Twitter vs. the Business-to-Business Model.
Over the past couple of days, I've been thinking about Business-to-Business (B2B) marketing as it relates to social media, and truth be told, I'm lost. Rather than go into a rant about how the internet's wronged me today, or try to get into a lesson about an abstract concept, I'm going to go through my take on the state of B2B social media marketing and pass it off to you, the reader.
Businesses are not individuals
One of the key concepts in social media is the emphasis on the individual: rather than talking to, or marketing to, large swathes of the population, you can interact with indivudual customers. This is great: for Business-to-Consumer strategies. But what about B2B? This is where the value of social media breaks down for me. I can see maintaining a blog: it allows you to keep your message out there and provides great SEO value. But if you're not targetting individuals at all, what's the point of Twitter? Or Facebook? Or FriendFeed? Or any other individual-based social network?
The decision makers are too old for Facebook
One counter to the above is that businesses don't really talk to each other: it's individual decision makers, and those people could be using social media to keep in touch. But in reality, I wonder how much that is the case. The average executive age is 53, and there's a substantial generational gap for social media. What's the average age of a Facebook user? It's probably under 35.
Even disregarding the generational gap in social media, there's something odd and unproductive about having decision makers hash complex B2B deals on social media. In the back of my mind, I've tried to picture Steve Ballmer and Jerry Yang working out a buyout deal over Twitter, and it's just awkward. I mean, come on:
B2B deals are large, complex, and time-consuming processes. 140 characters don't cut it, and the lack of a respect of privacy, at least in principle, is a problem. So where do these great social media tools fit in? How do you justify telling a B2B company that they can't afford to miss out on social media?
Short-term failure, long term success?
The one value I can see clearly with investing time and effort is to prepare for the next generation of executives, managers, and other decision makers. As scary as it sounds, there are people entering the workforce now who have spent their entire adult lives with Facebook, nevermind the increasing amount of the population who have never known a pre-Internet world. It would be remiss not to be talking to them using the same tools they use. But that's in 10 years or so: most social media addicts are in their 20s, or even younger; most executives are over 40.
So the value isn't really in an action item for businesses, but for them to be hiring people with minimal skill sets in the future: somewhat like knowing how to use email or Microsoft Office. But what about the short-term and medium-term (less than 10 years)?
I'm interested in your thoughts on this: let me know in the comments.
