This Spotlight on Social Media for Business-to-Business Companies series is brought to you by LinkedIn, where marketers can reach the world’s largest audience of professionals as they network, collaborate and share valuable business insights and information.
Veteran marketing pros and serial entrepreneurs Gary Slack and Lou Friedmann are bringing daily deals to the b-to-b marketplace on March 28 with the launch of their Chicago-based startup Bizy. Slack took time out of the pre-launch preparations to tell SmartBrief about the new business.
How did you come up with this idea?
It was the work we did circa 2002 to 2004 helping launch eBay Business, eBay’s small-business portal. Until then, eBay had been a purely consumer marketplace, but they started noticing small businesses coming to the platform to list and buy stuff — mostly IT equipment in the early days, but later, restaurant, farming and construction equipment.
Today, small-business buying and selling reportedly represents around 10% of all activity on eBay. (read more…)
This Spotlight on Social Media for Business-to-Business Companies series is brought to you by LinkedIn, where marketers can reach the world’s largest audience of professionals as they network, collaborate and share valuable business insights and information.
The following Q-and-A is with Kodak Online Marketing Manager Brian Nizinsky, who handles Kodak’s business-to-business social media marketing efforts.
Do you feel like the name recognition that Kodak has as a business-to-consumer brand helps or hurts its business-to-business efforts?
I think both. In the B2C space, what the brand is associated with – the digital camera, the printer, film – in a lot senses may not help in the B2B space. People think of Kodak in the realm of ‘Oh my father had a film camera’ or whatever, but … in the consideration phase, when people are doing initial research or gathering vendors together or manufactures together for potential purchases in the B2B space, the Kodak name may not come up. (read more…)
This Spotlight on Social Media for Business-to-Business Companies series is brought to you by LinkedIn, where marketers can reach the world’s largest audience of professionals as they network, collaborate and share valuable business insights and information.
The following Q-and-A is with Jeanne Quinn, marketing manager for Cisco Small Business.
What role does social media play in Cisco Small Business’s lead-generation strategy? Have you found social networks to be an effective sales aid? What tips can you share?
Right now in Cisco Small Business, we’re really focused on getting to know our customers and resellers better by doing lots of social listening — looking across lots of social platforms to see what small businesses and the resellers/IT consultants selling to them are saying about Cisco, as well as about technology in general. We then respond where we can to help solve problems and answer questions that people have.
And while we may get a lead here or there out of that effort, our main focus on is making people aware of us as experts in small-business networking and communications technology, and then connecting potential customers with resellers who can help them get the technology that will help their business be more effective and profitable. (read more…)
This Spotlight on Social Media for Business-to-Business Companies series is brought to you by LinkedIn, where marketers can reach the world’s largest audience of professionals as they network, collaborate and share valuable business insights and information.
The following Q-and-A is with Ashley Goetz, marketing coordinator at Quantum Retail, which provides technology and software solutions to retail companies. Read more about Quantum Retail’s best practices for businesses on its blog.
A lot of social-media best practices are aimed at consumer-focused businesses. How do you need to rethink social-media marketing when you’re approaching it from a business-to-business perspective?
When you’re doing it from a business-to-business perspective, it’s a little bit harder to engage higher level executives. What we try to approach it as is a [tool] for knowledge sharing and connecting those executives with resources that they maybe wouldn’t otherwise see.
For example, [on] our Twitter account, we don’t necessarily use it like retailers do — where you’re interacting with customers, answering questions. (read more…)
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Spotlight on business-to-business: Inside Intel's Facebook attack strategy
By Jesse Stanchak on April 25th, 2011 | 5 comments on this post
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