Social Media B2B

Many B2B companies are heading into 2010 with a slight bit of optimism, but they still are operating under tight budgets that demand measurable results. The web in general, and social media specifically, can be metrics-driven environments, so marketing departments, agencies and consultants are being held accountable for social media results in ways that were never required for traditional marketing tactics. B2B companies need to understand that we are still in an experimental phase of social media that may require testing, monitoring, failure and change of tactics.

While failure may be part of a social media test program, here are four things that will almost guarantee failure of your social media programs. We can even assume that there is a social media strategy with a content strategy, and it is integrated with the marketing plan, and these failures will still occur.

Siloed Social Media Practitioners
No matter if you work internal for the company or are providing social media services through an agency or as a consultant, you must be connected to the rest of the marketing or communications team. And this is true whether you are providing strategy or content for the organization. If you don’t know what is going on in other parts of the marketing organization, you cannot effectively do the job you were hired for. There is nothing worse than focusing your approach around a given project only to find it has been delayed.

Solution for Success: A 30-minute weekly meeting or phone call to cover a top-level overview of other projects. This is most important if you work remotely or outside of the organization.

Lack of Engagement
After establishing accounts on social networks like Twitter and Facebook, you only tweet out your own content. You set up automated tools to gradually grow your followers, but you do not engage with them. As Twitter has become more about providing value by sharing links, it is too easy to only push out content, and only retweet others rather than seek out potential conversationalists and engage with them.

Solution for Success: Review your own tweets on a daily basis and revise your approach to include engagement. These things are cyclical, and you may want to do this on a regular basis even after you have gotten used to engaging with your growing network. If you have a Facebook fan page, make sure you visit it at least once a day to ask questions, provide information and respond to comments.

Rely Only on Social Media
Social media is part of a marketing mix and usually cannot drive sales by itself. No matter how great a blog post is, how engaging tweets are, and how helpful you are on LinkedIn, other tactics must be used as well. Social media can do a lot of things, but for certain B2B niche products or services, it is better in a support role, rather than the star.

Solution for Success: Continue to invest in traditional communications, but always include links to social sites to build those communities. A customer who is a heavy Facebook user will notice a Facebook logo on your printed catalog and become a fan. Make sure you provide content to keep him interested within Facebook.

Don’t Give It Enough Time
Building a community takes time and making drastic, knee-jerk changes too quickly without allowing natural growth will ensure your failure.

Solution for Success: Give your plan the time it deserves to grow and succeed. Set expectations at the beginning that it will take time to show results. Evaluate various metrics on a weekly basis to see if you are reaching your goals. After two months of data, you can evaluate how the program is going. You may need to make major changes to your tactics, but you have the metrics to show what kinds of things worked and where your focus needs to be.

What are some lessons you have learned about social media failures?

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