Four reasons B2B companies may be slow to adopt social media
When you read marketing blogs today, nine out of every ten articles seem to be written about some aspect of social media. White Horse, a digital media company, has released an interesting publication titled “B2B Marketing Goes Social: A White Horse Survey Report” (registration required). White Horse surveyed 104 corporate marketers in March of 2010. This report yields some valuable insight into B2B marketers and their use of social media, which falls
Social media? Bah! Humbug!
behind that of their B2C colleagues, according to the report.
For example, 60 percent of B2B marketers have no one on staff dedicated full-time to social media, compared to just 46 percent of B2C marketers. Only 10 percent of B2B marketers had engaged an outside agency for social media marketing, compared to 28 percent of B2C marketers. Most revealing was the level of acceptance of social media among executives: 36 percent of B2B marketers reported low executive interest in social media, compared to just 9 percent among B2C marketers.
This begs the question, why? Here are a few reasons that B2B marketers haven’t fully embraced social media marketing:
- B2B marketers are ROI-driven. A B2B sale can be literally years in the making, involving strategic organizational decisions and budgeting on the part of the buyer, as well as significant investment of the part of the marketer. The stakes are too high to gamble in a field where ROI has proven especially hard to determine.
- Likewise, B2C decisions are emotional, while B2B are logical. A tweet may drive thousands of consumers to impulsively download the latest hit pop song from iTunes, but it’s unlikely to sell an enterprise solution to a major manufacturing company.
- It’s generational. Social media is still largely a youth-driven phenomenon. As more top executives retire and are replaced by marketers who have long embraced social media as a part of their lives, you may see B2B marketers embrace social media more consistently.
- B2B marketing isn’t brand-driven. B2B companies are often entrenched in a niche in which there may be relatively few players, compared to a typical B2C industry. Therefore, social media’s role as an effective brand promoter is not as effective.
White Horse provides a spot-on summary of the state of B2B and social media by stating that the end result for B2B and social media will be a happy marriage of new and traditional marketing methods:
“We believe strongly that the ultimate evolutionary stage of social media marketing is its integration with traditional tactics, and B2B marketers are uniquely well-positioned to make this leap. Social tactics align more naturally with highly relationship-driven B2B tactics than they do with awareness-centered B2C tactics.”
Determining ROI for media coverage
How does one measure the ROI of a media or public relations initiative?
Finding a solid answer to this question is not as easy as you’d think. Most of what you’ll find will either justify editorial coverage as “priceless” or claim that it has value that can’t be measured in the same way as the impact of a new piece of equipment or a more fuel-efficient delivery truck.
Still, where there’s a will, there’s a way. A Canadian industry group has come up with a comprehensive standard to judge ROI on media relations efforts: MR2P, the Media Relations Ratings Points system. Designed by the Canadian Public Relations Society‘s Measurement Committee, the program is described in a user manual available from the website:
The MRP (Media Relations Rating Points) system provides communications and marketing professionals with an easy-to-use tool that measures the effectiveness of any public relations campaign. The 10-point rating system can be used for any type of media coverage (i.e. print, TV, radio, online). The MRP system can also be used to measure crisis communications and unplanned media attention after the fact.
The primary objective of the MRP system is to create a standardized reporting mechanism that can be widely accepted and utilized with ease to measure coverage results. This system can be easily customized by Company or by project. MRP provides clear metrics to evaluate media coverage, track total impressions and cost per contact.
Each piece of media coverage is scored on a scale of one to 10. The first five points are for “tone” (with positive tone of the piece in question scoring higher), while the remaining five points are awarded for any of five criteria from a list, including such things as company or brand mention, use of a photo or image, a spokesperson quote, inclusion of the website, a call to action, and others. The total score of a media campaign is the average of the tone score plus the average of the criteria score.
Sounds impressive—but does the system really work? Canadian writer Ben Boudreau appeared satisfied with the system when he evaluated his own PR experiences as a finalist in a Canadian writing contest in 2007; he scored six out of 10 (60 percent). Brendan Hodgson blogs about his company’s use of MR2P when they rolled out a PR campaign for a large client. Their final score: 84 percent.
Hodgson was pleased with the performance, but only because the numbers matched what his clients told him: they were thrilled. My opinion? It’s great that there is a system to quantify PR and media campaign success and ROI. However, it is more important to meet the client’s expectations, whatever they may be. As Hodgson says of their expectations, “If this is how they define success, then run with it.”