We love examples of companies doing the right things when it comes to leveraging social media for B2B marketing and communications. We are also interested in new high tech company examples being used to represent B2B social media. We are are going to take a look at Autodesk, a CAD software companies that develops many different design software products used by a variety of design professionals. We are going to look at several screen shots and discuss what Autodesk seems to be doing right and also highlight some area for improvement.

It All Starts With The Homepage
When it comes to customer engagement and integrating social media into the complete user experience, the homepage plays an important role because it is the first page many customers see. Take a look at the two screen-shots above. Did Autodesk do something dramatic such as make their homepage a blog? No. However they have done two important things. First, they have shown that customer communities are a top priority by making a communities link a part of their main homepage navigation.

If you read this blog regularly, then you know that I am a huge advocate for context. My favorite aspect about this homepage, and the second important thing they did, is the “top searches” column in the middle of the page which shows what customers are interested in right now. This is valuable because it helps to answer customer questions, provides relevance to their own questions, and it gives your customers insight into what their competitors are working to learn more about.

Integrating Social Media With A Product-based Web Site
Looking at different B2B and B2C social media examples, you see a wide variety of ways that companies have integrated social media with traditional product web sites. Autodesk approaches this challenge by creating a sub-domain that houses all of its social content, which is called AREA. As part of AREA they have blogs, user forums, and software downloads.

There is a lot to like about AREA, and I have used arrows in the above image to help highlight those items. Autodesk is a design company, so I really appreciate that in the top right corner it gives users the opportunity to select different themes and have some control over the look of the community site. The clean navigation also makes it easy to go between blog content, discussions and software information. My favorite thing about the AREA page is that they have inserted their own banner ads on the page promoting relevant promotions and events for their customers. This serves as a solid example of integrating community and lead generation.

Managing Diverse Social Content

Autodesk has also been able to do something that many B2B companies struggle with. They have engaged a large group of employees to blog and answer customer questions on the web. They have created a way to manage this content by crating a blog homepage with some of the freshest posts and then creating a side bar that lists each blog author as well as an RSS feed for all of the blog content on the site. By doing this, they have empowered their users to easily engage with all content or maybe only the one or two blogs that directly impact their job function.

Leveraging Social Media For Lead Generation
Take a quick look at the screen shot above this section. This is the side navigation that appears on every page of Autodesk’s AREA user site. In the side bar, in addition to cross promoting the company’s Facebook and Twitter activity, is a section for trial software downloads. These trial downloads equate to lead generation for Autodesk. Without smacking its users in the face, Autodesk has developed a solution to insert lead generation at every stage of its online customer engagement. This type of integration not only helps lead generation but directly relates to the determination of ROI for social media for Autodesk.

Improving Engagement: An Important Next Step

Autodesk is doing many things right. Their next challenge is to improve their current efforts by working to support customer engagement. The AREA Twitter account is nothing more that an RSS feed with no engagement and many of the blog postings have very little comments and conversation around them. Like everything else though, this takes time and resources. Shift the tone of some of the content to ask questions and promote interaction will help, while it will also take time for customers to develop relationships with bloggers. Overall there is a lot to learn and takeaway from Autodesk.

What do you like about what Autodesk is doing? Could you do it with your company?

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