Social Media B2B

Marshall Kirkpatrick at Read Write Web wrote a great post titled “Five Ways to Use Social Media to Reach People Who Don’t Use Social Media”

The the advice that Marshall provides in this article is a great example how social media can be used in B2B marketing. His five core ideas are:

1. Develop Relationships with People Who Bridge The Gap Inside Other Organizations
2. Use Web 2.0 Tools to Learn About Real Life Public Events
3. Make Your Blog an Email Newsletter and Promote it Elsewhere
4. Look Harder, Your Audience Probably is Using Social Media That You Aren’t Aware Of
5. Use the Internet to Make Yourself Smarter In Real Life

From these five suggestions I think that the first one “Develop Relationships with People Who Bridge The Gap Inside Other Organizations” is the most important. In my experience I find that almost every company has an employee participating in social media, that person may not be someone who makes any choices about your product or service. However they may eat lunch or play golf with the person within that company that is your customer.

The IT and programming staff are often the first group of people within a company to participate in social media so look to engage them as your company begins using social media.

I would also urge everyone to understand the amount of knowledge and competitive intelligence available online. Technologies like RSS can deliver this information directly to your desktop in real time to provide the information need to help better market to B2B companies offline.

If the end user of your product is a the general consumer but you don’t sell directly to them, I would suggest monitoring social media conversations about your product compared to your competitors. If people say more positive things about your product than your competitors, you could use this information to help sell you product to new B2B partners. To track social media conversation syou can use free tools like Google Blog Search or you can use a more advanced tool such as Radian6 that can help you better value online conversations.

I hope that you take a way today that social media offers value to help improve B2B marketing.

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