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Do you primarily market to other businesses? Are you wondering how social media marketing applies to B2B businesses?

Let’s face it, most media coverage surrounding the influence of social media has had a tendency to lean towards platforms like Facebook and Twitter being designed for teens and infiltrated by die-hard Justin Bieber fans. This is not the case. Social media has become an essential part of business communications in the ever-changing online landscape.

In the run up to BIBA 2012 we’re keen to share our extensive experience of devising strategies and executing exciting social media campaigns for clients in the B2B environment. In light of the event we’ve crafted 4 steps to help professionals get started.

Our team of social media strategists will be at the event in Manchester on May 16th & 17th to shed some light on how your business can get started in social media, come and have a chat and let’s get your social skills up to scratch!

Kick Start Your B2B Social Media Strategy:

Step 1: Ask Why. What do you want to achieve with Social Media? What are your objectives, KPIs and measures of success? Lead generation, brand awareness, online PR, CRM? Set one or two clear goals. Look at your available resources and be realistic.

Step 2: Find your audience first –There are a wealth of free tools like Google Blog Search, Twitter Search, Facebook Search, LinkedIn Search and Social Mention. Make sure you’re searching for the right keywords to find the conversations that are relevant to your business. Choose the channels with the greatest reach to your target audience.

Step 3: Develop A Content Strategy – You’ve found your customers, listen to them first. The next step is to work out what to say to them. This is all about understanding what type of information is relevant and interesting to your customers. Develop blog posts, videos, e-mails, tweets to plug into your social platforms. Assess what type of content is the most effective at starting conversations.

Step 4: Plan. Measure. Optimise. – Plan who will monitor and respond to your audience. Prepare for how you will handle negative comments. Make sure your tracking, reporting and optimizing your social actions. ROI in social is notoriously hard to pin point, but the benefits can be clear. There are several tools to measure your special media efforts which will help you gain significant insights and prevent you from wasting your resources.

To best position your company for success in social media we recommend working with digital marketing professionals who can help you develop a social media strategy specifically for your business. Thankfully we’ll be there at BIBA 2012 to do just that!

A couple of decades ago I had an office to myself; no email, no music and no mobile – and erm, no PC. And a secretary sitting outside the office dealing with the post and waiting for instructions…sounds mad now doesn’t it!

Now I have constant email popping up on my screen; messages coming through on my mobile, calls direct to me from the mobile as well as the office phone. We have MTV at the end of the office, as well as spotify blaring out – lets just say a variety of – music. I’m surrounded by a bunch of delightful, passionate, digitally cute people who are empowered to interrupt, chat, ask questions or drag you off to a meeting.

In so many ways this is great – and we do make so many more decisions, more quickly.

On the other hand we live in an environment of constant distraction and it is really difficult to focus and complete one task properly and really give it the time it deserves.

Making a glacial slide to the point of this blog…the other day I took myself to a flotation tank www.floatworks.com to experience a bit of sensory deprivation. I’ve been meaning to try this for years but never had the time… So you float in a big salty enclosed ‘bath’ – completely isolated from the world around you… one minute you’re in a manic office – and the next you’re in an an environment where there is no noise, no smell, nothing to see, hear, touch..

Once I’d overcome the guilt of not being at my desk, and the feeling that I must be doing SOMETHING – it is amazing just to lie in space and let ones’ addled brain go into free-fall. I think its like de-fragging one’s own computer. I wont bang on about it here. Some people hate it…

Having washed the salt out of my hair and more or less re-engaged with the world, I realise I am not so important that I need to be constantly in touch – and most clients can cope with a voicemail and out of office for more than ten minutes. And that thinking time – real thinking time – is really important.

And maybe I can take the time out to do something slowly and well. To think about it and chew it around with other people before pressing ‘send’ or ‘print’. Maybe I don’t have to interrupt what I’m trying to achieve every 5 minutes.

So to segue this into a digital marketing blog and justify the £45 quid and 1 hour of my life spent in my own head:
If we’re going to market a product or service to time-poor, easily distracted, busy people, then it isn’t just about a multi-touch approach that invades your prospects from every device they engage with. At its worse that’s just annoying. It also needs to be interesting and thought provoking. It needs care, attention and passion. It’s all too easy to skim and we do need to make the time to do fewer things well. A good idea needs time to develop..

They offer three sessions for two in the tank..can I afford not to?

The Spotify play button has arrived and if you want to share tracks via your blog or website then this is the tool for you.

It requires a Spotify basic user account for your site visitors to listen to the tracks you embed, but that’s about as complex as it gets. The new play button allows you to share tracks and  playlists at a touch of a button – grab the spotify URI of the track you want to share, generate your embed code, add to blog and hey presto you have tracks to share with the world.

Now how much better would that campaign be if you could create a soundtrack to go along side it, royalty free?

Here an example of the button in action