Should b-2-b marketing follow where consumer marketing leads?

iPhone users socialising

A commonly held view is that b-2-b marketing uses similar techniques and channels as for consumer marketing, but does so on a smaller budget - until that is social media came along.

It is not just social media of course but the platforms used and how people communicate with one another. The smart phone and in particular the iPhone is the platform of choice right now that absorbs the attention of its owners seemingly every waking minute. If that is where people, in other words potential customers, spend their time then that is a place where product and service providers need to be too, in order to promote i.e. advertise their offers. Certainly a number of consumer companies think so and have invested heavily in social media and in particular Facebook to 'converse' with the younger audience. A recent report by Piper Jaffray which asked 5,000 teenagers to name their favourite social media site showed a significant decline in support for the best known sites like Facebook. A couple of articles (click links) illustrate the findings and add their own views raising questions about the marketing value of social media.

As noted in several previous blogs, our b-2-b clients are divided on social media as being appropriate to their business. At one extreme Facebook in particular is seen at best as trivial, or worse a place where 'friends' post and tag their pictures of recent drunken excess, or even bully others. A strange surreal world where without leaving the bedroom a user can socialise with a couple of thousand 'friends' they have never met, rather than their 2 or 3 real life acquaintances. Why they ask would we want our products to be associated with this banality?  Good question. The opposite view is that engaging through social media is an important channel because that is where customers and prospects spend so much of their time. This approach seems to demand an almost continuous news stream to gain any kind of visibility amongst the sea of messages that are out there. Purely anecdotally I  have noticed amongst people I know a trend for retired former work colleagues to be quite active users of Facebook, others sign up and after a burst of enthusiasm lose interest and another category simply shun Facebook. And of course there are many other social media sites that parents and retired people have not heard of yet where young people can go. A more relevant question is where, if on any of these numerous social media channels are your customers and prospects?

There is plenty of anecdotal evidence that the iPhone brigade spend an inordinate amount of time interacting with the device even and particularly, when supposedly actually socialising in a restaurant, at a barbecue (see photo) or even in the cinema or theatre. Take the example of a 24 year old in our family, one who shuns Facebook incidentally who switches on TV, plugs in headphones in one ear to talk to his girl friend, manages a steady stream of text messages on his iPhone, plays a game on his iPad and simultaneously discusses his menu requests for our evening meal. Or the daughters of friends sitting side by side sending Snapchat images of each other back and forth, pictures that vanish in seconds. Maybe its the platform that really fascinates and the popularity of apps will come and go. And don't forget more people are now reading their emails on mobile devices than on desk top computers and email campaigns have a proven track record.