B2B Social Media Marketing

I came from Shanghai. The city was quite impressive! Sorry for not posting articles because of my sojourn in Shanghai:)

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   B2B marketing is a type of marketing that goes between companies. These days, the importance of B2B marketing is ever increasing because companies also can be customers. For example, for a company that produces construction materials, its customers could be individuals who want to buy its products to decorate their houses by themselves. However, more importantly, their main target customers would include big construction companies that need construction materials to build tall apartments. In this sense, appealing to those companies, which in this case are customers, is utterly pivotal. Being aware of the significance of B2B marketing, companies are now taking advantage of social media as a means to implement effective B2B marketing strategies.

   Let us case study BP, a British oil company, that is being recently accused of the disasterous oil spill. BP is severely castigated by myriad individuals, governments, and non-governmental organizations for not properly dealing with the current situation. In the first place, BP fails to give people an impression that it is being apologetic for what it has done. It continuously sent out TV commercials and google advertisements, which ended up aggravating the audience. Recently, Tony Hayward, the senior excutive of BP, came up on TV to express how regretful and apologetic he and his company is to this calamitous disaster of the century. However, it only made the audience angry, worsening the situation. Hurriedly, BP launched Twitter and Facebook to at least show that it sincerely wants to communicate with the public. Again, people grew skeptic of BP. However, the biggest loss BP had to bear was that those who had partnerships or did business decided to leave BP. The loss could have been minimized had BP established good social networks with those companies rather than stucking up its noses.

   There are two important lessons to learn from this case.

 

1) It is important to business to maintain good relationships with other connected businesses, and social media can serve as a good tool.

 

2) More importantly, establishing trust requires quite a long time. Thus, when managing social media, companies should earnestly treat their customers rather than being perfunctory.