I received notice recently that my response has been designated ‘best answer’. Always gratifying but what’s more gratifying still is the fact that the person who asked the question saw fit to update my answer with that vote now – over a year later. Nice to know I can talk lasting sense!

Here’s the original question:

Can new social media be used for effective B2B marketing campaigns / promotion / lead generation and how to execute such campaigns (i.e. which sites to avoid, which ones provide best ROI)?

And here’s what I wrote back in March 2008. Re-reading it, I don’t think there’s anything I would change now.

Social media is perfect for B2B marketing because it allows you to interact directly with your potential customers. But, that said, there is not one straightforward strategy that fits all companies and all campaigns.

The struggle many marketing departments have with a social media strategy revolves around the question of time. Traditional campaigns tend to run for a set time on a set budget and usually have defined metrics for deciding on success. There are no quick and mesaurable wins with a social media campaign and that is something that needs to be accepted up front.

However, marketing departments are looking to social media precisely because they are discovering that their traditional campaigns are delivering diminishing returns: prospects are bombarded with more and more material and have simple tools for turning off interruptions they no longer wish to put up with. Press releases, too, are increasingly ignored by their target audience – the press.

Business buyers, like the rest of us, value information over blatant marketing material. A social media campaign, whether conducted from a blog, via podcasts, or through a blended approach of a number of tools, gives a company the opportunity to present its voice in an open, honest, and approachable way. If you can think of ROI now as Responsibility of Interaction, you can see that a strategy of sharing information becomes a stratgey of building trust in your business community and establishing your products and services as the market leaders by responding most effectively to the feedback of your audience, customers, and critics.

A survey done last year by Loudhouse Research in the UK revealed that company purchasing decision makers are relying on blogs second only to industry reports for buying intelligence. That means they’re turning to what people are saying about your products over and above any press coverage or brochures sitting on their desk. If you’re not part of that on-line conversation, then you have no way to influence it or refute negative comments.

Where are the cost benefits? Firstly, you’re building long-term loyalty and developing a rapid response network for customer feedback. Secondly, you’re saving money on traditional marketing that has been declining in effectiveness.

A final benefit of a social media campaign is that it is more likely to arouse the interest of traditional media outlets – the trade papers and retail IT magazines – than standard press releases and business briefings.

It’s a challenge, of course. But I believe it’s a challenge worth taking on.

The final sentence may be a bit portentous but for all the new tools and rapid adoption of social media in the last year, the basic premise remains the same: there’s a new way of marketing and everyone benefits.

B2B Marketing Magazine reports that a recent survey of 750 “business decision makers” by IPSOS on behalf of AOP (the Association of Online Publishers) shows that for almost all those polled (97%) the web was the form of media they used most.

Well, Duh!
What were the other 3% using? Stone tablets?

Let’s face it: at the start of 2009, if you’re going to hire a ‘decision maker’ for your business, you would hope that they had current knowledge of the market in which your business operates. And ‘current’ no longer means the news section of last quarter’s trade journal.

Huh?
But here’s the rub:

The piece goes on to say that, when it comes to business decision-making and purchasing, just over half of those surveyed turned to the web first.

Again, not a surprise. Yet the B2B piece takes this information and turns it on its head. Its conclusion: this shows that “traditional media (specifically print and events) still plays a significant role in this process.”

No, it doesn’t. It means traditional media’s influence is diminishing fast. To claim 50% as some sort of victory for trade magazines, events, and print-based marketing collateral is simply an ostrich take on the cup half full. Will the figure be 50% at the end of 2009? No.

Doh!
Most of the reaction to the survey quoted in my – yes, print – copy of this month’s ‘B2B Marketing’ has to be classed under the joint heading of ‘head in the sand’ and ‘wishful thinking’. Or, as marketing analyst Mr. H. Simpson from Springfield would summarise it, ‘doh!’.

There’s a bit of clutching at straws that the mysterious ‘business decision makers’ trust a site more when it’s backed by a reputable print publication. Then there’s the belief that the online ‘experience’ just can’t convey the smells and feel of a great brand. Here’s Declan Gane of the Events Industry Alliance, for instance:
“..brand experience is what B2B marketers and brand managers need to deliver…[A] live, face-to-face environment allows the customers to build a relationship with that brand beyond what is achievable online.”

The point is that with the simple expedient of watching a product demo online I can save the time and trouble of visiting a trade show. Networking with other buyers? That’s what LinkedIn is for. Getting the lowdown on the spec, testimonials, and a feel for how the product will benefit my business? Back to the web.

Whatever way you cut it, the web as procurement research tool is here to stay, even without scratch and sniff. If a disproportionately large part of your marketing budget is still geared towards print and events-based exposure, perhaps it’s time to check online and see what your competitors are doing and what customers are saying about your products and your company. Or are you waiting for the trade show to come round again?

So please bear with me while I indulge myself with another (great) list about how to get the most from LinkedIn, this time by Brian Wallace of Mashable – How to get the most out of LinkedIn.

Brian lists seven LinkedIn features that most businesses could benefit from using:

Quick Lookup – Look up who you are having that next business meeting with. You’ll be able to break the ice right away.

Q&A – Post questions to others in your industry. The Yahoo Answers look and feel of this feature has definitely made LinkedIn more active and interesting. A public question can be responded to by anyone that works in really any discipline. Such was the case where Derek Edmond spotted a discussion occurring about the trustworthiness of SEO.

Recommendations – Have clients or co-workers post recommendations, which future employers and clients can view to gauge your skill and level of trustworthiness. Conversely, if you’re an employer, these imply trustworthiness for a potential freelancer or new hire.

Background checks – Look up potential new hires or freelancers. This should be right up there in an HR manager’s toolbelt.

See what your competition is up to – Keep track of what others in your industry are up to. Network updates gives you a feed of recent activity, so you can see who your connections have friended, groups they have joined, and the people they have recommended. You’ll even be able to see when people are switching jobs.

Introductions – Use people you already know to help make introductions. It’s a great way to get in the door with a company you need to contact.

Open Networking – Go out and become a LION! You are an open networker.

Brian also links to a great post by Jennifer Laycock on Search Engine Guide about why LinkedIn is the one social network she would always recommend – the post gives some compelling, real world examples of the power of using LinkedIn. A great read for those who are unsure whether to bother investing their time and energy into the LinkedIn network.

So, there you have it. Even more reasons why LinkedIn could be good for you, and your business. And yes, I promise not to go on about LinkedIn for a while…

Step forward the Commoncraft team once more. LinkedIn approached them and asked them to create a short video that helped explain some of the benefits of belonging to the network. The original Commoncraft blog post about the video is here.

But if that’s too far to go, here’s the video.

The best part of the toolbar for me is the ability to link quickly to the LinkedIn profile of anyone who sends email to my Gmail account. There are other useful elements, of course, and you can find the full specification here.

Now there’s a mobile version of LinkedIn. The best thing about this will be accessing questions and answers on the go. I could also see sending LinkedIn invitations as a new form of exchanging business cards in meetings etc. But whatever works best for you: social networks thrive on the innovation of their users, after all.

The best way to find out about mobile LinkedIn is to point your phone to m.linkedin.com. There’s also a YouTube video from one of the lead engineers at LinkedIn, which I’ve added below.Â

Al Alvarez is a wonderful writer. He writes criticism, essays, non-fiction studies of subjects as diverse as poker, mountaineering, divorce, and working on oil rigs. He’s also a poet and a novelist and has written a superb autobiography called “Where Did It All Go Right?”. In a recent series of lectures – now published in book form as “The Writer’s Voice” – he introduces his subject like this:

“…in order to write well you must first learn how to listen. And that, in turn, is something writers have in common with their readers. Reading well means opening your ears to the presence behind the words and knowing which notes are true and which are false.”

There are two key points here. Firstly, that writers and readers share a common trait; and secondly, the ability to detect what’s authentic. But let’s leave the world of literature and apply these insights to social marketing. Traditional marketing ‘listened’ through surveys and opinion polls, market research and measuring media coverage. All, quite obviously, driven from ‘above’ and producing results that could easily be interpreted in whatever way best suited the marketers. There was no way to gauge what was authentic, in other words. Worse, the only voices heard were those both willing to be interrupted and to respond. Over time, this method almost guarantees that the marketers and the market are heading on separate paths.

Finding the conversation
To start listening, you need to find the conversation. You want to know what people are saying about your products and your company. Given the size of the internet and the vast numbers of people using it, this might seem an impossible task. Luckily, however, there are tools that make the task slightly less Herculean. Here are three simple methods of determining where you are being discussed:

• Google alerts – anyone can set up an alert on Google and, whenever your search term (eg. “purple king-sized super widget”) is found by Google, you’ll receive an email pointing to the link.
• del.icio.us – this takes a bit more work but if anyone has created a shared bookmark and tagged it with your company name or your product name, it will be here. You can widen your search to take in competitors and similar products, of course. The aim is to discover some of the authoratitive voices on the internet that may be discussing you.
• technorati – at the time of writing this post technorati claims to be “Currently tracking 112.8 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media.” One of its most useful features is that it clearly shows you how long ago a blog pot was written, so you can get a sense of when activity peaked on a certain conversation.

Passive listening (or tracking the conversation)
Once you’ve found the opinion makers and thought leaders or the forums where your type of products are discussed, it’s time to put in place a method for tracking the conversation.

The best way to keep track of blog conversations is via RSS. Adam put up a post here recently explaining what RSS is and what it does. Keeping track of your feeds is easy with a feed reader. I use Google’s reader but if you prefer an off-line version, give FeedDemon a try.

When conversations take place on forums, it can mean that you need to visit the forum regularly to keep up with the discussion. This is not necessarily a bad thing as it reinforces the listening habit. Remember why you’re doing this? It’s easy to lurk on a forum and just listen. Sometimes, forums have functionality to allow you to receive an email when a particular discussion is updated. Check the FAQ of any forum you join or visit to find out some of the ins and outs.

Active listening (or joining the conversation)
Lurking and eavesdropping are all very well for a while. But it can become a bit frustrating hearing only one side of the conversation. Now it’s time to let your voice be heard. If you’ve been paying attention in the forums and to the blog posts you’ve been reading, you should have a feel for the tone, topics, and limits for each conversation. Now’s the time to let them know you’re there.

One of the quickest wins comes from simply leaving a comment on a blog. If there’s a post that directly relates to you, your company, or one of its products, state your view. Let them know who you are and why you can talk with authority. If a post refers to a case of poor customer service, for instance, tell them you’ll look into it. Do that and report back your findings and you’ll find that immediately some of the bad press is diminished.

The next step is to start your own blog. Use it to ask questions and drive traffic to it by leaving comments on other blogs and forums. Make it a blog that matters to the audience you have been listening to.

Listening as call to action
As you establish your credibility, honesty, and authenticity through your blog and your willingness to listen, you’ll find that you can begin to shape the conversation. This is not about advertising: it’s about sharing news and information with an audience that is interested. They are reading your blog: you are not interrupting. Where before, this audience wanted to talk about your products and company but were limited to rumours and opinion, now they have a real-life horse’s mouth to get the facts from. You’ll stilled be called up on mistakes and bad judgement but the long-term ill effects will be minimal and be heavily outweighed by the positive effects.

Get listening today.