Another report, The Social Technographics® Of Business Buyers recently announced by Forrester , provides insights specifically into using social media for B2B PR and marketing. According to Forrester, 77% of business technology decision-makers use social media for business purposes—yet only about half feel that it plays an important role in the buying process. According to Forrester VP and principal analyst Laura Ramos , "B2B buying is fertile ground for emerging community sites, social networks, and user-contributed content. It's growing at an astounding rate. MORE >>

On the buyer side, FYIndOut is targeted at SMBs that are generally too small to have policies against endorsing vendors (as many larger enterprises unfortunately do) or to be clients of analyst firms like Gartner or Forrester. It's been obvious for some time that social media has an increasing role in b2b marketing , and that b2b companies will increasingly invest marketing dollars there as social media marketing practices become more standardized. How can b2b firms approach social media more strategically? Vendors have products and services designed to solve those problems. MORE >>

10 Great Web Sites by BtoB magazine A group of industry experts including Hoa Loranger from the Nielsen Norman Group, Alan Webber of Forrester Research and Dana Todd from Newsforce tell you what they like, and don't like, about 10 popular websites. What are the most important factors to consider when designing (or redesigning) a website? Where should you start? How can you ensure that your site works well on mobile devices as well as conventional browsers? Which tools can help make your efforts more productive and effective? Flash, widgets and Web 2.0 Do you need a.mobi domain? MORE >>

Forrester guru Jeremiah Owyang recommends desktop client Twhirl and search tool Tweetscan among his list of essential Twitter tools. This is the second of a two-part series. Part one covered what Twitter is and why it's cool ; this post discusses Twitter etiquette, tools, and speculation about its future. How to Twitter Properly Like any other social setting, Twitter has its own etiquette. This can be confusing to new users. And, as you can see by spending more than a few minutes on Twitter, it's apparently elusive to many long-time users as well.) That's because you probably are. Sorry. MORE >>

Charlene Li at Forrester Research has put together a nice report on how businesses can effectively utilize blogging (free, but registration is required for non-clients), titled "Blogging: Bubble or Big Deal? While there's no reason to doubt the accuracy of Forrester's consumer research, this statement is somwhat misleading. The report describes the growing popularity of blogs; why companies should consider blogging; how companies can take advantage of blogs; and best practices in corporate blogging. Blogs are informal conversations with customers. MORE >>