{"id":63109,"date":"2011-07-26T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-07-26T19:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/customerthink.com\/effectiveness_of_social_media_marketing_for_b2b_the_debate_rages_on\/"},"modified":"2011-07-26T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2011-07-26T19:00:00","slug":"effectiveness_of_social_media_marketing_for_b2b_the_debate_rages_on","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/effectiveness_of_social_media_marketing_for_b2b_the_debate_rages_on\/","title":{"rendered":"Effectiveness of Social Media Marketing for B2B &#8211; The Debate Rages On"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Popularity is a strange thing &ndash; whether it is a high visibility brand, a car, a pop star &ndash; as the popularity charts go up the numbers on the opposite side start to grow too. It&#8217;s true, die-hard fans will always have a community that looks down on them (their taste).<\/p>\n<p>Same is the case with Social Media Marketing (SMM). You can love it, hate it, but you can&#8217;t ignore it. And so it continues to be a topic of debate in the world of business. How effective really is it? Is it only the racehorse for the consumer market or <strong>can B2B marketers gain significant ROI from social media marketing<\/strong>?<\/p>\n<p>I recently read <a href=\"http:\/\/mashable.com\/2010\/11\/04\/b2b-social-marketing-strategies\/\" target=\"_blank\" onclick=\"pageTracker._trackPageview('\/outgoing\/mashable.com\/2010\/11\/04\/b2b-social-marketing-strategies\/?referer=');\">a study on B2B social marketing strategie<\/a>s that claims SMM really works for B2B. One case study is specifically about lead generation by a workplace solutions company called Regus. I watched the viral video this company used and I agree; great video! Was it the reason the company&#8217;s leads, sales and revenue increased?<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t think so. As they say in the study itself, this was an integrated campaign. The video was one of other strategies which included a sweepstakes, creating a community for professionals, in person events, etc.  It was a good tool to nurture inquiries received from an in person event. But at the heart of this campaign was a solid marketing plan, creativity, and an innovative use of social media in the overall effort to generate leads.<\/p>\n<p>From what we are seeing and hearing, I am increasingly of the opinion that:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Social media is and can become a very useful tool in your integrated B2B marketing toolkit.<\/li>\n<li>As a B2B marketer, your overall demand generation strategy must have critical milestones and objectives; and some of these can be delivered through the efficient integration of social technologies.<\/li>\n<li>You cannot, however, rely on social media marketing to work independently.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Tech companies swear by Twitter and spend time and effort on several 140-characters Tweets a day. LinkedIn is being touted as a great channel for B2B social networking and I&#8217;m sure it is. It&#8217;s easy to set up a company Facebook page and generate thousands of &#8220;Likes&#8221;. <strong>But&hellip;do you have a process to identify hot prospects and true leads from hand-raisers?<\/strong> Yes, of course you can lure the hungry to your hot dog cart, but <strong>do you have the &#8220;secret sauce&#8221;<\/strong> to draw out the &#8220;connoisseurs&#8221; who come back, frequently, and bring their best friends?<\/p>\n<p><strong>What are your thoughts? Is your B2B organization testing social media waters or have you found measurable results and ROI? Leave me a comment.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Popularity is a strange thing &ndash; whether it is a high visibility brand, a car, a pop star &ndash; as the popularity charts go up the numbers on the opposite side start to grow too. It&#8217;s true, die-hard fans will always have a community that looks down on them (their taste). Same is the case [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7081,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[128,36,101],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63109"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7081"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63109"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63109\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}