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In his famous visit to the Galapagos Islands, Charles Darwin developed a theory suggesting a link between the environment and evolution. He cataloged the incredible biodiversity of plant and animal life and the unique evolutionary quirks that allows these creatures to thrive.

B2B Marketers are sometimes considered to be behind the evolutionary curve of most digital trends when compared to their B2C brethren.  But like Darwin’s turtles in the Galapagos, the B2B Marcom species is evolving in this space because the social web environment happens to be extraordinarily well suited for their needs as they work to build trust, generate and convert leads, and provide a mechanism for sustained engagement.

Here’s how…

Trust and the Long Sale

Most B2B companies interact with leads in what can only be described as a “long sale.”  That is, months or sometimes years of nurturing a prospect down the marketing funnel from general awareness toward conversion.

Think of your most recent purchase (a sandwich, cup of coffee) and that compare that to B2B Marcom pros trying to court a buyer considering the purchase of, say, three million dollars worth of semiconductors and the buyer/seller dynamic quickly changes.  There’s so much risk inherent in making a B2B purchasing decisions.  Prospective buyers can stick around for months kicking the tires before they decide to buy.

Imagine camping out in a grocery store for six months before heading to the check out lane.  You’d have time to learn about every ingredient in your shopping chart.  You’d have weeks to walk around and ask other shoppers about their purchases and what sorts of meals they made using those ingredients.  By the time you checked out, you’d probably even know every employee by name.

See how the long sale is all about building trust?

Dive a bit deeper and you’d learn that “word of mouth from a colleague” is the most trusted information source among B2B purchasers (according to eMarketer: Key Factors in Purchase Decisions Among B2B Professionals subscription required), and it then becomes clear why social media is playing such as a critical for B2B Marketers.

Content Strategy and Thought Leadership

All of this courting and nurturing leads us to the next reason why B2B brands are quietly leading the industry – thought leadership content. Most B2C thought leadership programs in social media are really only designed to drive awareness and consideration.  The B2B space has evolved quite a bit differently.  Here, thought leadership programs are tasked with hitting all phases of the Marcom funnel.  Sure, B2B brands are using their arsenal (whitepapers, research, in-house experts) to build visibility in search and generally increase awareness among their prospects; this content - often existing marketing collateral repurposed for the social web - hits a prospect right at the top of the funnel as they consider their options among similar product or service providers.

But here’s where B2B has evolved into a different beast.  Thought leadership content that builds trust among prospective buyers can convert leads to sales, not just raise awareness.  In fact, according to Brian Carroll in his book, Lead Generation for the Complex Sale, B2B salespeople that had reached the status of “trusted adviser” were 70% more likely to come away with a sale.

Smart B2B marketers have become expert in developing a content-focused thought leadership strategy in an effort to nurture and convert these leads.

Here’s a just sample of what works in social media:

Benchmarking Surveys – nothing gets business decision makers more excited than the chance to compare themselves to one another.  B2B brands are often in the great position of having access to several customers in the same vertical.  A semiconductor widget manufacture sends out a quick survey to its customers, hires a researcher to make sense of the data, and an industry wide semiconductor widget report is born.  Put that sucker behind a lead gen form and suddenly that thought leadership strategy is doing a lot more than awareness building – it’s hard a core lead gen tool.

Product Applications – products in the B2B space can be amazingly complex. Imagine buying tennis shoes and being asked for your Qualified Sneaker Technician ID before you could make the purchase. B2B brands are finding new ways to give users and prospective users of their product useful, shareable information.  Often this includes user generated content - from real life applications to “off label” use – which helps to build positive word of mouth from colleagues.

Experts - brands in the B2B world have become proficient at indentify and making available their in-house experts to their customers and leads.  Often times, the expert is only proficient in one small sliver of the business.  Connect the relevant expert with the right lead, though, and that could make all the difference in a major sale.  Social media identifies, segments, and facilitates these connections via live chat on a product page, expert blogs, or Q&A session on professional networks.

Measurement

B2B companies have traditionally been leaders in measurement, especially when analyzing their CRM efforts, for a variety of reasons: Each lead in B2B is critically important (and valuable) so measuring and tracking prospective buyers has always been a unique skill set.  Also, unlike most B2C sales, one single B2B sale could have dozens of layers of decision makers all related to one purchase.  Multiply that by just a few different sales and the importance of a solid tracking system becomes clear.

In their book, One-to-One B2B, Roger and Peppers describe the differences of B2B and B2C, even referencing a wild, crazy time before computers:

“The truth is, B2B CRM is probably older and more established than consumer or B2C CRM, primarily because even before computers made it possible, sales reps would keep records of individual contacts, because it was worth it to do so.”

Beyond that, B2B marketers have always adopted a rigorous approach to measurement as everything can be traced back to the number of leads generated and converted. This religious commitment to measurement has translated to social media as well.  Salesforce.com – a favorite CRM tool among B2B sales teams – has launched an application called Service Cloud 2 that combines its traditional sales tracking tool with social media sites.  So now, a commenter on a product blog can be tracked and nurtured just as regular face-to-face encounter.  All this data allows for B2B brands to quickly assess what lead gen programs are working (live chat versus Facebook page versus product blog) and adapt the programs as needed.

This model – traditional Marcom metrics blended with social media data – is leading the way as B2B brands are demonstrating the effectiveness of a social media program in the mathematical language that CMOs have been seeing for years – increases in awareness, share of positive voice, sales, and the associated cost per point increase. (Our Digital Influence team developed a model for measuring social media in this way, it’s called Conversation Impact)

The bottom line is this: if carrier pigeons could do all this then there we’d have a shortage of bird cages.  The tool is irrelevant; B2B Marketers aren’t adopting social media at such a fast pace because they’re all giddy over FourSquare.  Nope.  B2B marketers will flock to whatever converts leads to sales and the fact that we’ve seen a recent quadrupling of B2B social media usage (according to BtoB Magazine and the Association of National Advertisers) suggests the extraordinarily potential of the social web to impact their business.  We will continue to watch as B2B brands evolve and shape the Word of Mouth industry as a result.

Here are a few great resources to do just that:

Social Media B2B Blog

B2B Lead Gen Blog

B2B Online - Resources

B2B Social Media Marketing