Participation in an industry specific neutral B2B social media site that is organized as a community is the best choice, in our opinion, for medium sized B2B businesses.

 

A neutral B2B social media site is, well, “neutral” which conveys great authority and credibility.

 

An industry specific neutral B2B social media site may have many user and supplier participants – in most cases, based on our observation, most supplier participants will be suppliers who supply products or services that are complimentary or related to your offer, helping you create more and better value to draw in more community members. 

 

Your objective on a neutral B2B social media site is to build trust and respect within the community.

 

Trust + Respect = Authority

 

Authority is your measure of value in the community on any B2B social media site.

 

When you build Authority coupled with an engaging warm, open style, encouraging comments, replying to comments and generally connecting to the community members you will build what we call new Professional Friendships.

 

And guess what? People like to buy from Trusted and Respected companies. They like to buy from companies with Authority.  And most importantly people like to buy from people with whom they have friendship! 

 

You should think of Authority as an asset - the same way you think of a capital asset like a new machine or a new factory. Buy it, maintain it, improve it, and it will create returns for as long as you own it. 

 

The only difference is that through a neutral B2B social media site, Authority is much less expensive to build than buying any sort of machine! 

 

We recently studied an example of a company who makes reflow ovens. Reflow ovens are used in the processing of printed circuit boards (PCB) for the electronics industry. In this case we are developing a B2B social media site called www.pcbengineer.com.

 

What a rich environment for the engineer who is responsible for the quality production of printed circuit boards!  This could be the most valuable site a PCB process engineer could have.

 

Imagine your content on a neutral B2B social media site tagged and organized by subject, forums for users to interact with other users and industry experts such as your people, online technologies allowing users to chat with your people anytime they are online – for most global businesses this will be 24 hours per day allowing you to intercept time-critical problems faced by your users and make a sale!

 

Imagine the the participation; imagine the contribution some of these people will make! Imagine the quality of the relationships and the loyalty you will generate by involving yourself in a neutral B2B social media site when you solve a problem for one of your users. Who do you think he will ask first when he is entering his sales cycle and thinking of a large new purchase?

 

You!