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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