The first full report from our recent survey of how business technology buyers use social media is now officially on the Forrester website. Its available to all Forrester clients, but if you are not a client here are some of the highlights:

The big takeaway: Technology buyers are highly socially active, the most active we have seen so far. Many technology vendors have been on the leading edge of social media marketing for some time (Dell and IBM come to top of mind) and for good reason. IT buyers — both in the IT department and within the line of business are highly engaged with social media, and use blogs, discussion forums, and rich media in many technology purchase processes.

What’s really exciting however is the difference between social activity overall, and social activity for business — or as we have been calling it in the office “puppies vs. servers.” So far puppies are still far more popular than servers but its not too far off. We expected a drop, but for technology buyers personal behavior really seems to translate into business behavior. We expect that trend to only grow over time.

If you’ve been reading this blog you know this research is a cornerstone of my and Laura Ramos’ agenda for the coming year so get ready for more to come! In the meantime, you can catch up with all the details of our first report by downloading the audio and slides from our recent Webinar, or checking out the slides embedded below.

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I’ve got a couple of upcoming Webinars that should be very relevant to anyone who follows my research. Best of all they are free! I hope you can join, and please email me if you have any questions about the content.

1. The NewsGator team has engaged me to present some my recent research on the value of Enterprise 2.0 — especially during a recession — to their customers and prospects Feb. 19, 2009 at 2 pm ET. The Webinar will mostly be me discussing how to leverage Enterprise 2.0 technologies for business efficiency and cost savings, as well as how to position the technology to executives. To join please fill out the form on NewsGator’s site.
2. My colleague Laura Ramos and I are holding a free Webinar for prospects (and clients that missed our Teleconference last week) on our recent B2B Social Technographics survey work (for some posts on the topic see here). The talk is going to have a lot of good content and a bit of Forrester pitch. It should be well worth your time if you are interested in social media and space is limited! Only the first 100 folks who sign up will get in (I know, I know, I tried). To sign up click here.

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Tomorrow morning (8AM PST, register here) my colleague Laura Ramos and I will be hosting a Forrester Teleconference detailing some of the early findings from our recent business to business (B2B) social buying survey. In preparation I have had my head WAY down in the weeds of the data and, as I did a couple of weeks ago, I wanted to surface one of the gems I uncovered: how technology buyers look at forums and social networking sites.

Forums are in many ways the old warhorse of both social media and the Internet, so not surprisingly they are heavily featured in our survey of B2B social media. They are heavily used by technologists, especially those in a highly technical discipline like hardware virtualization or storage. And they are often the most fleshed out social media in any technology vendor’s toolbox. Further, they can serve as a fantastic jumping off point into more full-featured social networking, as Dell has already begun to show.

For marketers one of the big questions is how great an impact do these sorts of forums have on a purchase decision? We know they are used for technical problem solving, but do buyers check them out before making a decision? The answer, is most definitely yes, but not to the extent we might expect:

When we asked respondents to rate the extent to which they prefer visiting forums and social networking sites to gain information about a purchase we find that exactly half prefer not to. A little more than one-in-four buyers prefer to use these sites for information gathering, and only 11% strongly prefer them. Forums perform a bit better among members of the IT department, but not much.

For marketers this should come as a relief. Few marketers have any sway whatsoever over support forums and communities and if buyers were making heavy use of them when vetting a product or vendor it would probably lead to some long political battles about how to manage, present, and even participate in these forums. For now, bullet dodged. That said, these forums have a ton of value for buyers, and while they may not be making use of them extensively today, many expect to going forward: When we asked respondents which emerging information sources they will look to over the next 12 months 60% cited forums and social networks, almost twice as much as the next most popular choice.

Marketers, start laying the political groundwork now. In the next one to two years your technical forums are likely to become a much bigger part of your social media strategy.

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