Dance With Strangers

Last week I spoke at BlogWorld Expo and this week I’m going to dedicate some posts to what I learned while at the show. Today are the five things I learned about B2B Marketers.

Early on Wednesday morning I met my fellow panelists for the first time. Kipp Bodnar had brought together three people who had implemented social media into B2B companies. Mica Veihman works at Monsanto, David B. Thomas at SAS and myself at BreakingPoint. Sitting in the speakers room prior to the panel Kipp, Mica and myself started to bat around ideas on blogger engagement, branding ROI, measuring lead generation from social media and of course a bit of baseball. While we were sitting talking, I quickly realized this was one of the better and more productive conversations I had taken part in at any marketing conference in the past year. The reason was simple; these were my people.

B2B marketers are a unique group, having to implement sophisticated communications programs that speak to people and businesses, while adding value and demonstrating product benefits. This also means that B2B marketers are being sent to industry trade shows and not always making it to the popular marketing conferences. In my limited experience this is even more exaggerated at social media focused shows such as SXSW or BlogWorld. Often I leave events feeling disappointed because most of the people were not aware of the unique needs of B2B marketers. Leaving the speaker room on our way to our panel discussion I was extremely excited about the prospects for our panel since I had already learned so much.

Our panel ended up being engaged by the audience and I believe we shared some good insights with folks. I’m going to discuss the challenges of panels in general later this week, but at the end of that first day I sat down and wrote this post, making a list of important things I learned about B2B marketers from being on the panel:

1. B2B marketers involved with social media are not measuring the impact of their social media work enough. The reason may be a lack of understanding on how to use social CRM or years of being comfortable with relying on false ROI measurements.
2. Social media is still being viewed as a separate entity within organizations. My belief is that this is the wrong approach and that social media must be part of the DNA of all your communications, internal and external. You don’t do eMarketing anymore right? Well you shouldn’t be calling it social media marketing either, because it’s not true.
3. There are not enough resources for B2B marketers, at least not free resources.
4. B2B marketers want to get together more often amongst each other and focus on their needs for a longer period of time than one 45 minute panel.
5. It is a huge challenge to be socially aware during any level of speaking such as proposed by Jeremiah Owyang and when you are constantly checking the Twitter stream you miss important topics and start repeating what others or yourself already stated.

Every time I’m on a panel or speak at a conference I learn so much about myself and about other people. This trip was no different in that aspect. But what is now evident is that B2B marketers are starving for more practical information about implementing social media techniques, effectively tracking success and learning from each other.

Where do you go to learn from other B2B marketers? What resources are you using? What conferences get the B2B marketing aspect right?