B2Bs, Up in the Air About that Social Media Thingy?

Source: iStock.com

Business-to-business (B2B) companies that have been on the fence about the usefulness of social media marketing will enjoy a recent blog post at Businessknowhow.com. Jean Van Rensselar, a public relations firm owner published a post titled, ‘B2B Skip the Social Media Marketing’.

She builds a comprehensive case about the B2B risks of using social media.  The post makes a big case against B2B companies using Facebook or Twitter to successfully find customers.

Rant: New technologies/ways of doing business always draw naysayers.   No doubt in the year 1439 when Gutenberg rolled out his new “moveable type” printing press there were those who said,  “What will all of those monks that have been handwriting books for a living do now?”

I agree with her opinion that neither Facebook nor Twitter are slam-dunks for driving visitors to your B2B web site and then magically converting them into leads and customers.  But then, there aren’t too many B2B slam-dunk marketing tools/strategies in my experience.

Like all aspects of business, successful social media marketing takes thoughtful planning, good execution and wise use of resources to achieve the right B2B results.  Any expert–social media marketing or otherwise–that suggests a business should  jump into using any tool without a strategy is not an expert.  This is the only other point I agree with in the post.

If according to the post “only 26 percent of B2B marketers have even used social networking as a marketing channel…” I say, B2B’ers start getting your feet wet.

Are your competitors  in the 26 percent of the social-media-adopters-pool along with these B2B social media practitioners?

• Mark Logic CEO Blog

• Cisco’s Product Launch in a Web 2.0 World (Marketing in a Web 2.0 World blog)

• Burns Engineering BE Blog

• Service-Now.com Community (blog, wiki, community, forum. Results here.)

• Emerson Process Experts Blog (results here)

You can read the entire ‘Skip Social Media’ post here.  The 20+ comments are priceless.

Okay B2B companies, pick a side.  Are you in the social-media-won’t-work-ignore-it-till-it-goes-away group?  Or….