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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Well, dead may be a bit of an overstatement, but it is clear that the phrase “Web 2.0″ is dying.

This week my new report “Inquiry Insights: Web 2.0 And Social Media Technologies, Q1 2009” hit the Forrester Website. Throughout a given year, Forrester fields thousands of inquiries from clients and non-clients alike . Analyzing the nature and frequency of these inquiries — while not yielding statistically significant conclusions — provides a fascinating window into the minds of IT professionals, marketers, and technology vendors concerned with specific topics and often shows major trends in technology interest throughout the technologies’ life cycle.

So what have we seen for the Web 2.0/Social media market? Though the arguments about what to call the market — consisting of blogs, wikis, social networks, RSS, widgets, etc. — have mostly faded away, what people call the market is no more settled than it was 3 or 4 years ago. The big shift: a move away from “Web 2.0″ and a move towards “social media” or even more frustratingly towards “social networking” as a overarching category (not pictured below).

The change has been occurring slowly over the last year or so, with the phrase Web 2.0 hitting its peak among Forrester’s clients in Q2 2008, and falling off from there. From my point of view Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle’s effort to evolve the phrase into “Web Squared” is effort well spent; Web 2.0 had been getting stale and had lost its cachet.

One final note for the Enterprise 2.0 enthusiasts out there, that phrase has clearly not caught on with Forrester’s clients yet at all. Partly this is due to the fact that — for reasons I don’t want to get into  — Forrester resisted using the phrase for the last couple of years, and partly because Forrester clients interested in Enterprise 2.0 topics also use the phrase social media. It makes life mighty confusing for our inquiry team whose job it is to route the questions to the right analysts.

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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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My colleague Josh Bernoff just blogged the opening of the 2009 Forrester Groundswell Awards. The entry forms are now live and waiting for you! The big change this year is that we are now taking B2B entries as a stand-alone category. So, if you have a great social media implementation or a client you are proud of we are looking forward to your entry.

Here are the instruction courtesy of Josh:

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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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I just finished reading a great Q&A in CW Bulletin, the online companion to CW Magazine. The interview is with a veteran creative director and entrepreneur at Grayton Integrated Publishing on how to cut costs with creative projects like marketing, advertising, and publications.

The interview contains some very sound advice, and I was struck at how much of it sounds familiar (pun intended):

What’s the first step to defining your objectives?
Whether you’re creating a magazine or a brochure or launching a full-blown campaign, don’t discuss what it will look like until you’ve agreed on its purpose. Who is your audience? What are you telling them? What are you hoping to achieve? Don’t try to figure out if your vehicle should be a bus or a Ferrari until you’ve determined where it’s coming from and where it’s headed.

Turns out the interviewee is my mother. Long-time readers of this blog may also remember that my Grandmother was recently in Sailing Magazine.

Alright dad, time to step it up!

Update: A few gramatical errors and some horrible spelling errors. Turns out my mother was also a copy editor.

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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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Since early October my colleague Laura Ramos and I have been publishing a series of reports examining the role of digital media in the business technology buying process. The data we have been drawing upon comes from Forrester’s Business Data Services offering and consists mainly of just one question: “When researching and comparing products, how important is each of the following media as a source of information for informing your purchase decision?”

Its a pretty simple question, but has been powerful in helping us to understand the importance of traditional and social media, online and offline interactions, the role of a sales rep, and many others. The results from this one question have been so encouraging we have invested the time and money in running an entire survey on the subject (some of the early results are here, and I will be sharing more on this blog over time).

The series of reports we have been publishing have been organized by technology category (networking and telecommunications, IT services, hardware, security, etc.) but some common themes are emerging. Here are three:

1. Social media is important to technology buyers. When compared to traditional information sources like peers and colleagues, sales reps, and trade shows, social media is not the be-all, end-all information source — the vast majority of buyers will still rely most heavily on the people and channels they know when making a technology purchase decision. However social media is starting to have an impact: among telecom and network buyers, for example, nearly two-thirds find discussion forums and social networks important. For hardware buyers the number is 64%; for security buyers it is 59%. I’ll even save you the suspense: Software will be a big number too. Its clear that social media is having an impact, and its one that we expect to only grow over time.
2. Buyers in more technical disciplines rely on social media more than the average. We can probably call this the discussion forums effect, but within technology categories it is the most technical disciplines that rely on social media the most. Among hardware buyers for example, discussion forums, blogs, and rich media all have the greatest impact on server and PC virtualization, data center, and storage decision-makers. Their peers focused on desktops, laptops, and hardware services, by contrast, rely more on traditional information sources.
3. Smaller firms place value on fewer information sources. Buyers at the largest companies have developed an omnivore attitude towards information sources; they consume nearly all of them voraciously. At smaller firms buyers are far more likely to rely on just one or two information sources. This sets up an odd dichotomy: At larger firms more buyers are likely to engage social media; at smaller firms those who do engage are more likely to be influenced.

I am very excited to dig into the results from our recent survey and will be writing up more insights — as well as the heavy-weight segmentation and approach research — over the coming year.

If you are interested in digging into the results along with us shoot me an email.

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