Sorry for Being a Social Media Buzzkill

A fellow PR pro in the Minneapolis/St. Paul community, Aaron Pearson works as a senior vice president and vertical markets segment leader for the Global Technology Practice of Weber Shandwick, a leading public relations firm.With 15 years of B2B and technology communications experience, Aaron has spent time in the manufacturing, enterprise software, data storage and telecommunications industries. Aaron is also a member of the Business Marketing Association and holds an MBA in marketing from the University of Minnesota Carlson School of Management. Without further introduction, take a read from this B2B Voices guest poster:

It’s interesting to me that so many of the conversations on Twitter among communications professionals concern social media – Twitter chief among them.I do appreciate many of them, (hey, Beers Who Twitter – Thanks @PaulDunay!) But there is a disconcerting, anything-can-work, dot-com boom feel about it.  

To be clear, I’m a huge cheerleader for the potential of social media and, more broadly, digital communications to elevate B2B communications programs. Who wouldn’t want to embrace communications channels that tend to be more measurable, more transparent, and more conversational? Research consistently shows that the most important form of marketing communications is word of mouth, and social media benefits from many of the personal, trusted characteristics of word of mouth.   

And yet, eight years after the dot-com bust, most of us still buy our groceries in a brick-and-mortar store even if we don’t make a mall run to buy music CDs anymore. There’s going to be a shake-out in social media (a real Twitpocalypse?) as people realize days are still 24 hours long, we have a finite amount of time to interact with each other, and in the face of competition, the business models of weaker communities show their flaws. (See Bloomberg, “MySpace Fires 30% of U.S. Workers.”) 

Our new online social web is here to stay, but for B2B marketers, it is no magic elixir to cure bad products or vague value propositions. We still need to use a battle-tested strategic planning process. What business outcome do we need to achieve? What insights does research give us into the needs of our audience, who they listen to, how they buy? Given those insights and our own creativity, what’s the right strategic approach, and how can we harness tactics both traditional and new in creative ways to ultimately accomplish those business objectives?

This may be boring and disappointing for some, but the alternative is costly failures like the Skittles experiment in the B2C realm as Razorfish’s Steven Cisowski outlined for us last week in Ad Age. Directionless innovation run amok.

According to a Feb. 20 Forrester report, “The Social Technographics of Business Buyers,” 68 percent of business decision-makers use social media for work purposes, a number that’s probably only grown since that information was collected in Q4 of last year. (Read more about it from analyst Laura Ramos’s original blog post.) And yet, social networks rank seventh in influencing technology purchase decisions, after web sites, sales people, traditional online or print media, trade shows, and of course, word of mouth.  

What I take away from this isn’t that digital communications and social media are relatively unimportant, but rather that they are increasing in importance rapidly yet the established channels aren’t going away.  Personal preferences for how individuals want to receive marketing information are fragmenting. Moreover – and this has always been the case – for complex, B2B purchases, the typical buyer is influenced at different stages in the buying process by different influencer channels. Fail to invest in one and you will fail to optimize your marketing dollars by missing leads you should have gotten, paying too much for them, or failing to convert enough into revenue. Invest in the wrong one – or do so unstrategically – and you basically just burn money (unless you get lucky). It’s getting harder, folks. 

As I was writing this, Phil Baumann, a registered nurse in Philadelphia, tweeted that, “Using Twitter as a be-all tool for healthcare is insane. There’s tons of ways to use it, but not w/out a brain.” Amen, and that goes for marketers, too.  Good luck out there.