How useful is social networking for companies involved in B2B marketing? Its worth has been identified for B2C but has never really been integrated into B2B.  This may be changing as outlined in this article entitled ‘A New Place to Face-to-Face: B2B Social Networking.’  Suggestions for utilizing social netwoorks include these rules:

Now before you run off and start participating in 100 different social networking sites, there are a few rules to abide by. First make sure you are only participating in those sites that are truly relevant to your product or service. Second, participate in a transparent fashion. Let people know who you are and be open and honest. Third, be prepared to accept the good with the bad. Don’t get defensive if people don’t love your product or service. Use this as a critical R&D feedback loop. 

The article goes on to suggest that a total commitment is required to make use of these opportunities and that a two way dialog (without actually meeting face-to-face) is the goal.

A nice piece on the need for reputation management when handling your online brand.

A few months ago, I had a series of conversations with managers who reflected on the increasing difficulty of managing the perception of their brand. They told stories of customer complaints spreading like wildfire through the Web before they had a chance to deal with them, and opinions expressed in blogs and forwarded e-mails by some of their detractors that appeared to be magically reprocessed into fact.

You don’t have to search hard to find examples of such challenges. An international fast-food chain is sideswiped by images available on YouTube of rats roaming freely in one of their outlets. A global apparel maker contends with allegations, published online, of operating sweatshops.  Read more

 

Your brand is one of your most important assets.  Your brand distinguishes you and your products.  It is an integral part of communicating your message and building your business.  Brand building crosses different media. For your web related brand identity you should be aware of two areas that are important:

•    Your Website
•    Other Websites and Search Engine Listings

Consistency of your brand is important.  Is your search engine identity in line with your website identity?  Ask yourself these two questions.

1.    Does your site communicate your brand effectively?

2.    What do the top ten search engine results for your company and your products communicate about your brand?

What the top ten search engine results say about you related to your brand identity.  These results are viewed on as being your content, even though much of it was never written by you.  Therefore you should actively manage your search engine space.

I got this quote from Seth Godin’s blog and it seems to related well to the idea of getting away from a single website mentality – to an total internet presence way of thinking.

“You don’t need one home page. You need a hundred or a thousand. And they’re all just as important”

Many people who have an online business think in terms of their ‘home’ website when in actual fact they should be obsessing over all the other different ways that they can establish their brand online.