Do You Know What Your B2B Peers Are Up To With Social Media? 4 Ways To Find Out

2009 April 8
tags: , ,
by annabarcelos

 

When I talk to various people within business to business organizations (who are still spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on traditional marketing by the way) I ask them if they are leveraging social media as part of their overall marketing strategy.  I get the same responses:

  • “We don’t have resource(s) to monitor that sort of activity.”
  • “We are still having a challenge building a business case for management on how it’s directly tied to the bottom line.”
  • “We’re not sure how to measure these efforts.”
  • “I don’t think it ‘fits within our corporate culture.’”

Well, whether it’s within your corporate culture or not, the facts are that more and more B2B companies are embracing social media.  Even more importantly, your potential buyers are using Web 2.0 technologies like blogs and user-generated videos to learn more about your products and services.   

Whether or not you’ve added social media to your marketing strategy, you need to keep up with it because your competitors are doing it, and it’s important you know what’s going on out there. 

Here are four simple ways you can monitor B2B social media activity.

Look who’s on Twitter – C-Levels in B2B are now using social media

ExecTweets  created by Federated Media, in partnership with Microsoft, segments executives who are currently on Twitter.  You’ll find top executives from B2B companies like Eastman Kodak, Sun Microsystems, and CISCO tweeting about various topics.

 

Participate in real-time conversations about B2B marketing on Twitter

Create a column on TweetDeck or search the #B2B hashtag on Twitter where B2B marketers are sharing interesting perspectives, links and stats. 

 

Use Google alerts to index tweets and any other activity going on with your company

Be sure to set up Google email alerts for your organization. Google indexes and notifies you via email every time your company, name or whatever you decide to monitor comes up.

Talk to other B2B marketers/companies about their social media strategies

Yes, it’s pretty straightforward, but how many of us these days actually pick up a phone and talk to each other? Additionally, some of us B2B marketers are still fairly new in the social media world. For that reason, it’s important to seek out and speak with other marketers or companies who have been there, done that.  Sure, there is a whole lot of information out there, but picking up the phone and actually speaking with someone about it is a change of pace and refreshing way to get feedback.

Have you launched a successful social media strategy at your company yet? Let us know how you’re doing – plusses and minuses.  This is what this blog is all about!

 

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  • Google Alerts can do a lot more than just monitor your brand's name. You can use it to actively mine for B2B sales leads. I've written a lot about this on my Google Alerts blog. Here is a recent post on B2B lead generation you might find useful:

    http://www.alertrank.com/mrgooglealerts/2009/04...
  • Every comment here makes a great point. It really takes and industry shift in mentality to get the process of using SM in marketing, but it's a shift that needs to happen, and is proving to be beneficial.

    We do plan on sing case studies on this blog, and if there are any in particular that you think would be beneficial, please let us know.
  • I don't think it's an option anymore... businesses NEED to be incorporating social media into their marketing mix.
  • kvcanipelli
    The rapid advances of social media are causing even conservative B2B execs to rethink their engagement strategies. We work with the industrial sector where everyone tends to know everyone else and buying/sales processes are very long and heavily spec driven, and social marketing is still looking for a place to roost. I've heard some very creative objections to social networking and SMM, most of them due to lack of insight on how much the Internet changed business process. My favorite? From the mouth of an otherwise visionary CEO of a technology-based service business: "None of our customers read blogs. None of my guys read blogs. We're not wasting our time with a blog!" While at the same time pressing for media coverage of new product advances. The ice melted recently when a competitor announced their new corporate "thought leadership" blog.

    Like so many technology shifts throughout history (think telephone systems or transportation networks), the value of social media is fundamentally in the network. If "sharing" isn't a norm in the industry (information or assets), resistance to SMM will continue. Until one day, when the critical mass is achieved. Then minds will open to how social media can be integrated into business process.

    Katherine Ventres Canipelli
    marketingFOLIO, inc.
    www.marketingfolio.com/the-industrious-marketer
  • Anna - You are so right - so many companies are really fearful of adding social media to their marketing mix, for the reasons you stated but also just out of lack of understanding of what it can do. I think starting out by just monitoring what is already going on is a great way to show organizations that they are probably already being talked about somewhere online.

    Not every company needs to go whole hog right away and not every social media tool is appropriate for all companies. Companies can start small by simply interacting with what's already out there. Instead of starting their own blog or podcast, they can comment on posts and engage in existing online communities that fit their niche or industry. If a company starts out by monitoring, like you said, then they can get a better sense for where there might be a good social media fit for them and can shape their strategy around the information they've gathered through the monitoring process.

    I also think it would be great to see some more B2B case studies of effective social media. That would really help organizations see how something like a ComcastCares or Dell IdeaStorm or Southwest Air social strategy translates to B2B. It's often hard to look at those B2C case studies and parse out how similar strategies could be tweaked for B2B, so additional B2B social media case studies would go a long way (and I'm sure we'll eventually see some on this blog!).

    @amymengel
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