You will find the answers in the video interview below between Jeffrey L. Cohen for Social Media B2B and David Meerman Scott, the author of The New Rules of Marketing & PR and World Wide Rave.
David Meerman Scott at SXSW from Jeffrey L. Cohen on Vimeo.
I agree fully with both of David’s answer.
Let’s look at the answer about the question in the difference in social media for B2C and B2B.
When a brand or government or non-government organisation or you decide to put yourself onto a social network, the whole idea is that you want to communicate the people, not only those within your circle, but to expand your circle to communicate with more people.
As an individual, when you go on Facebook or Twitter or Friendster, or what social network is the in thing today, it is all about wanting to share your daily activities, thoughts, interest with people who are your friends or who are strangers until they add you as a friend.
This is the same reason why brands, government, non-profit and the B2Bs should take when they decide they want to go on the social media bandwagon. The social networks are just tools of communication but the real winner is the content you want to share with the people you want to be in your network.
Social media is just another tool of communication where you, the brand, the government, the non-profits or the B2Bs want to use to reach out to the individual directly, not through another medium.
The content you produce is the content you yourself would want to read, see or hear as a person. The content produced should be targeted at the people with the goal of sharing and explaining, rather than to pitch or to sell!
The naysayers say if you go on social networks, who would want to read your daily details or who would want to know what your company is doing. But that isn’t really the question. The question should be “What is it that you want to share?”
In preparation for a pitch for a huge teleconferencing provider, the research I shared showed that their main competitor was sharing information by asking every single question posed about teleconferencing. This provider did not participate in any of the questions.
An online publisher asked what sort of content should she share on her publications Fan Page. I told her Fan Page was being seen as a Link spam just trying to get people to her online site.
Instead, I suggested that she should put more behind the scenes content on the Fan Page to share her experience in creating the magazine. She could post photos that never made it to the magazine and talk about how she came up with the idea for that photo shoot. Or she could use the Fan Page to share with her fans events that she will be attending as media.
As such, the person who posed the question and the readers reading the question will be instantly aware of the competitor’s brand instead of theirs. T
The question about ROI I guess would always be a focal point whenever new means of communication or the way we do work arises.
Can you remember the days when the IT or marketing folks were being asked about the ROI of having email accounts for employees or even about having a website in the early days of the Internet?
Social Media is still a relatively new way to communicate with the people both in your network or outside of yours. As such, it is no surprise that the question of ROI is often raised.
The web server had to go down during one of my social media client’s major event day for the public. As the event was held outdoors, the rain in the morning let to many queries whether the event will still go ahead.
So where did the client and the public turned to? The Facebook Fan Page that we worked on since August last year was the life saver. We created a FBML tab to share details of the event, made that the landing page and redirected the URL to the Fan Page as you do not need to log into Facebook to access the Fan Page.
We also posted queries made to ensure the public that the event will still continue and we had planned for wet weather like this.
We event posted up “live” weather updates on the venue itself and tried our best to answer the queries posted on the Fan Page.
If the ROI is about communicating to the people and to keep them instantly updated, then yes the ROI has been achieved and played a valuable role to keep the event going on smoothly.
The video serves as a reminder, even to me, that your a social media campaign is all about communicating to the people within your circle and to constantly expand the circle to include more people.
Social media is all about sharing and not much about the selling. Haven’t you heard the saying “The more you give, the more you shall receive?”
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