Social Media B2B

Many B2B marketers and pr professionals have heard about the real time web, and are looking to learn more about how to incorporate it into the communications mix. It continues to be one of the hottest topics of discussion around the social web water cooler, but has little meaning outside of this community. Real time web is what Twitter does well. It is what Facebook is trying to do. And it is what Google does not do well at all, and it is why rumors constantly surface about Google buying Twitter. For now, Twitter is standing firm as an independent platform that owns the real time web, but what does it mean for B2B companies.

First, a definition. The real time web refers to the parts of the web that are searched and cataloged as they happen. While Google news, and even a feed reader to capture news or blog updates, keep up with content as it is updated, the web’s most used search engine, Google, does not. Google’s spiders crawl the web, following links, just as they started doing ten years ago, and store the information in giant databases. Yes, things have changed in their algorithm of how they sort and rate the data, but Google search results show a snapshot of the web, not the web itself. Links point to the real web, but this is based on the what is stored, or cached, in the database. Twitter, and especially Twitter Search, shows information as it happens, and updates it in real time. Blogs, comments and forums are also part of the real time web.

This real time update and constant flow of information creates a couple of functional problems, but also opens up opportunities for B2B companies using social media tools. One of the biggest problems people and companies face is the fleeting nature of their content and message. Any tweet, comment or post, no matter how chock full of goodness, is just one more bit of data in the stream. Even if your customers and prospects watched every message that went by, it could be missed. And nobody does that anyway.

A solution for Twitter is to make your tweets part of a larger campaign. Write a blog post and tweet out several important points over the course of the day or over several days. Each tweet links back to the same post. Rather than posting the same tweet with the post title multiple times, this method gets several ideas out, but all linking back to the same blog post. This provides more value to your followers and offers more opportunities for your ideas to spread. Multiple tweets with different content might interest different people. This is a broader strategy than a straight time zone approach or tweeting the same thing multiple times of day to hit different work times or time zones. Make sure you use a URL shortener with analytics like bit.ly or idek.net, so you can track the clicks on your links and learn what works and what doesn’t.

The opposite situation is also a problem. People, whether they are customers or prospects, might be commenting about your company, industry or a researching an upcoming purchase, and you don’t see it. You don’t see every tweet or comment that goes by either. The simplest ways to catch these comments are with monitoring tools like Twitter Search and Google alerts. Lots of other monitoring tools are available for more robust searches, and here is a list from Social Media Today. If there are tools on this list that have been especially helpful, or others that you would like to recommend to readers, please let us know in the comments.

The most important part of using these monitoring tools is being able to respond. You must establish a response policy that is in keeping with the rest of your customer response policies. If every response must be approved by marketing, sales, pr, legal, etc, you are not taking advantage of the real time web. People must be empowered to respond quickly and appropriately in these real time channels. Your customers are now expecting a response, no matter where they post their comment. And if you don’t provide it, your competitors might. This is another example of customers, even those in business to business environments, having expectations that have been set by consumer company interactions.

The bar has been raised and you must be ready to meet the needs of your more demanding customers and prospects. They are on the real time web. Make sure you are too.

Jeffrey L. Cohen is the Managing Editor of SocialMediaB2B.com. Follow Jeff on Twitter at @jeffreylcohen.