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!