As business keep getting together by social media tools, companies become more agressive at courting each others. And as communications and technology make the world a smaller place, sales and marketing specialists need to understand and implement the principles of B2B marketing.

You can see how some of the most important brands of the world generate more of their revenues from their B2B aliances than consumers. This interactions get more complex each day with new and more competitors, extended buying cycles and increased sale expenses, and expert and exigent B2B clients who always want to give less for more. B2B communication works for an enterprise that wants to be credible and consistent and stay relevant in todays business enviroment. A strategy for efective communication reflects on the channel margins share, partners loyalty and word of mouth awareness.

The complex processes involved in managing a business-to-business relationship can be solved by developing a social network.

If you believe that people want to engage with, and trust other people that share their common interests, then why can’t social networking work for B2B audiences? Think Social Networks as communities of individuals that share ideas, opinions and knowledge and want to engage with others with the same interests.

Enterprises design and develop their own social networks to increase collaboration and engagement between the organization and its employees, partners and customers. This way by using social media tools companies transform a single-directonal website into a multi-directonal tool that encourages participation, engage, and learning. B2B communities are part of an enterprise social network where audience is not an end consumer but the extended enterprise vendors, suppliers, a member of a client and partners)

The B2B world has energetically embraced the grand online colloquy known as the two-way talk-back conversation. B2B communities provide modes for various organizations to collaborate in identifying methods to increase their sales, improve customer service, reduce costs, and enhance processes. This enterprise social networks focus on the delivery of the latest information to partners in order to increase sales and improve the relationship between organization and its partners. Partner-centric tools also enable organizations to train partners on latest product and services and to allow partner to share their experiences with the product/service and the client with the organization and each other.

The objective is transforming the Intelligence Community into a community that reinvents itself dynamically by learning, changing and adapting as the enviroment changes… there are too many new features that will make this transformation easier.Take for example the Wikis, as self-organizing knowledge websites and the Blogs as information sharing websites. Now… Imagine having both tools and even more inside your own social network.

Lucila.Campos@condiminds.com