The Marketing Leaders - Is social networking going mobile for B2B?

Talk is abundant about social networking in the B2C space, which BusinessWeek says is going mobile. Web 2.0 watered its growth, and 2007 has also been proclaimed the year of social networking. So is there any potential here in the B2B space?

With the dominance of YouTube and MySpace you’d be forgiven for thinking that it only has a realm in consumer markets. Even mobile social networking has been captured more by the B2C markets than its B2B counterpart, but Corbin Ball and Associates thinks in its article, ‘Twelve technology trends in the Meeting and Events Market’, that:

“Matchmaking programmes, popular in the singles scene, will continue to work their way into the meetings arena to bring people of like interests together…[and they] will move to mobile devices…one good contact at a meeting can often pay for the price of the entire trip. Using these technologies to assist people to connect can increase the value of the event significantly.”

The company believes that face-to-face meetings will remain a vital part of networking, education and relationship-building, but virtual meetings will increasingly play a role. With the uptake of mobile broadband networks, and with most of us having a mobile phone on our person most of the time or near us, there is a good opportunity for social networking to transform how mobile workers operate, network and interact with potential or existing customers, partners, and colleagues, on business-focused social media platforms using:

The company believes that the above are ideal for short, well-planned meetings, saving money on travel costs but they shouldn’t been seen as a replacement for traditional face-to-face meetings. Mobiles provide a very good platform too for conducting real-time event surveys, allowing instant feedback and voting from delegates and without the time delays associated with traditional surveys that have to be analysed after the event has finished. So if events using business social networking platforms are integrated with a mobile marketing dashboard, like that of Piri’s, it could then become possible for firms to have instant access to some very insightful and useful data for developing campaigns, networking and relationships.

Although focused more on the B2C sector, BusinessWeek’s article ‘Social Networking goes mobile’, which was written in May 2006 by Olga Kharif, quotes Jill Aldort of the Yankee Group and forecasted that almost every social network application is going to have a mobile element to it, and a number of multimedia-enabled handsets will come integrated with Flickr.

The idea of social networking revolves around the development of like-minded online communities of people, whether for business reasons, exchanging information and giving advice, or just for the purpose of meeting new friends. Microsoft, for example, in November 2006 launched a social networking and collaboration site for IT professionals called Aggreg8. The service allows them to set up working groups, post information and files, reply to postings, tag and rate them and receive updates using RSS feeds.

Social networking survey in B2B

45% of respondents have a profile on a social networking site;

Over half of them have a profile on Linkedin.com;

Other social networking sites popular with IT pros include Ryze, MySpace, and Orkut;

68.8% use social networking sites for business networking or development;

58.6 use them for personal reasons;

33.3% for searching for new employment;

And 13.8% use the technology for generating sales leads.

Source: Universal McCann and KnowledgeStorm and http://www.blog.clickz.com/061113-114538.htm

The research also shows that there is a cross-over between the usage of social networking media for purely social and business reasons, with a number of techies preferring consumer networks to those catering for their profession like ITtoolbox.com, Techrepublic.com, TechTarget.com, Infoworld.com and others. Perhaps they aren’t in a working frame of mind when they’re on this site though? Suggests Clickz.com’s blog posting.

In December 2006 CNET Networks UK launched atlarge.com, which it described as an “interesting experiment on two fronts…. firstly because it’s the first time we’ve launched a ‘non-media’ brand in the UK market…it’s an information service which brings user-generated content to the fore – written by business travellers for business travellers…secondly we are relying in the first instance on word-of-mouth and connected communities to populate the atlarge.com database. We figured that niche, ‘social networking’ is exactly that – it can only be as useful to the community it serves as the effort they put in to getting it off the ground…”, writes Suzie Daniels in ‘Atlarge.com – new social networking for business travellers’.

BT also launched a social networking platform in March, which targets small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). ZDNET.co.uk says it’s been testing the beta version of BT Tradespace since 7th February 2007. It is geared around helping SMEs and solving a major problem that they face: how to turn the Internet into an effective sales and marketing channel through which they can effectively promote their products and services. Some may not as yet been able to get to grips with the concepts behind the collaborative technologies of Web 2.0 as well. It allows SMEs to establish an online presence within minutes, but there’s no mention of whether there is any integration with mobile business social networking.

‘Mobile is accepted as the third screen for marketing, so how do you get on board?’

Mobile is proving to be one of the most effective channels for recruitment agents to communicate directly with their clients. It is instant, targeted and gets results. SMS messaging is used by many to communicate a range of information…

Source: http://www.wnim.com/archive/issue0706/index.htm

AirG, according to Mobile Marketing magazine, delivers what is described as ‘white label’ mobile social networking platforms to its brand partners. Over the last six years it has managed to build up a worldwide user-base of 20 million unique subscribers. The article claims that its users spend on average around 59 minutes a day using the service, and 59% of them don’t have a PC and over a third of them spend more than $80 on their phone bill. The article also reveals that online and mobile customers use the service in the same way, but this is far from reality. The differences make interaction more difficult. In the consumer world Match.com reportedly had tried to create a mobile version of its dating site, but in the end it had to create a separate database. Mobile is a different medium, currently requiring shorter lengths and more to the point types of communication.

However, the findings of AirG’s research sound impressive. The firm’s director, Frederick Ghahramani, commented: “We have been asked to do a few polls. It’s easy for us to throw a survey out and have a question answered quickly. On one survey, we got 10,000 responses in 20 minutes; on another 30,000 in 90 minutes.” Strangely enough he doesn’t want to turn these fantastic results into a revenue stream. It acts as a promotional tool, showing the power of being able to quickly interact with users and gain responses from the communication with them.

The key revenue stream and opportunity, particularly with regards to mobile social networking media for business and for consumers, lies in the potential for companies to not only interact with users, but to also to sell targeted advertising based on a user’s profiling. AirG estimates that it managed to sell advertising on about 2% of the 20 billion total page impressions last year. The key challenge is to convince advertisers that mobiles should be a key part of their marketing mix. The trouble is that they don’t often understand the value and potential power of mobile marketing, whether this concerns its potential for viral marketing or targeted advertising alone.

With the advent of Web 2.0 networking (plus targeted advertising etc.) with mobiles could, in spite of its limitations, prove very effective. The growth of the mobile broadband network for one has led to some phones being designed with bigger screens to improve the user’s experience, and it also opens up the potential for using a wider range of social networking applications for businesses to widen their contact networks, a new way to gain instant feedback from surveys, and to find new sources of revenue in ways that they’d never imagined before. There’s still more to be done to migrate users over from PCs to mobiles, particularly in the B2B networking space, which doesn’t comparatively seem to hit the headlines as much as it should and a much as those targeting consumers.

About Piri Limited

PIRI is an affordable, easy to use web based application that allows you to offer a wide range of reliable mobile messaging solutions to your clients, customers or users. Send out broadcast SMS messages advertising new products, run competitions and opinion polls, gather marketing information, all of this and a lot more can be achieved with PIRI.



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