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!

MarketingProfs Panel Discussion at B2B Forum

On the second day of the MarketingProfs B2B Forum, I greatly enjoyed the opportunity to sit on a panel led by Roy Young, President of MarketingProfs and including online marketing experts Chris Brogan, VP Strategy & Technology of CrossTech Media and Joel Granoff, Co-founder and CEO of Be Greeted.

We presented highlights from our recent research on how B2B marketers were using online media.

We discussed how webinars, search and email were widely deployed by B2B marketers (see chart `Lead Generation Goal by Medium`).

Although Chris was somewhat surprised that 49% of respondents are using blogs for lead generation, I noted that this in sync with other surveys. B2B marketers have leveraged blogging to boost their organic or natural search rankings. Higher rankings translate to more web inquiries.

Traditional content such as newsletters, press releases and case studies ranked highly for lead generation.

This chart pertains to a question asking marketers about content residing on their website.


Although media such as blogs, video and podcasts are ranked much lower, their ranking is signifcant given their newness.

Although these results were similar to previous studies, some marketers were confused by the findings. See Mike Stelzner`s blog for some comments.

B2B marketers ahead of B2C on New Media Adoption

On August 13, BtoB Magazine announced the results of their research on new media conducted with the Association of National Advertisers.

In June, BtoB and the ANA interviewed 326 B2B and B2C marketers from their respective house files.

The research confirmed a number of tiers of new media tools. The top tier includes proprietary Web sites, e-mail marketing, online ads, search engine optimization, search engine marketing and webinars. The middle tier includes blogs, RSS feeds, podcasts and video on demand. The bottom tier consists of wikis, mobile, viral video, social networks and Second Life.

It was found that B2B marketers allocate a significantly higher proportion of their budget to new media than B2C marketers. While B2C marketers view new media as best suited for brand building, B2B marketers look to new media for demand generation.

As far as I see it, the irony for B2B marketers is that although their solutions require extensive communication (often through a sales force), the budgets and tools at their disposal for marketing are often inadequate. The opposite is true for B2C: humongous budgets to communicate simple messages.

With new media tools and in particular Web 2.0 tools, B2B marketers are bolstered by tools where the cost of entry is the development of content, rather than price of the tools or cost of the marketing medium.

For more details and a PowerPoint summary of the BtoB/ANA research, follow this link to the BtoB website.