Building a B2B community takes time

This is an interesting video interview (by Jeffrey Cohen of the B2B Social Media blog) with Kirsten Watson, Director of Corporate Marketing at Kinaxis ( a supply chain management firm in Canada). Kinaxis set up an online community a year ago in an attempt to create an online space for supply chain management enthusiasts to meet and share information.  The results have exceeded their expectations and the community now has over 2,700 members and has, according to Cohen, led to a:

2.7X increase in traffic to Kinaxis.com

3.2X increase in conversions (leads)

Kinaxis Builds Social Media Community from Jeffrey L. Cohen on Vimeo.

This article from Fast Company explains more about Kinaxis's experiences and the lessons learned.  

For anyone thinking of creating an online community to support their B2B activities I think 4 key lessons come out of the video interview and which chime with my experiences of building something similar a few years ago:

1. Understand your market - learn what your suppliers and customers are doing online so you build a community that is relevant to them;
2. Be patient - Kinexis launched their blog in 2006 but it took a couple of years for it to gain traction;
3. Focus on SEO - optimise your sites to get up the rankings;
4. Don't use the community as a platform to promote your company - it has to offer real value to members if the community is to grow.

B2B social networking - has LinkedIn locked out the competition?

There's no doubting the success of social media in the consumer space - Facebook and Twitter have shown there is a demand for this type of networking (how sustainable Facebook is in the light of recent privacy concerns is another matter).  However, translating this success to the business world is another matter. Certainly some businesses are finding Facebook and Twitter a great way to market to consumers but, with the notable exception of LinkedIn, attempts to replicate Facebook in a B2B setting do not seem to have worked.  I've been looking at 2 UK attempts in this space, BT Tradespace and TalkBizNow.

BT Tradespace was launched in 2007 to provide a platform for SMEs to promote themselves online and to sell their products and services.  As of today there appears to be 36,455 companies listed on the site, although some of the companies seem to have multiple entries so the actual number of companies will be less.  Out of a total of pool of over 4 million SMEs in the UK this represents less than 1%.  Obviously the activity that takes place on the site is most important but I get the impression that this activity is declining.  Forum questions by members about issues with the site remain unanswered even after several days and discussions in the  "lounge" area rarely extend beyond self-promotion of members' companies.  There does not seem to be a sense of community or of any meaningful discussions taking place.  Looking at one of the promotional videos made by Tradespace, the main benefit of joining seems to be to improve the search engine optimisation (SEO) of members' web sites through linking.

Similarly, TalkBizNow which was launched a couple of years ago does not seem to have generated any critical mass and looks relatively dormant as a place for businesses to meet online.  Finding one of their "groups" with more than one member is quite difficult.  Scrolling through the list of 13 members which came up after a search for "consulting", none of them had joined any groups and the level of detail they had posted about themselves made it difficult to see why anyone would want to contact them.

In the winner-take-all world of social networks perhaps LinkedIn has won this battle.  The network effect encourages people to join the network that has the most members and LinkedIn certainly has the most members for this type of network.  LinkedIn Groups has helped the service move beyond being just a place to find a contact in a specific organisation and introduced the social element that had been missing.

I welcome any comments that prove me wrong on this and show other B2B networks in the UK or elsewhere that are succeeding or which contradict my views on Tradespace and TalkBizNow.

Future of Online

I managed to get up to the last day of the Online 2009 exhibition yesterday.  It was little different to any of the previous Online events I have been to over the last 15 years.  The main difference seemed to be smaller stands from the large information vendors with the central space of the main floor being a cafe area.  I'm sure this space was normally taken by an exhibitor.  It made me wonder whether this was simply a result of the recession or whether the days of large exhibitions like this are numbered.  Before the web, exhibitions and trade magazines were a major source of information for purchasers to find out what new products were being offered by information vendors.  B2B magazines such as IWR and Information Today have clearly been hit by the plethora of useful information now available on blogs, company websites and filtered RSS feeds from a variety of sources.  Perhaps exhibitions are going the same way.  The cost to companies of running a stand at online must be significant in terms of fees and staffing.  Of course, many exhibitors will say that they pick up a lot of business at these events and I'm sure for some of them that is still the case.  However, with all the other communication channels open to them, I'm not convinced the economics will make sense for a lot longer.  Having said all that, I enjoyed catching up with a number of people at the exhibition which, for me, made it all worthwhile. 

I also saw a pelican in St James's park on the way home.