The last couple of weeks I’ve been working on a series of case studies looking at social media marketing. Specifically I’ve been interviewing small to medium-sized tech firms about how they have made the transition from a static, traditional website to one that is more interactive and community oriented. We went with smaller firms because, while Dell and Google have highly engaging Web presences, we wanted to find out how firms with limited budgets are making the transition.

I wrapped up interviewing this week and found some great case examples to work with (thanks to everyone who participated!) though so far no one has felt like they really nailed the strategy, as we expected. All told I got to speak with 10 firms, all in different stages of deployment and with different strategies. There was great diversity, except for one little thing. When I asked how the traffic on the community parts of their websites compared to the corporate site overall we got a relatively tight range:  15%-30% of the corporate traffic is now coming from the site’s community features.

Now, longtime readers of this blog know that I pride myself on my stats chops, so there should be no mistake that this is not a statistically significant finding. But I do find it curious that such a tight range would emerge from just 10 interview, and I have a sneaking suspicion that further research would reveal a finding that is not far off from what we have seen so far. For those readers that have the numbers to weigh in, what have you seen on your own sites?

Not surprisingly the firms with strong discussion forums were up in the 30% range, while those with young blogging efforts were down in the 15% range, though across the board the interviewees reported growing traffic. In addition much of that traffic has been coming from organic search, bringing new visitors to the site, associating the firm’s content with valuable keywords  like “steel pricing”, and generally raising the SEO of the site at large. In fact, the one value of social media marketing that nearly everyone pointed too was search-engine optimization. So, if you’re trying to get a social media project off the ground I highly recommend keeping that nugget in your back pocket. Client engagement may still be a bit soft, but SEO is something most CMOs and even CEOs are willing to get behind.

A 10% boost in traffic (there has to be some overlap) and dramatically improved SEO sounds like a win to me.

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Just in case you can’t get enough of me, my colleague Tom Grant recently interviewed me for a Podcast for his blog The Heretech where we talk about marketing, B2B social media, and trash on the East Coast. All in all it was a fun 15 minutes.

If you want to skip to where things get a little “off-topic” jump to 10:33 and listen on. You will be treated to Tom trying to claim that he can understand the suffering of Lions fans as a 49ers fan, me disabusing him of that notion, a short discussion of driving habits by geography, and why the pace of the West Coast feels about right.

The Heretech Podcast

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The biggest news in the tech industry the past week has been the rumored IBM acquisition of Sun Microsystems. Like everyone else who follows the tech industry I have spent more than a few hours trying to get my head around all the competitive implications. Needless to say the rumor has made for some interesting hallway conversations, not to mention some lively debates among analysts in the office.

At the same time I have been finalizing the material for the B2B Social Media workshop my colleague Laura Ramos and I will be conducting tomorrow in Foster City, and next month in Orlando. In doing so, I couldn’t help but notice I have a lot of Sun examples of social media done right. IBM holds it’s own, but in the tech industry specifically Sun and Dell are the poster children of social media marketing, and both have been struggling mightily.

A couple of years ago I was on a panel with Toby Redshaw of Motorola, who in the course of discussion confidently declared that the only way to get a Web 2.0 initiative off the ground was to fire the CEO. Since then I have seen just that over and over again: the firms looking to implement Web 2.0 tools for social media marketing — as well as employee collaboration and productivity — are those with a “motivated” CEO, typically one who is fresh on the job. The CEO fresh on the job does not typically find himself at the most successful company.

Which brings us back to Sun and IBM. Let’s take a quick look at their homepages as they stood in August of 2008 (the orange boxes are mine). Notice anything? One has community and social media all over the place while the other offers just a hint. So which one is acquiring which? And is this more than just coincidence?

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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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