The survey breaks out categories of B2B and B2C marketing into products and services, and finds that B2B social media marketing for services is on par with marketing for all consumer products and services. Social media for B2B products spending is less than anything else and will continue to be for the next five years.

The post continues to say that social media aligns well with B2B marketing goals with its focus on building customer relationships and brand awareness.

Look for us to begin reviewing and publishing our survey data of SocialMediaB2B.com readers soon, which also confirms a general increase in social media spending in 2010. Has social media become a bigger part of your marketing budget in 2010?

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Here is a tweet to send about the survey (copy and paste)
If you are in B2B marketing, last chance to provide your feedback in the SocialMediaB2B.com (@smb2b) 2010 survey http://bit.ly/76YNc2

Please click here to take the survey

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1. Social media & B2B: Interactions are opportunities
by Rich Harris (on Jennifer Leggio’s blog)

2. The Business of Social Media: B2B and B2C Engagement by the Numbers
by Brian Solis

3. Social Media For B2B
by Amber Naslund

4. Crushing the Myth of B2B Social Media
by Jay Baer

5. B2B vs. B2C: Why is Social Media MORE Opportune For B2Bs Than B2Cs? It’s The ENGAGEMENT Level, Stupid.
by Christina “CK” Kerley

What are some recent articles you have found helpful in developing your social media programs?

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We know that our readers are a mix of people from all different size companies and this is one of those posts that may have more relevance to small and medium sized companies where you have knowledge and influence that flows to and from the top of the company. Actually, you may be the owner of the company. If you work for a large organization, you might never have thought about how integrating other companies into the mix affects marketing or social media strategies, but it still might relate to consolidation with other departments or adding more employees to your team.

Vertical Integration
The benefit of the Powered acquisitions is their ability to provide end to end solutions, but what they are really building is a vertically integrated solution where the consultants can recommend tools and capabilities that are under the same roof. The positive side is that deep familiarity with these solutions will yield stronger results, while critics charge that clients need agnostic solutions. This doesn’t mean you need to acquire a partner to really understand the best approach to creating social media strategies, but by creating stronger partnerships with vendors, you can acquire the knowledge needed to make the right recommendations.

Connect with vendors, but not just via email or telephone. If they are local, meet with them in person. If they are not local, find some common trade events to attend. Make it clear that you are not looking for a pitch, but you want to get to know them and understand the strengths of their products or services. If they are a social media provider, they will understand the value of the relationship. If they all they can do is to keep selling you, move on.

Scale
It is very possible that you can become a victim of your own success in 2010. Many companies started social media initiatives last year with small budgets and even smaller expectations. This year those programs will be expected to have real business impact that demonstrates return on investment in the only units that matter: dollars. This means working harder to get those results sooner. If you moved the needle before, you will be expected to continue doing it. There is a time intensive aspect to social media that requires companies to continually monitor and respond across the social web. If you could buy another company or absorb another department, you would suddenly have the ability to scale those programs. Since neither of those things are likely, find ways to get a bit of time from others.

We have written about getting others outside of marketing to blog. Others in your organization are on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and niche sites related to your industry. Make sure you have a coordinated social media effort so all employees understand how to represent the company on these sites.

Efficiency
The combining of companies also creates efficiencies in common processes or departments like billing and human resources. After the mantra of do more with less of last year, and employees common acceptance of stressful work environments because this job is better than no job, the last thing anyone wants to hear is they need to find ways to be more efficient in their social media execution. Assuming that you will not get additional resources in the first half of the year, you will have to learn to be more efficient. Combine common tasks so they can done together. An example of this is how often you check Facebook. Pick a few set times during the day and give yourself about 10-15 minutes to scan your personal profile and the fan pages you manage. This will make sure you are keeping up with comments on the fan pages and lets you dip into your own network on Facebook. Limiting it to specific times for a set interval will guarantee that you will be efficient.

What are some other benefits of having a large amount of additional resources available tomorrow?

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We are just getting started in 2010 and aside from gadget announcements from CES, the subject with the biggest amount of buzz on the web has been location-based social networking applications. Much of this buzz was created, when one of the leaders in the space, FourSquare announced that it was opening up its platform to all cities around the world. With all of this buzz, it begs the question, do these location-based networks have use cases for B2B companies?

The short answer is yes, they do. The first round of businesses that will begin to leverage these location-based applications will be local establishments like coffee shops, restaurants, gyms and other types of consumer-based small businesses. The application of services like FourSquare for them is pretty straight forward. For these businesses FourSquare acts like a public loyalty program. A quick look at the page for a business location shows who goes there and with what frequency.

How do located-based platforms benefit niche B2B companies? I can think of three cases in which they may work in the future, as these applications and the technology that supports it grows.

Making The Case For Location-Based In B2B

1. Adding A Valuable Layer To CRM – Location-based applications like FourSquare are the precursor to enterprise level location-based applications. As location-based technology begins to work its way into the enterprise, one of the key uses will be to manage sales teams and add richer data to CRM platforms. B2B companies will have private location-based networks for their sales staff. Using the GPS functionality in most smartphones used by sales staff, smart sales teams will automate locations of sales visits into the CRM system for a more accurate log of sales and nurturing activity. Additionally, it will make it easier for executives to change a sales person’s schedule to go talk with a “hot lead” because they will be able to do it on physical proximity in near real-time.

2. Identifying Prospects and Facilitating Lead Generation – Any good sales and marketing team for a B2B company has a profile of what their customers are like, or customer personas. They have an idea about their personality, what motivates them, the types of activities they like to do. A significant part of who a person is, are the places they go and the people they spend time with. If you are in the business of selling software to engineers, then you can find the places in your sales area that engineers are likely to frequent and use location-based applications as a way to connect with them.

3. Tradeshow and Event Marketing – For many B2B companies tradeshows and other business events are all about lead generation. This lead generation has traditionally been conducted through giving away prizes or electronic RSVP information where data is collected. Location-based applications provide a new level of lead generation at events. Location-based applications would allow for more prospect information gathering and real-time offers and discounts pushed to attendees. Imagine you just announced a new product at a press conference, wouldn’t it by powerful to send a special discount for that product only to those people who were physically in that room for the announcement? Checking in on a location-based platform would be their application for the discount.

Are location-based applications going to see rapid B2B adoption in 2010? It is unlikely. Conversely though, they should not be immediately dismissed without thoughts to the potential application they have towards business objectives.

What are your thoughts on location-based applications? Do they have a place in B2B?

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In order to do what you ultimately think is the best strategy and execution for your organization, you will need to have the resources to make it happen. Like any business function, convincing executives to invest is all about doing your homework and laying down a foundation.

5 Steps to Get B2B Social Media Funded

1. Understand The Numbers – To get money you have to show that you can make money. The first step is finding some of the little things that many in your organization don’t like to do. You need to determine areas of your business that you think B2B social media can support and help grow, help reduce cost, or foster innovation. Once you understand these areas, then it is important to know the numbers tied to these business functions. How much is a lead worth? How much does a call center call cost the business? What does better R&D mean to long-term product sales. These are the answers you must be armed with.

2. Develop A Strategy Based on Financial Gains – Does social media have benefits past direct financial gains? Of course, but it is the financial modeling for your plan that will get investment, not the branding and engagement benefits. If you want your B2B social media plan to succeed then you need to build it like a business plan, not a communications plan. Make no mistake, the web is a business. The two key things to focus on is how you will drive results on current business indicators that you can demonstrate with your knowledge from step one. Additionally if you can demonstrate new sources of revenue and/or cost savings that can be generated by your social media strategy, then you will greatly increase your odds of executive support.

3. Understand The Resources Needed Before Starting - Getting something like social media approved depends a lot on your ability to impress executives and blow them away with detail and knowledge of your plan. Something I see a lot is strategies and plans presented and even approved that have a lack of understanding of the resources needed to be successful. Social media isn’t free. You will need support from current or new staff as well as budgets to pay vendors for things like social media monitoring, hosting, development, premium accounts and many others. Having these resources understood ahead of time shows that you understand the scope of work and that this isn’t just some kind of experiment. Step 3 is the information that you will present that will make sure that you are taken seriously.

4. Find and Build A Hero – The first three steps are great and may be enough for many executives, but some will want more. We have already agreed that you can’t implement the right strategy without support and investment. However, without support and investment you do have the resources to build one hero. You can find the time to work with one member of the sales team and train him to leverage social media to improve his sales results. You likely have someone in mind already. The point of this step is to demonstrate that with the right training and strategy that social media can help your sales team achieve better results. If you can showcase the example of one team member doing it right and demonstrate the results that have already happened, then it is easy to demonstrate the possible organization wide impact.

5. Set ROI Metrics and Time Table From The Beginning – Think of step five as the knock out punch in your fight for B2B social media funding. When closing out your presentation for executives it is not enough to show them the potential return for their investment. A time table has to be assigned. Make a slide with a timeline and show the increments of time you believe that will serve as ROI milestones. Setting these goals against dates will give the executive team a clear understanding and help them see how social media fits in with the big business projections calendar.

If you do these five steps and do them right it will be very hard for an executive team not to support you.

Do you agree? What do you think I left out?

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11 B2B Social Media Predictions For 2010

Most Popular Posts on Social Media B2B in 2009

Big List: 13 B2B Social Media Prediction Blog Posts For 2010

Video: Top Stories of December in Social Media B2B

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1. eMarketer: 12 Digital Marketing Predictions for 2010
Lee Oden reviews the predictions made by eMarketer and finds mobile, ecommerce and social search leading the way in the new year.

2. 10 BtoB Marketers Predictions for 2010
Paul Dunay starts his predictions with the importance of Facebook for B2B marketers, and also talks about mobile, corporate websites and lead generation.

3. 10 Ways Social Media Will Change In 2010
Ravit Lichtenberg wrote a guest post on Read Write Web that highlights the all-encompassing nature of social media, the importance of ROI and the role of women in social media.

4. Social Media 2010: it’s time to get boring
The Church of the Customer follows an in and out format with the following entries included as in in 2010: turning employees loose on Twitter, Foursquare and the CMO participating in social media.

5. This is the future of social media
Mark W. Schaefer’s list looks unlike any other and includes his thoughts on human coupons, ongoing privacy debates, man-machine interface and the digital divide.

6. 100 Social Media & Content Marketing Predictions for 2010
Joe Pulizzi put out the call for predictions and presents over 100 predictions from more than 60 marketing, content marketing, custom publishing and social media thinkers and writers. The trends he found across those predictions are video, mobile, outsourced content, quality content and offline conversations.

7. 2010 Predictions: Will social media reach ubiquity?
Jennifer Leggio also turned to her network for predictions, and she presented the thoughts of 31 thought leaders, entrepreneurs and social media practitioners. Her summary of these predictions is that social media will be more about how companies do things, rather than a shiny toy.

8. 11 Smart Marketers Shared Their 2010 Predictions
Beth Harte takes a different approach to crowdsourcing Marketing Profs predictions and opens the question up to their LinkedIn Group. This gets responses from smart people you may not know. Integration is seen as a key to success in 2010.

9. Six Social Media Trends for 2010
David Armano points to emerging trends that include establishment and enforcement of social media policies, encouraging competition and mobile social media replacing cigarette breaks.

10. Looking ahead to 2010 with Shiv Singh
Mary Ellen Slayter spoke with Shiv Singh about what he sees as the trends for 2010. They included the growth of social brands, customers’ impatience for mediocrity and the applification of everything.

11. Five Social Media Predictions for 2010
Joel Postman sees augmented reality going mainstream, location-based apps dissolving into features of social networks and more regulation of social media.

12. eMarketer Weighs In on 2010 Trends: Social Media & Paid Content
Debra Aho Williamson predicts marketers will need better measurement on earned media, the increasing importance of social search and the the growth of advertising on social networks. Paul Verna anticipates Twitter building its business in 2010, rather than its audience as it did in 2009. He also see the changing of online news content and the convergence of digital video as trends in the new year.

13. 8 Predictions for SEO in 2010
Rand Fishkin collects his SEO predictions for 2010 including the changes ahead for Google’s real time search results, the importance of personalized search and increased spending on SEO. If you are not well-versed in SEO, even just reading this post of predictions is a good primer in SEO.

You can also check out our 2010 B2B Social Media Predictions.

If you have written your own prediction post or you have read ones that we missed, please add them to the comments below.

Note: This post was a collaborative effort with the list compiled by Kipp and the summaries written by Jeff. And it only matters if you take issue with the list or the summaries. And because Kipp’s picture is at the top.

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Looking toward 2010 the changes likely to happen will be far less sexy and shiny than the trends and tactics that were the focus of 2009. For B2B companies 2010 will be about more clearly connecting social media to business objectives and better understanding how to measure the direct and indirect return on investment of social media.

From a B2B perspective integrating social media into the sales funnel to support lead generation and transactions will be a top priority. B2B companies are likely also to shift more budgets to inbound marketing strategies, which are likely to include social media. Social CRM systems and integrating social data for sales team decision-making will also begin to happen on a broader scale in 2010.

Here are my 11 B2B Social Media Predictions for 2010.

1. Sales Staff Get Social Media Savvy – Next year social media is getting out of the B2B marketing department and starts creeping into other business functions. One of the departments that is going to begin to realize social media’s impact on its objectives is the sales team. With customers changing their habits and getting information differently, sales professionals will have to adapt. Once they learn about the added edge that social media gives them in terms of client and industry knowledge, they will start to slowly change their habits. This will be a slow process but it starts in 2010.

2. Inbound Marketing Gets Cash - In looking at the marketing mix and budgeting for 2010, forms of inbound marketing like social media and search engine marketing are likely to receive an increase in their share of the budget. While numbers may still remain much smaller than traditional advertising and direct mail, these budget upgrades will give inbound marketers the support they need to demonstrate ROI and increase investment in following years.

3. Location-Based Fills In The Gaps – Right now we live in two worlds: offline and online. The bridge between these two for B2B companies is leveraging devices with GPS functions to make location an important component of business information. Location will be a more important component of CRM data, B2B social networks, as well as other business applications. Knowing when and WHERE leads and clients are will improve relationships. Location is a game changer.

4. Social Media Lead Generation Becomes Common Place – Experimentation comes to an end in 2010. Social media, while being about conversations and great content, is going to get down to directly supporting lead generation. B2B companies realize that social platforms can generate leads, which directly create sales and transactions. Connecting leads from social media to CRM platforms and then closing sales cycle is what will happen in 2010.

5. Social Media Publishing Gets More Multi-Media – Recently I have been talking about video content in the B2B space. Next year will continue a trend that has seen diverse types of media used in B2B. Video both recorded and livestreamed will see an increase in use, but it is likely that B2B companies will start using more images as well, to help better tell their story. While text and audio have been the staples of B2B social media content up to this point, that will change in 2010.

6. Influencer Marketing Gets Even More Important – In the first quarter of 2009, 30 percent of B2B trade magazines closed. Historically, it has been these magazine relationships that B2B companies have leveraged to reach important industry influencers. In 2010 industry influencers are going to take a more active role in social media because of its low cost of entry and declining competition from print publications. As industry influencers use social media to build influence, companies will follow to engage with them and realize the importance of building credibility online.

7. Mobile Can No Longer Be Ignored - B2B companies on the digital front have focused heavily on their Web sites in recent years, but they have focused less on how their Web site works on mobile devices, or more importantly, how their lead generation processes work on mobile. The popularity of devices from RIM and Apple are causing a rising of the tide. These devices are giving users the expectations that all things should work on their mobile device and work as easily as their favorite applications. It is the companies that realize this and focus on simplifying the user experience that will be successful.

8. Corporate Web Sites Get Social – Corporate Web sites that are stagnant, are becoming useless. The next generation of B2B corporate web sites is going to be much more social. As lead generation and branding efforts transition to online, businesses will realize that engagement, relevance, and dynamic content on their corporate Web site is the best way to support these efforts. Things like product reviews, blogs, and content aggregation will begin to become common place as companies fight to be the “portal” for their industry.

9. Social and Real-Time Search Drive B2B Social Media Adoption – Search engines are an important source of inbound marketing leads for many B2B companies. In 2009 the major search engines made a lot of changes. Google’s shift to real-time search was one of the most important. Now that search engines have begun to include data from social networks and have started using online relationships to prioritize results it will become more important than ever that B2B companies participate on the social web in 2010. It is likely that those that don’t will begin to see a drop in online inbound marketing results.

10. B2B Gets Smart About Social Data – The light bulb is going to go off in the heads of many executives across major B2B industries. They are not only going to realize that “social media is here to stay.” Most already know that. The major revelation is going to be that the user generated content created every second on the social web can help them make better and more informed business decisions. Leadership will begin looking for ways to collect and analyze this data and then use it to improve product development, customer service, marketing and other aspects of business.

11. The Firewalls Start To Come Down – Currently the major road block for business to business social media marketing success is the blocking of social content and platforms in the workplace. Many employees and decision makers are restricted from accessing major social platforms and user generated content. This will see a major change in 2010 because organizations will realize that this interaction is important to their bottom line and that employees need to access information to make better choices for the business. The younger generation will help with this by advocating for this type of communication, but leadership will ultimately realize that business communications methods have fundamentally changed.

I am sure that many other changes will occur in 2010, but these are the items I feel are the most important and are likely to change. Do you agree? Have you seen things in your business to suggest otherwise? What did I leave off this list that should be on it?

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One of the reasons to consider some of these ideas is that marketing professionals do not always make good bloggers. People who are used to communicating in a marketing style of features and benefits can sometimes have trouble finding the right voice for a corporate blog. This voice needs to be established, along with the content strategy and editorial calendar of the blog, and maintained by a single owner, or editor, of the blog. The editor is also the one who is responsible making sure that posts keep flowing. They can either write all the posts themselves, or try to find help.

1. Finding Company Bloggers
Whether you are starting a corporate blog or you have been publishing one for a while, you should always be on the lookout for others within the company to write for it. As you talk to people within the company and they talk about interesting things they are doing or present a unique take on the state of the industry, ask them to write a guest post for the blog. Anyone can do this one time without a big commitment. This shows if they have what it takes to blog. And remember that not everyone does. Look for people with good ideas who can convey them well in writing.

2. Product Managers Share Expertise
Pay close attention to product managers or product engineers. These are people who best understand your customers’ issues and are providing solutions to those problems. If they can write about those issues at a higher level, beyond just “our products solve that,” people from the product team can make some of the best bloggers. These are also some of the most passionate members of your organization, which is a great trait for a blogger to have.

3. Promote Industry Issues
Do you have recognized industry thought leaders in your company? Do you have dynamic people with good ideas, who are well-connected in the industry? These are emerging thought leaders. These may be some of the harder people to convince to blog because of the time involved, but try to get several of these people to commit to one post per month. This is good for both the individuals and the company for them to be publishing regular articles about industry issues.

4. Create Competition Among Bloggers
Once you have a core group of bloggers writing for the company blog, one way to keep them productive and involved is to set up some friendly competition. Set up a leader board that tracks the popularity of posts. The things you can track and compare are number of posts, page views per post, number of retweets, and the biggie, number of comments. In addition to some internal competition complete with trash talking, there are two main things that happen from this leader board. It will force you to stay on top of the metrics of the blog since you have to keep the leaderboard updated, and it will encourage your bloggers to get better. They will learn what kinds of posts get more traffic, what kinds of headlines get retweeted, and what encourages comments. These are things that good bloggers learn by blogging, and by providing extra incentive to your non-marketing bloggers, they will develop these skills too.

5. Find the Next Speilberg Within Each Department
Not everyone is a videographer, but if you rotate the video role around a department you will find some creative people in your company. Since video is another way to tell a story, pick one person from each department and give them a month to shoot some video about something going on in their department, the company or the community. Rotate around people in the department and rotate departments. This will create a regular feature on the blog and really add some depth to the human side of your company. Keep this simple by having them shoot the video and you can edit it for them. It will keep a similar look to all the pieces.

Do you have other suggestions for lightening the blogging burden from the blog editor?

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