According to Chris Koch, “you’re going to be doing more social media marketing, whether you like it or not. ”

Although I totally agree that doing more social media is inevitable, I can hardly believe we won’t have live sales events such as seminars and round tables. The in-person events will just be a bit more targeted and regional.

In fact, I wonder if a bit more of “what worked well in the past” kind of attitude may be more prevalent than social media. If the economy is getting tougher then a clear path tied to lead generation will make marketers a bit more anxious not to try new things out.

A prudent approach for marketing is the alignment between the traditional marketing machine and the online/social media marketing machine. Yes, full integration between all the go-to-market activities. Too obvious? Probably.

See the whole article: Seven Reasons to Get Over Your Fear of Social Media Marketing

Yes, the internet is changing the way B2B marketing connects with their partners, sell to their customers and engage with the experts, and as part of B2B brand building, it is an important new element in the marketing mix.

But what is a B2B enterprise online community meant to do?

There are three different types of enterprise communities and there are often significant differences in their goals and behaviors. The three community types are:

Support communities
Engagement communities
Employee communities

Support Communities
A support community focuses on technical support issues and provides a place for customers to ask and answer questions. The forums are often supported by technical experts from the company who answer some of the most difficult questions, moderate conversations, and manage the overall health of the converstation

Companies engage in communties to reduce technical support call volume and thus reduce total cost of support.

Partner Communities are very similar but are intended to support a select, entitled user base, which is generally part of a partner or reseller program.

Tip #2 – Join in! – Don’t forget to comment, encourage and give genuine feedback. It helps everyone. Great B2B industry examples include:

Intel Leap Ahead
Juniper J-Net Communities
Oracle Forum
Symantec Technology Network

An interesting Article by Gartner: Yes, “What is the Business Value

Are there others B2B examples or links to share?

My next post will discuss online engagement communities.