B2B : on June 11th, acquaintances and strangers in the social field were together in Nijenrode to absorb strategy and cases during B2B goes social . I desperately long for good B2B examples, because they are moderately shared, so I had pinned my hopes on this program.
Although the evening was indeed structured in such a way that we went from strategy to practical examples, I could not escape the feeling that we were again talking a lot about 'how it actually could or should be', and the supply of good examples was rather poor. Is it really true that there are few (good) B2B cases?
Martijn van der Zee (Senior Vice President E-commerce Air France KLM) had a turkey mobile phone number list fascinating story about the approach and principles of the use of social at KLM, but especially towards end customers, mainly B2C. KLM Cargo for example, a B2B division par excellence, does very little with social. Strange, because B2C communication via social media is excellent at KLM: the knowledge and the mentality are in-house. Yet it seems that something is wrong, because these experiences are not translated to the B2B market. According to him, this is because it is much more difficult to add value to the chain in the cargo market.
Fergus Gloster's take aways
Fergus Gloster's take aways.
Deloitte, through Roos van Vugt , shows that it is possible to build a good B2B business case . B2B is all about relationships, engagement and connections. About being social. So why not use social media for that? Moreover, your employees, who maintain those relationships for your organization, are already online to a large extent. B2B also has the advantage that there is less buzz online -in terms of numbers-, so it is easier to oversee.
Comforting thought
We can console ourselves with the thought that even a strong social brand like KLM sometimes feels ashamed because some problems cannot yet be solved internally. Problems that you would actually like to have solved properly for excellent customer service, brand and reputation management or just plain commerce.