B2B marketing: catching the social media wave

Some recent opinion has posited that we as a profession (in B2B marketing at least) are being slow to adopt new social media channels. The inference is that we should do away with the tried and trusted and dive headlong into the deep, rewarding azure of social media.

For those of us that have been around a few (but actually not that many) years this is disconcertingly similar to the technology bubble of just under ten years ago. A very fragmented market, loads of hype, lots of confusion, a new dotcom pitching up every day. No one really knew where to put their money but there was loads of it so it got sprayed pretty much everywhere. With a highly inefficient allocation of capital many of these investments vaporised.

Arguably, however, social media has now entered a stabilised phase. There are a number of well established platforms and models. Until very recently this wasn’t the case and many marketers could be forgiven for sitting back and waiting for the froth to come off the market. With limited marketing budgets only so much can be devoted to the new and untested.

Some commentators have gone as far as to say you don’t need an ROI for social media. Again, this is reminiscent of the dotcom days when otherwise serious people were running around asking questions like: “What’s your business model?” as if the "old" rules didn't apply. Michael Porter struck a chord with me at the time when he sagely observed (and I’m paraphrasing) – there is only one business model: you buy something and then sell it for more than you bought it for. The questions for marketers now shouldn’t be: “What social media channels are you using?” but “Which channels deliver the most valuable dialogue with your customers?” The latter may or may not include social media sites.

Anyways, all this is sounding a little on the negative side. It shouldn’t sound do so because I’m a big fan. Why else would I be sitting here blogging when I should be tucked up in bed? No marketing professional would resist new channels if they are demonstrated to generate a return. To target them, marketers need to find out where on the web their customers are aggregating; how they can then engage with them effectively whilst still promoting true (and revealing) dialogue and have a strategy to deal with the results of that dialogue – both negative and positive. All this must be done in a measurable way whilst integrating with existing channels.

The good news is that this is an exciting time to be a marketer. There is a tsunami of new and innervating stuff out there for us to get to grips with. Amongst all this it’s also important not to forget the basics of brand building programs – the requirements for:

• Access to multiple media
• Integrated communications
• Measurement of results.

Finally, returning to the issue of speed of adoption of social media channels by B2B marketers it’s worth looking at the classic Rogers’ adoption curve. With just under a third of B2B marketers using blogs that puts us firmly in "early majority" territory. This may mean that we have some way to go to achieve truly community-focused marketing but think about the rate of diffusion of previous innovations (e.g. telephone, PC, internet) in the business environment and you might say we’re not doing too bad.