Posts Tagged ‘social media’
How Social Media Changed the Sales Cycle into the Buying Cycle
Friday, January 15th, 2010Back in prehistoric times (before the Internet, that is), b2b buyers learned about products and services by reading (print) magazines and (printed) analyst reports. Once they developed a short list of vendors for consideration, they contacted the companies (using phones, which were connected via wires) and the companies sent them (printed) sales collateral by mail (postal, that is). Then sales people would contact the prospects and use a “consultative” sales process. Buyers would tell each sales rep all about their company, industry and problems, and each sales rep in turn would then explain why his or her product/service was absolutely the best fit to meet the buyer’s needs. Marketers spent a lot of time creating attractive sales collateral materials–brochures, specification sheets and the like–and getting these printed on nice, glossy paper. Store rooms and offices were full of these glorious materials.
Then the Internet came along, and despite pronouncements that it would “change everything,” it really didn’t for the first several years. Sure, it was a leap forward in distribution technology: websites replaced printed magazines and reports, email replaced postal mail and faxes, phones lost their wires, and online conferencing reduced, somewhat, the need for travel. But processes didn’t really change much; marketers still spent a lot of time producing brochures and spec sheets, only now there were more often delivered in PDF form than printed. The sales process benefited from electronic communications, but remained largely the same. Detailed information about vendors and their offerings was still limited, enabling marketing and sales to act as gatekeepers of information. Even in the late 1990′s, sales people were still trained on how to control and manage the sales process.
Things began to change when blogging became popular about seven years ago. Established voices (journalists and analysts) had a new channel for expression. Customers, competitors, and other people with expertise in a given area even if they “had no dog in the fight” became new information sources for prospective buyers. Blogs were different from other forms of communication: less formal, more matter-of-fact, (sometimes) unbiased, and most importantly, they provided the opportunity for feedback. Readers could respond to and extend the conversation through comments. Marketing and sales were still largely in control, but buyers were entering sales cycles with more and better information.
But it’s been the explosion of social media and user-generated content over the past three years that has really changed the sales process. Prospects can ask questions, within or beyond their social networks. Anyone can answer; not just the traditional “experts,” but anyone inside or outside of a vendor organization, including customers. Journalists, analysts and other industry influencers have new channels for communication. Employees who in the past were far removed from customers, or at least certainly from prospects, can join online conversations. Customers can say pretty much the same things they’ve always said, only now instead of talking to only a few close colleagues and peers, their words can reach thousands or tens of thousands of social media readers and participants.
The result is that prospects can learn far more about an offering before ever contacting the vendor. Marketing has more involvement before the sale; marketers can’t control the conversations, but they need to monitor them and participate. By the time a prospective buyer contacts a vendor, they are closer to a decision and their information needs reduced to a small number of very specific questions (almost always including price). And they no longer have time for that “consultative sale;’ just as they are coming to the sales conversation armed with a tremendous amount of information about the vendor and it’s offerings, they expect the sales person to know about their company, needs and industry trends as well. No wonder sales groups are among the heaviest corporate users of social media. Tools like LinkedIn, Twitter and blogs not only enable sales pros to learn more about their prospects before the sale, they also raise the expectation that sales people will do so.
This is not necessarily bad news for sales. Social media has the potential to lengthen marketing cycles but shorten sales cycles, and by enabling both sides to begin the process knowing more about each other, to allow for higher-value conversations.
All of this is one reason webbiquity, or web presence optimization (WPO) is so important. Prospects are going to be checking you out online, well beyond your website, long before they have “raised their hands” and made themselves known to you. What will they find?
DBXNT74M6AKY
What is Webbiquity? How to Be Everywhere Online
Tuesday, January 12th, 2010Welcome to Webbiquity! What exactly is that? Briefly, Webbiquity, or web presence optimization (WPO for those who prefer TLA’s), is the fusion of SEO, social media, interactive PR, online reputation management and other disciplines to make an individual or organization ubiquitous on the web for their name/brand and unique descriptive phrase. If SEO is about getting your website onto page one of Google, WPO is about owning that page.
For example, Jill Konrath is webbiqitous for the phrase “selling to big companies,” holding all 10 spots on the front page of Google for that phrase. The results include her website, blog, a link to her book
From a historical perspective, the web a decade ago (or even a bit less) was still primarily a broadcast medium with limited inactivity. Although in theory anyone could own a website even then, the web presence of most commercial organizations was limited to their own websites and whatever had been written about them by professional publishers and analysts, plus a few directory listings. The last few years have, of course, seen the emergence of social media and an explosion of user-generated content. A company’s website is now only one of myriad places where customers, buyers and other interested parties can find information about it.
This new environment has created the conditions for web presence optimization: using all of the tools now available to make a company as “findable” as possible not only for branded searches but also for key phrases that uniquely describe the enterprise and its offerings. Using these tools properly means not only dominating search, but also presenting a clear and consistent message across channels, wherever buyers or industry influencers may find you.
Specifically, web presence optimization is about achieving webbiquity using the tools show in this diagram, including social networking, social bookmarking, blogging, interactive PR, video and content marketing to disseminate the company’s message as broadly as possible. Just as importantly, companies need to maximize the search value of these different tools and platforms by taking advantage of the linking and cross-linking opportunities they provide.
So, for example, social media releases–part of interactive PR efforts–point readers to company microsites and its media sharing (images, video, presentations etc.). Media sharing accounts are connected to Twitter, which is also used to promote content marketing. Reputation management sites point the organization’s Twitter account as well as social networking profiles. And everything links back the enterprise’s website and blog.
The end result is that when customers, prospects and influencers (bloggers, journalists, analysts etc.) are looking for information on your industry, they find you everywhere. Your story and messages are bolstered by your webbiquity. You have the opportunity to become a valued resource in your industry. Further, the interactions you have with these various constituencies across social networking and other media platforms demonstrate that your people aren’t just smart, they are also helpful and responsive.
This is obviously a high-level view of the elements of webbiquity. Future posts here will delve more deeply into the tools and tactics that can help you and your company “be everywhere online” for your brand and industry discussions.
How to Suck at Twitter (And Still Appear Successful)
Sunday, December 20th, 2009This post was originally published on the WebMarketCentral blog in December 2009.
There are a lot of great b2b marketers and social media contributors worth following on Twitter, like Ardath Albee, Mark Schaefer, Eric Fletcher, Jennifer Kane and Rob Rose to name just a few. These are people who definitely do not suck at Twitter. They are intelligent, discerning, helpful and social. All have respectable, even impressive, but not gargantuan numbers of followers.
But there is a different group of tweeters out there as well, a group whose members often have immense numbers of followers, though they seem to add little value, socially or intellectually. Yet these individuals often have immense numbers of followers—20,00, 30,00, even 50,ooo or more. They aren’t celebrities. How do they do it? After careful observation and analysis of the practices of these twerks, here are some of the secrets of those who suck at Twitter, yet appear highly successful.
Twitter Name
Never use your real name. It’s boring (plus it makes it too easy for the feds to track you down). Incorporate your spammy promise into your name, using something like @BigMoneyOnline. You can even cleverly insert special characters to create a handle like @WebCa$hMachine.
Twitter Bio
Leave it blank. Just because this is social media doesn’t mean you have actually share anything about yourself. Besides, leaving your bio blank adds an air of mystery!
If you feel compelled to put something there, make it as spammy and sales-y as possible. Here’s an example of an actual bio, only slightly retouched to protect the identity:
MLM, Internet Marketing, Cashflow, Twitter Automation. Just click the link above! = 40,000+ followers
(Are you barfing yet?)
Web Link
Point your link to an obnoxious “buy now” page. Make sure it is filled with lots of CAPITAL LETTERS and exclamation points!!! Be sure to include terms like “exclusive,” “limited time offer,” “secret,” and “free bonuses.” Hit your visitors hard. Remember, your goal is to convince the gullible that they can have better health, lose weight, or best of all, make big money working from home, without any real effort on their part.
Twitter Avatar
Don’t use your real face (again, makes it too easy for the authorities). The default Twitter bird is always a safe choice. Or, get creative and reflect the junk you’re trying to sell: use dollar signs, a sexy man/woman photo, or a cleavage shot.
Another tactic is to keep people guessing; if your “real” name is John, use a female photo, and use a male underwear model if it’s something like “Christine.”
Twitter Background
Again, make sure this sells your “promise.” Popular options include piles of cash, skinny models, fancy cars, yachts, or a photo of someone who looks kind of like you standing in front of some one else’s mansion.
Okay, that covers all of the header and background considerations, so let’s see how that all works together. Here’s an actual example from someone who sucks at Twitter, with only identifying information obscured:
Note the complete lack of a web link or bio and the use of the default Twitter background and avatar. Yet with only 3 tweets (all of which were sales pitches with a link back to the account owner’s spammy website), this person has almost 50,000 followers! How do they do it? Two more areas to get right:
Automate Everything
Hey, just because they call it “social” media doesn’t mean you have to actually interact with anyone, right? Use a tool like SocialOomph to create automated tweets, so you don’t have to actually read what all those other boring people are tweeting. Create an automated message to welcome new followers, because after all, people love getting spammy, untargeted, impersonal DMs. Make it blatantly self-promotional, somelike “Thanks for following. I’d love to help you! Buy my crap at [link].”
There are also automated tools to help you find new followers. They randomly follow a whole bunch of the people, then as soon as those folks follow you back, the tools automatically unfollow them and start over with a new group. Sure, you’ll pick mostly spam bots and low-activity accounts, but you’re bound to catch a few suckers in there as well! Especially with your impressively large number of followers.
Finally, there are your tweets themselves. There are several possible strategies here. One is to tweet nothing at all—remain mysterious! But that won’t help you sell your garbage, so a second, better approach is to tweet the same spammy sales message over and over.
Note how this account combines several of the recommendations above. The default background and avatar are used, there’s no bio or link, the tweets are no more than broadcast sales messages, and, as the tweet times indicate, the tweets are automated:
Almost 1,000 followers—not bad! Many more-socially-active small businesses haven’t hit that threshold yet.
A final tweet strategy is to mix slight variations of your pushy sales message with banal, tired and trite quotes from people like Zig Ziglar and Albert Einstein. I see this approach employed quite frequently. Is there a website out there somewhere, maybe called cheesyquotes.com, that collects these for people?
Whatever you do, don’t engage in conversations. That’s time wasted that could be spent fleecing the ignorant! And don’t ever retweet anything; who cares what other people have to say? If you absolutely must interact, make sure you tweets are absolutely worthless to anyone other than the recipient, such as “@imafool2 LOL! ROTFL!!” or “@takemycash Oh sure. Not!” And if you feel compelled to occasionally pass another’s tweet along, retweet only links that point back to your spammy sales site.
There you have it. Follow this guidance and you too can abuse the entire concept of social media, annoy others, build up a huge following despite the complete lack of value you provide, and no doubt, make big money working from home.
Best of 2008: Cool Web Tools
Saturday, December 12th, 2009Originally published on WebMarketCentral between August 2008 and September 2009.
Somewhat similar to tools like Basecamp and Projjex, DeskAway is an online collaboration tool that supports ad hoc work teams by enabling them to manage and track projects, share large files, send secure messages and report on activities. Pricing ranges from free (up to five users and three active projects at a time) to $99 per month for unlimited projects and users.
Gickr is a slick free tool for creating animated GIFs from any collection of photos. It can be used to create banner ads, slide shows or Flash-like animations.
This is a “connected thesaurus” that belongs in every writer’s toolbox. For any word or pair of words, it shows related words, connections between the words, rhyming words and more. For famous names, it can help find information such as occupation, birth and death years, nationality, and “trigger links” (e.g. “Clinton” and “Whitewater”).
OnlyWire lets you automatically submit content to all of your favorite social networking sites with a single button, and makes it easy for your blog readers to bookmark and share your content. If you don’t want to see their ads, a fee-based version is available for a reasonable $25 per year.
16 Essential PC Applications for Bloggers by Problogger
Frequent Best-of contributor Darren Rowse reviews essential blogging tools including SnagIt
64 B2B Marketing Tools and Resources by Modern B2B Marketing
In one of the most underrated posts of last year, Jon Miller provides links to more than 60 tools and information resources including blog posts, white papers, analyst reports, webcasts, podcasts, ebooks and articles on topics ranging from lead scoring and nurturing to marketing ROI and social media tools. Examples include David Raab’s Guide to Demand Generation Systems, Marketo’s Landing Page Test Calculator and this podcast from Laura Ramos on using Web 2.0 tactics to boost b2b marketing results.
9 Google Bookmarklets for SEOs by Search Engine Journal
The indispensable Ann Smarty reviews nine helpful bookmarlets (small tools activated from a button in your browser), such as Search selected text on Google and tools for Google Trends, Google Insights, and Google Blog Search.
While there are lots of website analytics programs out there, Clicky combines powerful functionality with affordable pricing in a way few others can match. Unlike Google Analytics (the application it’s most likely to be compared to), Clicky provides real-time stats, Twitter analytics, separate mobile visitor tracking, visitor details, WordPress integration and more. While their free and blogger plans offer limited funcitonality, their Pro ($60 per year as of this writing), Super Pro ($120/year) and Enterprise ($300/year) plans offer impressive capabilities at very reasonable cost. It’s hard to compete with free, but with all of these features and great value, Clicky has found a way to do it.
Facesaerch (yes, that’s the correct spelling) is just what its name implies: a search engine specifically for faces. Search for your favorite celebrity, a neighbor, your boss, your next prospective employee—anyone whose picture may be somewhere on the internet—to discover what photos of them have been posted and where.
Animoto lets you grab images from your hard drive or the web, choose a soundtrack from your audio collection or theirs, and then automatically creates a cool music video from your selections. While this tool would benefit from more attractive pricing (you can only make 30-second videos for free) and better controls, it’s worth checking out and playing with.
Similar to feedkiller, previously reviewed here, Feedoor.com lets you merge RSS feeds or even individual blog posts into a single feed. You can select how many stories from each source to include, and the tool provides advanced filtering options to include or exclude posts based on keywords, author and date. It also lets you create Javascript widgets for your blog or site that display headlines from your custom feed, and does it all with a simple, straightforward interface.
Crucial Firefox Plugins For SEM Professionals; Put Google To Work To Meet CPA Goals by Search Engine Land
Josh Dreller reviews seventeen helpful Firefox plugins, such as FireFTP (a fully functional and free FTP client that runs within Firefox), FireShot (a free screenshot capture tool with annotation capabilities), SearchStatus (a “Swiss army knife” for SEO pros) and Google Global (lets you search as though you were sitting anywhere in the world).
6 All-in-One Tools for Quick SEO Diagnostics by Search Engine Journal
Prolific SEO blogger Ann Smarty reviews a half-dozen SEO diagnostics tools including Quarkbase (a new addition to my arsenal), HubSpot’s Website Grader (one I use all the time), and Cubestat.
17 Online Free Web Based Applications That You Probably Would Love To Use! by SmashingApps
AN Jay reviews a variety of helpful and cool online tools here, from free web conferencing service Dimdim and URL shortener BudURL to Skydeck (an online tool for keeping track of your cell phone calls and text messages) and PDFescape, a free online PDF reader / editor / form filler and form designer tool.
This is an essential site for personal online reputation management. LookupPage lets you create an optimized personal profile that, in most cases, will show up very highly on the major search engines, helping you to “own” valuable first-search-page real estate for your name. The site offers free listing, as well as couple of affordable fee-based options that provide additional benefits such as an ad-free page and top listing guaranteed.
Another valuable site for reputation management, Retaggr not only enables you to create an online profile linked to your accounts on other social media sites, but also lets you easily create an online business card, social media email signature, and blog widget to help visitors easily add you to their friend lists.
An alternative search engine, Exalead may not be a “Google killer” but does provide some interesting features. The top menu and right sidebar box make it simple to narrow your search to the entire web, just your PC, or Wikipedia, as well as by related terms, site type, media type and other criteria.
Either a slick tool to help generate domain name ideas, check availability and register with just a few clicks, or at least a mildly interesting way to waste some time—you decide.
This is a slick tool that enables you to easily create a graphical HTML social media email signature for use with most common webmail services (Gmail, Yahoo mail, AOL, Hotmail etc.). WiseStamp lets you control the look of the email signature as well as adding RSS feeds and social networking links like LinkedIn and Facebook.
Face to Face video chat by ePoster
Concise review of ooVoo, a free video chat tool that’s been previously written about here. ooVoo is an easy-to-use tool for conducting video chat with anyone who has a webcam.
14 Tools to Legally Spy On Your Competition by FutureNow
The brilliant Bryan Eisenberg details more than a dozen tools to help compare or benchmark your site/blog against competitors, including Feed Compare (compare the size of your RSS subscriber base to others), Xinu Returns (shows how your site compares to others on search engines and social bookmarking sites) and Website Grader (provides an overall score for the SEO quality of your site plus competitive comparisons and recommendations for improvement).
The Top 100 Undiscovered Web Sites by PC Magazine
Finally, Kyle Monson reviews a slew of useful and/or entertaining online tools such as Animoto (automatically creates videos from uploaded music and photos), Jott (a cool and handy speech-to-text conversion tool) and, for researchers, NationMaster, a site which lets you compare countries on a wide variety of statistics ranging from the serious (economic measures, terrorism) to the trivial (softdrink consumption).
Surf Canyon is a broswer plugin for Firefox and IE that refines results as you search, helping to make them more relevant so you can find exactly what you’re looking for more quickly. Pandia’s review of how Surf Canyon personalizes search results states that “SurfCanyon accelerates the search process by re-ranking the search results based on your behaviour…Even though there’s no actual magic involved, this nifty little app does a great job of digging though the search results for the hits you need, even though Google buried them on page 12.”
In the same realm as Basecamp from 37signals, Projjex is an online project collaboration tool that lets you define groups, upload and share files, schedule meetings, assign tasks and send automated reminders. Projjex extends this functionality with cool, practical features like file tagging to simplify search, time tracking and iPhone integration. Serious users will eventually want to upgrade to the fee-based service, but the free offering is robust enough to be helpful tool for small businesses while providing larger organizations with a realistic trial before buying.
Follow me on Twitter badges / logos / buttons by limeshot marketing
Lots of bloggers are adding Twitter follow-me buttons and badges to their blogs, but thanks to limeshot, you no longer have to limit yourself to standard light-blue-and-white graphic. Here are 36 variations for a follow-me badge that reflects your color scheme and personality.
feedkiller is an rss mixing tool that lets you combine a variety of content into your website or favorite rss aggregator with a single rss feed. It’s free and very simple to set up. MakeUseOf.com notes in its review of feedkiller that “other tools can be used for that purpose (such as) RSS Mixer, Feedoor and FeedBlendr. However what makes FeedKiller standout is the ability to select the number of stories to include from each feed.” What would make it stand out even more is a simple PHP script for including the resulting feed on a website.
SearchCloud is a powerful search tool to use for multi-term, detailed searches. Any search engine will let you use multiple search words of course, but SearchCloud takes that a step further by letting you select a size for each search word or phrase, indicating its relative importance. And on the off-chance that SearchCloud isn’t intuitive enough for you, they even provide a one-minute video on how to use it
ScribeFire offers a Firfox browser plugin that lets bloggers drag and drop formatted text from the web into their blogs, post entries, take notes, categorize and tag their blog posts, upload images and share posts on social bookmarking and networking websites. The company also offers tools for both displaying and buying online ads. TechJaws has called ScribeFire a blogger’s best friend, and LifeHacker has made it a download of the day, pointing out that “In addition to Blogger and WordPress, ScribeFire works with Jeeran, LiveJournal, TypePad and Windows Live Spaces.”
Inspired by TweetDeck, Monitter is a real-time Twitter monitor that lets you keep track of live posts for any three keywords you enter, plus filter the display by geographic location or language (English, Spanish, and German). Frederic Lardinois wrote in his ReadWriteWeb review of Monitter that “Monitter is a cool and well designed way to monitor keywords on Twitter.”
Overall, this is more for amusement than practical business use (though the inbound link checker is very thorough and accurate). dnScoop is a domain check and website valuation tool that estimates the value of an established website or a domain name using several different criteria including the number of inbound links; the popularity, age and Pagerank of the domain; website traffic; and other factors.
At first glance, Propeller look like just another Digg clone or YASN: a social bookmarking site where you can post links, vote on them, comment, and share them with friends or a group. However, the site is owned by AOL, so there’s a chance it will be able to keep spammers and objectionable material out while avoiding the problems like the Digg Mafia or the StumbleUpon witch hunt. At last check, the links here were still do-follow, so they have SEO value as well. 
Top 5 Free Web Applications by Search For Blogging
Mert Erkal, Chief Editor of Bloghology Magazine, shares his favoriate free web applications, including ADrive, an online service for storing, transferring and sharing very large files; Audacity, a powerful open-source audio-editing program; and LogMeIn, a free remote-access service similar to GoToMyPC.
Convert Archives Into Different Compression Formats (RAR to ZIP and etc) by Raymond.cc
Although ZIP is the most commonly used format for file compression on Windows PCs, several other compression formats actually do a better job of producing more compact files. If you ever receive archives in these formats (such as RAR, 7z or KGB) and can’t open them, or you’d like to be able to use alternative formats, this handy utility converts archives between numerous compression formats.
Testing the Quintura Site Search Widget by Pandia Search Engine News
Quintura is an alternative search engine developed in Russia, based on semantic technology. What sets it apart from the crowd of other alternative search engines is the way it presents search results in Web 2.0-style clouds of related search terms that help you narrow or expand your search simply by clicking your mouse. The folks at Pandia explain here how you can now use the same technology to spider and search your own site or blog—for free.
social bookmarking services and community websites submitter by Social Poster
Here’s a list of 79 social submission bookmarklets you can simply drag to your Firefox toolbar to install. The list includes direct links to register for each service, login and submit a new item, as well as each site’s Pagerank and Alexa rank. This is social posting for the lazy (or extremely busy).
Top 10 Obscure Google Search Tricks by Lifehacker
This isn’t actually a new tool but rather a collection of neat tricks for using Google to accomplish a range of tasks, from simple things like tracking flight status and calculating currency conversion to more advanced activities like finding free music, filtering image search results and evading your company’s site blocking software (ahem, not so sure that last one is a good idea, but it’s an interesting trick). These have been compiled by Gina Trapani, best-selling author of Upgrade Your Life: The Lifehacker Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, Better
A search tool that provides “unlimited space,” enabling you to search Google, YouTube, RSS, eBay, Amazon, Yahoo!, Flickr and Images all in one 3D space. SpaceTime’s™ 3D Web Search lets you choose a search engine from the drop down menu, type in your search term and view all your search results at once in a slick 3D interface. It’s not quite something you can’t live without, but it is a fascinating and cool new way to search the web, find videos and shop online.
This is about as simple and elegant as web tools get. Hey, why waste twelve bucks on an alarm clock when you can make your $900 PC perform the same function?
Gmail Hacks, Tips & Tricks by Best of the Web
As with the Lifehacker post above, this isn’t a tool but rather an exceptionally useful collection of tips and tricks, in this case for Gmail users. Learn how to master Gmail’s keyboard shortcuts, streamline the process of adding attachments, quickly switch between multiple Google accounts, read your Google Reader RSS feeds from within Gmail, use Gmail as an external hard drive, back up your email account and more.
4Q – The Best Online Survey For A Website, Yours Free! by Occam’s Razor
Google Analytics evangelist Avinash Kaushik offers a free on-exit web survey tool featuring three simple questions to help site owners determine why certain pages get visited much more frequently than others, why certain pages have higher exit or bounce rates, and other critical information, using real data rather than idle speculation.
Pageflakes Acquisition Confirmed by TechCrunch
Erick Schonfeld reported a few months ago that custom web startup page provider Pageflakes had been acquired by LiveUniverse. Pageflakes is a cool tool for making the web your own, similar to Netvibes or TopNetPix, and has been covered in this blog before, most recently in January of this year when several new features were added to the tool. Under its new ownership, the tool so far keeps getting better.
A collection of a dozen cool webmaster tools including Mark Alert (provides an alert anytime a domain uses your trademark), detailed uptime reports on web hosting providers, DNS Tools (whois, traceroute, and ping), Domain Monitor (a free tool to monitor all your domains) and more.
Study: Webinars, Twitter, Blogs Critical for B2B Social Media
Thursday, November 19th, 2009The brilliant and helpful team at Business.com have just released a phenomenal, must read research report, the 2009 B2B Social Media Benchmarking Study. The report covers responses from a wide range of company sizes and industries, and breaks the data down by those attributes as well as title and department. Among the most interesting findings:
Webinars and podcasts topped the list of most popular social media resources for business information, followed closely by user ratings (good news for b2b-focused social media sites like FYIndOut.com), company/product profile pages on social media sites, and company blogs. Social bookmarking sites (e.g. Digg, Mixx, StumbleUpon) were viewed as least important, though they are still used by 28% of respondents.
Those figures hold as well specifically for senior management, with 77% listening to podcasts or webinars, 61% visiting company blogs and more than half participating in online business communities or forums.
Large companies (defined in the study as having 100 or more employees) are somewhat more likely to actively used social media than smaller enterprises, though the difference varied considerably by specific activities. For example, employees at large companies were considerably more likely (84% vs. 67%) to spend time on webinars and podcasts, but only slightly more inclined (64% vs. 54%) to read company blogs for information.
Not surprisingly, marketing and communications professionals are the heaviest users of b2b social media. This group is followed however by senior management, then sales, then—who would have thought it—accounting and finance.
60% of respondents report spending less than 20% of their work time using social media, with the largest single group (37%) saying they spend 10-20% of their day with it. Only one out of five employees spend 30% or more of their working hours with social media.
Most b2b social media users are relative newbies. 30% have used social media for less than a year, two-thirds have been active for less than two years, and more than 80% have four years of less of social media experience.
Even more pronounced, on a company level, nearly 40% of enterprises have been using social media as a b2b business resource for less than a year; 72% for less than two years; and almost 90% for less than four years.
Among the most popular activities for “outbound” (as opposed to research) social media activities for b2b companies, 81% maintain company accounts/profiles on social media sites, 75% are on Twitter, 74% maintain company blogs, and 73% monitor social media mentions of their companies. At the other end of the scale, only 42% advertise on social media sites and just 36% use social media for employee recruiting.
76% of b2b companies report that their social media initiatives are driven by marketing, with 13% saying customer service is the driver. In contrast, the figures for b2c companies are 63% and 26%, respectively.
Finally, there is the matter of social media measurement. Among the top social media success metrics, 68% of b2b companies use website traffic as a key measurement of success, 61% brand awareness, and 60% engagement with prospects. At the other end of the scale, only 37% use prospect lead volume as a success metric (likely because social media is far more effective at brand building than lead generation) and 26% say it provides useful product feedback.
The only findings that seem somewhat questionable are that 60% of respondents claimed they can demonstrate the revenue impact of social media activities and 57% said they can measure prospect lead volume. This is suspect because ROI metrics for social media are notoriously difficult to measure accurately, and because, if these measures were true, one would have expected different answers to the question above regarding success metrics.
Overall, this report from Business.com is fascinating reading and a valuable resource for anyone involved in b2b social media use. Again, you can download the b2b social media benchmark study here.
