Social Media
B2B Social Media – The Art of Conversation
There seem to be two issues of note this year in the B2B marketing space. I don’t typically declare those issues so early in the season for fear of peaking too early and looking like a twat, but this year I’ll make an exception. There are definitely two conversations – the agenda and the hidden agenda. Here’s how I see them unfolding…
The agenda is the recession, the economy, the C word, the shoot me now and let’s just end it all agenda. It’s a reasonable agenda – Lord knows we’ve heard enough from the Markets, the City and the ‘experts’ to know that we’re all doomed. The doomiest of the doomed are the people, businesses and services with the prefix (or indeed suffix) of ‘marketing’. So we’re all going to die and everyone wants to talk about it – to shoo the evil voodoo away, a bit like saying the word ‘cancer’ out loud.
That’s a very dull and depressing agenda and is it really what we want to spend the next year(s) talking about? People will lose jobs, businesses will close, the world will change. I’m still not getting anything helpful or interesting out of this conversation and on the basis that I’m not actually going to top myself just yet, I’d quite like to move forward. Thanks for asking.
I’ll concede one point on the recession agenda. For the foreseeable future, B2B clients and agencies are going to have to try different things and deliver results. Sound familiar? Uh huhh, thought so.
The far more interesting hidden agenda was just warming up last year when the economic shit hit the fan – it’s the Social Media Agenda. Has anyone noticed how social media has been spreading like a disease, except it’s not a disease. Social diseases are completely different and absolutely not on the agenda. It’s the overnight sensation that’s taken about seven years to appear overnight. Everyone, but everyone’s had a look at Social Media and formed an opinion – waste of time, waste of money, don’t understand it, can’t see the point. Or maybe they’ve become social media ‘experts’ with a view on what will and will not generate revenue and offer value and produce returns. Everyone’s full of shit of course because there are no experts, no one knows what’s going to work and the whole space is a complete land-grab.
I had a punt at twitter the other day and it’s like the WILD WEST out there. But I started some conversations. And they’re carrying on. I revisited Linkedin too – I’ve never really bothered with it before, but I was able to create a permission-based network of almost three hundred people interested in Birddog conversations in a few days. I’ve got absolutely no idea what I’m going to do with my twitter streams or my Linkedin network – yet. But I do know that, so far, almost everyone – client and agency has missed the point of these technologies. The point is the conversation.
The conversation is, for the first time, being shaped and determined by the customer not the provider. That was always the intention of the Social Media model – it’s very ‘Web2’. There’s a good argument that says ‘conversation doesn’t pay the rent’, but inevitably, new things take a while to figure out and I have the impression that the moment’s arrived. Or it’s at least arriving. There’s plenty of tech geekery around the subject and there are a load of no-marks professing to know all the answers, but there’s also a growing conversation. A movement. It has nothing to do with the people who think they know the answer to ‘Social Media Revenue Generation Models’. It’s just about the people – having the conversations and working it out for themselves and with each other. And from those conversations comes the revenue. Just as it always has.
This is the agenda. It’s still hugely unpredictable which makes it easily dismissed, but it’s a beautiful thing because nobody’s screwed with it yet. Those who have tried to manufacture a set result have been left behind by the power of the people who have other expectations and (for the first time?) the ability to shape outcomes.
So as B2B clients and agencies and brand champions and marketers how are we all going to reinvent ourselves? How will we be ‘creative’ in a Web2.0 world? How will we promote our brands when we can’t ‘push’ messages but have to learn how to ‘pull’?
We’re going to watch the weak and the irrelevant wiped out by the recession – that’s a given. Then we could spend the next several years talking about how awful it all was. Or we can try being creative again. Whatever happens, don’t waste a good recession…
Scot McKee
Managing Director
Birddog Ltd.
+44 (0)20 7323 6666
twitter: @scotmckee
6 Comments
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hide commentsScot
Great Britain plc has been good at one thing for a long time, ideas. We lead the world in certain industries including the dreaded “Marketing” and we show a lot of people how to do this stuff really well.
I have great confidence that by continuing to be ideas-led we will take full advantage of the recessionary opportunities that come up.
But the flip side is that if you work in a business that is low margin and process not ideas-led. Just outsource yourself to somewhere cheaper in the world. The uk is not where you should be trading.
Rebecca
Rebecca Caroe
09:38 27 February 2009
Rebecca,
You’re right of course. I think ‘ideas’ are exactly where the value lies in the emerging Social Media market. We now have to redefine what ‘creative’ means in the Creative Services industries. Creative no longer means design and artwork. These process aspects of our business can be outsourced. The value lies in the idea – and specifically how it can be applied to a multi-channel market. Interesting times…
S
x
Scot
12:05 27 February 2009
Scot,
The term ‘ web2.0 ‘ has already jumped the shark (a phrase which has also jumped itself and now been replaced with ‘nuked the fridge’). The hip kids don’t use it because it was really invented by marketers and as such lacks street cred. It’s also rejected by the techno weenies because technically it doesn’t actually utilise any functionality that wasn’t already around in ‘ WEB 1.0 ‘. It’s heading the way of ‘The Information Super Highway’ (remember that).
Interestingly the term WEB2.0 has been trade marked in Ireland and is likely to be trade marked across Europe by CMP Media. So I think that it’s best that we let them have it and then all snigger at them for being all dad-on-the-dancefloor by using a term that was past it’s use-by date shortly after it was coined.
K
Kieron
17:39 11 March 2009
Keiron – brilliant observations and quite right. Although, while the ‘kids’ may well have ‘poked the rabbit’, or ‘sucked the starfish’ (or whatever…) the Web2.0-Gate-Scandal is widely accredited to Tim O’Reilly who is hardly a ‘kid’. But who the hell cares anyway – Web2.0 is dead (according to Tech Crunch at least). R.I.P.
Scot
20:04 11 March 2009
Well written piece, Scott.
The thing that pricks my conscience about the constant demands (and yes, they are demands) of “Has YouTube/Twitter/Facebook worked out how to make money?!” is that the sites were firstly and foremostly created to meet user’s needs. If this is successfully done, then they are popular. The raison d’être comes first. Monetising the raison d’être can only come subsequently.
The problem right now is that the likes of Google and VCs want a return on their investments and they want it now – they paid a great deal money to acquire these popular sites, and equally to outmanoeuvre their competitors from potential business opportunities. But if they are scratching their heads now on how to extract a revenue stream, then by definition it means that the investors hadn’t figured out the revenue stream when they originally made the investment – they acted on blind faith, “if we build it, they will come…and we will reap fields of profit”. But as we saw in the first Dotcom boom not always “did they come”, and equally now it’s not a given that “we will reap fields of profit”. Like you say, “new things take a while to figure out”.
Best to let the flash in the pan diffuse, the dust settle, and let natural equilibria be attained. Unless you want to kill a good idea with overzealous and premature demands for revenue, then investors need to take a long term view of their investments. We’ve learnt from nine years ago that it is a fallacy and a waste to burn great amounts of money forcing something that might not necessarily be there; not to mention damaging the brand and reputation (for example http://www.smh.com.au/news/technology/biztech/wiggles-fans-see-red-over-userpays-site/2009/04/26/1240684340181.html)
Carl Kim
15:13 27 April 2009
Thanks Carl – you’re making a couple of really good points here. Firstly, Social Media is simply another tool – one of many that we can use as part of an integrated B2B marketing strategy. We’ve seen what happens if the technology is over-hyped and driven purely by the beancounters and the results weren’t pretty. We sholud learn from past mistakes. Secondly. thanks for the Wiggles link. Great example of how to ruin existing brand equity. How could a brand this big not think that by applying charges to a previously free site there would be customer fallout? And yet they did it anyway. Which perhaps makes the move even more cynical. It would appear that nothing is sacred. Customers want to feel good about their brand experiences – how would that experience make you feel? Excellent comment – thanks for posting.
S
Scot
09:33 28 April 2009