Scaling Social and the Future of B2B Social Marketing

Here’s a quick shout-out to the Salorix team for getting lots of great coverage in the recent Social Media Ecosystem Report. They were talked about, quoted, and got to submit a chart too… all in the section: Big Data Enables Enhanced Business Intelligence.

But why did this early-stage company get covered in this report – alongside IBM, Google, and Adobe no less?

Well, it turns out the “big data meets social media” thing is hard. Or as the report puts it,

“scaling social with intelligence is extremely challenging”

You see, we can no longer be happy simply responding to brand mentions and  boasting about our likes, retweets, and followers.

We need to also:

• Identify relevant and influential brand-related conversions
• Engage the consumers doing the talking
• Get them to amplify your brand message to their social network

That does sound hard, especially, since 90% of those conversations are happening outside of brand-controlled properties (this is what Salorix says). Makes me long for the days when ad banners still worked. (When was that exactly?)

As B2B marketers, we’ve traditionally done a good job embracing the role of influencers; perhaps even leaned on them to know the moods and minds of our prospects when we do not. We can no longer be happy with that, either.

If we want to engage prospects directly, it’s critical that we:

• Develop robust buyer personas that incorporate on how our prospects behave on social media
• Create content based on the what our prospects are saying and sharing across the social web
• Optimize our content for social engagement and social distribution

So, how are you adapting your marketing practices to connect with prospects, customers, and influencers? Let us know in the comments section, or tweet us @Leadtail, and let’s keep the conversation going.

The Social Media Ecosystem Report –Rise of Users, Intelligence, and Operating Systems was put together by the folks at Jordan Edmiston Group, an investment bank focused on media and marketing services, with support from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB).  Download the full report from the IAB website.