Last week, I had the honor of speaking with Jon Moody, Director of Marketing at Pyramid Analytics, in a webinar where he explained how he is using social channels for lead generation. The webinar was hosted by the great folks over at Business2Community.

Pyramid Analytics is a leading provider of business analytics solutions and winner of 2014 CIO Big Data award and has been using the NextPrinciples solution for the last few months.

In the webinar, Jon talked about the opportunities and challenges presented by social media for B2B companies and how he has started being able to measure the revenue impact of using social channels as opposed to being focused on the ‘vanity metrics’ such as Likes and Impressions.

You can find the full webinar here. The 3 key points that I took away from Jon’s session were:

  1. It’s futile to pretend that social doesn’t matter: Though it is increasingly obvious that social media touches each and every one of us in our personal and professional lives, there are still some who think that it is irrelevant to them. Jon’s message: “If you think social is prevalent now, just think in 2 or 5 years time it will be the default way of communicating and thinking.”
  2. Social media is very relevant for demand generation: There’s a lot of noise in the market today about “Social Selling” with many different “quick fixes” being suggested by gurus. However, if approached in a disciplined and scalable manner, it is indeed possible to use social media to significantly enhance your company’s demand generation process. He described the real benefits (in terms of the ability to find new leads and new revenue opportunities created). Jon’s quote: “Demand generation must include a social element or you will be missing out on a significant piece of the opportunity.”
  3. Applicability to B2B or B2C: A number of the questions from the participants revolved around whether social demand generation was relevant either for “only B2C” or “only B2B”. His response was that if your business involved an individual on the other end of the transaction, it did not matter if you were in a B2B or B2C industry. (My sidebar: his response reiterates the concept of business being H2H, not B2B or B2C). Jon’s quote: “Truly applicable to any environment, vertical, industry or segment where customers or prospects are active on social and have adopted that train of thought…So I would not put a limitation on the value and where this can be used.”

There’s a lot of other interesting content in the webinar where Jon describes how he has put a process in place to manage social lead generation and how he has started attributing revenue to their efforts on social media. Head over here to watch the webinar. As always, your comments are welcome!