Taking visitors to social media networks or connections to social media marketing efforts into the sales process has thus far eluded marketing.  The answer may be in this recent analysis provided by eMarketer.com.  While GenY is more optimistic about visitation and use of social media activities by US Professionals, Boomers and GenX think that professionals are less inclined.  This is not surprising as other statistics show an age gap.  What is important to realize is that Boomers and GenX are typically the ones making the decisions and holding the purse strings.  If they aren’t using social media to gather information about solutions, services, and vendors their purchase decision is not going to be influenced by what marketers put there.

Another revealing aspect of this study is the individual vehicles and their place in the typical workday.  Social networking, where marketers are looking to develop one-to-one relationships, are not as frequented by decision makers.  The other area to connect directly, internet forums, is also a lagging vehicle.  On the other hand, traditional vehicles such as a news site and personal email are ingrained in everyday behavior.  Social media, as a newer communication and information source, requires change in a decision maker’s behavior.  Other tools, such as mobile devices, were readily adopted due to teh fact that they mimicked and incorporated existing communication methods.  It wasn’t as much of a leap for people to make.  Social media, on the other hand, my be too different from how decision makers gather information or collaborate.

In a world where the journalist is considered a dying breed, across the board responents reconginzed the role they play in a professionals workday.  In fact, the gap is significant when compared to blogs.  This seems to point to a need to value and validated content versus opinion.  Another aspect to consider is that business journals are still able to sell online content and information.  Social media in time may become a trusted source of informtion, but today’s the number indicate that decision makers as designated by generation still rely and trust traditional sources.  Blogs, forums, and networks may still be seens as commentary and biased even is they are produced in journalistic fashion.

As GenY moves up the ranks and GenX further gravitates to social media int the workplace, things will shift.  But, this may still be several years out.   As marketers, we need to consider our audience’s preference for communication and information gathering when leveraging marketing tools that should drive sales.  Social media in business is still an immature source even as the hype has reached a crescendo.    If social media is not used regularly in a workday, it does not have the marketing power to transform engagement into sales.  Purchase decisions are complex and content and engagement needs to happen in a manner that creates trust, credibility, and aligns to the customer decision process.

The hype of late has really told the story of social media marketing within the consumer arena.  The picture is quite different in business-to-business.  When Forrester talks about 50% of marketers increasing their spend in social media, take out business-to-consumer and you get a very different perspective.  Supporting this, agencies see the big push in social media spending is really still from consumer focused companies.

In a recent Q&A session on LinkedIn, I asked marketers what percentage of marketing spend was for social media marketing and what that number was last year.  So, even if everyone said they were increasing spend, this could provide a perspective on how committed they were.  One reply provided an article from from eMarketer and included a graphic on social network advertising spend.  To my surprise, the biggest increase of spend was not this year (2009) 17% but last year (2008) 46%. No wonder all the hype over the past year.

But, this still doesn’t show what is happening in B2B.  That came from responses from marketing and business development.  The B2B social media marketing spend answer: no marketing spend.  None. Zero. However, that doesn’t mean that no effort is spent on social media marketing.  Dani Lee, Director of Marketing at Copanion says, “(This) is partly due to the fact that our B2B SMB target audience has low adoption of social networking. However, from a time perspective, we definitely spend more time on social networking this year compared to almost no time last year. We drive content to our social networking sites with the goal of creating more engagement with our audience over various channels.”  Another contributor doesn’t see that social media makes sense in highly complex solution sales.

The big question is, what does social media marketing do for B2B?  Or, is there also a factor that social media marketing as it is defined today does not represent B2B marketing perspectives for marketing overall.

Where social media marketing and advertising is focused on the consumer, the engagement is much more relaxed and, well, social.  In B2B, there is a lot of vested interest on both sides of the deal. Sending tweets to customers may not be the answer to relationship building.  There also may not be an audience to connect to through social networks and communities.  B2B is going to have to figure out what the conversation looks like from their perspective and map to social media outlets.  It all boils down to conversational preference.

You can watch the Q&A session on LinkedIn by going to http://www.linkedin.com/answers/marketing-sales/advertising-promotion/internet-marketing/MAR_ADP_INM/443710-575533?searchIdx=0&sik=1237987444226&goback=%2Easr_1_1237987444226

Also, if you would like to participate in a survey on budget and resource allocation, you can go to http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=9ccwmeJJoa_2f_2fcSl_2bwgr_2fDA_3d_3d

Part 2

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You Don’t Have to Get Social Media, You’re Doing It

Conversational Preference in B2B Social Media

She doesn’t think about what she is doing as new, different, or leading.  She blogs to tell friends and family what she is up to.  She is obsessed with Webkinz and all the things she can do in Webkinz World (I recently found out she has a boyfriend there, YIKES!).  She is plugged in to her Ninetendo DS and sits with friends connecting through a game.  Her goal is to get a cell phone when she turns 10 so that she can text with friends – we’ll see.  She doesn’t have to get it.  She just does it.

You may think that as B2B marketers and salespeople you are lagging behind your B2C brethren. I think that is wrong.  The foundations of social networking and communities already exist within your websites, trade associations, and professional associations.  You have a captive media audience with your analysts.  You also have existing media assets that you determined work. And, believe it of not, you are already doing it.

Here’s an example of social media in action during 2001.  I worked for a computer software company that had it’s own solutions as well as a large partner network.  The dot com bubble burst and our event budget was significantly scaled back.  However, we still wanted to have interaction with customers as well as fulfill our partnership obligations through joint marketing and sales efforts. Our solution was to combine webinar, conferencing, and forum capabilities to create a virtual conference.  The virtual conference mimicked live conferences with tracks, product showcasing, break-out sessions, as well as pre-scheduled customer meetings for demos and solution discussions.  We promoted it the way we would our other conferences, but there was no charge for the event. The event was highly successful both in attendance, interaction, and initiating or closing business even as the technology platforms were in an early stages of capabilities and usage.

A hidden benefit to the virtual conference was we now had an extensive asset library.  Webinars, flash demos, white papers, and forums that could be converted to FAQs as well as kept open for further community building and interaction.  It also pushed us to test new technologies and work out some of the kinks before applying them within our overal website.

If you think about it, social media is really just a virtualized society.  It makes it faster, easier, and at times cheaper to connect with others that have simliar interests or commonalities.  The tools today, as opposed to 2001, are more intuitive and flexible making it faster and easier to get started.  So, the real effort is taking what you have in your assets, look at how you interact both online and offline, and recreate that in social media.

Additionally, you will need to evaluate how the conversation is different in a face to face setting vs. the content push that primarily happens today with direct marketing efforts.  What works with events and meetings is dialogue exchange.  Our websites and marketing as a whole have become more of a linear mechanism to bring people into the lead management process.  The social setting is about exchange.  I heard one person say that social media is really a vortex – kenetic, circling, accelerating to a mutual objective.

Don’t believe that you are behind in your ability to implement an effective social media strategy.  It doesn’t matter if you “don’t get it”.  In many ways, you are already doing it.  Now there is a lexicon for it.

When talking about social media, it is really less about the technology and more about new and better ways to connect to customers in a one to one manners.  This is what sales is all about.  Add to the fact that social media is also highly portable through mobile devices and you have a tool for sales that aligns nicely to what sales wants, better engagement with customers.  While it may be tempting and on the surface seem easier to integrate into existing web and business applications utilizing laptops as clients, sales is not about the laptop.  Sales is about its mobile phone.

Why go mobile media with sales:

• The app is on the device sales uses most
• Mobile apps are simple to understand, simple to use, and simple and fast to set up
• The app is within touch of how sales interacts with the customer
• Mobile apps already exist to mash into mobile network, CRM/SFA apps within the enterprise
• Always “on” connection – wifi or mobile network

Getting sales to leverage social media is probably not going to be as much of an issue as it is adopting the mechanisms to do so.  Social networking is ultimately what sales does.  Simplicity is really the key.  I’ve worked with and know some extremely savvy and business oriented sales people that are the best because they are a consultant first, sales person second.  A good number of these friends and colleagues sell some of the most complex technology solutions out there.  Yet, when it comes to using anything more difficult than their Blackberry for a phone call or email, forget it.  If they can’t figure it out without using a manual, using it is never going to happen – unless under threat of docked commission.  It is no wonder The Sales 2.0 Network says that sales is still in the technological dark ages.

Providing usable tools that fit neatly into a sales persons favorite tool, their mobile phone, makes things familiar and accessible.  Today’s social media tools are simple to use, easy to understand, and ready to use in seconds.  Having these tools connected to account profiles, contacts, service records, transactions, and marketing content provides a mechanism for a more robust engagement with customers.  Social media becomes an extension of the consultative process.

Preassure on Enterprise Apps

Companies like Oracle, SAP, even Salesforce.com are on the hook to leverage mobile apps that integrate with CRM/SFA systems with simplistic interfaces that we have today.  Mobile technology with these enterprise applications is there, but needs to be mashed with social media apps and networks bringing sales closer to the customer.  Focusing requirement gathering efforts in marketing may seem the right path at first, but it is sales that actually could prove the wiser point of entry.  Marketing may be driving the need for social media integration but, leveraging sales leadership for insight into their relationship practices might yield better results for B2B organizations using social media.  After all, who is already networking and how similar is that to what social media and networks is all about.

Potential Cost Savings

Yet, even without tight integration with existing enterprise applications, today’s social media apps are already a powerful mechanism.  On top of that, there is a low or no cost of entry for companies.  Pilot programs to deploy these social media apps can act as the foundation to gather requirements for more robust and mature platforms.  In the process, marketing is also learning from these social media interactions to improve its own use.  It may even be cheaper having sales go mobile on social media than spending marketing dollars and also seeing ROI.

Related Article:  Giving Control of Social Media to Sales for B2B Marketing ROI

Findings from the Cisco VNI Mobile Forecast:

• Global mobile traffic will exceed two exabytes per month by 2013.
• Global mobile data traffic reached one exabyte per month in half the time that fixed data traffic did.
• Nearly 64 percent of the world’s mobile traffic will be video by 2013.
• Mobile video will grow at a CAGR of 150 percent between 2008 and 2013.
• Mobile broadband handsets with higher than 3G speeds and laptop air or data cards will constitute more than 80 percent of global mobile traffic by 2013.
• Latin America will have the strongest mobile growth at 166 percent CAGR, followed by the Asia-Pacific region at 146 percent.
• Asia-Pacific will account for one-third of all mobile data traffic by 2013.

*An exabyte is equal to: 1 billion gigabytes; 1,000 petabytes; 250 million DVDs

While the smallest market except for Central/Eastern Europe, it shows the impact video will have as Latin America develops further.  If you consider how mobile video has been an indicator of social media adoption, this is important.

Another player poised in this market is Microsoft.  In a recently announced partnership with Telefónica, Microsoft will offer its Windows Live Services expanding its reach across 12 countries further penetrating Argentina and Chili.  Through a partnership with Vivo, Microsoft already has reach within Brazil.

Lastly, Opera released its mobile report in August highlighting Brazil, Mexico and Venezuela as the large consumers of mobile web usage.

Select highlights for Latin America:

• Brazil leads the way in mobile Web usage in Latin America, followed closely by Mexico, Venezuela and Argentina.
• Orkut, metroFLOG and hi5 are the most prevalent social-networking sites in Latin America, although Facebook is the fourth-most-popular site in Venezuela.
• Local domains are few and far between in the top 10. Brazil leads all Latin American countries with two, while most have one or no local domains in the top 10.

Opera also shows a significant rise in social network participation.

So how big is this?  Consider that an ITU census of mobile lines in Latin America is 388 million.

This looks like a perfect storm and opportunity for marketers looking to reach customers in Latin America.  Similar to other emerging markets, mobile devices may be the key to connect.

Even as information is democratized in China, the pace at which it is happening is creating chaos in a marketer’s ability to get the message out in traditional tried and true mechanisms.  Social media marketing is really the key and future of marketing in China.

For three years I was managing customer data globally for a multi-national software company.  The biggest challenge was the integration and management of global databases and maintaining local language.  Outside of process and technical logistics, China was particularly challenging.  You could almost directly map China’s eco-data system to disruptive technology adoption.

• Huge choice and competition
• Constant churn
• Lack of standards
• New is better
• Jones-ing – “I want what he has”

This is China culture, from technology to everyday life.  Even as our social media usage in the US is beginning to mature, or at least become mainstream, China is still slightly behind.  The biggest reason I see is due to the fast rate of economic growth in individual wealth and fast emergence of a capitalist market.  The other aspect is that the Chinese are much more aware of each other and their relationships to each other making them more apt to shift and adapt.

You may think that this is the reason to avoid social media marketing in China but, I think the opposite is true.  It allows you to transcend targeting issues you are plagued with in traditional CRM or customer data management.

Issues with traditional CRM and Customer Data Management in China

• Emails continually acquired and discarded
• Non-stardard names mixing east and west and English and Chinese
• Mailing address changes, undocumented,  or too new to have consistent delivery
• Businesses go in and out of business in 6 months
• Lack of centralized reliable digital data repositories for reference
• Phone churn, landlines being forfeited for more reliable mobile phone service

What social media marketing offers is the ability to transcend and extend our communications to the China market overcoming issues with traditional communication sources.  The fact that the Chinese are adopting and embracing mobile technology and web interaction aligns the marketer to the customer.  This is not to say that traditional methods are obsolete.  There just may be a shift of how it is used and how it could integrate with China’s preferred method of communication and information gathering.  For instance, billboard usage and signage can be better connected to social media by providing SMS text to mobile phones for discounts or product sources instead of emailing an article or coupon to click and download.

At the heart of Chinese communication is social media.  Blogging and Twitter are pushing out news faster than journalists and the government can react.  New social networking sites are being created daily and gaining members fast.  It is the most reliable and pervasive form of connecting Chinese to Chinese and businesses to their Chinese customers.  Marketing models that don’t weight their communication strategies towards social media will not be positioned to capture the market and create loyal customer bases.

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Now that series a funding was secured by iWidgets, marketers are in store for better content outlets on social networks.  My brain is spinning thinking of what a better widget will do.

What do you think is in store for social media?  What would you like to see improved?