Today, let’s turn to some examples of how B2B marketers are embracing social media for this purpose.

A few weeks ago, McKinsey & Company released the results of their latest survey on social media: Building the Web 2.0 Enterprise: McKinsey Global Survey Results. The buzz on this report included a post from Peter Kim, a fellow Social Media Today blogger.

The McKinsey survey struck a chord with me in that 94% of responding executives deployed Web 2.0 media targeting internal parties versus 87% who interfaced with customers. This indicates an almost equal propensity to use these tools to communicate to both external and internal parties.

In targeting customers, improving customer service and acquiring new customers in internal markets were #1 (73%) and #2 (71%) respectively.

In other words, a significant proportion of survey respondents are using Web 2.0 tools for customer acquisition.

So if organizations are using social media to acquire customers, then how can we measure ROI?

An easy answer lies with blogging – the rainmaker of social media.

If your goal is to attract visitors to your website, blogs are an ideal medium to publish fresh, relevant content with keywords that attract the search engines like bees to honey.

Leads generated from organic or natural search results are of higher quality and are more likely to convert to qualified leads than any other medium. You can ask yourself: what is the value of a page one search result on Google?

Bingo! ROI can be calculated based on the value of qualified leads and closed sales generated through organic search. (Personal note: this week I closed a $20,000 account that found my organization through organic search and whom we never would have targeted with our outbound marketing efforts).

In a much less scientific method than McKinsey, I asked a question on LinkedIn Answers to see if marketers were using blogs to enhance their organic (or SEO) page rank and to gauge the impact on their business development.

Here are the highlights:

• The small direct marketing agency in Silicon Valley who achieves top organic search results in only 24 hours.
• The tech start-up in Austin who has generated substantial lead volume through their social media efforts in only a short period of time.
• A highly ranked blogger on wireless technology who resides in India.
• A web design firm in Ireland who attracts 40 unique visitors a day through blogging and organic search.
• A web design firm in India whose blogging has been so successful in improving their organic search results that the firm has canceled their paid search (PPC) program.

These small organizations have demonstrated high ROI on social media through blogging and can easily quantify the benefits.

Do you know of other organizations who have a similar perspective on generating ROI through social media such as blogging?

The seminar was chock full of interesting facts on social media usage by B2B marketers and by B2B decision-makers.

For both B2B vendors and the buyers of those solutions, social media is considered a second tier marketing medium.

Last month, Laura Ramos released a report entitled: How to Derive Value from B2B Blogging. A survey of 189 Forrester customers revealed the number of blogs started by these B2B organizations `plummeted` in 2007 from 2006 as the results from these blogs did not meet expectations.

Laura attributes part of this to using `warmed-over press releases` on blogs.

Another attendee and I leveraged the WebEx chat to ask questions on how the usage of social media varied by the size of the organization.

Anu Venkitaraman, Managing Partner of ReThink Marketing of Addison,TX and I, conducted a private chat discussing why small B2B marketers have embraced social media in a stronger way than their bigger B2B sisters and brothers.

Here are our top 10 (in no particular order and actually there are only 8):

1. Give me a Megaphone - For B2B start-ups evangelizing is a way of life to attract the attention of investors, partners and customers.
2. Talking about My Generation - Younger professionals are already well-versed in social networking and have a huge appetite for expressing themselves.
3. A Clean Slate – With little to no marketing infrastructure, a small B2B marketer can leapfrog to a web presence that includes social media. Witness the number of firms that use blogs as their website backbone.
4. The Big Squeeze – Hard dollars are in short supply for small firms. The cost of entry for social media in hard budget dollars is close to zero.
5. Sweat Equity – The greatest resource for a small firm is the hard labor that staff will invest to make their equity real. The production of relevant social media content requires this dedication and investment.
6. Risk / Reward – The small B2B marketer recognizes that the rewards associated with engaging in public customer dialog outweigh the risk of losing control of the marketing message.
7. Inverse Relationship of Press Releases - the number of parties who must approve a press release is inversely related to that organization`s embrace of social media. In other words, the more bureaucracy associated with marketing communications, the less likelihood that the wild west of social media will be approved by senior executives.
8. Let`s fail and try again - Smaller organizations are more likely to experiment with marketing media and social media is another option to test.

Are there any other reasons? Help me round off the number to 10!

I had met Greg Verdino twice prior to his presentation on leveraging new technology. I was suitably impressed with his choice of T-shirts and flip flops and wondered what thought leaders like Greg would wear for their presentation.

Greg`s choice of basic black worked well with his dry wit. A super presenter, Greg smoothly presented complex technologies in easy-to-understand choice phrases.

With a generation reared on social networks and online gaming, there are a host of technologies that businesses should explore to collaborate, communicate and build their business.

There were some interesting examples of B2B companies that were using new media. CDW, a reseller of technology products, offers a social network to its clients and uses this as an advisory board.

IBM engages prospects with a call, chat or should the prospect wish, a meeting in a virtual world.

Deloitte offers a deep selection of content through blogs and podcasts. In pursuing a thought leadership strategy, Deloitte has `greased the skids` by giving away valuable information.

Greg gave an example of how he leveraged his social networks including LinkedIn to prepare a presentation for Cisco. Senior marketers from IBM, Forrester and SAP came forth with suggestions.

Greg believes that knowledge is a commodity and connections are the differentiators. New ideas are often created when linked two existing ideas.

Unlocking Customer Behavior…How to Understand and Profit from Predictably Irrational Customers

The keynote was given by Dan Ariely, Alfred P. Sloan Profession of Behavioral Economics at MIT, Author of best-selling book Predictably Irrational.

Dan delivered a slam-dunk of a keynote drawing numerous examples of how we make irrational decisions.

Dan`s research indicates that we are susceptible to irrational behaviour and that our intuitions on behaviors are often wrong.

Dan made a very strong case for marketers to test. Marketers must conduct experiments rather than rely on our intuition. He added that it is only natural for a marketer to give an offer to everybody if the original offer worked.