B2B Voices

Kate and I will be down in Austin the next few days with 40,000 of our close personal friends to see what’s what at that SXSW Interactive thing. I’m going to be paying particularly close attention to the conference from a B2B point of view of course. (Follow me on Twitter!)

I’ve noticed that although social media has been a hot topic now for a few years, it seems like it’s becoming more disruptive to the status quote just over the last few months. For example:
• Increasingly we’re incorporating paid into our traditionally earned media focused campaigns. It’s now the norm.
• Agency roles are getting all mashed up. The client doesn’t care what you call yourself but only whether you can be effective at helping them grow audience engagement.

• We’re getting better access to the website analytics we need to understand how our communications programs are changing who comes to the website and what they do when they get there.
• We’re measuring success not just by the volume of mentions but on the nature of conversations.
• We’re getting far more analytical and tech tools are becoming more sophisticated.
• Brand journalism is absolutely exploding.

In addition, we (as an industry) are also shifting conversations beyond just “new ideas” to changing business processes and organizational structures within agencies and within client marketing and communications teams. This change management focus is a natural function of moving beyond pilots and tests to full scale program and campaigns.
So that’s the lens through which I’ll be looking at everything down in Austin. Stay tuned!