B2B marketing will not be effective in social media if it continues to focus on goals of awareness. Mailana, a nifty tool to analyze strong conversational relationships on Twitter shows that a circle of influence is a tight one.
ReadWriteWeb exposes The Inner Circles of 1o Greek Heroes on Twitter using Mailana. By typing in someones twitter name it produces a network graph and a ranked list of who a person converses with. RWW was interested in the top 5 of people like Evan Williams, Kevin Rose, and Shaq. They make the premise that this shows the influencers of the influencers. Which makes sense since the more you interact with someone, the more likely you would take into account their opinions or have similar opinions.
Outside of this being a bit creepy and verging on stalking, it is amazingly interesting. What struck me is just what type of people a person is most likely to converse with on Twitter. It seems that there are varying degrees of personal and professional as well as the range of insulation and outreach. Not that this should be much of a surprise but, for all the talk about the "socialness" of social media, connections for some of the biggest influencers have a high degree of professional connection and insulation.
For B2B word-of-mouth marketing, the inner circle is a tough thing to crack. Depending on who you want to connect to, and what you want to talk about, marketing has to not only learn how to hold conversations but also be a lot closer to the customer and conversation. This new marketing technique moves marketers closer to sales activities than broad stroke marketing activities.
Many are focusing social media goals on awareness generation and next on engagement. It seems to be more about driving activity on the vehicle than a focus on a business objective. At this high level, marketing is just not going to be effective to change opinions. You are starting at square one. To make social media work for you, focus on thought leadership and building relationships through reciprocating interactive vehicles.
You probably have a pretty well established market presence unless you are just starting out. In this instance, you are probably already working your network and partners heavily. So, leverage those existing relationships to crack the inner circle. Always incorporate customers into your social media outreach. Identify ways to expand your customer advocacy programs to social media. Always ensure you incorporate customers into your webinars and demos to encourage and expand conversation. Never go it alone.
Another way to leverage your social media community venues is to engage customers during the sales cycle or customer advisory sessions within these venues. Conference calls with presentations and demos are integrated in your social media sites. Hold your regular customer advisory calls within the community. Use your community as the place to interact and people will recognize that this is the place to do so.
At the end of the day, who your customers turn to to make decisions isn't any different than it always was. Mailana now makes it easier to see who they are. Who are your customers talking to?
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