by social media than technology, for obvious reasons. According to Forrester Research, nearly three quarters of IT professionals use web 2.0 features in a professional capacity. From code writing to documentation to problem solving, IT professionals have come to expect a certain level of accessibility and interaction with their technology providers as well as their peers.

Here are just a few ways prospects in any industry might expect social media to add value to the complex selection & implementation process:

• Provide prospects with frictionless access to a community of peers who have actually implemented, adopted & delivered results to their businesses.
• Allow the brand to collaborate with various levels of decision makers in a very public way – from solving implementation challenges to helping make the business case for selection.
• Drive timely, accurate marketing decision and product improvements.

The last bullet can’t be overstated. Social media isn’t just a channel, it’s a change agent for best-in-class companies. The Aberdeen Group data suggests a key to success is the internal process that supports and capitalizes on customer-facing social media. Successful processes

• Deliver customer insights to multiple business units in a timely manner
• Deliver frequent, relevant, timely responses to customer interactions

The challenge for organizations we talk with seems to be this: Lead generation is still the digital strategy du jour — the big kahuna of online measurement. To capitalize on the value social media can bring, best-in-class brands are engaging customers at all stages of the customer lifecycle– not just the selection process. This is easy if you are a starting from scratch but a bit of a challenge for organizations built on delivering digital content in exchange for capturing leads information and funneling them to a commissioned sales force. Marketing teams in this boat will need to take a good, hard look at the real decision process and their role in serving their community in a broader sense. They’ll need to adopt metrics that quantify their participation in the entire, end-to-end process.

Social media is an extremely powerful tool for building and nuturing relationships. If you are in B-to-B marketing, ask yourself this: How can we put our wealth of content and better still, our experts, into the service of our community, independent of lead generation activities? If you are like most of the b-to-b companies we work with, you have expertise to spare.

What do you think? The technology part is easy. Is your organization ready to capitalize on the promise of social media?

Tagged as: new consumer journey, social web, technology

• share