Successes and Shortfalls of Marketing Technology: As Shared with the Milwaukee BMA

November 14, 2011 — Laura Ramos

Xerox Document Services - Example of Thought Leadership on Sustainability

From social media to sales enablement, I have found new marketing technologies are abundant, often replacing established tools in the marketing programs and operations toolbox.  In my relatively brief time here at Xerox Document Services, we’ve enjoyed the opportunity — and challenge — of adopting a variety of new technologies with a mix of successes and shortfalls.

On November 10, I had the honor of delivering the keynote presentation to the Milwaukee chapter of the BMA. (The BMA is an organization I shamelessly plug to all B2B marketers.) I shared a few lessons that we’ve learned rolling out social media, lead management automation, and guided selling tools in our professional services organization where sales coverage runs the gamut from geography to industry.

It was a frank recounting of the challenges and problems many marketers face with new technology adoption across a range of programs, campaigns, and operations. It was the ”practical experience” view to the perspective  that Debbie Qaquish, Chief Revenue Officer of the Pedowitz Group, shared on how revenue marketers are changing the landscape of the industry through lead management automation. 

You can find the presentation on the Milwaukee BMA site, scroll to the bottom as the presentation is the last one featured on this page.  In it I talk about:

1) The state of B2B marketing and how the explosion of online tactics has made it harder for marketing to escape the execution treadmill and demonstrate its true value to the business.

2) How Xerox Document Services uses an online destination and social media to share thought leading perspectives from some of our key executives.  On this site, we talk about sustainability, change management, transforming enterprise marketing, innovation, and the future of documents.  Topics completely unrelated to copiers and printing.

3) Demand generation and lead management: how we use industry experts and clear, specific targeting to develop a perspective on key issues — like the future of the insurance industry — and share these with current clients and prospects. And how we keep the conversation going.

4) A cautionary note about guided selling and sales enablement and how the most exciting new technologies may be a bit much for your sales people to digest in one swallow.  Instead start with something they know (powerpoint slides) and give them a tool that enhances their effectiveness and professionalism when presenting in front of clients.

I also shared the following lessons with the 40 or so BMA members and guests who joined us for dinner and the evening presentation:

  • We are never finished.  Technology makes many new marketing approaches possible, but you have to keep feeding the machine.
  • Choose carefully, understand impact/risks of the new technology approaches you want to try.
  • Get inside your business financials to select metrics. If your programs and technology don’t show results in the language of business, you will fail to gain support.
  • Partner with sales, but gain senior management support. If the “big boss” doesn’t demonstrate both interest in and commitment to your implementations, then the road to success will be long and difficult.
  • Focus on audience and objectives first, the rest will follow. This is the POST principle.
  • People, process, and change management are more important than technology. Technology for technology’s sake is never a good thing.
  • Content generation is biggest success factor and hurdle. Figure out how to keep the content coming.
  • Use reporting to improve marketing, not just “prove” it.
  • Don’t be afraid to fail.

If you can relate to the contents in the presentation, let me know how.  Also, join your local chapter of the BMA. It’s a wonderful organization that I know helps to improve the business marketing profession.

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Join Me at SocialTech 2010: Oct. 27 at the Doubletree in San Jose

October 25, 2010 — Laura Ramos

As a former Forrester analyst, I’ve had a long-standing relationship with the wonderful folks at MarketingProfs.  I’ve come to value greatly the resources — both online and in-person – this organization provides to marketers who, frankly, can’t afford the big-ticket price of a marketing consultant or industry analyst firm. This Tuesday, MarketingProfs will host SocialTech 2010, their inaugural social media conference for B2B marketers in the high technology space.

After a rocky start caused by the slow economy, and postponement of the event from March until October, SocialTech 2010 promises to bring together the visionaries and experts who have used the power of social media to transform the way B2B technology companies market their products and services. At 3 pm on Tuesday afternoon, I will speak on a panel featuring:

In this session, Michael and René will present highlights from recent research — conducted by IDC and Palo Alto Networks separately and respectively — to benchmark the use of social media for B2B high-tech marketing. Michael will explain why traditional corporate culture remains the largest barrier to successful social media initiatives today. He’ll discuss the different operational challenges organizations face to effectively deploy and manage social media initiatives. René will then provide highlights on the adoption and usage of social media in his experience at Palo Alto Networks and (probably) Serena Software, where he worked previously. 

After Michael and René speak, Gurmeet and I will react to the research and share some things we are seeing and doing within our own organizations. Hopefully we can provide advice on how you can encourage social media use within your own organization while demonstrating its value to the business.

Prior to my panel, at 2 pm that same afternoon, my colleague Jeannine Rossignol will join Chris Koch from ITSMA to talk about “The Role of Social Media in the Buying Process“  and how Xerox has used social media to enable internal salespeople to have more informed discussions with customers. While I only touch on it in my panel presentation, Jeannine will talk more about “Competipedia”—a secure, interactive, wiki-based resource for the Xerox Global Services sales force to find the latest competitive information. Chris will share how CSC did also leveraged wiki technology when they launched the first B2B social networking site for the insurance industry, called WikonnecT. Wikis and service companies — anyone seeing a trend here?

The SocialTech agenda promises both forward-looking views from Jeremiah Owyang, Guy Kawasaki, and Robert Scoble – visionaries that no conference on social media should be without. I also hope you will find a lot of practical, real-world advice that you can put into action after you leave the conference.  Will I see you there?  I hope so!

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Reading “Facebook Marketing for Dummies” To Help Set Social Strategy

June 2, 2010 — 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.

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Don’t Be A Social Media Tool

May 15, 2010 — Laura Ramos

A few nights ago I had the delightful privilege of speaking on a panel called “Tweets, Tags, and Texts: Making Social Media Work for You” sponsored by my alma mater, Santa Clara University Leavey School of Business, Alumni Council.  Panelists included:

Ben Parr provided a most memorable comment, and I could not resist echoing it again. To paraphrase, Ben warned the crowd, “If you think of social media strictly from the tool perspective, you will become a tool…”

The Online Slang Dictionary defines a “tool” as “an uncool person, a loser.”

Focus simply, or too intently, on the technology and your social efforts will fall short of the mark. This advice is what my former Forrester-colleague Josh Bernoff, co-author of Groundswell and (now) Empowered, described in his seminal work on setting social strategy, and which I later adopted in much of my research.  We used the acronym POST to remind marketers and business people to focus on your audience and objective first, and to consider which technology will help you reach your objective last.

P = People                               ”Who do you want to reach socially?
O = Objective                         ”How do you want to change your relationship with them?”
S = Strategy                             “How will you do that? And how will you know you were successful?”
T = Tools… Technology, Tactics     “Which social tools will you use?”

I found it particularly insightful that this little quip came from Ben.  He was, by far, the biggest social media enthusiast on the panel, and the one most steeply entrenched in it as an editor of Mashable. (Imagine, if you will, Ben sitting next to Felix, the General Counsel for TrendMicro.) Ben reminded me a lot of former colleague Jeremiah Owyang, a social media maven extraordinaire who taught me a lot about how to engage socially and successfully.  Both Ben and Jeremiah are quick to encourage business folks to cast off into social waters and start sailing. Yet I find it interesting that both believe that, to have a successful journey, you can’t just hire a boat with the best GPS navigation and sonar systems, but that you have to know where you want to go – and who you want to take along – to have a safe and happy voyage.

Professor Terri Griffin, who moderated the panel discussion, felt that Ben’s comment summed up the evening well. Besides narrowing in on a specific audience and articulating a clear, measurable objective, what are some other keys to success you have found in charting these unfamiliar social waters?

(PS. Yes, for those of you who notice, I am backfilling my blog with old posts.  Let’s just say Xerox has kept me a bit busy of late!)

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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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Social Media Use Soars Among B2B Marketers: Really?

August 4, 2009 — Laura Ramos

On July 20, BtoB Magazine, in conjunction with the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) published findings from the June 2009 online survey of 172 client-side marketers, 77 self-identified as primarily targeting B2B.  You can find the online version of the article here.

My colleague Josh Bernoff spoke at the ANA/BtoB conference today, called “B-toB Marketing in the New World“, and dropped me a quick note to say that his presentation — where he talked about “The Social Imperative in B2B Marketing” – was well received. He also shared an offhand remark along the lines of “those B2B marketers could sure use your help.”

At first, I found Josh’s comment a bit out of kilter with the title of the BtoB Magazine article, “Social media use soars among b-to-b marketers”. How can Forrester’s leading expert on social media strategy, co-author of Groundswell, find the ANA audience needing to know more about how to use social media successfully?  Then it dawned on me: use and success are not necessarily the same here.

The online article doesn’t include a key chart from the physical publication. The chart shows the percentage of b-to-b marketers using, or planning to use, the following “newer media” platforms.  (Again, planning and doing are two different things.) Reading directly from the July 20 chart, the data looks like this:

Your own Web site = 99%, email marketing = 94%, SEO-organic = 79%, Online ads/banners = 73%, SEM-paid search = 71%, Webinars = 66%, Social networks/social media = 57% (question: why lump these two together?), RSS feeds = 46%, Viral video = 42%, Podcasts = 38%, Video-on-demand and Wikis = 36% each, and Mobile, Gaming and Second Life bringing up the rear at 18%, 7% , and 6% respectively.

Surprisingly, not too different from Forrester survey findings published earlier this year. (See Figure 6 in particular).

The title touts the main finding, that among the 77 who responded, 57% of b-to-b marketers in this survey say they are using social media as a marketing tactic (remember, this is labeled as social network/social media), up from a mere 15% in 2007.

But let’s look at the numbers a little more closely: the first 6 items in rank order are not typically considered “social” media, but rather interactive tactics that many marketers have embraced gradually during the past number of years.

I think combining social networks and social media gums things up a bit because most marketers look at things like blogs, podcasts, microblogging (Twitter), open social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.), wikis, and even video as the more “social” tactics emerging in the new campaign toolbox. So, having a corporate blog, for example, could lead respondents to say “yes, I am using social media,” and inflate the number a bit.

I’m guessing subscribers to the ANA can get a final version of the report and look at the data directly. But this article highlights how — despite the hype — “social media” is an emerging concept and the definition of what is “in” social media (and what is not) is not commonly shared.

What is more interesting is a paragraph from the August 3 press release published by the ANA prior to the start of the conference.  To quote, it says:

“In 2009, the most effective newer media platforms were as follows: Search engine marketing (SEM) (65 percent), Own Web site (59 percent), Search engine optimization (SEO) (55 percent), E-mail marketing (45 percent).”

Ah, so when evaluating whether these marketing approaches are ”effective,” the “social” media don’t yet meet a majority of B2B marketer expectations. While use is soaring, that use is still fairly experimental, and questions about how this activity pays of in direct business value begin to arise.

Today, Josh told the Chicago conference audience, “to reach B2B buyers with social technologies, concentrate on objectives.” This is a key theme in Groundswell, a tenant of our POST method for setting social strategy, and the principle behind Social Technographics – you have to understand how your audience engages in social activity, and what you want to achieve by engaging with them, to make social media succeed.

Perhaps the most interesting points were made by several of readers who left comments about the July 20 article online, in particular Liz Stott, Marketing Strategist, Penton Media.  You should read the whole thread, but I can’t help but quote Liz to close this post:

“My only word of caution to marketers would be to determine if your prospects/customers are really using SM for business decisions, before you dedicate full time employees to community building roles. Marketers see SM as “free” – but it’s not free at all, especially when you consider the Value of Time, and the high costs associated with community building personnel.”

Couldn’t of said it better myself.

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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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B2B Blogging Report Generates Attention

February 5, 2009 — Laura Ramos

Want to get a lot of online attention — good and otherwise? Write about corporate blogging. Who’s doing it, how to do it, what works, and what to avoid generates tons of attention from the throngs who advise B2B marketers about blogging best practices. I’ve been watching B2B blogging for over 2 years now, and I have to say that I am not overwhelmed.

Corporate bloggers seem to miss out on one key fundamental — you have to know your audience inside and out to write interesting blogs that catch their attention. I often tell people that blogging is like raising a child — it may seem like a lot of fun to get one started, but afterwards you are committed for the long haul.  And successfully raising a blog requires consistency, discipline, a willingness to listen, the ability to admit mistakes and move on and (above all) accepting criticism.  As the mother of two teenagers, I think I know a bit about that last point!

In June 2008, I wrote a research report about the state of business-to-business blogging. Currently, I am reading Paul Gillin’s really good book, “Secrets of Social Media Marketing“, and found a citation (on page 71) to this research.  I am flattered, even though Paul didn’t cite the source directly.  Here’s what else I had to say about the report when the blogging community caught hold of it:

Clarifying Our (Popular) B2B Blogging Research — July 11, 2008

Last month Forrester published my latest report on B2B blogging, which has been picked up extensively by the business press and blogging community — the Wall Street Journal Business Technology blog, BtoB Magazine Online, and Marketing Pilgrim to name a few. As a long-time analyst, let me say there is nothing more satisfying that to see your research read and discussed. Thank you sincerely for your interest!

While the business media has been representing the details in the research accurately, I’ve run across a couple of blog posts that – and let me be very clear here – AGREE with the main message but do not establish some key facts up front. To make sure readers understand the scope and methodology behind this research, and to avoid confusion, I want to clarify a few things that some may have missed if not reading the whole report (or the endnotes and attached spreadsheets).

1) To look for trends, we reviewed blogging activity publicly available from 90 of the Fortune 500 and Computer Business Review 250 companies.  Why 90 companies? Because we wanted a round number and could only find 44 B2B-focused companies with blogs in the Fortune 500 list. By the way, this is an increase from the 29 we found in late 2006, when we published our first report on this topic. We expanded our search to the CBR 250 because we are interested in how large, enterprises (who represent many of our clients) approach blogging. Endnote 1 in the report explains our sources and the spreadsheet behind Figure 2 lists the blogs we examined in detail.

2) This report focuses on B2B firms exclusively, and high technology companies primarily.  I believe that blogging activity among B2C firms is experiencing a different set of trends and you can check with my colleagues Charlene Li, Josh Bernoff, and Jeremiah Owyang to find out more about this. For example, Charlene’s key research on the “ROI of Blogging” looks at the Total Economic Impact of GM’s Fastlane blog. Charlene and Josh revisit this example in the book Groundswell. The TEI model applies to B2B blogs, but B2B marketers must realize that their mileage may vary and the assumptions Charlene uses may or may not apply. Do your own math, folks, don’t just use our numbers….

3) This report does NOT try to put a number on total blogging in the B2B space. Regardless of your opinion about the validity blog counts running around out there, we all agree there are a lot of them. I don’t know this for a fact, but my experience tells me that sole proprietors and small business owners author the majority of B2B blogs.  This report reviews what is happening at very big firms because, frankly, that’s who most of our customers are. So be careful when you read the percentages quoted by some bloggers because the percentages apply to either the 90 firms we examined or the 189 respondents to our survey.  It’s a smaller universe than “all B2B blogging”, so take a moment to understand whether our data and analysis fits your situation.

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B2B marketers are very interesting in blogging.  I’ll have more to say on this subject in future posts.  But feel free to post your thoughts on the best blogs — or blog advice sources — you’ve seen here.  Also, take a look at my research on Marketing’s Role In B2B Blogging.  Hint: B2B marketes should enlist blogs to support future sales processes and activities.

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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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