Dude, Social Media for B2B, Everyone’s Talking About It, Bro.

One of the hottest topics in social media as it pertains to corporate, is how to incorporate social media into a company’s currently existing B2B strategy and initiatives. I’ve witnessed several discussions about this topic. The bottom line is that the solution is NOT in the tools available (Twitter, Facebook). The solution is not hiring some agency to set up an account on every social site.

Social media strategies and proposed solutions should only be created based on analysis. There are companies and agencies that have come to this conclusion on their own (a good thing), however the main issue still exists. Most of these entities are analyzing the wrong things to generate their strategy. Of course it’s important to know your audience/segment/demo…whatever you wanna call it. It’s important to understand what your top 3 competitors are or aren’t doing. That’s all standard blah blah blah…

The fruits of social media for any business, any type of business, in any industry, come from the enhancement of interactions. Enhancing the key interactions are the core of all social media successes in my opinion. Those key interactions are the ones that catalyze the rest of your efforts across the board.

Where Should You Start?

With B2B, it’s a little different. Don’t waste your time focusing on the hype of the currently popular tools like you would in the consumer world. B2B is a different beast because B2B customers, relationships and conversations are NOT typically the type that you share with the general public. When you are thinking about how to deal with your distys and the sales channel, remember that Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and the zillions of other tier 2/tier 3 sites were not created, nor have they thrived, because they had the nature of B2B in mind. It’s hard not to wince when I hear companies say stuff like, “I know we NEED social media in our B2B strategy, it’s the latest thing and we don’t wanna miss the boat.” What people should really be saying is, “I know we need to enhance our relationships and interactions with our customers on the B2B side. If social media has a place here, let’s use it.”

A Scenario

As the top social media person in your company, you are approached by some inside sales people that manage the big accounts. They heard about social media, have heard of Twitter, Facebook, and so on. They want to incorporate social media into their B2B program/marketing roadmap but aren’t sure how to go about it.

Here are some simple steps to get started that I’ve been using:

1. Discovery Time. Set up a meeting with your new stakeholders so that you can discuss the entire process for the way they communicate and interact with their customers. Find out all points in the process with a customer that they have a direct interaction, human to human. Find out if there’s a site/application that they interact with where feedback or communications with those customers happens, like Salesforce.com, etc. EVERY touch point of interaction needs to be noted whether it’s a person OR a process that interacts with them. An accurate picture of this will help you get closer to identifying the gaps that need to be filled. Also it’s important to ask them if they know what their customers currently need and have, and what they need but don’t have. Your stakeholders should be able to answer those questions quickly. If they can’t, then they have approached you too early in the game.
2. Get More Feedback. Your stakeholders will know a lot about their customers. If social media is new to their fold however, I don’t think it hurts to give them some homework. Have them pick out 5-10 of their most difficult and opinionated customers. They should let those customers know that they are exploring introducing some social media concepts into the relationship and process and would like some feedback on ways they could improve on communicating/interacting. Based on those results, it’s time to begin the construction of your plan.
3. Choose Your Drug. You now have a list of interactions to take a look at, know who their audience is, and what their needs are. The next steps are to assess with the stakeholder what kinds of interactions seem to really work and which ones seem to fall on deaf ears (which we will throw out of the equation immediately for this new social media plan). Zoom in on the good stuff and research if there’s currently a social tool, site, or product offering that could help augment those things that currently work. Keep in mind that there may not be. Most social media sites were initially designed with nimble, chaotic, public conversation/interaction in mind so I can tell you right now that trying to bend and sculpt the public consumer factor of something like Facebook and Twitter, is not the right approach and will fail (unless of course Facebook/Twitter decide they want to change their whole model and reason for existence to serving enterprise level B2B marketing initiatives – probably not gonna happen). If you found something out there that works, then congrats and move forward with an execution for testing it out. If you cannot find a solution in a pretty little package with a bow on it somewhere then you may have to explore spending some budget on custom apps/sites that will serve your specific purpose. If you go that route, your risk better be pretty calculated as that path can get costly.
4. Testing 1, 2, 3. Is This Thing On? Testing your new idea in a live environment is crucial and exciting. Remember that since this may be uncharted territory for your company’s B2B effort, you may run into surprising results. In some of my experiences, I’ve set up expectations and not only were they not met, I witnessed something completely new about my customers that I wasn’t aware of, just based on how they interacted. Take that stuff seriously folks. Those are the nuggets of social media decision-making right there.
5. Execute. Analyze. Tweak. Repeat. If you are an experienced marketer, you know this routine well. If you don’t know this routine well, you shouldn’t be in marketing or any other line of work that requires analysis and ROI.

Go On With Yo’ Bad Self.

I hope some of this stuff helps you. These are some things that I’m doing right now and they seem to be working well as a fundamentally basic approach. I know that the variables in play for every company are so vast and at times amorphous. As I learn more and more through my experiences, running through these exercises with my current company and other clients, I’ll post the meat of what went down, regardless if what I tried succeeded or failed.

Onward.