The Social and Emotional Side of B2B

Social Media has finally traversed from the basements where our teenagers surf Facebook and MySpace to the 45th Floor mahogany boardroom where Chief Marketing Officers and Chief Executive Officers converse about go-to-market strategy. If you’re skeptical of this conclusion, look no further than a survey by Forrester (B2B Buyers Have High Social Participation) that suggests 69 percent of B2B professionals use social networks for business purposes. Now that we got that business justification out of the way, lets get straight to the point. B2B executives are looking to reboot their marketing functions after their pipelines dried up during the recession and traditional marketing approaches failed to jump start discussions with prospects in any significant number.

Yes, it is time to throw the baby out with the marketing bath water and rebuild B2B marketing around the social web. And yes, I said social web, not social media. This is not about producing more white papers or putting on more webinars or standing on more stages at trade shows. This is about B2B companies facilitating more fruitful conversations on whatever issues they purport to help solve. And consequently having people trust the company when time comes to invest in a partner. There is a place for direct marketing, traditional PR, email marketing, and event management, but B2B marketing needs a new foundation. I know I need to go further in justifying blowing up entire marketing departments. And rest assured there will be posts dedicated to explaining this point. For now, I want you to know what I stand for. That way you can decide whether to enter the conversation here on B2B social media marketing (I’ll use the term social media instead of social web because it of the general acceptance of the term).

I firmly believe in three tenets:

• B2B companies should showcase their value propositions through emotion. Get emotional about your purpose. Get angry about the issues that confront your clients and prospects. For example, the cost of maintaining data centers is extraordinarily high and impedes growth. Without this cost, a company could conceivably afford to hire more workers. Get angry that data centers stand in the way of sustainable growth. Inefficient supply chains inhibit companies from providing exactly what customers want exactly when they want it. Get angry that supply chains should be more efficient.

• Personal brands will eclipse the power of corporate brands. Even at B2B companies, contracts will ultimately be signed because someone outside the company trusted someone inside the company. The dawn of B2B becoming People2People is upon us.

• Marketing should be held accountable for sales. Marketing can do more than just focus on the initial phase of the sales funnel, awareness. With social media, marketing is armed with the data necessary to do more than we have in the past in the phases of consideration, action, loyalty and evangelism. Marketing’s goal used to be to get maximum exposure. That was the best we could do with the tools of measurement available. But now, because of cookies on IP addresses, we can track how many people went from <insert social medium here> to the company website. From clips to clicks.

I am Jonathan Blank, a B2B Marketing Professional that believes in business showing some emotion. What do you believe in?

Stay tuned for an explanation on why this is called B2B Coffee Shops…

Related posts:

1. Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics for B2B Social Media

Tagged as: b2b, data, emotion, Jonathan Blank, Marketing, personal branding, PR, social media