B2B Social Media: Putting a Human Touch

B2B, or business-to-business, describes commerce transactions between businesses (e.x. between a manufacture and a wholesaler) as opposed to B2C (business-to-Consumers) or B2G (business-to-government).

You may wonder why I am writing on this topic since I’ve decided to focus more on consumers in this blog. Well, the point I am trying to make with this post is that we may treat B2B more like B2C when implementing social media efforts.

As Li and Bernoff point out, it’s important to look at the target audience of B2B not only as businesses (organizations), but also as businesspeople (contact points representing the organizations). This concept is crucial when a business approaches another business using social media- you cannot connect, communicate, and share ideas with a business, but the people doing the business.

My experience as a marketing communication intern in a Raleigh-based PR agency has helped me understand the importance of putting human touch to B2B. I have worked on three B2B projects using social media to help our gaming technology clients (game engine, game localization, and game artificial intelligence) develop and maintain relationships with such businesses as game developers, game publishers, and game education institutes. We make efforts to reach them, impress them, and make connections with them, so as to create business opportunities for our clients.

In retrospect, the critical part of our work always involves learning and connecting with the key people in the businesses. For example, we do regularly email campaigns for a game engine client to inform game publishers of the technology. We customized campaigns when reaching various key decision makers. For CTOs and chief programmers, we inserted video demos in the email, and included the link to the online community where they could discuss technical details with the engineers from our client side. The strategy was implemented based on the fact that management on the technology side contribute to the decision making by making critical judgment of advantages and disadvantages of technology, so they need to know what kind of technology is available here. Whereas for CEOs and CFOs, they go to trade shows and they care about price, value and budget. Thus we reach them with the help of Salesforce event management function- before major trade shows, they would receive emails that inform them of our client’s competitive edge (addressing past successful titles of similar genres developed with the technology, price-performance ratio, etc.), plus a chance for a coffee together in the upcoming trade show.

In a word, knowing who you are communicating with is essential to B2B social media practices. Are they more of spectators than critics? Would they appreciate an opportunity to create contents? Or maybe they are fine as long as they can make comments, or subscribe to things, or share things? Strategies are built on the people, so start to learn them.