It has always seemed more or less straightforward to me how a consumer brand might use new capabilities in interpersonal connectedness to develop itself. Business-to-Business dynamics in this context, however, have always been harder for me to imagine. Why? Perhaps it’s because B2B is generally thought of as interaction between organizations, not individuals. It may also be because many of these types of purchasing decisions are so quantitatively driven that the “conversation” about the product just has a bit less proportional value.
Against this backdrop, I stumbled upon this little matrix the other day, courtesy of Ogilvy:
A glance at this table reminds us once again: If a conversation can take place about something, Twitter either already is or soon will be a channel through which that conversation flows , and there are plenty of critical conversations taking place in Business-to-Business.
For industries and markets that are lagging in tech-savvy, the implications are twofold:
- Those businesses that learn how to adopt and leverage these tools internally in spite of industry resistance will realize increased efficiencies that can give them competitive advantages over their peers.
- As adoption becomes widespread and businesses begin to use these tools as instruments of engagement and dissemination, institutions that procrastinate adoption will find themselves gradually cut off from these new key channels and markets, with potentially serious implications.