It’s that time of year again when over 5,000 search engine marketers amass at Search Engine Strategies New York, March 23 – 24, 2010.

This year’s show is set to focus on using search as a means for connecting with your customers. The three-day agenda also features prominent discussions of leveraging the combined impact of search and social media.

Business.com’s VP Sales, Patricia Neuray, will be a panelist in one such session on Day 2 (Wednesday, March 24 at 10:30 a.m.): Social and Search: Integrating Social Media and Search to Drive the Brand. For those looking to increase brand presence through online marketing, this is a must-attend session featuring key insight from Business.com and big brands like IBM.

For those of you looking to the Search Engine Strategies show  for more tactical search marketing advice like keyword selection and usage, don’t miss Business.com’s SES Theatre Presentation on Day 1 (Tuesday, March 23 at 1:00 p.m.), 5 Keyword-Related Traps to Avoid in B2B Search Marketing, featuring Business.com’s East Coast Sales Director Arkady Fridman and Strategic Account Executive Seamus Heaney.

And, if you’re already planning to attend SES New York, don’t forget to swing by the Business.com booth (#300) to say hello and enter to win an Amazon Kindle and $50 American Express® gift card!

Business.com will also be co-sponsoring this year’s car giveaway – learn more on how you can win a brand new Honda Fit!

We look forward to seeing you at SES New York.

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Optimizing B2B online marketing ROI requires many things – a well-defined target audience, clear strategy and tactics for targeting business buyers online, engaging creative, solid execution and accurate performance metrics to name the major ones. By checking each of these off, however, have you truly optimized your B2B online marketing performance?

Based on my 12+ years connecting business buyers and advertisers online across client, agency and publisher roles, the answer is a resounding “NO”. The best most B2B companies achieve with their online marketing programs is average performance through a favorite tactic and/or advertising partner, a situation reflected in statements like:

• “We tried banner ads on a couple sites, but the click-through rate was terrible so we stopped them”
• “We dropped paid search everywhere except Google because Google Analytics showed us that was where all our sales came from”
• “Email marketing is the only thing that works for us”
• “SEO is free so we focus on that over paid search”

And yet, as any casual reader of MarketingProfs, MarketingSherpa, Search Engine Watch, Search Engine Land or other great online marketing resources can tell you, there’s an abundance of phenomenal success stories describing the exact opposite of the statements above. Why the difference? How can these tactics or advertising partners perform so well for some and so poorly for others? There are four main traps which keep B2B marketers from truly optimizing online marketing performance.

Trap #1: Viewing Business Buying as an Event, not a Process

Ask any B2B marketer to describe business buying and they’ll give a reasonably consistent description of a process involving multiple people across multiple stages over time, similar to the following:

The latest Enquiro research about business buying and the Internet suggests that while 50% of business spend is simple repeat ordering from existing vendors, the other 50% fits this general process, with buyers researching new vendors for products/services they already purchase from someone today or for completely new “blank slate” purchases.

In addition, as shown in this figure from MarketingSherpa’s 2009-10 B2B Marketing Benchmark Guide, B2B marketers report that nearly 70% of business purchases take more than two months to convert from a lead to a sale.

While B2B marketers know intellectually that business buying is process and not a single event, there’s a problem – 94% have no insight into how their online marketing programs impact anything other than the last event before a conversion or purchase. This is based on our own study of B2B web analytics market share across more than 27,000 B2B web sites, but is also consistent with research from Microsoft’s Atlas Institute which found 93-95% of audience engagements with online advertising get no credit when advertisers review campaign performance.

B2B marketers are trapped by their inability to see how various online marketing campaigns impact different stages of the buying process. They are forced to look through a small window into the very end of the process.

The 94% of B2B online marketers facing this problem fall into one of two camps on this issue. The first doesn’t realize the trap exists. They are flabbergasted by the implications when they understand what’s really happening. They’ve always accepted what they see in their web analytics as the truth, or made due with no insight into online campaign performance, without really understanding their view is limited to the very end of the funnel. When confronted with this fact, there is usually a long moment of stunned silence as all the performance and optimization decisions they’ve made based on faulty data flash through their minds, followed by a statement like “OK, this is a problem” coupled with a long heavy resigned sigh.

The second camp is more experience with the limitations of web analytics. These marketers know their view is limited to the end of the funnel, and have chosen to accept the situation because “that’s all there is to work with.” They recognize they’re trapped and choose to do what they can while dragging the trap around. They should avoid any conclusions about B2B online campaigns or media which primarily address earlier stages in the buying process, but that’s difficult to do in practice.

Trap #2: Believing that Business Buyers Seek Optimal Solutions

People aren’t rational optimizers with infinite time and resources to find the best answer. Instead, people satisfice across most decisions they make, putting in just enough effort to find a workable solution. This insight about the difference between viewing people as rational optimizers vs. satisficers underlies the latest model of the business buying process developed by Gord Hotchkiss of Enquiro Research based on a study of over 3,000 business buyers co-sponsored by Enquiro, Business.com, Google, Marketo and Demandbase.

The point B2B online marketers need to understand is simple: rather than taking the time to actively seek and rationally balance the pros and cons of your product/service offering versus the competition, business buyers will simply find their own way to a satisfactory solution when gathering information online using whatever information is readily available. Even then, the 50% of business spend which involves a hunt for new vendors/solutions tilts decidedly in favor of existing, approved vendors.

This means that while your company may offer a clearly superior solution, you may lose the sale to an existing vendor as business buyers seek to reduce the time and risks inherent in building a new vendor relationship, working with new people, learning new systems, etc. The trap around believing, explicitly or implicitly, that business buyers seek optimal solutions is commonly evident in the assumptions which work their way into many B2B online marketing plans:

1) Lead count or visitor-to-lead conversion rate are key performance metrics - getting prospects to register for a whitepaper or webinar may be an essential entry point into the B2B lead nurturing process. But the number of leads generated by a given online marketing program or traffic source, and the conversion rate of visitors from that program/source which convert to leads, are relatively unimportant when viewed alone. These metrics are convenient, yes, and the counts are high enough to make most marketers feel they’re learning something valuable for performance optimization.

However, what actually matters is lead quality – percentage of leads matching target segments, how well those leads convert to buyers and how much they actually buy. With the risk management characteristics of business buying, and strong preference for existing vendors, the B2B online marketing campaigns or traffic sources associated with the best quality leads may be very different from those that look the best in terms of initial lead count.

2) Business buyers will find the content on your corporate web site to be authoritative and critical to the buying decision - in fact, they may never find your web site and encounter this great content if it isn’t directly in their path as they research solutions online. Also, according to MarketingSherpa’s B2B Marketing Benchmark Guide, business buyers trust what they find on business news and information web sites much more than what they find on your site.

3) There are 1-2 key online entry points into our web site - recalling trap #1 above, B2B online marketers know the web site a portion of users visited immediately prior to landing on their own web site. However, unless you take the time to actually sit down with prospects at various stages of the buying process and have them show you, on their own computer in their own office, how they find business buying-related information online then you won’t have a clue about (a) the full online path and all the sites touched along the way, and (b) why many viable prospects never make it to your site at all. Without this context, it’s impossible to make accurate sense of the “flat” web traffic stats provided by comScore, Nielsen, quantcast, Compete or others. More about this below.

Trap #3: Misunderstanding How Business Buyers Use the Internet

In April, 2009, there were approximately 47 million US adults (18+) Internet users involved in the business buying process, according to comScore Plan Metrix. This is approximately 30% of the total US adult population and 46% of all employed US adult Internet users.

47 million people will not all swim in the same direction when they head into an an ocean of billions of business-related web pages, pursuing a huge range of products/services, at different stages in the business buying process and buffeted initially by semi-personalized search results from general search engines when they dive in at the start of each session.

Put this way, statements like “we only advertise on Google because everyone uses Google” are comical, bordering on tragic. As the dominant general search engine and online portal, most people do use Google, and Google PPC and SEO programs are an essential component of most B2B online marketing plans. But business buyers use Google and other general search engines like Yahoo! and Bing interchangeably (the average Internet user uses three different search engines in a given month) and to get somewhere else. 71% of paid search clicks on general search engines are navigational. This “somewhere else” describes a huge range of different types of sites which support the business buying process in one way or another, from niche business publication sites to directories, product comparison sites, virtual events and social networking sites just to name a few.

The performance-harming traps from misunderstanding how business buyers use the Internet during the purchasing process are either (a) focusing B2B online marketing programs too narrowly on just a few major traffic sources, and/or (b) misapplying strategy, tactics and metrics that work for one campaign or traffic source to other, different campaigns and traffic sources. In the first of these, B2B marketers significantly limit their ability to deliver their brand message and offers at key points in the buying process. In the second, they assume that one successful display ad or PPC campaign on one site should be replicated exactly on other sites and perform the same despite significant differences in functionality, audience and audience stage in the buying process between.

Trap #4: If You Have a Hammer, Everything Looks Like a Nail

This important trap bears mentioning, but it’s so well known that I decided to put it last. If you’re an expert at something, situations where your expertise can be (or you feel should be) applied pop up everywhere. We like those situations, and we become frustrated if our expertise isn’t used or is used but results in poor performance. That’s just the way our minds work.

However, problems arise when our expert toolkit isn’t up to the job at hand. Let’s say you’re a golfer. If you only practiced putting and then played a round of golf, you’d probably putt reasonably well but would suffer trying to get the ball from the tee to the green. In this situation, how would you respond? Would you say: “I’m sure glad I’m good at putting but to improve my overall score I need understand and practice with my driver and irons as well”? Or would you say: “The only thing that matters in golf is how well you putt because that’s closest to the hole – the rest doesn’t matter and is a waste of time to even think about”?

Now let’s put the same situation in a B2B online marketing context. Let’s say you’re a Google AdWords pro. If you spend 95% of your time on AdWords campaigns and are asked to improve overall online marketing ROI, how would you respond? Would you say: “I’ve got AdWords dialed and the end of the funnel covered, but to improve ROI, I need to understand and start display ad campaigns to build awareness and vertical search/directory campaigns to better cover the shortlist phase”? Or would you say: “The only thing that matters in online marketing is Google AdWords because campaigns there convert the best on branded terms – the rest doesn’t matter and is a waste of time to even think about”?

What would you say? What would your agency say? Are either or both of you trapped with a hammer in your hand and seeing nails everywhere you look?

Escaping the Traps that Sap B2B Online Marketing Performance

Some B2B companies and marketers are content with low to average performance. Chances are, that’s not you if you’ve read this far. You want to know how to boost performance somewhere between great and utterly astounding. You won’t find the key to truly superior performance in the top 5 tips for better PPC performance or top 10 things you need to know about SEO. These are great, don’t get me wrong, but they’re tactics that almost anyone can learn and apply.

To escape the traps that lock your B2B online marketing program into average performance, you need to do two things: keep your mind open to alternatives and have the flexibility to act on those alternatives.

Keeping an Open Mind

Repeat after me….online marketing is evolving too quickly for me, my team and my agency to possibly keep up with everything. Think about how few true, enduring experts there are within your own industry, and then compare the speed of change in your industry to that of search marketing, social media, viral marketing or other online marketing domains. Most B2B industries are evolving not nearly as quickly as online marketing, and this forces most B2B online marketers to fit squarely into one of the following roles:

• Niche Tactic Experts – the display advertising pro or paid search guru, for example, who focuses on a specific tactical domain, system or advertising partner.
• Big Picture Generalists – have experience with multiple types of online marketing and often driving cross-channel identify-test-integrate-optimize programs (e.g., identify new channels/tactics, test, integrate into existing marketing mix and optimize across the mix).
• Survivors – everyone else who’s wading through the constant change and information overload with a focus on just getting things done

To keep an open mind, it’s important to understand which of these roles both you and those you consult with fit into today. Accept the strengths and weaknesses of that position. There’s nothing inherently good or bad about each of these roles, but each role does have its limitations.

For example, a Niche Tactic Expert with a expertise in Google PPC campaigns can make sure their company has a solid presence on the search engine most people will turn to at the start of the business buying process and for navigation to the company’s web site in response to other online or offline marketing campaigns and/or at the end of the buying process. This expertise is critical. However, the effort involved to stay a niche tactical expert means little effort will go into understanding other online marketing channels (e.g., vertical search, directories) or tactics (e.g., banner advertising, social media), and judgments about those other channels/tactics will typically be filtered through the lens of existing expertise. When a display advertising expert speaks about display advertising, you should listen. When they speak about the performance of SEO or social media vs. display advertising, it’s time to tune out.

Similarly, someone in a Survivor role with responsibilities across multiple online and offline marketing domains is applying the 80/20 rule to pick what to focus on given available time and resources. That’s a critical function as well. But to deliver superior performance, Survivors need to constantly remind themselves to be tactic agnostic and avoid snap, satisficing judgments.

The main point here is that it’s impossible to know and keep up with everything in B2B online marketing. Once you accept that, and the strengths and limitations of where you fit today, it is much easier to keep the open mind necessary to identify and capitalize on new online marketing opportunities that can drive superior performance.

Maintaining the Flexibility to Act on Alternatives

While you may be able to keep an open mind about new opportunities in the rapidly evolving world of B2B online marketing, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be able to act. As with the business buying process, managing risk plays a big part in the choice to explore new paid search channels, ad networks, remnant banner inventory and especially social media.

Managing risk to gain the flexibility to act on alternatives largely boils down to managing resources and expectations. The most experienced and successful B2B online marketers make sure they keep a portion of their budget and time set aside for testing new opportunities. Similarly, they know to manage expectations down – both their own and others – when starting campaigns using new tactics, on new sites or in virtually any new online marketing situation. These experienced marketers may seem like raging pessimists, constantly sandbagging expectations while delivering superior results, but they have enough experience to expect the unexpected with interactive marketing.

Related posts

• Webinar – B2B Social Media: Facts, Fictions & Focus Areas for 2010
• VIDEO: The Challenge with Measuring B2B Online Conversions
• The Cardinal Sin of B2B Search Marketing
• Improving B2B Search Marketing ROI
• Improve Search Marketing ROI During a Recession: Top 10 Insider Tips

Looking for ways to improve brand recognition, demonstrate expertise and attract new business leads? If you have compelling content to share, hosting a webinar is a relatively quick, easy and inexpensive option…if you know what you’re doing.

Follow these 10 tips for the path to a foolproof webinar.

Tip #1 – Clearly Define Your Target Audience and Webinar Goals

Looking to educate new clients? Trying to establish thought leadership on a particular topic or with a specific audience? Focused on generating new sales leads?

Knowing the answers to these questions and clearly outlining your webinar goals will help to craft the content and prove essential when it comes time to select your webinar conferencing software/service provider.

Tip #2 – Use Tip #1 to Drive Selection of the Right Webinar Software/Service Provider

Selecting the right webinar provider  will make or break your webinar. A few webinar providers worth considering are On24, Citrix gotoWebinar, and Cisco WebEx, just to name a few.

The truth: there is no right or wrong webinar provider. The best webinar provider for your needs will depend on what you’ve already defined as your webinar goals in Tip #1.

When considering each provider, openly share your webinar goals with the provider. The provider can then help steer you toward the appropriate product for you and address key considerations like adding a toll-free conference bridge (so webinar participants won’t be charged to attend the webinar), your anticipated number of attendees (some providers cap at 1,000 or less), how interactive you’d like the webinar to be (e.g., polls, surveys, etc.) and whether or not you will want an on-demand, recorded version post-event.

Tip #3 – Don’t Rush Through Creating Your Webinar Registration Form

You’ve got the date, time and webinar provider selected and are ready to get the word out. Although it’s tempting to rush through webinar registration form set-up so you can start sharing the news, it’s important to take a strategic approach to building your form.

Again, back to Tip #1 – if you’re looking at this as a potential lead gen effort, you’ll want to select the form fields that will capture all relevant information. Consider your long-term goals – do you anticipate issuing additional research on this topic? Hoping to make this webinar a series? Consider adding a checkbox for registrants to opt-in to future research and webinar invitations.

Finally, treat your registration page like… a registration form page. The same optimization tactics apply like using minimal form fields and keeping form visibility above the fold.

Tip #4 – Make a ‘To Do’ Timeline & Send it to Everyone

Now that your registration form is up, it’s countdown to Webinar Day. To stay organized, create a master to-do list including everything from marketing pushes to technical tasks.  Date and assign these items. The sooner everyone knows what’s required of him/her, the more time you have to gauge pre-webinar marketing efforts and troubleshoot forgotten items.

Create a separate Excel tab or document for the day of the webinar. Outline a play-by-play of everything to be done prior to hitting the ‘Live’ button so there’s zero confusion as to when and who is supposed to hit record, mute, etc.

Tip #5 – Get the Word Out!

With the to-do timeline you’ve created in Tip #4, you should already know the how and when of spreading the word.

Don’t be shy about promoting your webinar – send an E-mail to your existing subscriber base if you have one or consider renting an E-mail list or running an ad. Mention the webinar on your Web site. Tweet, blog and spread the world in your online communities and forums like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Tip #6 – Friend Your Webinar Provider Account Rep

As the webinar draws near, make friends with your account rep – the more they know about your webinar, the better they’ll be able to help make your webinar a success. And, knowing someone is a phone call or E-mail away should anything go wrong provides invaluable comfort the day of the webinar.

Tip #7 – Practice, Practice, Practice

The week leading up to the webinar, set aside a daily one-hour window for practice. Begin with practicing the basics of giving controls, recording and launching interactive features like questions and polls. Later in the week, invite attendees (coworkers) to mimic the webinar experience for both the presenter and the audience. Your presenter also gets extra practice, which is always a plus.

Tip #8 – Designate at Least One Person as Day-Of Tech Support

Technology + People = Problems. During the webinar, make sure to have someone monitoring the questions box for anyone who is expressing difficulty with audio or visual. Although many issues will be relative to the user’s own device, it can still alert you to larger issues and will send a positive, professional message to attendees.

Also check the E-mail address used as the default address to send the registration confirmations. Many attendees experiencing trouble will try and E-mail this address the day of the event for some last-minute help.

Tip#9 – Thank Attendees for Attending & Share with all Registrants the On-Demand Version within 48 Hours

Whether or not a person attended the webinar, it’s good practice to send a link to your on-demand version to all attendees and registrants within 48 hours, when the presentation is still fresh in their minds. You may also consider sharing the presentation slides using SlideShare or another online presentation sharing site.

Tip #10 – Get Your On-Demand Version and Additional Webinar Questions on your Web Site

Want to continue the webinar buzz after it’s over? Consider posting answers to all webinar questions you weren’t able to attend on either your company blog or Web site. Hoping to continue to use your webinar to show thought leadership and gain additional leads? Make sure to post your on-demand version to your site with a registration component.

Related posts

• Webinar – B2B Social Media: Facts, Fictions & Focus Areas for 2010
• Stop Undermining Your B2B Online Marketing ROI
• Social Media Lead Generation with Q&A Forums
• Are Virtual Trade Shows Worthwhile for B2B?
• Advanced Twitter Search to Build Your B2B Brand

Thanks to all of you who joined today’s live broadcast of the first webinar based on our Business Social Media Benchmarking research, “B2B Social Media: Facts, Fictions and Focus Areas for 2010″.

For those who weren’t able to make it, here’s a link to the recorded version of this B2B social media webinar.

The webinar draws on insights from our recent research on the social media activities of over 3,000 business people and companies to separate fact from fiction in this rapidly evolving space. Social media channels DO offer companies a significant opportunity to engage business buyers online, generate leads, drive revenue and engage/retain customers. However, our business social media benchmarking research and experience over the past year (see our B2B social media case study for more info) suggest B2B marketers are:

• Having trouble identifying the social media channels that offer the greatest opportunity for building their traffic, leads and revenue
• Pursuing too many social media initiatives at one time to be successful
• Confused about where the boundaries for the ‘80/20 rule’ lie for various social media initiatives

To help B2B marketers get on track with their social media plans for 2010 and beyond, the webinar covered key findings about the top social media sites and resources people use for business, including important differences across industries, and the business-related information they’re seeking through these channels.

Our free B2B Social Media Benchmarking Study report is good background reading and provides far more benchmarking stats than we could possibly cover in the webinar.

Needless to say, this is a lot to cover in a 60 minute webinar. For all of you who asked questions I wasn’t able to cover during the webinar itself, look for me to address in upcoming blog posts.

Once again, here’s a link to the B2B Social Media: Facts, Fictions & Focus Areas for 2010 webinar.

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• B2B Social Media Resources
• Stop Undermining Your B2B Online Marketing ROI
• Social Media Marketing to Small Businesses – New Research
• Social Media Lead Generation with Q&A Forums
• Social Media Best Practices – The Q&A Conundrum

Work for an search marketing agency managing campaigns for B2B clients?

If so, check out the B2B search marketing agency resources section of the Business.com Ad Center. There you’ll find a variety of useful resources to help deliver the best B2B search marketing ROI to your clients including:

• Our monthly B2B search marketing agency newsletter with the latest advanced B2B PPC and SEO tips plus detailed overviews of all new Business.com product releases and site enhancements.
• Special Business.com offers for agencies
• Up-to-date resources to help you pitch Business.com PPC, directory inclusion and/or banner advertising to your clients.
• Business.com advertising FAQs for agencies to help you easily answer client questions about Business.com advertising, and more…

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Oil and water. Mars and Venus. Search and branding.

Not long ago (or still?), brand marketing and search marketing were viewed as two polar opposites in the marketing mix. Many diehard pros specializing in one or the other of these areas still struggle to understand find value in, or even imagine, using search marketing to build or reinforce a brand message.

“The 10 blue links of the search results page are simply not a worthwhile medium for building brands,” say the brand marketers.

“Who cares about building brand awareness and preference when we’re driving conversions!” say the search marketers.

We address this debate for B2B brand marketing and B2B search marketing pros in *NEW* Business.com whitepaper “Building B2B Brands through Search Marketing“.

Here’s a quick summary:

The purpose of this whitepaper is to provide a straightforward overview of how to build your business-to-business (B2B) brand through search marketing, and to provide several best practice tips for finding and leveraging brand-building opportunities in the context of search marketing. Specifically, we cover the three fundamental ways paid search and SEO connect with B2B brand campaigns:

1. Brand initiatives provide key inputs for search marketing campaigns

2. Search marketing delivers an impactful, branded experience

3. Search marketing impressions, CTR and conversion rates are affected by brand campaigns

And, in the process, review the mounting research supporting the impact of a strong B2B brand presence in search results on search marketing ROI.

We don’t get into the “which is better” debate that branding pros and search marketers so often fall into. As you review the research it quickly becomes apparent that this debate is a waste of time - brand marketer and search marketers absolutely need each other to deliver the best possible ROI for their companies.

Visit http://www.business.com/info/b2b-online-marketing/building-b2b-brands today to get your copy of “Building B2B Brands through Search Marketing”.

And once you’ve had a chance to read through it, we’d love to hear your impressions below.

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Jason Falls of Social Media Explorer wrote a great post today about social media lead generation through participation in question-and-answer (Q&A) forums such as LinkedIn Answers, Business.com Answers, Yahoo! Answers, etc. In it, he provides highlights of our recently-released report covering social media best practices for Q&A forums as well as additional perspective from his own poll asking LinkedIn users how often they answer questions on LinkedIn for lead generation purposes.

A comment on the post from ‘derekedmond’ caught my eye because of how well it reflects some of the Q&A success stories from the study and Business.com Answers I wrote about in a prior post. Here is his comment:

“I have some friends and colleagues absolutely killing it with forums/question-answer-sites (wrote a post on my personal blog about this a few weeks ago). The reason being is that for small niches, if you can find a passionate audience or community your site/product satisfies a need with, it’s amazing the amount of traffic, exposure, and links one can get.

My experience is that you have to dig deeper to find the most value and opportunities – and there is certainly less support/public examples to go by, but with patience and perseverance it can definitely work.”

The core issue he speaks to is “quality” – an online forum in which a dialog quickly forms between people seeking answers to important questions and experts (often vendors) who have answers to those questions delivers a high-quality experience and amazing results for both parties.  This is what lead gen should be: people with real needs connecting with someone who can help them meet that need.

Q&A Forum Characteristics Impact Lead Gen Opportunities

Unfortunately, this quality Q&A experience is often very difficult to achieve in broad, general forums such as Yahoo! Answers which depend on the combination of high traffic volume and the search skills of those asking and answering questions for these high-quality dialogs to form. Macro-niche forums like LinkedIn Answers can deliver a somewhat better experience by attracting a more targeted audience but rely on those with questions and those with high quality answers to find one another. Micro-niche forums like derekedmond mentions are at the other extreme – great, very focused discussions but can be both difficult to find and may not be broad enough to be something most experts would frequently monitor or participate in.

Moderated B2B Q&A with Business.com Answers

With Business.com Answers, our own business Q&A site we launched a few months ago, we’re working to combine the best of micro- and macro-niche Q&A forums to make it easier for business people to form high quality dialogs around specific business needs.

Millions of business people visit the Business.com site each month to find something they need for their business – the site combines the most popular B2B online directory with tens of thousands of business how-to guides and, with the introduction of Business.com Answers, the ability to directly post their business questions on the site.

To help people get the best possible answers to their questions, we’re taking a more proactive approach than other large-scale Q&A forums, reaching out to subject-area experts and relevant vendors with specific questions they should be able to answer. This more ‘personal’ introduction to Business.com Answers also helps us reinforce a number of the best practices for participating in Q&A forums that we wrote about in the recent report covered by Jason Falls.

If you participate in Q&A forums for lead generation purposes today, or are thinking about doing so in the near future, give Business.com Answers a try. And if you’re already using Business.com Answers, we’d love to hear more about your experience and the results you’re seeing!

Related posts

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• Social Media Best Practices – The Q&A Conundrum
• New B2B Social Media Benchmarking Study Released
• Interview: Top 5 B2B Online Community Myths with Impact Interactions’ Mike Rowland
• Interview: B2B Online Community Insights from Mark Yolton, SAP Community Network

Do online question-and-answer (Q&A) forums like Yahoo! Answers, LinkedIn Answers, Answers.com – or the recently launched Business.com Answers – offer a significant opportunity to better engage with prospects and customers, generate leads and drive revenue? Yes, they do, but success depends on following social media best practices.

Q&A forums should provide an excellent place for people with specific questions to connect with experts or others who have direct experience in that area. For example, participants in our recent Business Social Media Benchmarking Study described the benefits of Q&A forums this way:

“I was trying to fix something with one of my products for weeks. I searched Google for hours looking for an answer. I finally broke down and asked the question on a forum site that I use. Within a day I had three answers, all of which fixed the problem. Since then I ask the question first and Google second.” - Owner, 1-4 employee company, Food & Beverage industry

“I gained a new client from answering questions on LinkedIn.” - Head of Marketing, 5-9 employee company

“When first trying to grow our social media following, the moment we shifted to answering questions instead of just broadcasting links was when things really took off for us.” - Manager, 20-49 employee company, Telecommunications industry

Q&A forum success stories are also evident in the forums themselves, such as these examples from Business.com Answers:

Pam, a regional manager at Nutrition Research Group, posts a question on Business.com Answers looking for a wholesale sports nutrition distributor in Washington or Oregon to sell their products. Anthony Mercurio from Advantis Nutrition responds, Pam visits the Advantis Nutrition web site and requests more information about distribution opportunities.

Sharron, business development/sales manager at The Esmeralda Inn in North Carolina, question asking for advice on marketing the hotel for overnight workshops and meetings. The same day, Gina, the owner of publisher Serendipity Media Group in Fresno, California, responds that she’d be interested in setting up a writing seminar at The Esmeralda Inn.

However, many business experts with the most valuable answers to share do not yet participate in Q&A forums or, like these Business Social Media Benchmarking Study participants, find that Q&A forum participation has been less fruitful and/or more challenging than they would like:

“I believe the LinkedIn answers I have provided have been nothing but a waste of valuable time.” – Sole Proprietor

“On Yahoo! Answers and LinkedIn Answers it is hard to find questions related to our industry and to keep consistent searches going so we can answer in a timely manner.” – Individual Contributor, 100-499 employee company

To help companies get the most out of Q&A forum participation and drive business results, we just released the latest report in our business social media benchmarking series, Social Media Best Practices: Question & Answer Forums. This free, 42-page report provides a unique holistic perspective on the use of business Q&A forums from the combined insights of both Q&A users – over 1,100 people who currently turn to Q&A forums for business information or advice – and Q&A ‘Experts’, over 800 companies participating in Q&A forums as a way to build awareness of company products or services, attract web site visitors and generate leads.

Visit http://www.business.com/info/social-media-best-practices-q-and-a to download this free report and we’d love to hear your Q&A forum success stories (or horror stories!) in the comments section below.

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One area of marketing that remains strong despite the economic downturn is B2B search marketing.   However, as we found in our recent B2B web analytics study involving more than 27,000 B2B web sites, most B2B marketers are still struggling to understand which search marketing campaigns are driving their online conversions.

Watch my recent interview with WebProNews to learn more about understanding web analytics and the best B2B online conversion tracking tools.

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In the latest report from our Business Social Media Benchmarking Study research, “Engaging Small Business Decision Makers Through Social Media,” we address a key question on the minds of companies marketing to small business:

What are the best social media channels for reaching and engaging with small business decision makers?

The answer, it turns out, depends very significantly on the industry you target for your company’s products or services, whether or not you target business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C) companies and, at small businesses with 10-99 employees, the job level of your target decision maker (e.g., middle-management vs. senior management vs. C-level).

The results we report are based on insights from over 1,700 participants in a middle management (Director, Department Head, Supervisor) or above role in a small business (<100 employees) in the US or Canada. All of these study participants currently use one or more social media resources for business-relevant information in their day-to-day job. Here are some of the key findings:

• Overall, the most popular social media resources small business decision makers turn to for business are webinars and podcasts, user ratings and reviews of business products and services, and business profiles (accounts, fan pages, channels, etc.) on social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other sites.

• Small business decision makers are attracted to the speed and convenience with which they can find or request business-relevant information from social media channels. For example, webinars save the time and expense of travel for professional education.

• Industry has a major impact on both the number of social media resources used for business and the most popular types. For example, small business decision makers in the Healthcare, Retail and Legal industries use significantly fewer social media resources for business than study respondents from other industries.

• Within small businesses, company size (sole proprietor vs. micro-business with 1-9 employees vs. small business with 10-99 employees) and job role or department in a company aren’t related to business social media usage in any meaningful way.

• We can gain some very interesting insights into the likely evolution of business social media usage by looking across industries and at small business decision makers with different levels of social media experience.

Visit http://www.business.com/info/engaging-small-business-through-social-media to download a copy of the complete 40 pg. report with 32 charts.

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Want to know if social media is relevant for B2B companies? What about the top social media resources used by people in the Healthcare or Financial Services industries (just to name a few)? Or how B2B and B2C companies differ in the types of social media initiatives they pursue?

See all this and more in Business.com’s 2009 B2B Social Media Benchmarking Study report, available at http://www.business.com/info/b2b-social-media-benchmark-study.

This 57 page research report contains 63 charts and is based on responses from nearly 3,000 North American participants in Business.com’s Business Social Media Benchmarking Survey. The 2009 B2B Social Media Benchmarking Study report covers the stats and facts B2B companies need to reach their target business audience most effectively through social media channels as well as where B2B companies are finding social media success.

Here is the report table of contents for more detail on what the report contains:

• Introduction
• Reaching a Business Audience through Social Media
  • Top Business Social Media Resources by Company Size
  • Top Business Social Media Resources by Industry
  • Top Business Social Media Resources for Senior Management
  • Top Business Social Media Resources by Job Role
• Social Media Initiatives at B2B Companies
  • Respondent and Company Experience with Business Social Media
  • Top B2B Company Social Media Activities 34
  • How B2B Companies Judge Social Media Success
  • Initiative Detail: Managing Business Profiles on Social Media Sites
  • Initiative Detail: Participating in Q&A Sites
  • Initiative Detail: Using Social Media Monitoring Tools
  • Initiative Detail: Sharing Business Content on Social Media Sites
• Additional Reports Based on this Research
  • 2009 Business Social Media Benchmarking Study
  • 2009 B2B Social Media Benchmarking Study
  • Upcoming Reports
• About the B2B Social Media Benchmarking Study
• Contact
• More Resources from Business.com

To the best of our knowledge, this is the most comprehensive look at the current state of B2B social media available today. Download your copy of Business.com’s 2009 B2B Social Media Benchmarking Study today and tell us what you think below!

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In recently released Business.com 2009 Business Social Media Benchmarking Study, one of the main sections of the study covers how business people currently use different social media resources to find business-relevant information in their day-to-day jobs.

Among the nearly 2,400 study participants turning to social media channels for business information, the most popular resources are webinars and podcasts followed by ratings/reviews of business products and services. The third most popular resource – visiting company or product profile pages on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter – was cited by 62% of respondents and is perhaps the most interesting in light of recent studies suggesting that only 10% of companies give employees full access to social networks at work. 

Are CIOs over-reacting and cutting off an important source of business information?  Download the free 2009 Business Social Media Benchmarking Study report for more details.

Top Social Media Resources Used for Business Information from Business.com's 2009 Business Social Media Benchmarking Study

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This is one of the conclusions found in the 2009 Business Social Media Benchmarking study and is based on 2,293 responses from North American business professionals. The figure below, found on pg. 7 of the study (which can be downloaded at http://www.business.com/info/business-social-media-benchmark-study), shows indexed use of social media channels to get the information and resources respondents need to do their day-to-day jobs.

Use of Social Media as a Business Information Resource by Industry | Business.com's 2009 Business Social Media Benchmarking Study

Real Estate agents are some of the most passionate networkers around, and bringing these skills to the online world through social media is a natural extension of their offline behavior. As one respondent put it, social media allows “[me to] stay socially connected with my customers and potential clients.” In addition, social media allow those in real estate and construction to easily learn more about potential clients and customers by finding and reviewing profiles of those individuals on sites like LinkedIn and Facebook.

While those in Law are finding value in the convenience of webinars and podcasts to stay current or learn more about specific legal topics, social media channels are not yet a core resource for the research legal professionals conduct on a day-to-day basis.

To learn more about the use of social media for businessby job role (hint: its not the IT team that’s tapping social media for business information), company size and much more, download your copy of Business.com’s 2009 Business Social Media Benchmarking Study at http://www.business.com/info/business-social-media-benchmark-study.

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We’re very happy to announce that Business.com’s 2009 Business Social Media Benchmarking Study report is now available as a free download at http://www.business.com/info/business-social-media-benchmark-study.

With 2,948 participants from the US and Canada, this is the largest study to date of how North American businesses, and business people, use social media as well as the value they find across different social media activities and sites. All study participants currently used social media in their day-to-day jobs as a resource for business-relevant information and/or work for a company currently managing, developing or planning social media initiatives.

This 42 page initial report provides excellent business social media benchmarking data for 2010 strategic planning. The report table of contents and list of figures are included below for more detail:

Table of Contents

Beyond Chatting with Friends: Social Media as a Business Resource
     Who Uses Social Media as a Resource for Business Information?
     Most Popular Social Media Resources for Business
Most Useful Social Media Resources for Business
Current State of Corporate Social Media Initiatives
     Respondent and Company Experience with Business Social Media
     Top Corporate Social Media Activities
     How Companies Judge Social Media Success
     Initiative Detail: Managing Business Profiles on Social Media Sites
     Initiative Detail: Participating in Q&A Sites
     Initiative Detail: Using Social Media Monitoring Tools
     Initiative Detail: Sharing Business Content on Social Media Sites
     Initiative Detail: Business Content Bookmarking on Social Media Sites
Upcoming Reports Based on this Reseach
About the Study

List of Figures

Figure 1: Use of Social Media as a Business Information Resource by Job Level
Figure 2: Use of Social Media as a Business Information Resource by Job Role
Figure 3: Use of Social Media as a Business Information Resource by Company Size
Figure 4: Use of Social Media as a Business Information Resource by Industry
Figure 5: Most Popular Social Media Resources for Business Information
Figure 6: Number of Different Social Media Sites/Resources Used for Business Information
Figure 7: Usefulness of Different Social Media for Business Information
Figure 8: % of Work Time Spent Managing or Involved with Company Social Media Initiatives
Figure 9: Experience with Business Social Media Among Those Currently Managing or Involved with Business Social Media Initiatives
Figure 10: Company Experience with Social Media
Figure 11: Most Popular Business Social Media Initiatives
Figure 12: Company Department Driving Social Media Initiatives
Figure 13: Number of Different Business Social Media Initiatives Planned, in Development or Currently Running
Figure 14: Top Social Media Success Metrics
Figure 15: Ability to See Impact of Social Media Initiatives on Success Metrics
Figure 16: Ability to See Impact of Social Media Initiatives on Success Metrics by Company Experience with Social Media
Figure 17: Top Social Media Sites on Which Companies Maintain Business Profiles
Figure 18: Ability to See Business Impact of Profiles on Social Media Sites
Figure 19: Net Promoter Scores for Business Profiles on Select Sites
Figure 20: Top Q&A Sites on Which Companies Participate
Figure 21: Ability to See Business Impact of Participating on Q&A Sites
Figure 22: Net Promoter Score for Participating in Q&A on Select Sites
Figure 23: Most Popular Tools for Monitoring Online Conversations
Figure 24: Ability to See Business Impact of Online Conversation Monitoring Tools
Figure 25: Net Promoter Score for Select Social Media Monitoring Tools
Figure 26: Top Sites to Which Companies Upload Content
Figure 27: Ability to See Business Impact of Content Sharing on Select Sites
Figure 28: Net Promoter Score for Select Content Sharing Sites
Figure 29: Top Sites Companies Use for Social Bookmarking
Figure 30: Ability to See Business Impact of Social Bookmarking on Select Sites
Figure 31: Net Promoter Score for Select Social Bookmarking Sites
Figure 32: Study Participants by Company Size
Figure 33: Study Participants by Industry
Figure 34: Study Participants by Job Role
Figure 35: Study Participants by Job Level
Figure 36: Study Participants by Company Product / Service Focus
Figure 37: Study Participants by Company Type (B2C, B2B or Mixed)
Figure 38: Study Participants by Primary Customer Location
Figure 39: Study Participants by Company Potential Customer Count
Figure 40: Study Participants by Company Average Sales Cycle

We’ll be providing snapshots of some of the data in future blog posts but why wait – download Business.com’s 2009 Business Social Media Benchmarking Study today and let us know what you think!

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B2B marketers are rapidly incorporating social media into their marketing mix, and for good reason. Studies show that companies active in social media generate more revenue than their less social counterparts, prospective customers are increasingly comfortable interacting with brands on social media sites, and the downside risks of not engaging are too significant to ignore.

The challenge, especially for smaller companies, is measuring the results from social media activities. Particularly in tough economic times, every marketing activity is expected to show an ROI.

But it’s easy to measure the ROI of social media marketing, right? That’s certainly what some bloggers would have you believe, at least. The standard formula goes something like this:

• Create a knowledge asset such as an eBook, white paper or helpful online tool.
• Create a landing page to collect lead information before giving access to the asset.
• Share the link to that landing page on social media sites.
• Determine the total revenue from any sales resulting from the leads you collected in the previous step.
• Divide that revenue number by the cost of creating and sharing the asset. Boom! There’s your ROI.

Never mind that there can be a significant cost involved in building up a following on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and elsewhere before you can even run such a campaign, and that cost should be allocated across time. Even ignoring that cost, and assuming you can show results using the above formula, at best you have demonstrated an ROI from a social media program, but by no means the ROI.

Demonstrating a hard return on social media investment in the B2B realm is problematic, for at least three reasons:

1. Social media is much more of a PR activity than a direct response marketing vehicle. Like other activities, it increases name recognition, enhances branding and builds credibility. It helps establish relationships with thought leaders and other influential voices in your industry. It can also strengthen customer relationships. It is not, however, generally a good medium for direct promotion, and attempting to use it that way (e.g. by turning your blog into an extended marketing brochure) is likely to backfire.

There is an exception to this, though it applies more in the B2C world than B2B: if you are selling a commoditized product and your primary differentiator is price, then social media can be effective for direct marketing; e.g., you can blog about your specials or Tweet something like “Great deal at the minute – Epson Stylus S21 Printer, Pack of 3 Inks AND a free pack of paper all for only $96.09 + FREE DELIVERY!” But in most B2B situations—differentiation on features, substantial price points, complex sales cycles, multiple decision-makers, significant service component—this doesn’t apply.

2.  The problem of last-click attribution. Research shows that in more than 90% of b2b sales, buyers were influenced by multiple brand exposures rather than responding to a single ad or other medium. In other words, that customer you attribute to coming to you through AdWords, or Twitter, or a Facebook ad most likely saw your name in numerous places—an online publication, a press release, your blog, someone else’s blog, in an analyst report, at a trade show, in a directory, on your website, in an email newsletter, somewhere else or any combination of the preceding—before they made that last click. Marketing automation and demand generation software is great for tracking touch points after a prospective customer is identified as a lead, but no software can magically track all of your brand exposures prior to that point.

3. B2B social media is as much about “influencing the influencers” as it is about reaching buyers directly. A typical B2B Twitter or Friendfeed account, for example, may include as followers consultants, analysts, industry journalists, bloggers and others who will never buy your product or service, but can most certainly influence buying decisions in your market. Rarely will you be able to trace a sale back specifically to your social media outreach efforts to these key influencers (see the last-click attribution issue above), though such efforts unquestionably had an impact.

In short, while social media can certainly play an important role in demand generation (along with advertising, PR and other activities), the complexity of b2b buying processes makes its precise impact difficult to gauge.

About the author: Tom Pick is an online marketing executive with KC Associates (http://www.kc-associates.com), a marketing and PR firm in Minneapolis, Minnesota, focused on b2b technology clients. He also writes the award-winning WebMarketCentral blog (http://webmarketcentral.blogspot.com), a blog about B2B lead generation, social media, interactive PR, SEO and search engine marketing.

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Just wanted to let you know that Business.com will be attending the following events:

• BtoB’s NetMarketing Breakfast in San Francisco on 10/15
• OMC Webinar Featuring Ben Hanna – “Top 10 Secrets for BtoB Paid Search & SEO Best Practices to Drive Relevant Traffic and Tangible ROI” 10/27 – sign up here!

Hope to see you there!

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UPDATE – the Business Social Media Benchmark Study report is now available as a free download from http://www.business.com/info/business-social-media-benchmark-study

All the data for Business.com’s 2009 Business Social Media Benchmark Survey is in and a hearty “Thanks!” to all those who participated. The survey closed on Friday, September 4th and we’re working hard to analyze the data and write the summary report.

With over 2,000 complete responses from businesses in the US and Canada, this is the largest study to date of how business people use social media as an information resource in their day-to-day jobs the types of business social media initiatives companies are currently pursuing. Here’s a quick overview of the industries represented in the results:

We’ll post a link here to the 2009 Business Social Media Benchmarking Study report as soon as it’s ready so make sure to bookmark this post or follow @B2BOnlineMktg on Twitter!

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Twitter just announced that there is a new Twitter Terms of Service, and we know you’re all getting around to reading it, but…you’ve been busy. So here is a quick guide to what you need to know:

1. The basic points (per Biz Stone’s comments about the new Terms of Service):

•  ”Your tweets belong to you, not Twitter.”
•  ”We leave the door open for advertising.”

2. The rules to Twitter (pay attention here – these are some of the factors Twitter takes into account to determine spam):

•  If you follow a large amount of users in a short amount of time
•  If you follow and unfollow people in a short time period
•  If you repeatedly follow and unfollow people
•  If you have a small number of followers compared to the number of people you are following
•  If your updates consist mainly of links, and not personal updates
•  If you post multiple unrelated updates to a trending topic

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Mark Yolton, SVP of SAP Community Network

Q: Tell us about yourself and your background – what did you do before running the SAP community?

A: I’m Senior Vice President of the SAP Community Network. I’ve been at SAP for 4 years. I’ve spent 25 plus years in business, mostly technology. Back in the day I was at Unisys, Sun Microsystems, PeopleSoft, Oracle, and then SAP. My background is in marketing – that’s where I spent most of my career. In the mid-nineties, that led me to the web – I did early corporate websites at Unisys. And I helped Sun transition to e-business. Then I was at Sun and PeopleSoft in marketing roles. I’ve been at SAP for four years, since 2005.

Q: The SAP Community Network (SCN) is six years old and has 1.7 million members. How and why did you grow to that level?

A: Core to the success is that we offer specific value to the members. We call them members rather than users. “Members” feels like part of a club – not cold and distant like “users.” We embrace these people as an extension of our company — as important customers and thought leaders – and we treat them respectfully, in a transparent manner.

We provide them value they can get nowhere else – connections to other customers, innovators, and thought leaders in the tech world – but also in their industry as well. Those in banking learn from other bankers, consumer product people from others in that industry, and so on.

We can extract content from SAP content organizations – other third-party sites can’t do that. We offer tools through downloads, and offer rich connections through discussions, blogs, wikis, and top contributor webinars. Our members develop relationships with peers and partners. Content and connections are key.

Q: Does real business occur in your community? If so, how do you track this?

A: We help individuals and companies accomplish their jobs faster and with higher quality. This is tracked through anecdotal evidence including feedback from surveys, comments to blogs, discussion forum replies, and so on. We get 6,000 forum posts every day, and the median time before the first reply is seventeen minutes. We track how quickly people get answers. There are 3.4 answers to every question on average. A member usually gets one quick answer, than other answers that offer additional info. We ask for feedback about quality – and that feedback says community members get extremely high quality answers. Our Net Promoter score in the 60% range. A good score would be in 30-35% range.

We also measure whether they return and whether they engage – there have been more than five million individual visitors over the past year – more than 20 million total visits. They wouldn’t visit if they weren’t happy.

Many how-to questions are asked in our forums regarding best practices with SAP software, or “Does Product X fit with Product Y?” When non-support-type questions are asked in support forums, we encourage them to ask their peers. We’ve seen a number of misdirected questions to customer care drop – well, the rate of increase has slowed – the customer support team is asked fewer how-to questions, and these questions have increased in the forums. The answers to those questions help people do their jobs better, and faster.

Q: What do your team’s 35 employees do?

A: The important aspect of social media is that the community itself is as engaged as possible: sharing content, authoring whitepapers, blogging – our customers, partners, and thought leaders in the enterprise software world. My team runs programs that encourage best practices and sharing of experience, and encourage customers to help other customers and partners. We have reputation programs. A small handful of our team runs programs that encourage grassroots communication and knowledge sharing. Another part of our team is involved in content publishing – there is an account manager to draw content out of SAP organizations, format it, and make it more web-ready and publishable. We have project and program management – we seek to innovate and offer the community new features and capabilities. For example, earlier this year, we started a University Alliances Community to address university communities to engage them with developers, business analysts and consultants. The goal is to get students and professors to talk to each other and get them collaborating with actual practitioners in the workplace on real-world business and technology issues. They form connections, so when students graduate, they know how to be technologists using SAP systems or businesspeople leveraging our systems. And they learn the expectation of collaboration with peers in the working world.

Q: How does online and offline community intersect at SAP?

A: We believe that virtual community is great, but the connections that you form virtually can be enhanced and enriched through physical events. We have a conference, SAP TechEd – there are four each year in cities all over the world. Our members see it as an annual “family reunion.” We extend these conferences on Facebook and Twitter. This physical manifestation of community is crucial to our success. Events deepen and enrich relationships. Our communities are so global. We have a member from Peru who was active in our online community for many years and he finally was able to attend a TechEd conference last year. He was like a kid at Christmastime, encountering one thousand laptops with the latest technology, meeting his heroes. They went out for a beer, shared meals, chatted between official program sessions. They helped him fix code, and advance his career for years virtually, and he finally got to meet them in person at our event.

Part of our social media strategy around events is “letting the community take care of it.”

• We use Twitter to talk about events beforehand, during, and after the conference. We get people excited about who’s speaking, and the topics they will be speaking about. Speakers share previews of their content before the conference. During events the Twitter traffic is incredible – hundreds of thousands want to know what’s going on – it allows the people not present to stay up-to-date. We did a product launch in NYC earlier this year and we sent some top contributors who polled a larger audience through Twitter at our press conference. Then we asked questions that came from Twitter of the person on stage – which we then webcast and tweeted out to the community. This broadened the reach of conference, and as a result we were among the top-ten trending topics on Twitter that day.

• We use flickr – so individuals can each take their own photos and tag them and then the community can see them aggregated.

• We use LinkedIn to promote the event and give updates during the event.

• We use community blogs for speakers to share presentation abstracts, ask questions of the audience before their talks, and to draw people to their sessions.

• Some of us even use Facebook connections, and of course Digg and other tools

We do set up strategy each year for the coming year – and we’re currently working on an updated three-year strategy. At the beginning of each year, we set strategy depending on the maturity of the community at that point, the accomplishments from the year before, the members’ expressed priority wishes, our business strategy and priorities, and other factors. This is largely organic, fluid, and flexible within certain parameters.

• Of course we want to grow – so we want to increase membership. We ask ourselves if the things we’re doing are creating value for the audience we’re trying to serve – measured by traffic to our communities.

• Another element is measuring engagement – this is Web 2.0, not Web 1.0, and Web 2.0 means engaging and getting a groundswell of grassroots user-generated content (UGC) in wikis, blogs, and so on. We measure that engagement by tracking the increase in forum conversations and numbers of blogs from our community.

• Some of our metrics are more tied to business goals – are we gaining efficiencies – for example, we look at pseudo-support questions that are redirected to the community to answer. Are these set of questions best answered by other customers being redirected – at the appropriate quality and speed?

• We also track top-line goals like revenue, market share, and product adoption. We notice when we launch a new product with a community component, the rate of adoption is much faster. There is a ramp-up period, when a product has gone live but has not yet achieved enough market penetration to be generally available. Until then you need to invest money, time and effort in marketing and education. We’ve had products go slow through the ramp-up process, but then we help by introducing a social media component, and then product adoption goes much faster.

Q: How has online community enhanced SAP solutions?

A: SAP Ecohub is an online community-powered marketplace for partner and SAP-type solutions — tools built around our core. Those partners want access to our customer base. We used to publish a partner solutions catalog, but then we built SAP Ecohub, which gives members the ability to use screenshots, to include technical specs, to show demo’s, and really drill down to business problems. The community members are able to rate, rank and review different SAP and partner solutions according to their value to them. The voice of the customer is used to enhance the product catalog. Before the community started, there was not as much richness.

Marketing used to push content, but now there is much more conversation – it’s more balanced now. Social media and communities allow us to engage throughout our company and throughout our ecosystem. Product managers get feedback from customers. If there’s some kind of issue in the marketplace, we know immediately because of Twitter, our blogs, and so on. We know before the issue becomes a black eye — we can address it first.

Q: Has SAP’s corporate culture had to change to embrace online community values? Was there internal pushback?

A: We are fairly conservative. To be this aggressive with community and social media required change within the company. And by doing this, the perception of SAP changed. People realized we can be agile and transparent, authentic, and still be careful about quality. They realize that we are interested in helping our customers to be successful, and that we are embracing the ecosystem of our partners. Customers expect us to help them run their businesses, so we have to be both conservative and innovative.

There was internal pushback – how far should we go? How fast? What are the right ways to orchestrate such a community? What are the right controls? Our CEO and board members have a deep understanding about what we’re doing with communities and social media, and they understand the strategic benefit and that the benefit is much greater than the risk. They understand that the risk of not participating is greater than the risk of something going wrong. We can differentiate from the competition by engaging very actively. We can plug into the power of member influence. This requires constant internal marketing of the communities, and a sales job to bring later adopters to the table.

But our ecosystem strategy, of which community is part, is also a corporate strategy for SAP. SAP has chosen to engage actively and aggressively with its broad, global ecosystem.

Q: According to Charlene Li’s Altimeter Group’s recent report that deep brand engagement correlates with financial performance – do you think that’s true? Or is it the reverse? SAP was listed as a brand using best practices for engagement – your engagement is not limited to a few social media experts, but extends across your brand.

A: It’s a chicken and egg question. Are successful companies more engaged in social media because they can be – because they are successful, or are they successful because they are engaged in social media? There is a correlation…we don’t know if there is causality. I can say that being engaged in community and social media has brought SAP tremendous benefits, including product adoption, market penetration, and so on — and also richness of relationship which can translate into customer satisfaction and success – and I would guess that would translate into customer loyalty.

I know that these communities have brought SAP tremendous financial and non-financial benefits.

Editor’s Note:

Mark Yolton orchestrates the large, open communities of innovation at SAP for the benefit of customers, partners, and SAP. These include:

SDN – SAP Developer Network – http://sdn.sap.com
BPX – Business Process Expert Community – http://bpx.sap.com
BOC – Business Objects Community – http://boc.sap.com
SAP EcoHub – http://ecohub.sap.com
UAC – University Alliances Community – http://uac.sap.com
SAP TechEd & SAP Tech Tour – http://sapteched.com
SCN – SAP Community Network – http://scn.sap.com

Together, these communities are ~1.7 million members in 200+ countries, with forums, wiki, blogs, eLearning, downloads, whitepapers and articles, 400,000 bi-weekly newsletter subscribers, etc.

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By S. Ryan DeShazer, Global Director of Search Marketing, GyroHSR

I’ve been known to tell clients that, unless you plan on shutting down your corporate Web site, you cannot ignore search. It’s essential to online existence to be findable. In fact, there’s a great quote I use regularly in workshops and new business presentations. It’s simple, to the point, and perfectly brilliant:

“If you cannot be searched, you do not exist.”

For the new entrant to B2B search marketing, the challenge can be daunting. There is so much to consider, and depending on the industry, a bevy of sophisticated competitors are waiting to eat your lunch. But search is essential to any organization’s viability, so you must overcome any fear and get started. Now.

And while effective strategies first incorporate business objectives before turning to tactics, it should be noted that in search there’s really only one tactic: search! Forget this nonsense that either paid or organic search is preferable over the other. Organic results and paid ads share the same page real estate, and to the user there is little on-the-fly distinction between the two. Eye-scanning studies have confirmed this: page placement is more important in determining which listings get attention than whether they are paid or organic.

The Trick: Pick Fights You Can Win

You’ve no doubt seen a graphic similar to the one below before. The theory of the long-tail, in this case visually representing a client’s search keyword-referred traffic for a given time period. The long tail is a very exciting reality and represents a chance for almost every advertiser to “pick a fight they can win.” Essentially, keyword phrases that are queried can be broken into three categories: “head,” “torso,” and “tail” terms.

“Head” terms are general (and, therefore, typically very competitive) terms that relate to the particular industry. “Torso” terms are more specific and receive fewer queries. “Tail” terms are those that are so specific that they receive very few searches, but when added together amount to a large percentage of overall search-referred visitors.

The Key to Winning: Keyword Optimization

Identify which of these hundreds or thousands of keywords (head, torso, and tail) your company can generate positive returns from. Securing the top position for the most popular keyword phrase in the industry isn’t always enough to ensure success. That positioning has to drive an appropriate response among your target audiences.

Start with paid search to cast a wide net and quickly identify which combinations of keyword phrases, ad units and landing pages yield the greatest rates of response. Paid search, unlike organic, can operate fluidly in response to changing market dynamics or advertiser missteps. What if a keyword doesn’t generate the response that was hypothesized? Re-script the ad, change out the landing page, reduce the keyword-level bid or even remove that keyword from the portfolio altogether. With a bit of diligence, it can be determined with statistical certainty which combinations are working. Organic search takes much more elbow grease, and patience, to move the needle.

Once armed with that insight, bring the top-performing combination from paid search into the fold for optimization and claim as much of the “free” search traffic as possible. Recent statistics show that organic listings receive approximately 75 percent of all search click-throughs, so you’re leaving a lot on the table by not taking this extra step. Remember to optimize only for top performing paid search keyword terms and you’ve found some fights you can win.

Over time, less-sophisticated competition will continue to bloody each other’s noses with high-cost paid campaigns and uninformed organic programs. By following this approach, you can side-step those battles and stay focused on what matters most: results.

S. Ryan DeShazer
Global Director of Search Marketing, GyroHSR

Ryan DeShazer is a seasoned digital marketing professional, having served entrepreneurial stints at pay-per-click (PPC) marketing firm Clix Marketing and again as co-owner of interactive boutique NOEINK. His current responsibilities at GyroHSR include developing and advancing the firm’s search engine marketing (SEM) capabilities.

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NOTE: This is part 4 of Business.com’s Twitter for business case study where we share interesting, valuable insights about B2B online marketing through our @B2BOnlineMktg Twitter account and, in the process, build awareness of Business.com as a key online resource for solutions to business challenges. You can find our monthly updates to this case study and other useful B2B social media case studies here – http://www.smartbusinessresults.com/b2b-social-media/.

Business.com's B2BOnlineMktg Twitter Account Stats On July 6, 2009

At four months into our B2B Twitter experience we’ve been more successful at developing a following and engaging our target audience of B2B marketers than I initially expected. These gains have come through a combination of focus – rather than trying to tackle the entire world of B2B social media opportunities all at once, we tackled two blogs and two Twitter accounts with two FTEs  – consistent measurement and a healthy willingness to test a wide range of Twitter tactics rather than just following existing “best practices”.

Here’s an update on Twitter metrics from our first Twitter post on March 2, 2009 through July 6. After that, we’ll look at a couple basic characteristics of business Twitter users with the highest follower count and what this means for building a large, engaged business audience on Twitter.

Key Stats for @B2BOnlineMktg at 120 Days

Followers: 2,840

Following: 204

Tweets: 585

Tracked clicks on tweets: 8,209

Top 10 @B2BOnlineMktgtweets by number of clicks over the last 30 days (replaced original ow.ly link with [link] so we don’t mess up tweet tracking):

1. 9 Internet marketing calculators – bookmark this one! [link](via @smallbiztrends) #socialmedia #ppc #seo (55 clicks)
2. …And @markwschaefer’s list of B2B social media superstars: IBM, GE, Cisco, Boeing & Ingram Micro – [link] #b2b (55 clicks)
3. New B2B lead gen study shows social media becoming important lead driver (up to 15% of total). [link] #b2b (45 clicks)
4. Social media metrics – 9 key metrics for measuring the impact of your blogger outreach. [link] #b2b #pr #wa (44 clicks)
5. 9 tips for creating banner ads that drive better ROI from @InbarChap – good B2B display advice. [link] #b2b (43 clicks)
6. 64% of C-level execs conduct 6+ searches per day to locate business information. [link] #b2b (38 clicks)
7. How marketing goals impact use of different online ad types – Excellent chart from MarketingSherpa [link] (37 clicks)
8. Who’s watching your online reputation? Good advice for B2B companies getting into social media. [link] (37 clicks)
9. Time for self-reflection…Why your B2B marketing is so lousy - [link](via @admazing) #b2b (35 clicks)
10. Marketing a Software-as-a-Service / SaaS solution? Here are 10 essential tips for better results - [link] #b2b (33 clicks)

A Look at the “Pro Business Tweeters”

One of our goals when starting on Twitter was to learn the fastest route to a large, engaged group of Twitter followers. We had some advantages in building our @B2BOnlineMktg account, like thousands of subscribers to our B2B search marketing newsletter that we could make aware of our Twitter presence, but we intentionally didn’t use all our promotional power to drive followers. As I’ve said before, we also didn’t use the “spam-and-cull” approach - following hundreds or thousands of Twitter users, seeing which ones automatically follow back, culling out those who do not, following another set of users, and so on - because we want a large and ENGAGED following. What good are 10,000 Twitter followers if none of them pay any attention to what you’re tweeting?

To start getting a handle on how to build a large, engaged group of Twitter followers, we followed a number of more experienced B2B Twitter accounts with 5,000+ followers and started watching for patterns. Among these ”pro business tweeters”, there were two starkly different groups in terms of the Twitter Follower-Friend Ratio:

• Follower-Friend Ratio ~= 1
  • roughly equal number of followers and following
  • attract followers interested in tweet content and/or building their own follower count (i.e., great targets for the “spam-and-cull” approach to building a Twitter following)
  • wide range of people and backgrounds but usually have multiple years of Twitter experience
  • tweet a lot of thoughts/observations, some links to interesting content they’ve found and retweet a limited set of other pro business tweeters
• Follower-Friend Ratio = 5+
  • attract followers interested in tweet content only since its obviously unlikely that these accounts will follow you back
  • usually following <300-400 other Twitter users, and often much less than that (<50)
  • may be big brands or social media/Twitter-specific companies with a large customer base already on Twitter, publishing companies with the reach to attract a lot of followers to a Twitter account or long-time Twitter users who chose not to automatically follow other users back
  • may or may not tweet a lot of thoughts/observations, heavy focus on links to their own or other relevant content they’ve found and retweet a limited set of others

The follower-friend ratio caught my eye because, after reseaching many of the existing B2B social media “best practices,” it was clear that there were two very different, and often conflicting, perspectives on the right way to engage in social media. The first is a view of social media as an interpersonal medium governed by interpersonal rules. For example, if someone wants to be your friend, the polite thing is to shake hands, say “hi”, and try to be friends – most people would consider it just plain rude to walk away. Those pro business tweeters with a follower-friend ratio around 1 seem to be following this norm and with automatically following someone back. Since there’s no obvious, objective benefit to blocking a follower if you decide not to be their friend, follower and following counts grow together.

The other group with a follower-friend ratio on the 5+ range seems to be viewing social media as a mass communication medium governed by mass communication rules, and the pro business tweeters in this group are often larger companies, business media and/or experienced execs at mid- to large-sized companies. From a mass communication perspective, its perfectly acceptable and even expected for the relationship to be one-sided or interactive only on demand (such as when a customer has a question). After all, its utterly impossible for someone to follow 5,000+ other Twitter users, let alone 500, and pay attention to all their tweets. If you think reading and processing 100 emails a day is a challenge, try 5,000 tweets.

You see these same styles with newer and much smaller Twitter for business accounts as well – some follow hundreds of others to kick start their own follower base (and then worry about how unfollowing may hurt their reputation) while others follow very few but seem to attract a lot of followers themselves.

Thoughts on Building An Engaged Business Twitter Following

If you’ve though of using Twitter for business and/or find your existing business Twitter presence stalled out with little follower engagement, here are some thoughts to get you on the right track: 

Twitter is a viable business communication channel, end of story – From what I’ve seen in the past four months, Twitter has a role as a business communication channel for most B2B companies. Whether Twitter figures out a way to monetize its business or not is irrelevant because, if Twitter fails, some other micro-blogging platform will take its place. If you’ve already tried Twitter for your business and struggled to make it work, its most likely because the B2B social media rules are still being written. Don’t give up, and keep your eye on this list of B2B social media resources for the straight scoop.

Twitter for business is mass communication- I’m sure I’ll get hate mail for this one but if you plan to use Twitter for business, and you have more than a few hundred prospects/customers/influencers combined, you’re kidding yourself if you think interpersonal norms can govern how you use Twitter or other social media for your business. Why? Because Twitter is incredibly inefficient for forming interpersonal relationships. 140 character tweets are efficient for finding interesting people/content, maintaining contact with existing “friends” (as was the original purpose of Twitter) and asking/addressing simple questions. Establishing more meaningful business relationships through Twitter, though, is highly inefficient – people connect on Twitter, then want to take the conversation elsewhere because going back-and-forth through 140 character bursts is a quick road to carpal tunnel syndrome. For the vast majority of businesses out there, “mass communication” is the model you should follow as you plan your Twitter strategy.

You have a business contact list, so use it – As a business on Twitter, you don’t need to build a following like an individual would. This is a key advantage for business Twitter users that’s either forgotten or, more likely, ignored out of some combination of a misplaced desire to not disrupt existing communication channels and the sheer revulsion many B2B marketers feel when considering how a P2P or B2C trend may apply to their business. Get over it.  Establish a basic Twitter presence, make your prospects and customers aware of this new channel, and let them use it.

Focus on tweet quality over tweet quantity- I covered this finding in my interview with Mark Schaefer about Twitter for business, but we’ve found that tweeting interesting things (e.g., tweets with links that more people click on) has a much bigger, positive influence on follower growth rate than does tweet volume (e.g., making sure you tweet very frequently to keep your tweets in front of your followers). In other words, the best practice for getting people’s attention and interest on Twitter is the same as it is across other business communication channels – talk when you have something important to say. Blanketing your followers with tweets doesn’t work any better than does blanketing the media with press releases about non-issues or hammering a direct mail list with irrelevant offers. One more reason to look at Twitter as a mass communication channel for business rather than a medium ruled by strict adherence to norms of interpersonal interaction.

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By S. Ryan DeShazer, Global Director of Search Marketing, GyroHSR

What I’ve always enjoyed about being a B2B search marketer is the inherent complexity involved in persuading the business buyer. Not only do communications need to speak to multiple stakeholders to the purchase decision, but those stakeholders typically happen to be pretty intelligent people, holding prominent roles in their organizations. Gimmicks definitely will not work here.

So the challenge to B2B search marketers is in determining how to secure multiple buy-ins from a finite and intelligent group, overcome a lengthy consideration process, while mitigating fears over high costs and risks associated with the transaction.

Nobody said this was easy work.

The trick to maintain your sanity, while delivering positive returns on ad spend is to focus on things that are under your control. In B2B search marketing, that means you have to do things a bit differently than in B2C. To succeed, you must:

1)    Recognize that business purchase consideration cycles aren’t always linear
2)    Let micro B2B conversions show the way
3)    Capitalize on navigational search
4)    Draw qualitative conclusions from quantitative data

Business Purchase Consideration Cycles Aren’t Always Linear

This is huge. B2B marketers tend to over-think programs and believe that their audiences fit neatly into pre-defined, academic categories of Awareness, Consideration, Negotiation, Purchase. In my experience, no B2B transaction actually maps to this type of consideration cycle. B2B transactions follow myriad paths to completion. The only commonality among B2B transactions is that, at some point, a company became aware of another’s offerings and decided to ultimately purchase.

Not very helpful insight when planning a search program. So, what are B2B search marketers to do?

Let Micro B2B Conversions Show the Way

Not everything has to be about the purchase. Introduce a call-to-action that focuses just on the ultimate transaction and you will lose 95% of your potential audience. What is more impactful, is introducing offers or points of engagement that directly address individual stages of the consideration cycle. Think of these as “micro conversions,” or opt-ins that map to earlier consideration.

For example, online ROI calculators can often be the perfect “offer” made to those considering a purchase, comparing alternatives, and attempting to determine the payback period of a capital investment. Provide website visitors with tools to better inform their purchase decision, and engagement with your website and brand will increase. Investigate what your competitive set is doing and see where you can borrow, and best their offers.

Capitalize on Navigational Search

Navigational search, or search terms that are queried specifically to navigate directly to a particular brand’s website, are huge opportunities as well. In our experience, a disproportionately large number of search-driven conversions will come from brand-term queries.

It makes sense too. Anytime there is complexity in the purchase decision process, you can anticipate that a brand preference emerges as the transaction draws nearer. We see evidence of this as search-referred traffic becomes more brand-focused over the life of the visitor’s website touches. In fact, we’ve invested in analytics technologies that specifically help us to investigate and understand the holistic chain of search events that lead to an ultimate conversion.

Clients don’t always like focusing on branded terms as part of their Search programs, but they’re essential to efficiently capturing and converting web audiences.

Draw Qualitative Conclusions from Quantitative Data

Marketing is not formulaic. It cannot be solved by mathematics, nor can it be run by software alone. Human intelligence and oversight are needed in order for marketing to ensure the brand realizes its full market potential. The raw numbers can, however, help to enhance our own understanding of the marketplace dynamics.

What is the search data telling us that we weren’t aware of previously? Have our target audiences responded differently to our messaging than we originally hypothesized? Has our offer failed to entice action? If so, why has it failed? Can we test alternative messaging to see whether it’s the messaging or the offer itself?

Data can lead us to either conclusions or more questions. Where we’re taken to more questions, we follow-up with more hypotheses.

These four insights can help your search programs become far more comprehensive and relevant to B2B audiences. Your efforts and diligence will help round out a more complete view of your market, that in turn can be used to help establish a long-term competitive advantage. Ultimately, you will be engaging and converting more search-referred prospects than ever before.

S. Ryan DeShazer
Global Director of Search Marketing, GyroHSR

Ryan DeShazer is a seasoned digital marketing professional, having served entrepreneurial stints at pay-per-click (PPC) marketing firm Clix Marketing and again as co-owner of interactive boutique NOEINK. His current responsibilities at GyroHSR include developing and advancing the firm’s search engine marketing (SEM) capabilities.

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At Business.com, we’re dedicated to providing high quality traffic to our advertisers.

As such, we’re very pleased to announce that Business.com is one of the first four pay-per-click industry leaders, including Microsoft (adCenter and Atlas Media Console), to earn click quality accreditation from the Media Rating Council (MRC) certifying full compliance with the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) Click Measurement Guidelines. See our press release here.

The MRC accreditation means Business.com advertisers can be assured that the clicks they pay for on Business.com are generated by real people with a real interest in the product or service being advertised.

Business.com has been an active member of the IAB’s Click Measurement Working Group over the last three years, working with other industry leaders to finalize a clear, standardized definition of a “click” and how clicks are measured and counted, including the identification of fraudulent or other invalid clicks. Published in May 2009, the IAB Click Measurement Guidelines also include auditing and certification recommendation for organizations involved in performance-based advertising.  To earn MRC click quality accreditation, a company must undergo a through MRC-drive audit of its operations and review of the findings by the MRC Audit Committee. Once granted, click quality accreditation by the MRC certifies that an organization has provided full and complete information to the MRC regarding all details of its operation, conducts its processing and reporting substantially in accordance with representations to its clients and in compliance with IAB guidelines, and submits to annual audits of its systems by CPA firms engaged by the MRC.

Suffice to say, receiving MRC click quality accreditation is a lot of work but well worth the effort as part of our commitment to click quality and good measurement practices. While Business.com is one of the very first to earn this accreditation, keep your eye out for more announcements as other leading companies offering performance-based advertising commit to full compliance with the IAB’s Click Measurement Guidelines.

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In this  interview with Mike Rowland of Impact Interactions, a consulting group advising B2B companies such as Cisco on social media and online community strategy, Mike covers the top 5 myths about building B2B online communities and then offers his top tips for successful community building:

Myth #1: B2B online communities must have a serious tone

MR: When you look at B2C communities, the perception is that they are fun and entertaining, but B2B communities have to be cut and dry. But for B2B, the facilitators, like in any community, need to haveboth a sense of humor and people skills to be effective. They don’t have to be serious and focused all the time. B2B doesn’t have to stand for “no fun.” That is not true. Think “measured fun” – for example, the kind of discussion that happens at the watercooler.

Myth #2: New B2B online communities need a presence on all major social networking sites

MR: We see communities that get launched with webcasts, blogs, Twitter, Facebook. If you are in too many places at once, you fragment your audience, and they never link all of your efforts together. Start small with your feature set, so you can aggregate people first, before giving them multiple tools. Too much focus on tools, rather than the behaviors you’re trying to get, can backfire.

Myth #3: B2B online communities need active moderation to start but eventually run themselves

MR: When building a B2B community, you should expect that your company will always need to be actively involved. When companies stop actively engaging in community, it alienates people. If you see zero responses, it feels like the company doesn’t care. For example, I’ve seen cases where companies will launch an open Q & A channel, but they don’t set up a team of subject matter or community experts. It becomes a virtual wasteland. Companies underestimate the work communities take.

Companies think that there’s a magic formula, and that once there is active community participation then the company can pull back because they are no longer needed. That’s not true. Companies must maintain their activity level, not just at launch, but have a plan for what they’ll be doing in three months, and into the future. Don’t expect to start out heavy, then back out substantially. B2B relationship-building is much more intense than B2C – you can’t just back out.

Myth #4: B2C and B2B online communities have similar participation rates

MR: The 90-9-1 participation ratio (90% lurkers, 9% intermittent contributors, 1% active participants) that community managers often cite as a benchmark is a myth, at least for B2B communities. In my experience, that ratio doesn’t fit well. That model doesn’t take into account what the community is trying to accomplish. In a B2B support community, if users don’t see their issue and need support, they post it – it’s different than a gossip community where there may not be a high user incentive to post as opposed to lurking. Support communities still have lurkers, but the intermittent contributor participation percentage can be as high as 25-30%. On the other hand, active participants in B2B communities can be more like 0.1% or a tenth of what community managers expect to see in B2C.

Myth #5: Social networking site metrics indicate the health of B2B communities

MR:The main problem with participation in B2B Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIngroups and so on is that you’re able to identify active participants and intermittent contributors, but you can’t see who’s just reading. Social networking site follower or friend counts can also be misleading because not all of these people could even be considered lurkers. Instead, use social network sites as beacons to point traffic to your site so you can measure community participation more actively.

Mike’s top tips for building B2B online communities:

MR:What does the audience hear from you over time to make you want to take action? You can’t just blitz people – you have to be providing info over time – it’s more about brand awareness. B2B companies are playing catch up a lot – but things are moving faster now. Dell and Cisco are examples of B2B companies on Twitter – that’s a big growth market.

To B2B companies getting started, ask yourself what you are trying to accomplish. Lead generation/sooner-faster sales, support? Companies need to put that into a goal – and really think about their business objectives. What would the KPI’s be? Success indicators can come from CRM, the community, the website, the ecommerce website.

After that we start talking about tools. What are you offering? If it’s perceived that you’re not offering something of value, you’ll have a low conversion rate. And –- how good is the user interface and navigation? With each extra step you lose more people. How passionate are people regarding your product or brand? Higher passion equals a higher energy rate for your online community.

We get asked questions like — for 100,000 visits per month, how many registrants should we have? It depends. There are so many variables. Compare the percent of registrations to traffic. The ratio is dependent on value exchange –- what are you offering?

An example of a passionate B2B community is Cisco Networking Professionals. The power of that brand is a combination of everything they do in the marketplace –-good products, people, treatment of customers – and how they get the message out – that ties directly into their community metrics.

A smaller company without brand awareness can use social media to get started –- online community must come later. Create an executive level blog to set the tone –- talk about where the company/industry is going. Set up Twitter –- feature your blog and call attention to yourself as a company that’s willing to communicate.

Everyone thinks they’re a social media expert. The key is to understand people, not tools. Understand what drives behavior, and why they’d want to interact.

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Online Community Unconference 2009

At Forum One’s energized gathering of online community professionals at the Online Community Unconference in Mountain View last week, there was great interest in B2B online communities compared to last year’s conference (marketers are starting to realize that B2B companies need social media too). Mike Rowland of Impact Interactions, a community consulting group, led a well-attended session on B2B communities and their characteristics based on his six years of experience helping major B2B companies such as Cisco, Intel, and SAP establish relationships with their customers and prospects using online communities and other social media.

Here are Mike Rowland’s six key takeaways for building B2B online communities:

1) Building B2B online communities takes more than copying B2C practices

Clearly defined objectives and a focus on driving business results are the hallmarks of more successful B2B online community efforts. You can’t get there by simply adopting B2C community practices without reference to whether these make sense for your business or target audience.

2) Question the 90-9-1 participation ratio 

B2C community managers typically expect that 90% of visitors will be lurkers, 9% will be intermittent participants and 1% will be active participants (90-9-1). In the B2B space, according to Rowland, the typical ratio is closer to 99-0.9-0.1 – B2B online communities will have about 1/10th the active participants of a B2C community at comparable traffic volumes – but participation rates are all over the map. In support communities where people can ask a quick question and get a quick response, the 0.9% intermittent participant rate expands.

3. Don’t confuse traffic and behavior with value

Its easy to get excited about traffic to your B2B online community, or from seeing members interact to address issues or challenges. However, don’t confuse traffic and behavior with value to your business. Is your B2B online community generating more revenue for your business? More leads? Lowering support costs? Raising awareness? Providing key insights into your customer base? Understand the business reasons for creating your community in the first place and keep your eye on those metrics.

4. B2B online community participants are buyers

Survey research from multiple B2B online communities shows that 60+% of members say that something they read or saw in the community influenced them to buy. This is a theme Forrester’s Laura Ramos also mentioned in our B2B social media with her.

5. Use Twitter and Facebook to direct traffic to specific landing pages

Give B2B social media and community participants a clear call to action and take traffic to specific landing pages. Keeping track of traffic, leads, revenue, etc. from each third party application is also critical.

6. Young B2B communities take significant work to build

B2B communities don’t just emerge in the field of dreams sense – if you build it, they will come.  Given the community participation ratios above, B2B communities are much harder to build than B2C communities. Companies must to be prepared to work to build relationships and grow the community over time. While you will put in more work at first, and an active B2B online community will require somewhat less effort over time, don’t expect to just sit back and watch as your community grows astronomically. It takes work, but the business value derived may be well worth the effort.

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