B2B Marketing POSTs by Laura Ramos

Earlier this week Jeremiah Owyang and I presented our recommendations on social media strategy to a client who had hired us to conduct research like the “Social Technographics of Business Buyers” report. For the sake of argument, let’s say that the results were similar enough that using the Forrester syndicated data as an example would have led us to the same conclusions.  As a reminder from my previous post, 91% of IT and business buyers exhibit Spectator (i.e. reading blogs, read forums, watch video) and 58% exhibit Critic (i.e. post ratings or reviews, comment on a blog, contribute to online forums) behavior – making these categories of social behavior the most common.

Because Spectator and Critic behaviors were also common among this client’s target audience, we recommended that the client pursue some very specific objectives in their social media plans.  In short we said they should use social media to:

1) Listen to what these socially active buyers are talking about. This means investing in the means (which this client already had) to monitor online “buzz” about topics of interest to these buyers. Sound hard?  Not really, it can be as simple as setting up searches on Google’s advanced search page. For the blogosphere, it means using one of the blog-specific search engines like Technorati, Google Blog Search, Blogpulse, etc. Or setting up a TweetDeck page to monitor several topics, or using Twittersearch.

2) Talk with them. Reach out and participate in discussions, comment on blogs, publish content/reports, syndicate podcasts or videos online.  Do this on sites and destinations that are NOT associated with your brand or company, as well as your own.  As Jeremiah puts it, “you have to fish where the fish are.”

3) Provide new opportunities to interact with and support each other. This is where you get to show how you can add value.  Use listening and talking activity to direct interested parties to your site and to content that they can read, rate , and comment on. Now you have the start of an engage online audience.

We specifically told them to demonstrate they can achive these objectives in ways that measurably change their interactions and relationships with buyers BEFORE pursuing a more advanced community-building strategy.

At the conclusion of this presentation, the listeners asked two very interesting questions that gave me pause. They wanted to know, “In light of the findings, should we continue to pursue our community strategy?” and “Can we use communities to support and talk with our customers?” These questions made me wonder if they had heard a word we had said!

Let me go back to first principles — first principles in the POST methodology to be specific — to explain my frustration.  POST says “understand your audience first and learn whether or not they are engaged in social activity.” Ok, the results show clearly that technology buyers are a socially active crowd. But most are Spectators which means they aren’t talking, voting, or creating content. You have to figure out indirectly — by studying what they search for, click on, read, and down load –which topics interest them the most.  You must also talk with them to test you findings and see if you can get them to read and follow you.  Then you should try this with another audience or topic, and then another. 

Jumping directly to the conclusion that “communities” — and investing in community platforms, community software applications, social business software, whatever — is putting the T before the P in POST.  This is backwards and doomed to fail.

While the Social Technographics of business buyers is high, this finding does not mean that any and every social approach will send them flocking to your corporate Web site or community pages. Marketers who use social media successfully concentrate on P = people/audience and O = objectives/outcomes first. Almost exclusively.  The choice of technology, tactic, or tool becomes a distant second. 

A word of advice to CMOS: if your marketing department comes to you and says “we need to build a community”, ask them “For whom?” and “How will this community impact our business in measurable ways during this economy?”  These P and O questions will get them to focus on the right things, not just the technology.