After talking to a number of companies in the channel, you’d think a reasonably clear idea of what works in business to business (B2B) social media would start to emerge. But as the old Gershwin song put it so succinctly, “it ain’t necessarily so.” Some people swear by Twitter, others extol the virtues of LinkedIn, others commend Facebook, even if it is dismissed by some as a “consumer” application and there are a few who take the time and effort to blog. According to Olivier Choron, founder and CEO of purechannelapps, the diversity of opinion of what is the best B2B social media platform shouldn’t come as a surprise.
He cites two different pieces of research into the use of social media that returned two different results. In Europe, there are “massive differences” from country to country. One thing he is certain of is that resellers are not fully abreast with social media. Why? There are a number of reasons. In many instances, the ‘powers that be’ within channel organisations tend to be “quite old” and don’t get social media. Another problem is that there are no success stories to use to illustrate how to use social media properly. “We’ve been trying to find success stories involving channel partners, but it’s very difficult,” Choron maintains.
Matter of content
The time and resource that needs to be devoted to using social media as a business tool is another issue because, as he puts its bluntly, “channel partners don’t have much of either.” Even if they do start to deploy social media as a B2B tool, there’s another big concern: content. What content do channel partners have for social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and blogs? According to Choron, they don’t have any. He would say that given that his company has just launched a web-based tool called socialondemand that enables vendors to deliver social media content via channel partners to their users. But if there’s one group in the channel supply chain that isn’t short of content that it wants to communicate to channel partners and to customers, its vendors. Choron describes the tool as the same as ‘campaign on demand’ except it uses the social media space.
Vendors using the channel can find it difficult and time consuming managing what content should go to which partners and there is no guarantee that partners will redistribute content. It is also a very difficult process to track and evaluate. But ‘socialondemand’ enables a vendor to track what information has been republished by channel partners, how many followers they have, how many times the short URL has been clicked and what has been downloaded. At the same time, resellers can choose which bits of the vendor content they want by opting for information which falls into selected categories such as “storage” and “small business.”
This helps overcome one of the big problems with vendor social media content in that although there is a lot of it about, it doesn’t tend to be targeted. Choron is confident that the system will allow channel partners “to quickly create a valuable, targeted and trusted stream of social media content while maintaining absolute control. Socialondemand enables partners to finally get involved with the B2B social media world with very little elbow grease.”
Something new
Subscribers 0
Fans 0
Followers 0
Followers