SAP.com
What really impresses me about SAP.com is that SAP is willing to try new things and use the home page to sandbox interesting ideas—like incorporating a partnership message into the solution pathway. SAP has also incorporated social media into the site to help sell solutions, which is a smart idea for products complicated enough to [...]
Five Sites to Watch in 2010 – Pt. 3 – SAP
POSTED: February 22nd, 2010
Five Sites to Watch in 2010 – Pt. 2 – CDW
POSTED: February 16th, 2010CDW - Online Commerce Machine!
What caught my eye about CDW is that it is stretching the Amazon/B2C model to suit higher-end products not normally associated with retail sale—including a surprisingly large stock of Juniper Network products. CDW is a revenue-generating machine, and it has been extremely smart about integrating social media into the browsing experiences, including [...]
Five Sites to Watch in 2010 – Pt. 1 – Disney
POSTED: February 11th, 2010Good news for 2010: the business community is finally realizing the productivity potential of social media. As this trend continues, it will be interesting to see B2B companies explore, adopt, and integrate the technology—especially into e-commerce—often using B2C social media initiatives as a model.
I’m certainly keeping an eye on these trends so that Juniper.net users continue [...]
Engaging with Social Media in Japan, Korea, and China
POSTED: November 25th, 2009
Though the Asian countries I recently visited are at different stages of B2B adoption, they’re all acutely aware of how much social media is changing communication—making it more about engagement and less about broadcast.
And in response to these new market demands, organizations that use social media most effectively are those who see social media for what it really is: a tool for building community.
For instance, we’ve been hearing a lot of buzz about Twitter recently, but we shouldn’t forget that it’s not the brand name that’s important; it’s the activity that the tool makes possible that is important. It’s the social and business networking—the sense of community engagement—that is the key difference.
Japan: The Changing Perceptions of Social Media
POSTED: November 20th, 2009
Twitter has been a huge success in Japan as an entertainment medium. In fact, @shimmage visited a bookstore that had devoted an entire shelf to books originally having appeared as tweets! But when I met with the Japan marketing team two months ago, I was told that social media such as Twitter was rarely used in a B2B context. How can a medium so popular with the general public be underused in the business community? Is Twitter a victim of its own success?
One of the biggest hurdles of B2B adoption is that over 50% of Japanese companies block social media sites outright, such as the popular Japanese Facebook variant Mixi and Twitter. The popular conception is that such technology saps, rather than contributes to, productivity. In other words, it’s just for entertainment. It’s understandable, then, if this attitude might dissuade companies from establishing a social media presence.
