Everything About BtoB Magaine’s Social Media Study Is Wrong
By Kipp Bodnar
Mon, Jul 27, 2009
Last week BtoB Magazine and the Association of National Advertisers released results of a study about B2B marketers use of social media. I read the article through a couple of times and then proceeded to think about it for a couple of days. After that time my initial feeling about the study has remained the same.
This study completely dropped the ball. How? It was focused in the complete wrong direction. I don’t need a study to tell me that B2B marketers are using LinkedIn, that is clear through daily interactions. However, they completely over-looked what the customers’ activity is online and how that impacts their decisions.
From the study: “Facebook is the most-used social media site overall (74%), and enjoys high use among b-to-b marketers (60%).”
I don’t care, and neither should you, that 60% of B2B marketers are using Facebook. We should be caring about how much of that use is for B2B marketing and how effective is it. It is this focus away from the customer and strategy that is stunting the education of social media for B2B organizations.
I understand that stats like this sell magazines and generate pageviews but it does nothing to help inform organizations and solve their problems. The lack of real depth in discussing social media ROI will only strengthen the strong-hold of organizations that feel social media is a “waste of time”
Here is to hoping that the next survey will shift focus to the truly important issues and go beyond the stats focused to drive traffic.
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ROI for each entity that uses social media can be drastically different, I agree that boiling this down to a common denominator is difficult. Variables like staffing, system costs, content managers etc, will be varied in each organization. Headlines are just that headlines, often the true story is much deeper.
If an organization wants to be able to present a true ROI, it needs to be driven from leads that are iniitally contacted or found via conversations with customers within the social media space. Once that conversation turns into a lead, the lead turns into a sale and then a calculation can be made. Depending on the organization the KPIs and costs that are allocated into that calaculation will differ as well. At the end of the day, I feel the brass ring is different for each business.