Kipp Bodnar: 11 B2B Social Media Predictions for 2010

Priit Kallas

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Filed under: Social Media, Trends

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Tags: B2B social media, inbound marketing, influencers, location based services, real-time search, social data, social media trends, social networks

Kipp Bodnar is writing about B2B social media future. Here’s a summary of the points with little commentary from me. Social media will spread from marketing department to sales. This will make social networks prominent lead generation tools. Seth Godin has predicted that in a few years 90% of the B2B leads will come from social networks. These trends will increase the budgets for the inbound marketing. To gain credibility B2B companies will target influencers. On the other hand CNET study suggest:

Shape your marketing messages for the larger network of moderately connected users, not just the few highly connected individuals at the top. This involves considering this group’s emotional and informational needs, not just modifying the messages you used for the top tier. – Guy Kawasaki, The Myth of A Listers and Influencers

Understanding the importance of social data and the use of real-time search will make it clear that B2B companies have to get social to stay in the picture and engage prospects. Social media will mean business and this will bring down the firewalls that now block employees from accessing social networks.

The content of B2B social media communication will get more exciting. Video, audio, streaming media, interactive tools and other stuff you can play around with will be used more and more. The best tools will make completing your goals fun. This fun will hopefully spill over to corporate web sites that start to develop social elements. The ones who don’t adapt will soon become obsolete

The corporate website of the future will be a credible source of opinion and fact, authored by both the corporation and community. The result? A true first-stop community resource where information flows for better products and services. – Jeremiah Owyang, How To Evolve Your Irrelevant Corporate Website

As for location based services, I believe that they will have a lot of impact on consumer side but B2B decisions is less influenced by real-time and location based services. The same goes for the importance of mobile base content. The B2C will lead the way and B2B lag behind.
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Image credit: Carl Dwyer

Posted on: December 17, 2009