B2B Social Media Podcast: Episode 2

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Eric Schwartzman and Paul Gillin, co-authors of Social Marketing to the Business Customer – the first book devoted entirely to B2B marketing – present the second podcast in our series on the developments in and best practices for marketing and engaging business customers online.  

B2B Social Media Podcast Highlight

Alibaba has invested $4.5 billion in logistics. The exchange will take a cut of transactions brokered with its partners. This is a new role for an exchange, and we wonder if it presages a new business model. Are you using Alibaba? We’d love to hear about your experiences.  

LinkedIn has new features, including a cool visualization tool showing people’s relationships in your professional network. It’s early stage and not very useful, but it demonstrates how social maps can be applied to rich professional networks.  

Eric says it’s a proof of concept at best. He doesn’t see much value in the visualization tool and has no time to figure it out.

However, he does see a lot of value in combining relationships with geographic data to improve sales prospecting.  

A recent Wall Street Journal story documented the sometimes nasty surprise of session-based clicks. Buyers can include session-based clicks When they sign up for a pay-per-click marketing campaign.

Depending upon the user’s previous behavior, this option may serve their ads against different queries.

Some buyers find that session-based clicks can drive up advertising fees without delivering much value.

A simple way to avoid this problem is to turn off the session-based click option.  

LinkedIn also offers intriguing new advertising options that enable advertisers to target all professional demographics and interests. Every technology has a downside, though.

Eric notes that these new features can also be used for poaching employees by enabling recruiters to target advertising to specific companies.  

Do you use LinkedIn for professional advice and networking? It’s the preferred social network for B2B marketing consultants and we provide some examples of how it pays off.

Eric has been spending time in the B2B marketing group on LinkedIn and is impressed by the moderator, who gently but firmly guides the conversation and keeps everyone on topic without alienating passionate interactions.