Charlie Treadwell, Director of Social Marketing at Symantec and Jon Lewis, Vice President of Content at LaneTerralever have discussed social media in the B2B market - find out what theu believe there's unequivocal proof that B2B leads in proving the value of social. 

Lewis: What are some of the challenges you’ve run into when trying to prove the value of social media in a B2B organization?

Treadwell: We were always having trouble getting in front of our CEO or the head of sales at Cisco to really show the value of social. So, we wanted to do something like Dell and Gatorade did with their social media listening center. There is just something about actually having a command center or listening center that gets the attention of your executives. That way our executives could actually see instant feedback from people they knew. All of a sudden, we had people like the CEO saying, “What else can you show me?” That was huge for us. It was all because we were able to visualize the social conversation and make it meaningful to them.

Lewis: What role do you think data has in the future of social media marketing?

Treadwell: When you break down social media to what it is at its core you realize it’s ultimately people engaging with people. Those engagements produce a large set of data for marketers. Being able to interpret, process and blend that data with other data sets, like your booking, sales, web traffic and demographic data, is where you start to see the largest opportunities.

It’s critical to make those opportunities available and that requires bringing different parts of your business together and blending data in different systems. You need people that can not only process the data, but can then communicate what it means in a way that people can take it and do something with it quickly.

Lewis: What is the biggest misconception about social media in the B2B space?

Treadwell: While we spend a lot of time talking about things like big data, the thing that people forget is whether it’s B2B or B2C, at the end of the day, you’re still speaking to real people. Whether it is an influencer or decision maker on the business side, you can still have that person fall in love with and bond with your brand the way they do with Nike or Pepsi.

In B2B it doesn’t always have to be “cold” business content. Instead, you should aim to create fun and engaging content that strikes an emotional chord with the consumer.

One of the interesting things about my new role at Symantec is we have a consumer brand and an enterprise brand. We get to blend many of those different opportunities and learning across both sides of the organization.

Lewis: What are some of the most important things you think B2C marketers could learn from their B2B counterparts?

Treadwell: I recently sat down and had coffee with the VP of Marketing at one of the biggest consumer brands in the world. I asked her what they were doing and she flat out said, “You guys are three years ahead of us.” I think that speaks to our ability as B2B marketers to make the business case and get people together across different departments and business units. Another big thing for the consumer side of things is how they use analytics. I think businesses have no shortage of MBA’s and statisticians. The key is leveraging them in the right way.

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