Apr 28 2008
B2B Social Networking: The New B2B Marketing?
By Jeffrey Peel - At last week’s Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco there was, as expected, lots of discussion about social networking. The discussions didn’t just focus on the usual suspect social networking sites either. There was a lot of discussion about how so-called “micro-blogging” sites are becoming increasingly influential. Micro-blogging sites like Twitter allow for much more rapid one-to-many interactions and are now considered a key component of the social networking/blogosphere. In fact, I’d go even further and say that by the end of the conference on Friday I was all twittered out. And this morning I read that Twitter may just have closed a round of funding.
All this means that social networking is becoming more and more granular but it also means that the distinction between b2b networks and consumer networks is blurring. Twitter, in particular, is becoming a day to day interaction tool for the celebrity tech bloggers who were there in abundance last week (like Robert Scoble and Stowe Boyd). In fact Boyd has now come up with the idea of the Twitchpitch that mandates PR types who want to pitch a story to him have to use Twitter. When I ran into him at a drinks party last week he made clear that he didn’t care much for Facebook pitches either.
Therefore if you thought that all you had to do to get your B2B social networking strategy together was to have a Linked-In profile, I’m going to have to tell you that you need to think again. Complex social networking ecosystems allow people to pick and choose - and people will define themselves in the ecosystem according to their favourite tools (and none of us has time to use them all).
This, of course, means that there is an increasing role for marketing services companies. Social networking elements in the marketing mix are essential in order to elicit information on how markets are evolving. B2B networks are becoming the definitive communications media for channel owners, consultants, journalists and other ‘influencers’ in the tech space - not just celeb bloggers.
As Stowe Boyd said in a panel session last week, social networking is about people talking. And, when people talk, marketing people should always be interested.
