Tag Archives: b2b

Recap of Social Media Seminar at Berghs: B2B Challenges

Tobias Brandt, Digital Director of Digitas,  held a breakfast seminar this morning, I was in the audience with about 200 other social media hungry individuals. There´s a new interactive world opening, most companies sees this as a real challenge.
How can you build your corporate brand in a media landscape with new channels increasing at a furious rate?

It was a good seminar but there´s should have been stronger examples of B2B and social media.

Tobias mentioned that there´s three driving forces within digital communication:

  • Information
  • Personalization
  • Participation

It is in “participation” that we can see a much stronger B2C presence, B2B and social media is still evolving and not mature at all.

Business.com is ranking tops sites where companies are present: No 1 is Facebook. This is interesting, if you look at a typical company group at facebook it´s really not that interesting: containing photos and a way for mostly employees to communicate. Corporate facebook groups are often open but contain information more or less that´s of more or less no interest to others outside of the company.

The top sites that companies use to upload content is youtube.com ! Why, well it´s a standard platform with great video capabilities and you can embed the content on your own website. It´s also possible to do corporate branding on  your youtube.com channel.
The no 3 site where companies upload content is slideshare.com, they provide a great platform to easily share slides 🙂
A new function of Slideshare is branding, you can have your own “channel” on slideshare so that your company stand out from the large amount of slides. Note the low number of companies that use branding on Slideshare, it could explode soon!

An important question is whether companies should invest time and money in their own social platform or use standard platforms? My point of view is that the standard social media platforms suits Small Medium Business (SMB) best, why?
It´s easier for SMB to adapt to new technologies because they are more flexible and depending on new channel for sales. A number of questions is raised with B2B, who own the information and IP when it´floating in the social media space? Your legal department will most likely go wild when you want to connect your line of business applications and intranet with public channels. And even if you can persuade legal, IT department will scratch their head because they won´t know how to do it. It´s easier for SMB to use the standard social media channels such as facebook, twitter and Slideshare , because they have a smaller legacy to carry.

Comcast and Comhem have both moved (expanded) their customer service to Twitter, why? Because they get more ways of communicating with their customers. Last year, Comhem had a large service failure and their web-based customer service (www.comhem.com) failed. Had they been as fast as Comcast to adapt to social media and been present at twitter, they could have reached their customers using additional channels such as Twitter or Facebook.

This is a funny example on how comcast´s own tech staff failed to contact  customers service from a customer location, and fell asleep on the couch

Will standard communications channels replace the good old web sites? Tobias don´t think so and I agree. There´s a trend that you interact with a company on twitter (and searching what others have to say) on Twitter and don´t visit the corporate web . Why visit the  web site when the company is in my own social media backyard? actually there´s no need unless you’re an influencer that seeks more specific information that you want to share with others. The visitor of tech web sites are specialists and bloggers that seeks the latest information and thereby becomes the channel between a company and it´s customers (consumers and companies). Web site´s become more specialised and community like, serving specific needs. The large chunk of information will flow in standard social media platforms.

The real challenge: How can companies connects their business to social media channels without exposing to much of their business to the competition? And doing so without compromising legal and IP.

Social media training will be mandatory for companies that want to succeed!

This blog post contains a blend of my own opinion and information from Tobias seminar, hope you can keep it apart.