Friday, October 16, 2009

Is B2B Web 2.0 Over Before It Ever Started?

Not yet, but it’s getting close. The potential suspects in its death…the recession, the CFO and the Legal Department.

Suddenly, every legal department around the country has become the de facto Web 2.0 governance committee. What doesn’t get killed, modified, or mangled is left to the CFO to cut. Senior executives, who for the most part lack an understanding of the tools, are growing tired of all the noise around Digital, Web 2.0, Social Media, etc. 

They are now directing their organizations back to what they believe to be proven strategies (as they say in the FS industry "past performance is not indicatve of future results) and tactics (core products, best customers and traditional sales & marketing tactics, like DM). It’s back to the future.

You’re mission, if you choose to accept it, is to find proven “sweetspots” for Web 2.0 in your organization now…and put it in your 2010 plan.  Here are a few “no brainers” and/or proven areas that have shown to be impactful and/or demonstrate measurable value:

  • Twitter - customer services applications, awareness building for events, new content, etc….no brainers
  • Blogs – thought leadership, using them to help explain applications of products, credibility and audience builders…all winners and measurable.
  • VODcast – similar to blogs, keep them short and on point, and work on getting the cost down. 
  • Wiki’s – defining internal nomenclature, taxonomy, and knowledge management all winners and well worth the effort.
As for social networks, I have a few thoughts that I’ll share in my next post. Here’s a preview.

Recently I met with David Godes, a professor at the Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland. David and I got together to discuss our shared interest in sales processes, sales & marketing integration and social networks (we first meet when he was an associate professor at Harvard Business School, after he wrote a case study on the work we did with Avaya on managing integrated sales and marketing pipelines).

David and a colleague wrote an article published in the Harvard Business Review in 2006 on Sales Networks.  After reading the article several times, I think it’s a useful guide for leveraging Social Networking tools to enable the sales forces. Although the study of social networks has been around for years, and it served for the development of social networking tools, the application for sales hasn’t really been developed. I believe this holds tremendous opportunity to discover “killer applications” for social media tools.

For now, think about this, the first wave of Web innovation (Web 1.0) was followed by a recession (Dot.com bust) that separated the “winners” from the “losers”.  Successful technology innovations need a “killer app” to take hold. Often times it is very different from what the technology was originally designed to do (Myspace, as an example). We are now making our way (hopefully…and slowly) out of a recession that was preceded by the second wave of web innovation…what “killer applications” have you discovered - are they sustainable, and can you defend your investment in them going forward?

Do it quickly…time is running out.   As Tim Washer said at the B2B Social Communication when asked about IBM's very funny video series "The Art of the Sale"; “things have changed in our social media governance and policies. I don’t think I could do this again given the current environment.”

3 comments:

  1. Some marketers have a bad habit of trumpeting what they will be doing even before they do it. In some organizations, it’s better to start small and slightly under the radar instead of announcing your “social media initiative” with great fanfare.

    I’m not suggesting going around legal or the CFO, but start with something small that will be easy for them to accept like a Twitter account to publicize press releases and move on from there.

    Melissa

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  2. I agree with Chris that B2B adoption is far from over.

    In my experience, most execs fear social media because of perceived loss of control over the brand. It's extremely hard to change this perception. So Scott, I like your suggestion of defining why and how these tactics will be used.

    But I'd also suggest pitching internal collaboration tools as an interim step towards implementing a social media strategy. After a bit of internal success, many of these tools (like the innovation tool Spigit) can be extended to your customers, your customers' customers, etc.

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  3. The short answer: the end of the honeymoon may be nearing for two reasons. Good social media requires the person or company executive to do real work maintaining a dialogue, and there's less creative and media dollars in it for agencies.

    The longer answer: it's unclear whether social media works and like advertising, most marketers are too lazy to build quality ROI metrics. Social media is a manifestation of early adopter theory - that a small group of alphas can influence the masses virally faster than other media. Whether it's Diffusion of Innovations (Rogers 1964), who coined the term 'early adopters' or books like Tipping Point, Influentials, Six Degrees, etc., everyone assumes the early adopter network model rationalizes the medium. For a counter-intuitive view, read Is the Tipping Point Toast? in Fast Company about Duncan Watts at Yahoo (published in 2008, but recently resurfaced), which applies core social behavior research suggesting trends are more random than influencer-driven.

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