B2B Social Media Technographics

Two blog posts ago, I wrote about a superlative book about social media usage, "Groundswell" , and the framework used in the book to segment levels of social media participation. I also wrote about the related profile tool that Forrester Research provides to generate snapshots of how many consumers fall in each of the six technographic segments of this framework also organized by three demographic criteria: age, country and gender.

I'm pleased to see that Forrester has just put online a similar profile tool for B2B technology buyers. Here's a sample output screen for technology buyers of software in businesses with 100-499 employees who are responsible for buying software:

The good news is that 78% are participating in social media which would indicate that a social media strategy would be an essential part of a marketing mix to attract this market. (caveat: the sample size of 80 is small-you'd want to confirm that your own customers and prospects have similar characteristics)

Here's the same profile for companies with 20,000+ employees. Social media participation is less for each segmentation of the technographic ladder but overall participation still nets out about the same, at 79%:
This data is great for those targeting technology buyers which basically means IT people. A next step for Forrester is to gather data for other markets within businesses, e.g. marketers, sales people, HR, executives, etc.

My experience is that corporate marketers, although they are responsible to evaluate social media as part of their own company's marketing mix, are less likely to use it themselves than the data shown here for IT people. Here is an observation I made as a response to a blog post by Laura Ramos at Forrester:

My experience with our prospects and clients, marketing managers and executives of mid and large size companies, is this:

• most are on the ignorant, reluctant, trailing edge of adopting things like blogs, Twitter, Rss feeds, Facebook profiles and groups, etc.

• many do not even "search" regularly on business topics (e.g. we can't get to them via organic or PPC)

• the ones who are more adventurous, trying things like having a Facebook profile or joining a Facebook group, or blogging are disappointed at how little benefit there is and how much time it takes from other activities

So we in turn, do maintain our blog, facebook group, rss feed, PPC etc. for image and to reach the minority of enthusiastic adopters, but the bulk of our marketing success still comes from old school marketing-trade shows, media coverage, telemarketing,etc.

I'd be interested to hear from others who market to B2B audiences to hear about their experiences with social media marketing to different audience types (e.g. IT vs. marketing).
Finally, here's a live version of the B2B tool that you can test drive right now: