The changing face of networking

One of the biggest developments over the past 18 months in the consumer space has been the rise of the social networks. This rapid consumer adoption of sites like MySpace, Bebo and Facebook has been quickly picked up by the business community with B2B social networking sites such as LinkedIn which, after seeing a slow start to member numbers 3-4 years ago, has doubled in size over the last 2 years on the back of the social networking boom.

The prediction is that consumer focused social networking sites will evolve away from their current generalist nature towards more specialist communities; whether that’s related to shopping (Yub.com), pets (fuzzster.com) or student travel (statravellers.com). This will become increasingly relevant for the B2B world where communities can be easily built on industry sectors. It’s always been true within the interactive and software world, where developer forums have been a key means of product development and solutioning, but these more specialist social networks are popping against wider industry sectors:

• MedicalMingle.com for Healthcare professionals
• Sermo, where doctors can seek advice and get access to relevant content
• INmobile.org - a network for senior mobile telecoms executives
• Adgabber - for the advertising community
• E-Factor – a European-based network for entrepreneurs to share knowledge and advice
• Damsels in Success – a women-only professional networking site, focusing on career and business issues.

B2B brands will need to understand how to ensure that they can leverage these new networks to drive awareness, seed content (as with the B2C world) and build customer advocacy.

Online PR is important here – the ability to get news out quickly, targeted to your specialist audience and often through trade bodies, can enhance influence in the marketplace and so improve the ability to get new customers considering you as an authority in your space.

And outside of the social networks themselves, the personal Blog has also been adopted by the B2B community. One of the most famous examples of B2B blogs is Darren Strange’s “Officerocker” that he created in the run up to the launch of Office 2007. Darren is the UK product manager for the 2007 Microsoft Office system and is credited with changing Microsoft Office into a personality rather than a faceless product through blogging. Since setting up the blog two years ago, “Officerocker” has allowed him to build a dialogue with customers, partners and press attracting around 250,000 hits each month.

Potentially one of the biggest (but currently most under-utilised) communication areas is RSS. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) allows users to subscribe to an information feed from a website and view it within their own browser. What’s important about RSS feeds is that (a) the user has actively subscribed to that information, and (b) unlike email, there are no ISP issues to be navigated, so RSS means 100% deliverability of information to the user.

Some 80% of internet professionals are already using industry or sector-specific RSS feeds, and more than half of them (54%) have personalised homepages. [Source: E-consultancy / Convera, Nov 2007]