Monday, September 23, 2013

Social Media for B2B

Social Media for B2B

The B2C side of social media has seen greater pull so far. However, the influence of social media in the B2B space is being recognized to a great extent recently. A report by Business.com reveals that 55% of B2B survey respondents search for information using social media.
It will be interesting to see how the giants in the Master Data Management (MDM) space like SAP, Oracle and IBM are adapting to this surge in demand by their Fortune 500 customers.
Though these firms have their pages on Facebook and Linkdin for promotion and better customer service, there have been hardly any initiatives so far which are directed toward integrating social media as a new channel for identifying, acquiring and servicing customers. MDM needs to build the capability to match the data fed in from social media and attach it to a customer profile that already exists within the enterprise.  The company can then actually know what a particular customer really thinks about its products. Marketing can then be much more targeted and product positioning can be easily verified.  
Adding social sites as a data source to the MDM hub and a shift in mindset is needed to ensure that social sites are not seen within the organization as a mere advertising tool but as a medium of interaction between the company and the customers.
http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1666414.

Prachi Snehal

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