Yesterday was my second day attending the Marketing Profs B2B Forum in Chicago. I met a lot of blog friends and made some new ones. The panel I attended on emerging media and its implications on B2B marketing was great and had the audience truly engaged. Here are my takeaways.
David Armano (moderator) | Critical Mass
- B2B is made up of people
- People demand good experiences
- Technology is an enabler to deliver experience
- Site progression has gone from Useful -> Usable -> Desirable -> Sustainable -> Social
- 25% of social media content on the top 20 brands comes from social media
- Dell example – Direct2Dell for blogging, Ideastorm for crowdsourcing, DellOutlet on Twitter
- SalesForce example – Merging platforms with Facebook to create FaceForce
[From left to right: Chris Yeh, Todd Andrlik, Mike Gamson, Phil Gomes, Matt Lohman and David Armano]
Todd Andrlik | Leopardo Construction
- Social newsroom at Leopardo powered by Wordpress blogging software
- Appears traditional, but has built in social media hooks
- Search, RSS, tagging, categories are all built in
- Looking to niche audiences to create blogs and show thought leadership (green building)
Matt Lohman | Knowledgestorm
- Knowledge storm syndicates popular, topical blog content and surrounds it with related white papers and research
- Engagement is over a longer sales cycle
- Leveraging RSS to aggregate and disperse information
- Bringing experts to the customers as a service and surround them with content
Phil Gomes | Edelman me2revolution
- Demonstrated his Bloglines account live (750+ feeds)
- Segments the information topically
- Uses this network of nodes to process raw information
- Looking at small programs that are more cost effective and add up to big benefit
Chris Yeh | Ustream
- Video equipment is cheap and available
- Youtube proves the demand for video is in place
- Ustream does live video over the web for free
- The interaction is 2-way
- Chat is built in so feedback is real time
- The content is embeddable and therefore portable to other networks
- There is a sense of urgency with live video (if you miss it you lose out)
Mike Gamson | LinkedIn
- LinkedIn empowers users to solidify offline relationships
- Use on new biz pitches to leverage connections
- The platform is evolving, but is professionally focused
- Facebook is much more social and should remain separate
Tags: B2B, chicago, chris yeh, david armano, forum, MarketingProfs, matt lohman, mike gamson, phil gomes, todd andrlik
I think David touched on some of the most important points:
# People demand good experiences
# Technology is an enabler to deliver experience
# Site progression has gone from Useful -> Usable -> Desirable -> Sustainable -> Social
Essentially whatever industry we are in, it’s about the people. And enabling the users to develop their own unique user experiences that are useful and usable for them, it makes more sense for them to spread the word of mouth.
Cheers,
Cindy
Cindy — You’re absolutely right on the money. Customization and personalization are crucial to give people value and great experiences. Thank you for your comment!
You guys motivated me to go back and pitch a web 2.0 zone (instead of updating our existing static web site) to my managment. But I do alliance marketing, so I’m anticipating push back from my company’s subject matter experts — and from the software Partner I work with — on the time it takes to contribute. Any suggestion on how to head off those objections of “time”? It won’t fly if I can’t get the right contributors.