B2B Marketing POSTs by Laura Ramos

Forrester analysts Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li published our business best seller, Groundswell, last year. The book captured marketer, community manager, social strategist, executive and enthusiast attention alike. Long on B2C examples, however, readers sometimes wondered “how much of this applies to B2B marketing?” and “how much does social participation carry over into the working world?”  I’m happy to say “quite a bit” to both questions.

Tomorrow, my colleague Oliver Young and I will present a preview of upcoming research on how business decision makers participate in social activity. Here’s what I had to say about it on Forrester’s Interactive Marketing blog:

How Do B2B Buyers Participate Socially? – February 11, 2009

My colleague Josh Bernoff lit the social computing world on fire last year when Forrester published Groundswell, which Josh co-authored with Charlene Li, now heading up Altimeter Group. Groundswell introduces marketers, community managers, and social enthusiasts to Social Technographics – a method for describing describe a population according to its participation in social activity. You can interact with our online tool on the Groundswell site to learn more about how this profiling works.

B2B marketers see this and ask, “Does this behavior translate into the working world?” Interactive marketers want to know how truly engaged business buyers are in social activity to gauge how much time, effort, and commitment they need to put in emerging social media versus other, more traditional marketing tactics. We analysts at Forrester can help by drawing analogies using our knowledge of consumer behavior, but we didn’t have the data to profile exactly how business buyers participate socially.

Until now.

Tomorrow (Feb 12 at 11:30 am ET), Oliver Young and I will preview the results of Forrester research into the social participaton of B2B buyers — folks involved in technology decision making at firms with 100 employees or more, in 5 major geographic regions, and across 7 major industry groups. The Webinar will touch on the results from over 1200 survey responses showing B2B buyers lead active social lives and a good portion — but not all — of this behavior happens while on the job.

If you’d like to learn more, register here.  Feel free to pass this offer along to your friends and colleagues too. It’s free and open to non-Forrester clients. Space is limited however.

Watch this space, and my blog for B2B marketers, for more on this as we unveil the accompanying research report and start talking more about how marketers can use this information to inform their social media strategy and marketing mix.

Tags: B2B marketing, social media, buyer behavior :: Add to del.icio.us

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Personally, I hope you can join us…this is the start of a lot of great research and insight that will help B2B marketers ride the wave of the social media groundswell.