What's Wrong With Social Media For B2B Marketing
I believe social media has an inherent bias against the realities of B2B marketing. This is the topic of my new article "What's Wrong With Social Media For B2B Marketing", now available as part of Search Engine Land's Strictly Business column.
There’s no topic that bloggers like to write about and link to more than blogging itself. And because links are what people (and search engines) use to rank blogs, this creates the perverse incentive to write about social media more than other marketing topics, especially other B2B marketing topics.
I’m not saying that social media doesn’t play a role in B2B marketing, since it clearly has a big role to play in driving traffic, building thought leadership, and facilitating word of mouth referrals.
But to B2B marketers, social media is just one tactic in a portfolio of techniques that best practice companies use to generate awareness, drive leads, and nurture relationships. The reality of B2B marketing today is that more prosaic methods such as PPC campaign management, lead nurturing, customer case studies, and good old-fashioned PR still matter more than social media techniques.
What do you think?
Check out the complete article, What’s Wrong With Social Media For B2B Marketing.
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Indeed I find that there are very few blogs out there using blogging as part of the marketing communications mix. There are plenty of blogs about blogging, or about marketing in general, but few using blogs as an instrument to market anything else than blogging. Sometimes, blogging appears to me as a large self-supporting carrousel.
The few business blogs that our out there which do not deal with blogging or marketing tend to deal with social, environmental or humanitarian causes.
Having experimented a bit with social media in other sectors than the blogosphere, I must say that success is spotty at best.
Posted by: Hans De Keulenaer | June 13, 2007 at 05:31 AM
Just finished poring through hundreds of pages of analyst reports and many hours of surfing for a B2B client in prep for a presentation on 2.0. Most of the hype focuses on traffic, eyeballs, blogger influence and viral marketing - none of which are germaine to B2B. The point for B2B is then enabling technology and the expectations for what constitutes a "web experience" even for staid zootsuit types. Consumer leads - business follows. 2.0 is setting a new expectation and businesses will both profit from and be challenged by, these new expectations - imho
Posted by: Chet Geschickter | June 20, 2007 at 03:38 PM
I have been in many different teams where someone suggests blogging as an integral part of the campaign - either it's B2C or B2B marketing. And one of the things that nobody thinks of is that this is full time job to gather material and thoughts to build the content.
Most of the teams like to leave the responsibility undetermined. We say "let's do it so that everyone get's to do one post and then it'll build enough content".
I've always thought of a company who offers the service of building content. Because I think it's rather obvious that when a page gets some certain critical mass of content it'll start living on it's own.
So You could buy this critical mass.
Take the picture rating environments for example. If there's 3 photos then You'd hardly stick to this page. If there's 3000 then you'll probably spend a lot more time in there.
And if there's the addition of communicating!
We all want to talk about ourselves. And none of us we want to listen to the others. Unless we have an opportunity to listen to those who we think that can make us sound smart when we speak.
For example I read an article about Jack Welch today. He said a few well known truths in it. And I used those thoughts many times to illustrate my point today.
Like it was said in the buzzmarketing book - we want to know stuff that we can build upon a conversation during which we look smart.
So only those B2B blogs would probably work where someone would lay golden eggs for the others to use in conversations afterwards.
How big are the odds of doing that in the method of "let's all write one post".
Posted by: Maret | June 25, 2007 at 01:24 PM