How to employ social media in your B2B marketing

In an interesting article “Small Business Social Media Adoption Doubles Since 2009” Steven Fisher writes that according the research done by the University of Maryland and Network Solutions currently 24% of small businesses in US actively employs social media, such as Tweeter or Facebook, for branding and attracting new customers.

In the current prolonged downturn, small companies have to push the limits and become more innovative in their customer engagement, acquisition and retention strategies. Social media, if properly used, can become an efficient and low-cost marketing channel for small businesses offering consumer goods and services. There are numerous success stories proving this.

However, it is still unclear if the same applies to startups and small-to-medium sized enterprises offering B2B (business-to-business) services, products and solutions in IT, Telecom, Wireless and other high-tech industry verticals. Can they effectively leverage on social media to increase their brand awareness and generate new sales, and what tools and applications shall they use?

After speaking to nearly 100 smaller suppliers at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona in February this year, I noticed that the interest in using social media for B2B marketing for high-tech companies is growing. Several companies I met are already using social media channels. However, a vast majority have no clear social media strategy and do not really know how best to use it to reach their service provider customers. Traditional B2B marketing with expensive trade shows, conference sponsoring, paid ads and PR agencies still rules.

Research recently conducted by Azouk Network has shown that only about 10% of 3000 small and medium Telecom suppliers offer RSS feeds on their websites. Very few have company blogs and most of valuable content they produce including conference presentations, customer cases studies or product descriptions is not even published on their websites and you will have a really hard time finding them on social media sites.

One of the main problems is the lack of knowledge and tools that can transform social media services into efficient B2B marketing channels. The most popular services like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are not really meant for B2B applications. They are primarily geared towards individuals rather than companies and industry verticals. That’s why many marketers I talked to at the MWC said that they had thought about using social media but did not really know how to proceed. Well, simply creating your company profile on LinkedIn or Facebook is definitely not enough.

This is one of the main reasons why we created Azouk (www.azouk.com). Azouk is an online service 100% focused on professional content sharing and discovery. Azouk allows Telecom professionals to find the best and most highly rated papers, presentations, product descriptions and other types of content in their field of expertise.

Azouk can help you to quickly create a new B2B online marketing channel providing an innovative and smart way to reach the right groups of customers and decision makers within your market segment. The Azouk Company Channel service enables you to aggregate new and existing information about your products, services and solutions and optimize it for social media and search engine exposure. To learn more about our new service, please click on Azouk Company Channel.

Scaling social networks — beyond Moore's law limits

Even though the Moore's law surprisingly still continues to apply, it yields only that — doubling of transistors in consumer-level CPUs every two years. It yields, however, smaller increase in CPUs computational capabilities and we used to demand more, more and more from our machines.

As the size of the Web increases, number and size of social networks follow this trend. And so does the Azouk network of expert and professional content. To handle it, to process it, to serve it — we need a system that can scale faster and cheaper than allows the Moore's law.

Azouk  is distrbuted from the ground up. This, in fact, is a no-brainer. It's a must-have for an expert social site like this. Sure, it may be not perfect from the very beginning, but we aim to avoid the costs of redesigning and rewriting all website's backend as our network grows.

We believe in free and open software, so the website's backend is based on Linux running inside OpenVZ containers, website is written in Django/Python, our gateway is nginx and we use GlusterFS distributed filesystem. We even contributed to the Open Source community, providing the heart of our distributed system architecture, Multiplexer. The latter provides distributed, fault-tolerant environment of loosely coupled services that can be run in a cloud.

Ready to see, how it works?

Who is an expert?

In today's world specialization rules. Professionals active in any industry vertical always specialize in very narrow areas of business, technology, medicine, management, financial services, etc. This is clearly seen in domain of IT where some people spend nearly a lifetime to become true experts in just one system or platform (e.g. .NET or SAP specialist), or in medicine where hundreds of specializations (e.g. hand or brain surgeon). When we call somebody a "telecom specialist" or "expert in money trading" we usually mean that they are specialists in some specific areas like radio communications or foreign exchange, respectively.

I have been active in IT and Telecom for 30 years but I would hardly call myslelf a "Telco expert". I am indeed an expert in service creation, service delivery platforms, telecom middleware, and a few other areas, but ask me about optoelectronic or voice codex - I know they what they are, but in these topics I an a layman rather than expert.

Therefore, if we want to measure our "level of expertise" we need to do this in a very narrow areas. This observation is the corner stone of Azouk Expert Rating algorithm that aims at providing an objective way of measuring the "expertise" of industry professionals in all relevant areas of their domain (industry vertical).

The Expert Rating is also applied to professional content, like papers, presentations, market updates, product descriptions, blog posts, etc. In this case, we can measure the "relevance" of a content iteme to specific topics, technologies, standards, services, etc. By doing semantic analysis and applaying Expert Rating we can quickly asses that a piece of news provides an interesting insight into the adoption of "WiMAX" in "emerging markets" (high rating) whereas information provided there about "Voice over IP" is rather poor or irrelevant (low rating).


Read more about Azouk expert rating

The expert’s dilemma — sorting the wheat from the chaff

Every industry experts and professional like you and I have constant problems with finding the best content and discarding the worthless stuff. Out in the Web, there are hundreds of thousands of documents, papers, presentations, interviews, market updates, news, websites in our areas of expertise. How to drill through all this and get quickly the most relevant and highly rated stuff?

Google is our ultimate tool. I love Google and I think it is the most ingenious service invented in the Web space. Every time we search for something specific in our area of expertise, Google returns instantly millions of results. But quite often they are completely irrelevant. Google simply do not understand our "expert jargon" and often "mixes up" things.

Every industry vertical and area of business and technology has developed a unique vocabulary full of all those cryptic three and four-letter acronyms and odd terms. It takes sometimes years for us to comprehend, memorise and pronounce them and this is what makes us experts in our domains.

Another problem is to get straight to the right stuff. Evert time I do research in some new area I wonder "what top experts in this area would recommend to me?". Google cannot be much at hand. It simply hasn got managed to get into our minds.

Today to to learn from top experts and reach the right information we have to buy market reports and journals, attend conferences or use external consultants, which is expensive, time consuming and sometimes inefficient. I always thought that there must be some other way.

That's why nearly two years ago the idea of Azouk was born. Me and my colleagues wanted simply to create a free online service that provides an alternative way to reach the best content and information and to "meet" top experts in the cyberspace.

I have started this blog to tell you more about this exciting project and explain how all of us can benefit by "wrapping" our networking and collaboration around knowledge, information and content, and how this way we can add a true "human factor" to the web search.

To start, simply go to Azouk and get the first experience. If you have a bit more time check my personal page on Azouk and learn more about my choices and recommendations.

Kris Kimbler