Titled, "Social Media and B-to-B: What's Working?, What isn't?, and What's Next?", the event lasted two days and involved about 120 people. Pictured is Ralph Oliva, Executive Director at ISBM - Penn State and Marketing Professor at Penn State Smeal College of Business, welcoming the crowd to the meeting room during day 2.
Providing insight at the event, in addition to me, were:
- Paul Auditore - SAP
- Rob Leavitt - Solutions Insights
- Jeff Hayzlett - Kodak
- Tony Summerlin - Kickstand LLC
- Arvind Rangaswamy - Penn State
- Ralph Oliva - ISBM
- Doug Webster - Cisco
- Dave Will - Peach New Media
- Scott Gillum - GyroHSR
Here is my biggest take-away from the event: Unlike discussions of B2B SOCIAL MEDIA in the past, this discussion had COHERENCY. As Ralph Oliva put it, in the past, we were comparing apples to bicycles. Now, we are beginning to see order and best practices.
Some of the consistent themes that I noted in my twitter stream (follow #isbm3) are:
- Put your tech people up front when using B2B social media. THEY are your ROCK STARS!
- EXPERIMENT w social media.
- CONSTANT education & learning are required for social media to be done well
- REACH OUT to your network to gain their insights and support
- social media can become a major SALES CHANNEL
- long-tail & quality matter
- advertising can be reduced and sales can be driven up