Worldcom Social Media B2B Study

It is official: social media has taken the world by storm.

Across the globe, hundreds of millions of people spend their days tapping on their keyboards and thumbing the screens of their smart phones. News breaks on Twitter feeds. Advertisements sprout from Facebook pages. Entertainment streams on YouTube channels. And commentators debate on the pages of their blogs.

Businesses, too, have jumped into the digital fray, engaging with consumers, marketing their products and services, and touting their brands on the web. Indeed, one recent survey showed that close to 80 percent of Fortune 100 companies are using social media tools to connect with potential customers and longstanding clients. And the trend s are pointing upward: more than two-thirds of respondents to a new Harvard Business Review poll believe the use of social media tools will grow significantly over the next few years.

Innovative digital tools have truly revolutionized the world, bringing life and work, commerce, media, entertainment and marketing online in exciting and previously unimaginable ways. As the first-ever Worldcom Social Media B2B Study shows, the business-to-business (B2B) industry has staked its claim on the Net, and is uniquely positioned to flourish in the new media environment.

An Eye Towards the Future

In April 2011, the Worldcom Public Relations Group—the world’s leading partnership of independently owned public relations firms—polled 123 B2B company leaders , primarily in North America and Western Europe, about their use of social media.

Nearly all of those firms surveyed—an impressive 83 percent—use social media to communicate with their target audiences, and close to nine-in-ten agency executives believe social media will increase in value for their firms over the next year. With those projections in mind, it comes as no surprise that more than half of firms surveyed intend to boost spending on social media for the coming year.

 

Tweet First, Find Friends Later

The bulk of social media resources, it appears, are being directed towards Twitter, with 85 percent of respondents active on the micro-blogging site. Facebook comes in second, with 74 percent of firms taking advantage of its rich content capabilities and massive social network, followed by LinkedIn (72 percent), YouTube (69 percent) and corporate blogs (60 percent).

  

Continental Divide

Geographic location turns out to be a major indicator of social media goals: Among B2B agencies in North America, promoting “thought leadership” is the key reason to use social media (30 percent); an ocean away, Western European B2B firms use  the social web to engage new and existing clients (31 and 25 percent, respectively). Interestingly, thought leadership fails to even register in Europe.

Not surprisingly, to achieve their respective goals, firms in different regions favor different social platforms: 31 percent of agencies in the United States, Canada and Mexico favor Twitter (followed by Facebook—25 percent—and LinkedIn—19 percent); in Western Europe, the same percentage favor Facebook (with Twitter and corporate blogs listed next, garnering 25 percent each). Furthermore, in the United States, more than nine-in ten firms use Twitter, while just six-in-ten Western European agencies do.

Building Business

Despite differences in priorities and platforms, there are some goals that most firms worldwide share: 80 percent of B2B companies are using social media tools to interact with potential clients, and 76 percent work online to engage existing clients, suggesting the digital space is ripe for finding and sustaining business.

Companies also log on to social networks to build extensions of their own company web sites (60 percent), to communicate with journalists (58 percent) and for employee recruitment and alumni communications (50 percent), though none of these uses were cited as “most important.” That distinction was cited for agencies looking to communicate their thought leadership (26 percent), communicate with clients (23 percent) and communicate with potential clients (20 percent).

Muddle in the Middle?

Company size turns out to be quite a strong indicator of social media adoption. When broken down by revenue, small companies—those under $50 million—and large companies—those over $1 billion—prove to be leaders in the digital media sphere. Some 80 percent of small companies and 88 percent of large companies have been using social media for more than one year, compared to just 57 percent of mid-sized firms—and just over a third of mid-sized companies have been using social media for more than six months. Furthermore, less than half of medium-sized companies will boost their social media budgets for the coming year, as opposed to nearly three-quarters of small companies.

Business to business companies have a robust opportunity to include social media tools into their marketing communication strategies – whether it be to access client communities, focus on new business sales or dialogue with journalists. The evolution is ongoing and we expect it only be enhanced in the coming year.

 

Inclusion of clients in product development - big marketing opportunity

Today we are surrounded by large amounts of information and advertisements. The range of offered products and services is very wide. More and more we see so popular poster effect, which emphasizes the ubiquity of advertising that people perceive less and less because it is overload. Therefore reputation of companies becomes more important than ever and can be easily destroyed. Companies can come within minutes of many years of work on the good oppinion of its brand. The question is how to build, develop and protect their reputation?

People want to choose best products or services which they can always rely on. Great potential for marketing agencies is to help large audience with sorting of large amount of information and help to get most important data and immediate answers to questions about the product or service. Customers want to have information whenever, about whatever, wherever and in the required form and they want also to get a professional and impartial oppinion from experts in the field. Therefore it is good to build on social media fancommunities and know how to deal with them properly. People like to participate in the development of new products and services, too. They like to feel that they can influence happening and that the product or service is developed with them and for them.

The biggest marketing opportunity for businesses is to give clients the chance to develop a product or service that exactly matches their requirements. On the internet is a series of options where you can publish a platform or application, under which customers would be able to develop products or services corresponding to their exact requirements. Each customer can have different requirements for specific parameters, so it should be on the internet presentation of company incorporated online configurator for create product exactly according to wishes of a particular client. Marketing key message should be that the customer is at the center and that the company meets him at all. The company mustn’t forget also that the public should always be able to evaluate products and ask the opinion of impartial experts. Firms should therefore be in contact with a professional blogger or other opinion leaders on the internet and monitor their views and impact on the reputation of the company. These views should be crucial for major corporate decisions.

In these days reputation of company associated with a number of factors stands and will stand in the foreground. It is up to the company, which method it chooses to be closer to their stakeholders and to offer them exactly what they want.

PRAM Consulting team

How to spark interest in satellite beams

To get a satellite operator into lifestyle media, PRAM Consulting starts to educate the public about Space – on a big scale.

SES is a leading telecommunication services provider on the global market – in the Czech Republic three out of four satellite TV homes receive the signal from the company’s fleet. Although there are intermediaries between the satellite operator and the end-consumer, SES attaches great emphasis on building a broader awareness of its services. Therefore PRAM Consulting entered the B2B oriented company into a rather unusual corner of the media landscape: lifestyle periodicals.

PRAM prepared a series of articles treating many popular aspects of space exploration and satellite technology. The texts are filled with highly interesting details and rare background information provided by an expert on space technology, including the history of satellite technology, space debris, recovery operations on the orbit or satellite theft – did you know that these devices can be hacked too? The paragraph or two featuring SES also contains valuable information, as people don’t want to read marketing newspeak.

So far the articles have been published in the local National Geographic magazine or on Technet.cz, the leading technology lifestyle portal on the Czech market. But this is just the beginning: the texts are shared with the SES’ agencies throughout the CEE region and also are expected to be published in their markets.

It seems the media doesn’t need a lot of persuasion to publish the articles since they are receiving very good feedback from their readers. SES is being featured in several important media, reaching the general public in a captivating way.