Top 10 Reasons Small Businesses Excel at Social Media

Today I attended Forrester's Webinar "Defining Your B2B Social Media Strategy" with Vice President and Principal Analyst, Laura Ramos, and Vice President of Tech Industry Consulting, Dan Klein.

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!