Luis Fernandes: Online Marketing Professional for High-Tech Companies

The cold I had the last couple of weeks kept me from posting, but I’m feeling better and have some interesting thoughts I wanted to share on social networking badges.

Seeing how more and more B2B Web sites are using social media to leverage SEO, I started researching a bit more about social networking ROI or even if there is such a thing for the B2B space. It didn’t take long to notice that there’s just not a lot of B2B marketers sharing their successes with social networking. That’s not to say that it doesn’t work. In fact, after polling a small group of successful B2B marketers, B2B social networking looks pretty promising.

This all started after I noticed more and more B2B sites placing social networking badges on the level 2+ pages on their sites. For exmaple, USI added the some common social bookmarking chicklets to the upper periphery of the main content block of their pages. As of today, there aren’t many other application management vendors offering social bookmarks on their corporate Web sites. Most of the time, you’ll find chicklets on corporate business blogs like on IONAs.

One way marketers seem to approach social networking is by visitor type. For instance, seeing how tech companies commonly target messaging to both C-level and tech folk, it can become harder to justify the use of social networking on a corporate site when out of these two persona types, the one likely to use the social bookmark is not the decision maker. – Or is it that simple?

To help me put this in perspective, I decided to quickly poll some web marketing professionals using the Q&A tool in linkedin. Targeting the Internet marketing segment, I fielded a simple open ended question about the use/value of social networking in the B2B space. Below are some of the responses.

It almost seems as though corporations are “testing the waters” with linking these badges to their sites. There is however, a movement equivalent in the open source relham such as ICEcore and others. Just like this technology, social networking for b2b, will make their way full circle,

Users” in the B2B space are “people” too and have the need to bookmark pages, just like everybody else.

Companies should keep in mind two things – their brand identity, and the demographics of the business contacts they are trying to reach. We have used social networking badges selectively in the past because it relates to the services we provide, and also fits our corporate culture and brand identity.

I have seen uses of these badges in places that did seem “odd”, as they were not a fit for the services or company I was researching. Like most other components of marketing, gratuitous use provides little benefit and can create a negative impact to the brand but selective use that achieves a goal and fits the brand can be beneficial.

If they feel they have content on their website which is worth submitting to these sites, why not? For example, it can be great to help promote a corporate blog.

Just adding them to look cool/hip is just plain silly.

The ROI is absolutely amazing…and companies are also finding very nice ancialiary benefits, such as “employer branding,” especially in the highly competitve fields like engineering, law and medical.

Other than those isolated cases, I think B2B can use social media very effectively as long as they take the time to adequately plan their strategy. It can easily go way beyond simple networking if they take time to consider the myriad of tools available.

Judging from the answers I received, it seems to comes back to aligning the business model with new marketing. I like Seth Godni’s approach to this idea, “Ask not what New Marketing can do for you. Ask what you can do to thrive with New Marketing.” – Seth Godin, Meatball Sunday

I don’t mean to pontificate Godin’s message, although it is important to see that the underpinnings of social networking use really come down to altering the business itself. If social networking is considered a means to improving marketing, you first have to determine if the business model is aligned . In other words, if you have something worth talking about, then expect users to bookmark -regardless of user type. If not, then adding chicklets to your site is not going to do much good. So, before you add social bookmarking badges (aka chicklets) determine the quality of our messaging, first.

Good luck,

L