What If Your B2B Corporate Web Site Was A Social Network?
Tue, Nov 17, 2009
I have spent a lot of time thinking recently about B2B corporate Web sites. Most are worthless and serve only some obligatory need to serve as an online brochure to the few people a month that look at it. The days of the static 10 page corporate B2B Web site are over. That vision should be dead and gone if you are the CMO or director of marketing for a B2B company.
I am also not one to complain without offering up a solution. The idea for this post came to me from Amazon. I was looking at books, then I was reading product reviews and then I was looking at the profiles of some of the reviewers. I wasn’t on a Web site that sells stuff, no I was on a social network full of engaged people polarized by their thoughts on almost every single product in a mass directory of all the goods that Amazon sells. That is a truly amazing experience if you stop and think about it. Then I began thinking. Why can’t B2B companies do this?
What Is Stopping You From Transforming Your Corporate B2B Web Site?
So why does your B2B Web site still stuck in the world of static brochure sites? What is your excuse?:
*We don’t have the budget for a new site
*Our leadership doesn’t value online
*Customers don’t by products online
I am sure that some of you have countless more excuses to add to that list. To all of those excuses I would like to respond with only one question.
Is customer service and experience a top priority of your organization?
Scaling The B2B Customer Experience
If you answered yes to my question above, then please continue reading, because I wrote this post for you. Social networks like the one Amazon has built aren’t important because they are cool or because they have cool features. These networks are important because they help scale customer experiences. There is no way a company even as large as Amazon could answer the amount of product questions its users have daily or for that matter contribute diverse credible viewpoints on hundreds of thousands of products.
Your company can’t either. If you want your customers to have the best experience and service, then you have no option but to ask for their help. How has trying to do it on your own worked up to this point?
What If Your Corporate Web Site Really Was A Social Network?
Let’s get back to my original question of this post. Are you willing to blow up your current Web site? If so, what should it be. It doesn’t have to be a social network. It has to be engaging, relevant, and open to what your customers want. The important thing to do is ask yourself the crazy “what if” questions and really think about what your answers are. Here are a few ideas to think about when planning the next generation of your corporate B2B Web site.
1. How can you connect your employees and customers?
2. What type of experience makes your company worth telling other people about?
3. How do you connect the products you make to the people that make them?
4. What if you made it easier for your customers to talk to each other?
5. Is their another company that has created the experience you want?
Ask your these questions and take the leadership within your organization to help make change.
What do you think the next generation of B2B Web sites look like?
Kipp Bodnar is publisher of SocialMediaB2B.com. Follow Kipp on Twitter @kippbodnar.
Tags: B2B, social network, web site
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Great post, Kip.
Totally agree.
I hope we can do this at HubSpot, soon.
We actually just moved from a big “Communities” as one of 5 major tabs on our corporate site to just having a smaller link in the header. I assume it was because we didn’t want to mix the social in at the very top of our long enterprise sales funnel. We do want to mix community in various product/solution pages as people get to the point they are looking for peer reviews.
Rick,
Thanks for your comment. Look forward to seeing how HubSpot evolves.
John,
That is an interesting move. Do you think that the community aspect should have a large integration on the home page?
Thanks, Kipp, for an excellent post.
Both as an employee and as a consultant I’ve tried to convince several companies that this is the direction they need to go if they want to engage customers and activate their site. They are just sooo afraid of losing control that they’d rather see their sites wither on the vine than cede any of their absolute control.
In this age of user-driven media, even B2B publishers fail to grasp the concept that the distribution of information is no longer simply top down, and that, as aggregators, they are in a great position to monetize user-generated content. And their market is one where print publications are folding (pun intended) on a weekly basis! Their online programs could be their lifeboat, (albeit a smaller one and that’s an issue too), but they are loathe to reinvent their editorial position or marketing strategies.
I think this is a great thought, and I would love to have you elaborate on it. What about investors, we are a fortune 1000 and we have several people who come to our site to look at our investor information, what do you suggest for this?
Jennifer,
Thank you fro your question. I think their are multiple ways to handle the issue of sharing investor information as a corporate Web site evolves. Depending on the amount of information you could create widget or Twitter feed to make the data portable via RSS.
Or you could do something more radical. What if when someone visited your homepage you can give them the option to select the information they were looking for and create a custom modular homepage for every visitor.
All businesses have to get better at serving relevant and customized information whenever possible.
I hope this helps!
You start out talking about B2B, but the only example you give is B2C – Amazon.
What is a good B2B site that does what you’re suggesting?
My web provider http://www.infomgmt.com/ has an option for forums. I just haven’t enabled it yet.
James,
CDW is probably the closest, but remember that Amazon is both B2C and B2B. Most in the B2B haven’t gotten to this stage of their Web site development yet.