Jonathan Becher, CMO at SAP, talks about Social Media for B2B
Notes taken from Jonathan Becher's talk during the Social Media Today webinar. He can be followed at @jbecher
Business proposition is shifting from selling really expensive stuff to companies, but now selling to lines of business within companies. More and more product goes to the non-IT audience. The software we sell is increasingly not just about making a company better but making a company treat its own customers better. Our mantra, our value proposition is to the customer's customer. Once you do that, you look a lot more like a consumer brand. We don't get caught up too much in B2B or B2C. We use the phrase "people to people."
Many CMOs came up in an era where one of the fundamental value propositions of marketing was to control the message. They spent time in rooms talking about how to position and describe the product. Thinking about what the brand stood for was one of the most important things we could do in marketing.
If you embrace social media, you can't control the message. You can orchestrate it and amplify the messages that are most true, but you can't start from command and control.
