Of all the questions I’m asked about social media, its applicability in business-to-business companies is probably the most common. Come to think of it, it’s not always posed in the form of a question. Just as often, it’s a statement: “There’s no role for social media in B-to-B.”

Social media actually makes more sense in B-to-B companies than business-to-consumer firms.

A lot of B-to-B companies evidently agree. In a 2007 report by Forrester, researcher Laura Ramos found that, as of the end of 2006, nearly 40% of B2B marketers surveyed used blogs, social networks, or user-generated content in their efforts.

The benefits of social media to B-to-B companies is simple: It’s all about relationships. B-to-C companies nearly always need to get their messages to large, amorphous groups of people; the companies have no relationship with the vast majority of those people. In most B-to-B environments, companies know exactly who their customers and prospective customers are. Social media provides B-to-B companies with a channel to have conversations that you’d like to have one-on-one with every customer and prospect, but just can’t.

Sun Microsystems, a social media poster child, gets this. (Most people don’t think about it, but Sun is primarily a B-to-B company; you’re not likely to find a rackmount server at Best Buy and the average customer isn’t likely to download and install Solaris.) Commenting about the value of having his employees blogging about their work, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz said…

I don’t have the advertising budget to get our message to, for instance, Java developers working on handset applications for the medical industry. But one of our developers, just be taking time to write a blog, can do a great job getting our message out to a fanatic readership.

Hat tip to Phil Gomes for that quote, by the way.

During an interview for my upcoming book (Tactical Transparency, co-authored by John C. Havens), Schwartz offered additional insight into the value of engaging B-to-B customers through social media:

I don???t just sell to my customers, I love my customers. I embrace my customers and ask them to embrace me, . I ask them for their insights and input. As a result, the products we build become assets of those communities. Somebody who feels part of a community is going to be a much more aggressive evangelist for our products than someone who just paid $29.95 for it at a big-box retailer.

Those customers become “aggressive evangelists” because Sun—using social media as a channel for transparency—shares with customers “what???s next for a product, how we are going to manage our relationship with them, how we are going to treat them.”

That’s exactly the kind of insight that can be shared on a B-to-B blog, along with other carefully-chosen social media tools.

Is there really a reason to worry about the competition?

Some worry that such open, transparent communication can give too much away to the competition. I view this worry from two angles. First, if it really is something the competition shouldn’t see, don’t communicate it—not on a blog, not in a press release, not in any venue that can result in unintended disclosure. But I do have to wonder how much of this concern targets information from which competitors couldn’t really benefit. After all, if you’re already talking about it, how quickly could a competitor catch up with you? (I once read a quote about excessive focus on the competition that stuck with me: “Nobody ever won a tennis match by keeping their eye on the scoreboard.”)

Again, Sun’s Schwartz makes it clear that there is a difference between open discussion with customers and the need to keep secret things secret:

We also have a responsibility to our customers not to leak what they???ve shared with us. We have legal obligations because we???re subject to Reg FD, which says we have to share with everybody at the same time information that might be deemed material to our performance. For folks to violate those principles because it???s convenient or expeditious isn???t a good thing. Everybody can talk to everybody, I don???t have any problem with that, but everybody should remember that we have signed confidentiality agreements with folks and we have to honor them. There are a lot of people who do business with us because they know we can keep a secret.

In other words, open conversation via social media and confidentiality are not mutually exclusive.

B-to-B and blogs

There are more practical uses of B-to-B blogging than discussing company plans. At EDS, for example, the Next Big Thing blog, authored by EDS’s fellows, explores the future of technology from the perspective of the company’s brightest minds. The topics addressed by EDS’a bloggers are higher-level discussion topics that affect companies and the world strategically; there is no focus by the fellows on day-to-day operational issues.

Johnson Controls blogs for reputational reasons, a B-to-B company aiming its messages at consumers with its Your Energy Forum blog, which focuses on the smart use of energy at home, at work, and on the road. A blurb on the blog touts it as “a way for those in the energy efficiency movement to discuss how we’re working to reduce energy consumption. Visit to give or share your perspective.”

Architectural firms, general contractors, and (of course) PR agencies—along with a host of other B-to-BN companies—are all blogging.

Social Media Today puts another spin on B-to-B blogging. The company manages sites populated by posts from prominent bloggers in related fields; readers can not only comment on the posts but use a Digg-like function to vote for posts they like. The sites are B-to-B focused and sponsored by companies anxious for the insights not only from the bloggers, but from the comments and votes they inspire. The Customer Collective—focused on B-too-B sales and marketing—is sponsored by Oracle, for example.

(You can hear an interview I recently interviewed Robin Fray Carey for IABC’s conference podcast on BlogTalk Radio; Social Media Today is a conference sponsor.)

B-to-B beyond blogging

But there’s more to social media than just blogs. Many of the channels presumed to cater exclusively to consumers can serve B-to-B communications. A search of YouTube revealed more than 2,000 videos tagged “software as service” many focused on B-to-B companies like Salesforce.com. By putting B-to-B-related videos on YouTube, you make them embedable elsewhere and increase the likelihood that they’ll be discovered and talked about by your target market.

IBM recently re-launched its IBM and the Future Of podcast series. Here, thought leaders within the company, often joined by outside experts, examine how technology will impact a wide variety of activities. Recent topics have included shopping, movies, water management, data security, mobile phones, Africa and medical imaging.

Interviewed for “Tactical Transparency, investor relations expert Domnic Jones explained the value of blogs like EDS’s and podcasts like IBM’s, which offer insight into the depth of the company’s expertise by shining a light on the people who will bring profitable new services to life. “???Past performance is one thing, but investors are placing their bets on the future of the company,” Jones said, and employee talent will drive much of that future.

IBM has found other ways to tap into social media. The company’s developerWorks site allows customers to network with each other. IBM also uses the site to share information and bookmarks of interest with customers. Gartner Group’s Nikos Drakos, commenting on developerWorks, said, “If you create a place where engineers can find peer support, learning, and provide feedback to vendors, you are ultimately providing better customer care.”

More traditional social networks represent another avenue for B-to-B companies. Ernst & Young, for instance, executed a recruiting campaign on Facebook that captured the attention of The Wall Street Journal, among others. Deloitte used YouTube as a channel for recruiting with its Deloitte Film Festival, featuring employee-produced videos.

If this post weren’t already running ridiculously long, I’d talk about the use of widgets by B-to-B companies, LinkedIn networks blog network advertising potential, the list goes on. And what’s the potential for emerging channels like Twitter and FriendFeed?

With so many B-to-B companies engaged in social computing—an so many demonstrating solid business results from lead generation to bolstered reputations to strengthened customer loyalty—why do so many people continue to insist that social media has no place in the B-to-B world?