It’s a theme that’s gotten gradually louder across 2012, and we’d expect it to continue into the end of the year: a growing (and, in our opinion, appropriate) skepticism over the business value of social and digital media. For the last few years, we’ve been hearing from our friends in B2B marketing that B2C-like tactics – such as social media – are increasingly effective in the B2B environment. Cutting Edge B2B Marketing B2C Marketing Customer Understanding Global Marketing Social Media MarketingWhat are you keeping an eye on? MORE >>

Social media’s not so new anymore, but brands seem to be in the midst of high-profile failures all the time. So, we thought: if we were to create a guide on how to fail at social media, what would it look like? For a long time, companies and brands mostly thought of social media as a secondary channel for marcomms and customer service. But brands still aren’t putting the kind of strategic and planning muscle behind social media that they dedicate to other channels: for the most part, social is relegated to a role supporting more traditional channels. MORE >>

Digital media can help introduce doubt around current assumptions, disseminate new ideas broadly, and add social proof/credible support to those new ideas. We recently polled B2B CMOs on their top priorities for next year and “Digital integration” came pretty high on the list.  Since buyers increasingly delay contact with Sales in order to do their own supplier research online, digital is a pretty hot topic for B2Bs.  That’s why most invest almost 15% of marcomm budget in digital and emerging channels (and even higher for B2B services). Cisco is a great example here. MORE >>

Let’s look at last year’s ad for Chatter.com, Salesforce’s enterprise social media platform: There’s an emotional message here: the cloud, as embodied by Chatter, is a futuristic, quasi-magical solution for keeping far-flung, overworked teams on the same page. B2B marketers typically don’t get to participate in the Super Bowl hoopla – at least, not in the same way that their B2C colleagues do. But if you’ve got the budget for it, there’s a smart way that Super Bowl ads can fit into B2B marketing plans. Now, Chatter hasn’t done that. MORE >>

Cisco knew it needed to shift this perception, so it first listened to existing conversations on social media for about a month to establish a strong baseline knowledge of current trends and customer language.  When social media was new, many of our members set up teams to focus on Facebook and other social platforms; we found, though, that social must be integrated with the rest of the company’s marketing efforts and coordinated by a Ringmaster (you can read more about our HBR article here ).Just To get content into your customers’ hands, it needs to be credible.  MORE >>