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.

Obama and his team have leveraged a host of social tools to reach it’s audience, including: a Facebook page, MySpace page, Youtube channel, Twittering, Flickr, an iPhone application, a blog, and more.

Reaching your target audience is clearly important in a presidential campaign, and part of Obama’s target audience is obviously a demographic who engage in social media, so reaching out to them in their natural surroundings sounds like a good idea.

It’s interesting to see the importance that the election team is placing on engaging with people on the web – a web that is changing the way people communicate – and are using a variety of tools, networks, and communication platforms to reach out. It’s also interesting to see that they are obviously backing that importance with a reasonable resource – both in time and money – investing in social and web tools to promote the cause.

What a great marketing effort.

It will be fascinating to see if any traffic analytics appear after the election, and if Obama wins, whether these new sources of engagement are attributed to his success. I wonder how much more we are going to see these types of tools and networks being used for a variety of promoting communication – if it’s good enough for presidential elections campaigns, then surely all tyes of organisations and campaigns will continue to rely more and more heavily on reaching out using the web.

You can read the New York Times article in full by clicking here.