Social Media B2B

In today’s social web it is easy to get distracted by the newest shiny object. This isn’t a bad thing because some of those shiny objects could have an important impact on the future of your organization. The downside of this is that they can easily distract you from what is important and working right now.

For B2B communications, regardless if we like it or not, e-mail is still the killer digital application. Because e-mail has become a universal communication standard, it isn’t necessary to do research on use, like we currently need to do with other social applications.

E-mail Usage Statistics:

* According to Pew Internet and American Life Project data from April, 2009, 90% of US Internet users have gone online and sent or read email.

* The Radicati Group also suggests that some 247 billion emails are sent each day in 2009.

Getting Past The Firewall
E-mail solves the firewall issue for many B2B marketers. As we have talked about before, B2B companies have additional challenges when it come to social media, because many of their customers still don’t not have access to certain social platforms at work. While other industries may lack access to a public Internet altogether because of security and regulation. However, in these situations it is highly likely that prospective customers do have e-mail.

Positioning E-mail For B2B Communications
We can agree that the majority of people in B2B use e-mail. However, we can also likely agree than many of those folks don’t like using e-mail. Our disdain for e-mail comes from using it for things that it is not best designed for. It is great at one-to-one communication and for creating records of communication. E-mail though doesn’t scale well. It is not great for large group communication and event organization. We get frustrated, myself included, because our exceptions for e-mail aren’t right.

For B2B e-mail is many things: a one-to-one internal and external communications tool, a permission-based marketing platform, lead generation pipeline, etc. What it isn’t is an excuse to not have real conversations in real-time, with real people. E-mail doesn’t replace the phone, a blog, social network, etc.

Bonus: Check out this great presentation regarding how e-mail relates to social media. Best slide: “E-mail is the currency of all social accounts”

Related posts:

1. Google Wave’s Application For B2B Companies Explained Communication on the web is about people and building relationships...
2. Generating E-mail Leads from B2B Conferences Any time you go to a B2B trade show or...
3. Google Will Force All B2B Companies To Tweet Yesterday will long be known as the day that...
4. Public Vs. Private Content In B2B Social Media Much of today’s B2B online marketing happens by generating leads...
5. What Is An API and What Does It Have To Do With B2B? Acronyms are a major pain. It seems like every industry...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.