Most marketers in Advanced Manufacturing & Energy and other B2B segments are trying to figure out how best to use social media. With Twitter becoming a household word and LinkedIn and Facebook gaining users in the important 35-plus age category, the pressure is increasing to “do something.” Often compounding the sense of urgency is the loss of control as customers, distributors and employees start up blogs, groups or pages related to your business or products.
How do you get back control and deliver business value? Consider taking a cue from Levi Strauss. Just as Mr. Strauss made his fortune selling dry goods to miners rather than panning for gold, you can provide customers and business partners who are blogging, tweeting, poking and linking the tools to make their use of social media more enriching. You may not control the number of feeds and pages devoted to you or your products, but you can provide context to the conversation and strengthen relationships in the process.
Marketers in the Advanced Manufacturing and Energy industry who are interested in this supply-side approach should visit the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Social Media Resources page; a site increasing in popularity due to the recent H1N1 flu virus outbreak. Here, visitors can choose from a wide variety of social tools including blogs, eCards, YouTube videos, Flickr photos, podcasts, badges, buttons, widgets like the one you see below and syndicated content.
The CDC has an excellent social media strategy for communicating directly to consumers and this resources page enhances that effort by helping healthcare providers and organizations provide important, entertaining and accurate information to their friends, fans and followers. This ensures greater reach of the CDC’s messages and fulfills its mission of being the most credible source for health information in the U.S.
So if you find that your customers are mining social media for gold, consider offering them some supplies. Even if you’re strictly a B2B player, you can still be a source of better content and fun social interaction, and that may just be the solution for making more solid business connections in the Advanced Manufacturing & Energy marketplace.
(Guest contributor Ron Loch is a senior vice president at Gibbs & Soell Public Relations.)
Great thought. Providing customers and key opinion leaders with the tools to share their views and experiences can help them be ambassadors for your brand, and position you to help shape industry dialogue. This strategy also reinforces the essence of public relations – leveraging the credibility of a third party to deliver a message.