Yeah You're Different

How much longer will you subscribe to the notion that business customers aren’t using social media? Or, that the way B2C companies use it is irrelevant to your B2B firm? Each of those notions can be dispelled in the amount of time it takes you to say, “We’re different.” Here we go.

If your B2B company thinks it will let someone else be the pioneer you may want to consider this, a 2009 study by MarketingProfs found that ALL COMPANIES, regardless of model and size, are predominately using Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Blogs, and Linkedin. So, if the tactics are often the same, how do the lessons from B2C not apply? You won’t have to teach them how to interact. The B2C guys did that for you. Just don’t let your competition teach them how to connect with a B2B.

Even if you can’t offer a coupon (bet you could if you thought about it long enough) the core ingredients of social media success: storytelling, humanization, friendship, and purchase intent are not B2B or B2C items. They are human items and they apply as long as you have prospects, members, patients, prospective customers and employees.

Okay, so we’ve established that your B2B is just not that different from a B2C marketer in knowing which platforms matter. Still you insist that your sophisticated decision makers have no time for such foolishness. Oh yes they do. Forrester found that 81% of U.S. adults with an Internet connection use social media in some form. Further, last year’s Forrester study of B2B technology buyers found that they use social media nearly twice as much as U.S. adults overall.

Ok. Maybe I was wrong. You are different. But, you’re different because you’re not connected.

I’m at www.facebook.com/timcnicholson or www.twitter.com/timbigfish