B2B Marketing POSTs by Laura Ramos

I attended the ITSMA Marketing Leadership Forum recently and ran into my old friend Paul Dunay. Paul spoke at the event and shared his experiences as the (relatively) new Global Managing Director of Services and Social Marketing at Avaya. One of his first challenges was to figure out how to reel-in an explosion of social activity at Avaya into something that would create powerful, authentic, personal interactions.

To start, Paul asked, “What are the conversations that we want to join?”  The next step was to listen to the conversations already happening – it helps that Avaya has a distinct company name, so it is relatively easy to search for those talking about the them. Based on those conversations, Paul and team chose the following social objectives:

• Demonstrate Avaya Thought Leadership
• Increase Brand Awareness
• Generate Demand
• Showcase Innovation
• Embrace Product Ideas

Facebook became one of the key social tools for achieving these goals. (It doesn’t hurt that Paul is the co-author of Facebook Marketing for Dummies.)  Paul asked a provocative question:  “Why have a Web site when you can use Facebook for free?” Interesting thought, especially when you consider how the amount of traffic on Facebook dwarfs many other online destinations.  For example, Paul stated that LinkedIn is only 10% the size of Facebook today.  But do business people use Facebook for business purposes?  Or will something else become the key social network for the B2B world?

At this point, my new boss, Julie Meyers, Vice President, Strategy and Marketing for Xerox Global Services in North America, turned to me and said, “I’d like to see us have a social networking strategy by the end of June.” So I picked up Paul’s book and started reading.

Many companies have success with Facebook today. These firms: 

• Use Facebook as a recruitment tool.
• Advertise using Facebook Marketplace, industry-related groups, and targeted campaigns.
• Solicit feedback from customers; give them a forum to voice concerns.
• Energize attendees around an event.
• Leverage it for internal knowledge sharing and communication.

Yet, despite these early achievements, I have to say that I’m not sure what might be right strategy for our team of professional services marketers at Xerox to pursue. My research at Forrester indicated that LinkedIn is the preferred social networking site in business, but – relative to other media – its use is nascent. Paul’s book offers a lot of great advice on the tools and capabilities Facebook offers – many of which B2B marketers can leverage quite easily.  Yet the question still lingers: “Will we find an audience there?”

I’m still not sure, but watch this blog for future posts to learn where the “search for a strategy goes.”  If any of you have a suggestion or two, please feel free to share it here by posting a comment.