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©Copyright Base One Integrated Marketing 2009 - Social Media white paper

Business-to-business ina person-to-person world

Social media was designed or people. There’s no getting away romit. But in B2B marketing, we work on behal o businesses. Our workrevolves around the commercial relationships that exist betweencompanies. We are concerned with the convoluted buying processes,the committee decisions and the product complexity that goeswith B2B, rather than the (generally) more spontaneous, emotionaland human buying decisions that characterise the B2C world.So what on earth are we doing thinking that we can use socialmedia? By denition, social media is designed to be strictly ‘person-to-person’. So what role can media like blogs, social networksetc play in our hard, impersonal, commercial world?Surely it’s never going to t. So how are B2B marketers going to make useo social media? How do we overcome the business-to-people paradox?How is it all going to work?

How does B2B marketing ft with thepersonal nature o social media?

Social media is about behaviour,not technology

To answer the question we need to rst look at what social media really is,and how it came about. Social media is not so much a collection o sites andtechnologies as the symptoms o an enormous shit in buyer behaviour.Phenomena such as Twitter, Facebook and MySpace are the ‘agcarriers’ or the social media movement. The buzz that surroundsthese initiatives is arguably based more on astonishment at theirsudden rise to prominence than on what they actually allow peopleto do. As a result, blinded by the sensation o the whole thing, wesometimes ail to see the underlying reasons or the rise o social media.And that reason is not about technology, it is about behaviour.

“It’s about what people do, not the machines that let them do it.”

©Copyright Base One Integrated Marketing 2009 - Social Media white paper

To analyse this behaviour, we need to separate businessnetworking rom social networking. They have much in common,but the motives behind them are entirely dierent.

“Social networking is based onsubconscious, emotional drivers”

Business networking v social networking

Since commerce began, it has been necessary to build relationships orbusiness. When the rst nomadic tradesmen arrived in the rst settled townsto barter and trade, exchanging urs and spices or goods they could notobtain where they came rom, they had to know whom they were dealingwith. Inormation exchange was as important as the exchange o goods andcoins, quite simply because the ormer improved the chances o the latter.And as business relationships have evolved through the centuries, it hasremained true that these are, rst and oremost, business relationships.Business people connect in order to improve the transmission o valuerom one to the other, to oil the wheels o commerce. While theserelationships may be cordial, their raison d’etre is commercial.Social networking, on the other hand, is driven by a bewildering number ostrictly personal motives – psychological and sociological – that are beyondthe scope o this paper. Sufce to say, people connect on this level orreasons o belonging, protection, enjoyment, comort. They do it becausethey like it, and because they have a deep-seated need or communionwith their ellow humans. Social networking is based on subconscious,emotional drivers – not because there is a chance o making a trade.

Inormation and the business buyer

Beore the arrival o social media, the relationship between a businessbrand and the business customer was much simpler. The buyersought inormation about products and solutions which would allowthem to do business, but where did they nd this inormation?Traditionally, there were two sources:Vendors: communicating via web, print or in person, vendors providedinormation to potential buyers. They still do. But this inormationis not impartial. It is inormation devalued by the commercialinterests o the provider. Crudely speaking, they wanted you tobuy their product so only gave you their hal o the story. Buyersbecame skilled at ltering this inormation and comparing vendors,and were thus able to make good use o awed inormation.To this day, the distinction remains true. So when internet technologyprovided a new and improved means or building interpersonalrelationships at the start o the 21st century, two distinct groups opeople began to exploit it or these same two distinct reasons.

©Copyright Base One Integrated Marketing 2009 - Social Media white paper

Industry press: by contrast, inormation delivered via established publisherswas, in principle, impartial. However, it was not universally availablebecause it carried a cost, both in terms o time and money. Money becausethe publishers had to make money by charging or a subscription, and timebecause the exact inormation a buyer needed was not always easy to nd.The attractiveness o this material created the B2B advertising market,since vendors were also able to insert their own ‘party line’ into otherwiseimpartial inormation sources, thus increasing their awareness with buyers.This is how it worked, rom the earliest days o publishing until theturn o the 21st century. But then something amazing happened.The vendors and the publishers lost control.A third option opened up, made available by the internet.Publishers lost their control because anyone, anywhere wasable to publish inormation. Vendors lost control because buyerswere able to nd an alternative to their inormation stream.This third option has oten been called the Buyersphere. It is the placewhere buyers share inormation online. It is where they orm opinionson business purchases, It is where, regardless o their industry, or theesoteric nature o their search, they can nd answers. And this ground-breaking business benet was made possible by social media.I lots o people start using a certain path, it becomes a recognised route.It is more a river than a highway. Flexible, organic and unpredictable,its course depends on the actions o its content. A river is not denedby its place on a map, it is where the water chooses to ow.And thus, i there is a reason to change course, it can happen overnight.In the Buyersphere, buyers seek inormation where they can nd it. I itis not there – or i they nd nothing but the vendor-biased inormationthey used to have – they simply divert and go somewhere else.

The Buyersphere: a river, not a highway

In the early days o the internet, the phrase “inormation superhighway”was a avourite amongst politicians and technologists alike. The idea o ahuge pipe, along which data could be transerred at blinding speeds wasa compelling one. But as we have got used to the idea, we have begun tounderstand that it is not as accurate a metaphor as we once thought.The ‘highway’ that we now use or data is indeed a ast one. Data – andthereore inormation – moves instantaneously rom A to B. But the keydierence is that the path it takes is not governed by the people who built it.There is no single ‘superhighway’, built by a central authority, along which allinormation is channelled. Instead, inormation nds its own way, dependingon the path o least resistance, ie greatest popularity amongst users.

“Inormation nds its own way,depending on the path o least resistance”