I have just read this article on UtalkMarketing and have repeated it below as it is so relevant to marketing teams with B2B businesses.
Social media marketing will become increasingly important to business-to-business (B2B) marketing in 2010, according to a new magazine poll.
BtoB magazine’s “2010 Outlook” reveals that six in 10 B2B marketers were planning to increase their spend on social media marketing next year while website, e-mail and search spending were also at the top of the list for online tactics to increase.
Fifty-four percent of respondents currently use social media for marketing, an increase of 9% since November last year.
‘Thought leadership’ is the main purpose for the increase in spend, according to the respondents, while one-half hoped to generate leads through social media.
Responses were similar to the polls June research, though fewer marketers in November hoped to do much research or advertising on social networks.
B2B respondents to a survey by Visible Technologies and SiriusDecisions had somewhat different priorities: The top way they leveraged social media was for generating awareness, followed by customer engagement.
About one-third of respondents to the Visible Technologies/Sirius Decisions study had created a customer community, while one-fifth used podcasts. Slightly fewer (18%) relied on blogs, and only 14% were tweeting.
Success in the social channel was mainly measured through web traffic and response rates and qualified leads, however, most B2B marketers reported tracking results themselves, either manually or with a monitoring tool. One-fifth relied on an agency for metrics, while 21% reported not tracking their success at all.
A big question out there these days is: What is the ROI of Social Media? Here’s a good video that may help explain it from the blog ’Socialnomics’.
“Our head of social media is our customer” – McDonalds… this says it all for me.
The consumer in this new world of chat and tweet really does have a huge influence on a businesses ROI, and it makes the question “Should I get involved in social media?” a no-brainer.
On 18th January McDonald’s started a twitter campaign to promote the brand’s guarantee of fresh produce with the hashtags #MeetTheFarmers and #McDstories. The wholesomeness of the campaign’s intentions soon crashed and burnt as consumers started to supply their own #McDstories (and comments). Topics covered included the meat content, McDonald’s horror stories – such as fingernails [...]
“Our head of social media is our customer” – McDonalds… this says it all for me.
The consumer in this new world of chat and tweet really does have a huge influence on a businesses ROI, and it makes the question “Should I get involved in social media?” a no-brainer.