I had a great time at MarketingProfs’ SocialTech 2010 conference earlier this week drilling into B2B social media for high tech companies. was particularly impressed by the big-name brands represented at the event, from Facebook to Cisco, Microsoft to Xerox. For what it’s worth, I did not see a lot of large agencies represented. Jeremiah Owyang of Altimeter Group had the opening keynote. agree. At Weber Shandwick , we sometimes call the website a “home base” property and social media sites “outposts” of the brand. The two need to work together a lot more than they do today in almost every case. MORE >>

I’m a little slow on the uptake with this one but I wanted to flag Forrester’s report, “ Social Technographics: Business Technology Buyers ,” which came out about a month ago (April 28) and looks at the social media habits of business technology decision-makers. Good quantitative research into B2B social media usage is fairly thin. If you have access to the full report, it’s worth a review. Also a summary from B2B Online here. It shows, not surprisingly, that penetration of social media continues to increase. Obviously, individuals could select more than one category.). Flickr from LawsonComm. MORE >>

One of the things I like most about doing B2B communications over B2C is the challenge to be original and unique. Unlike the thousands of coffee shops that operate on the millions of corners around the globe, most B2B companies offer very specialized products/services for very targeted audiences. This is probably one of the reasons why I enjoy the challenge of doing social media for the exchange — we need to be even more creative to capture the attention of our audiences. One thing we’ve done that has worked for us is live Twitter interviews. can archive them at StockTwits.com. MORE >>

A group of us here in the office have been having some discussions lately about our digital and social media capabilities in the B2B social media space.  If you work in an agency, you know how it goes – the big, splashy, sexy B2C stuff tends to get all the attention. After all, they have Ashton Kutcher. We have engineers, analysts and ROI models. came upon a realization that I think was shared by others there, that the concept is so broad as to be all but. Image via Wikipedia. meaningless. Maybe that’s self-evident but there are some consequences borne out of that realization. Customer service? MORE >>

Last week I read through a recent study by The Kaiser Family Foundation on media habits of 8 to 18-year olds. You can read a great summary of the study over at Wall St. Cheat Sheet.  The study is clearly aimed at parents (me) and how kids are interacting with various media (my kids — all under the age of 8 — clearly prefer the iPhone, Leapster and Internet over TV).  However, there are some very salient points here from a marketing perspective to examine, which I did make and sent to our web, research and product marketing directors. Will you outsource video? Cheat Sheet MORE >>