Three experts demonstrate how B2B companies can capitalize with social media
This is the first installment of the “Social Media ROI Series” (#SocialMediaROI) that my company Spark Media Solutions is hosting and producing for Zuberance.
Working for a B2B company and you don’t think social media applies to you? Is your product too expensive to see any benefit from social media? Neither concern is true. Even B2B companies with high ticket items and long sales cycles can benefit from social media. And this was the discussion in the first episode of Zuberance’s “Social Media ROI Series” Webinar
In the first installment, I led a high-level discussion about leveraging the power of social media to achieve B2B marketing objectives.
- First, Paul Dunay (@pauldunay), Global Managing Director of Services and Social Marketing for Avaya, outlines how the enterprise communications giant streamlined and fortified its approach to social media — and how it has been able to quantify the ROI.
- Next, CDW’s Sr. Segment Marketing Manager, Lauren McCadney (@LMcCadney), shares the online retailer’s strategic approach to tapping social media networks to drive sales, build its brand, provide responsive customer service, and authentically engage with important customers.
- Finally, Rob Fuggetta (@RobFugetta), Founder and CEO of Zuberance (@zuberance), offers three essential tips for B2B marketers looking to use social media to identify and activate their brand advocates.
The show also features questions from the Social Media ROI Webinar Series live audience. Please listen and watch the slidecast. Or, if you like you can subscribe to the Social Media ROI podcast via iTunes or RSS.David Spark, a partner in Socialmedia.biz, helps businesses grow by developing thought leadership through storytelling and covering live events. Contact David by email, follow him on Twitter and Google Plus or leave a comment below.
(part 1) Paul, Lauren, and Rob all shared some great advice. The presentation reminded me, however, that just as there's no “one size fits all” approach to social media, “BtoB” is a more more complex and multi-faceted operating environment than BtoC. The BtoB examples included in this presentation struck me as having a strong individual consumer orientation, which means that a BtoC approach to social media can work reasonably well with them. I recently did some work with some manufacturing firms, however, and they would find little potential reward in these approaches.
(part 2) That's not to say they can't benefit from social media though – they should just leverage it differently. I hope that future installments in this series move beyond the BtoC ideas that are dominating today's discussions and help leaders take a more expansive view of how the technologies can be used. I share some of my own thoughts in a white paper called “Trickle-Up Socialnomics: Leveraging Social Media in the BtoB Context.” It describes how BtoB firms can view their supply chain as a Social Media Chain and use it to develop new business opportunities and can be accessed here: http://tiny.cc/TUSpaper.
Thanks.
Courtney Hunt
Founder, Social Media in Organizations (SMinOrgs) Community
http://www.techsonhandstore.com -I think this is a great way of updating us on how B2B is working. Social media is the new way of advertising.