Live From Summit On Customer Engagement 2009

October 20, 2009 — Laura Ramos

Today and tomorrow the Customer Strategy Group is hosting its inaugural summit on customer engagement – an intimate, executive conference designed for B2B marketers who manage customer reference programs, advisory boards, and the emerging area of online communities.  I will speak later today to about 70 t0 80 marketers and sponsors about “Understanding the Value of Customer Engagement”

Business marketers know customers who give references, participate on advisory boards, and engage in online communities are more valuable than those who are bystanders. But how do you quantify this value and socialize it to the rest of the business – especially in a tight economy when all the focus is on revenue and pipeline?  This forum takes a close look at this question.  In my presentation, I will introduce a model for measuring customer engagement that includes four components: involvement, interaction, intimacy, and influence. Each component requires data collected from online and offline sources that — when done successfully — give marketers a more holistic appreciation of their customers’ actions while recognizing that value comes not just from transactions but also from actions customers take to influence others. I show how marketing messages become conversations, and dollars shift from media buying to customer understanding, when firms adopt engagement metrics to capture the value of customer relationships

Here are the highlights from the morning keynote sessions I attended:

1)       Sean Geehan, who helps B2B executives understand what it takes to drive revenue, growth, and shareholder value. In his work on customer engagement, he has shown that companies that target their customer programs at their “top 20%” customers outperform the market by several factors.  He profiles companies like Harris Corporation, HCL, and Oracle in his upcoming book to demonstrate this.   He sees firms that specifically target decision makers in customer engagement programs (versus end users or middle management) see retention rates of 90% (vs. 72%) and account growth of 12% (vs. 4%).  Most importantly their reference rates are 94% vs 28% — underlining the vital importance of creating customer engagement at the executive level, not simply among worker bees.  I think this has BIG implications for community development in B2B.

2)  Tim Thorsteinson, President, Broadcast Communications Division, Harris Corporation talked about the benefits of customers engagement in face of the seismic shift in the broadcasting market from conventional, US-based TV stations to cable, satellite, government, international and sports. His division sells video equipment in all these markets and 50% of their revenue now comes from products introduced in last 24 months. (They spend about $90M on R&D). Approximately 10% of customers generate 90% of revenue. His main point is that Harris could not have made this shift successfully without creating an executive advisory board – focused on this 10% — to draw insight from and validate their decisions. And these customers deliver value: EAB members drove 16% of Harris Broadcast revenue in 2009.

Observations: He enjoys fairly exclusive access to his dozen or so EAB members since Harris’ competitors don’t actively pursue customer advisory boards. He says face-to-face, intimate, offsite meetings with deep content – but that also feature a fun, inviting locations or activities — is very important to keeping these relationships strong.  No stand-ins allowed; members can’t send substitutes to the meetings. In between Harris uses quarterly conference calls and newsletters to stay in touch. Content includes technical issues, industry trends, but is not salesy.  He knows the EAB is successful because networking happens outside – and Tim believes this would continue without Harris’s sponsorship. EAB members talk about how to make their sector more attractive to Wall Street.  They also want a seat at the table with other industry leaders, where relevant dialog can happen, and where they can talk about the real business problems they face (not technology/ products.) 

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Making Your B2B Marketing Work — Better!

September 1, 2009 — Laura Ramos

A worldwide recession and social media have swept up B2B marketers in a perfect storm, tossed between tighter budgets and the demand to do more online without guideposts or established benefits. Opportunities and challenges abound for marketers targeting other businesses through a direct sales force or channel partners. Before 2010 planning — and the push to pump up the pipeline to make year-end revenue goals — hit full stride, now is an excellent time to step outside your daily routine, tune up B2B marketing strategy, and learn new best practices.

Sound intriguing? If so, have I got a deal for you!  (Oh, c’mon, you suspected a pitch was coming, now didn’t you?)

On September 17, 2009 (Thursday) I am leading a full-day workshop in Cambridge, MA on “Making B2B Marketing Work”. This workshop brings B2B marketing peers together to explore and discuss how marketing has changed in light of the digital/social media shift and the pressures imposed by the current economy. It will help you think through a number of issues — how to stretch budget dollars by better integrating digital and physical tactics, tap into social media, drive healthier pipelines, target and qualify your best customers, and create a marketing technology infrastructure that increases efficiency through automation – just to name a few of the top takeaways. You will also gain hands-on experience assessing your integrated marketing accumen and lead management maturity while hearing “tricks of the trade” from our expert panel (who join us at the end of the day.)

You may want to check out Forrester’s site for further workshop details if you need answers to the following questions:

  • How do I optimize my marketing mix in 2010?
  • What are the best practices for generating, and managing, demand?
  • How do I better integrate digital and social media into my campaigns?
  • How do I improve marketing’s working relationship with sales?
  • How do I make my Web site generate better leads?
  • What are the best social media tactics to use?
  • What technology investments should I make in 2010?

In my rather “un-humble” opinion, I’ve found participants feel that the two best features of this workshop are:

1) Networking and interpersonal interaction. The workshop is intimate (typically between 7 adn 15 participants) which gives you the opportunity to spend time with peers (and the analyst, of course!) talking about what matters to you and how you have been making B2B marketing work. Participants from Tech and non-Tech industries share experiences and learn from each others’ successes and mistakes.

2) Talking with the panel of experts.  Plan to stick around to enjoy the wine/cheese reception for further networking and to meet with our expert panel. I’m gathering the invitees now, but past participants included experts in search marketing, community development, demand generation, and marketing automation. The discussion is lively and really gets to the heart of “what should you do in practice to make B2B marketing work?”

Will you join me?  Hope to see you there!

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Change Management: The Key to Successful Marketing Process

August 27, 2009 — Laura Ramos

Digital marketing is a double-edged sword for B2B marketers making it a bigger part of their marketing mix. On the one side, digital is more targetable, addressable, and measurable than traditional channels like advertising, promotions, and tradeshows. Online, marketing now has more data to help them “know” more about prospects and buyers. On the other hand, the options available in the marketing mix have exploded and executives want to hold marketing more accountable for program results and campaign spend. Given these turbulent times, marketing challenges increase exponentially and marketing automation moves from a “nice to have” to “essential” investment. But technology implemented without a clear understanding of process typically gets many marketers into hot water. Face it, many of us have tremendous experience running campaigns and programs, but little experience with the change management needed to move process from ad hoc to repeatable and disciplined.

The August quarterly MOCCA meeting looked a little closer at the marketing operations community experience implementing process. Brenda Kring, Director of Demand Generation for CyberSource (who hosted the meeting) and Membership and Content Chair for the MOCCA steering committee, presented the results from the July association survey on marketing process. The audience then listened to a panel share their stories on how change management impacts processes, automation, applications and people and talk about the specific challenges each experienced rolling out automation. The conversation and questions reinforced for me how minor a role technology selection plays in operationalizing marketing and how automating poor process only results in long term problems.

Here are a few of the findings from the survey that stood out:

1) Process is important, but not approached in a systematic way. Of the 36 members who responded, 2/3 said they only apply process rigorously in a few key areas. Just 6% said they had a “very process-oriented culture” where they worked. Of those who implemented process, 2/3 said they did not use a formal methodology or defined their own as they went along.

2) Top management must push change. 44% of respondents said the key factor that led to a successful implementation top executives drive change from the top. 30% said getting stakeholder buy-in was essential. This underlines how people is the essential ingredient in change management, and marketing is no exception to this rule.

3) Marketing operations wants more accountability in process change. Almost 80% of respondents said their experience with process change was neutral or unsuccessful. Integrating accountability – making sure folks adhere to the new process or changed state – was the change 29% of respondents said they would make in retrospect. (This would also relieve executive management from spending times getting the troops lined up and marching in the right direction.)

(A few statistics about this group of respondents:  72% hail from the tech industry, 61% are in firms over 1000 employees, and 53% work at companies that earned $1 billion or more in revenue — so a very interesting sampling, especially to my research.)

If you’d like to see more information about the survey, check out the MOCCA and look up the Q3 meeting. I’d be interested to hear what you think are the top issues that keep marketers from implementing process successfully. What do you think achieves – or holds back – success in marketing process automation and change management?

(Disclosure: I back-dated this post to correspond closer to the timing of the meeting.  Sorry folks, just so much to do!)

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2009 Economic Impact on B2B Budgets and Practices

April 3, 2009 — Laura Ramos

MarketingProfs hosted Digital Marketing World Spring 2009 virtually. The free conference attracted over 2000 attendees, and mesmerized most with a video speech by David Plouffe, Barak Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign manager, who spoke extemporaneously about how the campaign team developed a world-class community of followers who blew away previous fund raising records (over $580M in 2 years with the majority from individual donors.) Using social media like Facebook, Twitter, etc., the campaign connected a dispersed group of people and generated brand loyalty with unparalleled success.

I know all of this because I followed Mr. Plouffe on the agenda and enjoyed quite a bit of carryover from his incredibly popular session. (Thank you David!) I would also like to think that B2B marketers are quite interested in the impact of the current recession on marketing budgets and mix. Here are a few highlights from the research:

1) Traditional tactics still command the lion’s share of the budget. Trade shows, direct mail, inside sales, TV and print hold a tight grip on the five top spots in our list of most expensive B2B marketing tactics. Coming in sixth, the company Web site is the only digital tactic to scrape together a double-digit percentage of marketing budgets

2) Social media makes a few budgetary inroads. Virtual trade shows, community sites, rich media (video, podcasts, etc.), blogs, and other Web 2.0 tools like RSS subscriptions, mashups, and widgets got a bigger portion of markeitng budget leftovers this year: each of these emerging tactics captured between 3 and 5% of the marketing budget this year versus the measly 1 to 2% devoted last year.

3) Recessionary concerns slammed the brakes on spending plans. While 3/4 of respondents reported program budgets holding steady or enjoying reasonable increases in 2008, spending came to a skidding stop in 2009 with only 58% of marketers reporting that their budgets would grow or stay the same, a sizable drop. The most striking figure is that 42% expect overall budgets to getslammed by 23% on average. (See Figure)

Marketing Spending Plans Dropped in 2009 v 2008

Marketing Spending Plans Dropped in 2009 v 2008

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This data — and a lot more — is part of a joint study with MarketingProfs, Forrester surveyed 317 B2B marketing professionals in firms with annual revenues ranging from less than $20 million to more than $5 billion and who met our minimum criteria for marketing spend and mix.

Forrester will publish the results of this research shortly in two documents that I will blog about in the coming weeks.

I also plan to give another rendition of the Digital Marketing World presentation for Forrester audiences in May. Check the blog for date and time.

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Four Transformative Steps For B2B Marketers

February 19, 2009 — Laura Ramos

The final installment in my blog series published on the Forrester Interactive Marketing Professional blog offers four key steps B2B marketers should undertake, starting in 2009, to avoid a diminished role inside their firms:

How To Avoid Becoming Obsolete (Part Final) – January 16, 2009

Two things before I start: 1) A big “Thank You’ to everyone who commented on my blog posts, emailed me, or spoke to me by phone about the research called “How To Avoid B2B Marketing Obsolescence“, and 2) No, I really don’t believe B2B marketers will become obsolete.  That was just a title that would get you to read further!

I wanted to conclude the multipart blog series I started last year with a few comments about the research that resulted.  Published yesterday, the report recommends B2B marketers, particulary those who work in the Interactive area, focus on the following four areas to avoid becoming obsolete in their executives’ eyes. Focusing simply on new campaigns, clever advertising, and delving into social media will only paper over problems. Turning up the heat on conventional marketing activities won’t spur the profound changes required. To avoid obsolescence, B2B marketers should undertake four transformative steps:

1) Build a marketing-only database to capture buyer insight.
Today, stalking prospects with outbound, undifferentiated messages yields unpredictable results. But this is what happens when marketers rely primarily on list providers, database marketing services, or other sources of information for targeting buyers. To make campaigns pay off, marketers need to collect and analyze more information about what separates their best customers from the others. Build a marketing database to do this. Big firms may need to look at something from Aprimo or Unica, smaller firms can get by with less. But get a handle on your prospect data in 2009.

2) Shift from simply generating demand to managing it.
When marketing delivers a new batch of leads, sales wants to know exactly which ones have the most potential, regardless of whether marketing outsources the leads or not. To convince sales that marketing-qualified leads are worth pursuing, marketing must execute multifaceted campaigns that engage — and qualify —prospects while extending marketing’s responsibility further along the sales pipeline. Top marketers focus on managing demand, not generating it. They also score their leads numerically, systematically.  I’ve talked about this before, but you can see how you rate here.

3) Combine digital and traditional tactics to build dialogue around needs and motivations.
Business buying cycles are long, and marketers use this to their advantage when they weave together digital and physical channels to engage buyers emotionally, deliver brand experiences, and form ongoing relationships. Integrated marketing success in B2B depends on leveraging the strengths of different channels to build an ongoing conversation with buyers. To do this well requires organizational alignment, an outcome-based strategy, deep customer insight, analytic planning, and consistent measurement. Find out how you stack up here.

4) Embrace the groundswell and community marketing principles.
As Social Computing moves into the business world, B2B marketers dial down on acquisition and step up to community marketing. To set community marketing strategy successfully, marketers must know whether target customers willingly participate in social activity on the job.  We have data to share with you about how buyers behave socially while working. Come preview it at our teleconference.They also need to set social objectives that align with business outcomes, and evaluate tactical and technology choices last.

What other advice would you offer to B2B marketers to avoid obsolescence in 2009, particulary in light of the recession?  Let me know…

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One further insight/clarification I would add to point #1: Yes, marketers should build a marketing-primarily database to improve buyer insight.  I would more precisely define “buyer” in this case as including early stage responders up to and including long term customers. Trying to develop a database of all potential buyers is best left to the database marketing services firms, from whom you can buy this data at a reasonable price and avoid the headaches of trying to consolidate, de-duplicate, clean, and keep it current.

The archive to a second teleconference by Oliver Young and myself can be found here, for no charge to non-Forrester clients.  This page includes the Powerpoint slides, MP3 audio download, and a link where you can see/purchase the report. Clients can find the archive of the February 3rd teleconference here.

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B2B Marketing: Obsolete? Not Yet!

February 17, 2009 — Laura Ramos

I am an advocate for excellence in business marketing. I don’t believe for a minute that the marketing profession will disappear any time soon. But I think it’s possible for marketing to assume a much diminished role at the executive table as sales, development, service and support use technology to connect directly with prospects and current customers. Social Computing and Tech Populism provide the evidence that this risk is real.

I raised a few eyebrows and stirred a few passions when I first posted on this topic. Here is the second post in the series on obsolescence, which begins to address the changes B2B marketers need to make, and make soon:

Will B2B Marketing Become Obsolete? (Part II) - October 24, 2008

Wow.  I am overwhelmed by the response I received from my first post on this subject. Looks like I hit a nerve and inspired some great commentary.  In particular, I’d like to call attention to the thoughful response from Arthur Einstein, who is the VP of Marketing at Loyalty Builders. I wanted to comment briefly on what I am hearing from all of you so far. To avoid obsolescence, readers believe B2B marketers must focus on:

1) Improving customer insight. Business buyers are people, not faceless companies. Rational decisions get clouded by emotions, motivations, and desires. B2B marketers must stop pushing out communications and start listening to what buyers need. Customer research, segmentation, understanding the buying process, and creating relevant information that engages prospects in conversations — and ultimately long-lasting relationships — all require marketers to understand their customers deeply. This includes gathering and analyzing factual, behavioral, and social information.  Most marketing organizations are woefully underinvested in the technology, processes, and skills needed to do this right.

2) Managing demand, not just trying to generate it. B2B marketing and selling involves supplier teams interacting with buyer teams. This means fostering multiple interactions that evolve in a nonlinear fashion to build relationships and success. It require sales and marketing to work together to give buyers the unvarnished information they need to make a well-considered selection.  This also means all parts of the selling organization need to get more involved in educating and nurturing demand. When marketers deliver fewer, but more qualified leads that sales can act upon, then marketing’s value becomes tangible and strategic to the business. Bottomline: there isn’t an unlimited amount of demand out there to draw upon, so marketers need to figure out which ones to invest in to grow into a relationship.

3) Embracing the social groundswell. Buyers have turned to peers for advice for 100 years; social computing simply extends and supports this behavior. Buyers also mistrust advertising and messaging because marketing has been too focused on feeds, speeds, and fluffy claims — not on value, evidence, and real solutions. Good news: Readers are optimistic that social media, and Web 2.0 tools, offer new opportunities for marketers to correct these past mistakes and use social activity to build relationships that are essential to effective B2B marketing.

To this list, I would also say B2B marketers must learn how to: 4) integrate online and offline communication to better create dialogue and learn more about customer needs and 5) use technology to quantitatively measure, test, and report on marketing activity and the progress of building relationships. Automation will drive the efficiency that wards off obsolesence.

Stay tuned for Part III of exploring how B2B marketers can avoid obsolesence…

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Avoiding obsolescence is not about grabbing onto new tactics or technologies in an attempt to rise above the landslide of messages bombarding buyers every day.  Goodness knows the Web 2.0 world provides an abundance of these tools and the hype to make everyone feel you must jump in immediately or get left in the dust.  It’s not about finding the next unique gimmick or chasing the next eye-catching fad. It’s about making marketing relevant to buyers, and — as a result — to the business. 

Despite rumors to the contrary, buyers have not lost their senses or their trust in conventional marketing communication channels. In our recent research, business publications and sales people follow close behind peers/word of mouth and the Web site as the primary sources of information buyers use when validating purchase decisions. The challenge for B2B marketers has been, is, and will always be finding productive ways to put concise information in front a well-segmented and targeted audience so they will look over and say, “yes, I would like to talk to you about that further.” Delivering messages, information, and offers through marketing that blends traditional channels with digital, social approaches works most effectively when it creates conversation, not just shouts through the bullhorn.

With marketing budgets under tight financial scrutiny, it’s time for B2B marketers to account for their true impact on the business. Otherwise, becoming simply the “make it pretty department” is right around the corner.

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Is B2B Marketing at Risk of Obsolescence?

February 16, 2009 — Laura Ramos

Technology Populism and Social Computing are two big ideas that Forrester coined to describe the unstoppable impact of technology on business process, business people, and purchasing.  Briefly, for those unfamiliar, the defintions are:

Technology Populism – An adoption trend led by a technology-native workforce that self-provisions collaborative tools, information sources, and human networks — requiring minimal or no ongoing support from a central IT organization.

Social Computing – A social structure in which technology puts power in communities, not institutions. (Similarly, the Groundswell is a social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations.) 

Both ideas talk about how technology puts power in the hands of individuals — buyer or worker — and that traditional control over technology and information — byIT or corporations — will decrease as  a result. I think both ideas are important for marketers to grasp because those who brush aside the idea that a groundswell of social activity has — and will continue to have — little impact on business will soon find themselves on the path of the dinosaurs and dodo birds.  Social computing and tech populism are only two factors forcing B2B marketers to take a hard look at their role in the world.  In the first of a four part series on Forrester’s Interactive Marketing Professional blog, I talked about the forces I see at work pushing marketing toward a diminished position inside the companies they serve if they don’t take steps to mitigate these forces now:

Will B2B Marketing Become Obsolete? (Part I) – October 22, 2008

Today marks the beginning of my 8th year at Forrester and my 4th year researching B2B marketing. I’d like to use this anniversary to start a blog conversation about what I see happening in B2B marketing and to think about what’s next. And, frankly, I am concerned about the future of the business marketing profession.  In particular, for those of us marketing high technology products and services.
First of all, I see four macro trends working against increasing marketing’s future value.  In brief they are:

1) Commoditization: software as a service, open source, service-oriented architectures and a number of similar trends make it easier to enter a market and more difficult to differentiate products on features and capabilities alone. As a result, marketers need to work harder to understand, attract, and engage an audience. And it takes multiple touches to involve prospects in conversation and figure out if they are ready for sales to contact.

 

2) Consumerism and the social groundswell: Buyers are more likely to use information from associates than from institutional sources, like marketing messages and sales people, when purchasing. We found proof of this recently at Forrester when we surveyed business decision makers this year and found 36% of the 2187 who buy networking products and 34% of the 2148 who buy security solutions turn to peers (word of mouth) when researching what to buy. Peers were the #1information source picked in both survey samples. Social computing also establishes more open and authentic communication that will fundamentally change how marketing works – no longer will marketers be able to “spin” product problems or customers concerns away. Look at Dell or Comcast for examples of this.

 

3) Ad avoidance translates to sales call avoidance. Consumers are really good at avoiding ads. Technology only helps them do this. Tivo lets prospects skip commercials, spam blockers keep email clean, and pop-up blockers keep online ads away. This behavior spills over into the business world where busy buyers turn to the Web to get information while avoiding phone and sales calls until they are further in the buying process.

 

4) Globalization: Besides needing to address customers in fragmented regional markets, marketers are beginning to face offshore skill competition. Not only do marketers outsource their brains to interactive, ad, and PR agencies, but now outsourcing practices like lead generation and telemarketing are starting to bleed over into core campaign design and execution functions.

 

Unfortunately, I see marketers focus take a narrow view that causes them to miss seeing the impact of these trends looming ahead. When I ask B2B marketers, “What is marketing’s charter or mission at your company?,” most often I hear “We generate demand.”  This goal is very hard to measure. Why? Because most B2B products are highly-considered sales involving a sales force or indirect channel where marketing gets caught in the middle or brushed to the side. Marketers who simply want to know which tactics work best and which statistics matter fail to see beyond the front of the funnel. Without this broader perspective, marketing will become obsolete as the Web, blogosphere, and social networks let businesses connect buyers directly with product development and bypass marketing all together.

 

So what should marketers do to avoid this fate?  I’d like to hear from you on this topic.  Feel free to comment or contact me. I will be posting more thoughts on this topic over the next couple of weeks. (Hint: managing demand, not generating it, is a key discipline B2B marketers must improve.)  But I’d like your thoughts first.  What should B2B marketers do to become more relevant to the business and avoid becoming obsolete?

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This blog post garnered quite a bit of commentary. You are welcome to chime in here, as always.

 

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How Do Business Buyers Engage Socially?

February 11, 2009 — 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.

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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.

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B2B Marketers: Getting On Top Of Social Media

February 3, 2009 — Laura Ramos

Last year, I jumped onto the social media bandwagon and started researching and writing about the use of Web 2.0 technologies — like blogs, podcasting, wikis, tagging services, shared bookmarks, social networks, dynamic applications, and rich Internet apps. — in B2B marketing. In mid-July, Forrester officially kicked off this research, which you can read about in the copy of the blog post below. Here are the three things I have learned in the meantime:

1) B2B marketers are worried about social media, but don’t yet fully understand it’s implications.  Many treat social tactics like yet another outbound communication channel — which is a recipe for disaster.

2) Social media is not the same as social networks or communities. Buyers, customers, influencers, technical types, and “concerned citizens’ will band together online to get what they need from each other — regardless of how clever, interesting, or mundane a social venue vendors try to put in front of them.  Marketers need to understand the impact of social communities, but trying to start one on behalf of your business is an endeavor not to be taken lightly.

3) Marketers focus too much on the tools and not enough on the community/activity.  Even after carefully explaining why it is essential to put audience and business purpose ahead of tools when considering social media, marketers still ask me “but what are the best examples of how other companies have used <fill in the blank with any social tool you can think of> in their marketing programs?”

Bottomline: B2B marketers have a long way to go to set and execute successful social media strategy.  Here’s more food for thought on the matter. (Yes, the date is ‘dated’ but much of the insight still applies):

B2B Marketers Eye Social Media, Web 2.0 Tactics — August 1, 2008

Last Wednesday, Dan Klein — who heads up tech industry consulting here at Forrester — joined me on a teleconference to talk about how B2B marketers should “Define Your B2B Social Media Strategy.” Web 2.0 marketing is a subject of great interest to business marketers as almost 700 signed up for the Webinar, just over 300 attended, and 120 participated in a pre-show survey. The vast majority of the invitations went out to Forrester clients and, judging by the list of attendees, the participation ranged from large tech firms to small business services providers. Folks from software, hardware, telecom, agencies, start ups, database marketing, and media were present.

What did we learn from this interactive session? Here are a few highlights:

1) Social media use in marketing is just emerging. While 2/3 say they use email and Webinars in their marketing mix today, only 35% or fewer use blogs, online forums, video produced by marketing, podcasts, customer contributed content, or other Web 2.0 tactics.  Surprisingly, 42% said they are using social networks like Facebook — up from the 25% who said they did in our earlier 2008 research. (Click on the tiny picture below to see the data up close.)

Social_media_webinar_survey_3

2) Benefits are hard to gauge right now. Depending on which tactic they use, between 30 and 36% of respondents said it was “Too early to tell” whether using social media translated into marketing success.  In contrast, 25% said landing pages and Webinars successfully helped the generate leads in a measurable way.

3) Marketers are sticking with what works. As a result, 65% or more of the survey respondents said that Webinars, landing pages, video marketing, and online forums figure significantly in their 2009 marketing plans. On the other hand 55% or more said that RSS feeds, podcasting, widgets and virtual worlds were marginal or irrelevant in their futures.

4) And, finally, the most popular questions were about how to understand customers’ use of social media. They included: How do we figure out what customers are doing socially? What is the best way to get this information? How do we understand how Web 2.0- savvy our buyers are? How do we assess customer use of social media?

It’s the $64,000 question, isn’t it?  How to reach customers through this brand-spanking new medium. But it’s the wrong question for marketers to ask if they want to be successful with social media.  Social media use is about creating dialog and relationships with a community. The community says what is important, not the marketing folks. This is going to be a very hard lesson for B2B marketers to learn because it means putting the right people — technical, customer-facing, problem-solving people — in front of the community and letting them engage in an open, trustworthy manner. And they may not get the corporate messaging right everytime…

In this new Web 2.0 world, the right question is: how do I get to know my audience better and what they want from social interaction? For this, Forrester developed Social Technographics and the POST methodology, which we talked about briefly on the Webinar.

If you’d like to know more, check out our research on POST and Social Technographics. Or you can join me in Cambridge, MA on August 13 for my “Making B2B Marketing Work” work shop, where we will talk more about social media, among other topics.  In the meantime, let me know what successes you are finding as you explore incorporating social behavior and Web 2.0 tools in your marketing.

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BTW – The next installment of the “Making B2B Marketing Work” work shop will be held February 19, 2009 in Foster City. It will focus on social media as an essential part of the B2B marketing mix and go-to-market strategy.

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