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At Wildfire, we work with a range of B2B and B2C clients and I genuinely believe there is real potential for both in terms of social media. But, I’m often frustrated by the lack of really good industry insight into using social media for B2B campaigns.

So, when I saw an event – the Dell B2B Huddle – organised by blogger Neville Hobson and Kerry Bridge from Dell, I jumped at the chance to attend.

I went to the event eager to learn more about what other companies focused on B2B marketing were doing in the social media space. And overall, the day delivered.

Rather than a blow by blow account, here is my run down of the key themes and ideas that kept cropping up throughout the day:

A lack of focus on B2B

The event was advertised as focusing on B2B, but much of the day could have been equally talking about B2C. To my mind, this could be for two main reasons; either that social media for B2B and B2C is pretty similar, or there just isn’t as many high-profile examples of B2B social media campaigns.

Personally I think the latter is closer to the truth. Having said this, I saw some great case studies from the likes of Salesforce and Intel in the afternoon, both of whom were using social media in really creative ways to reach a business audience.

There was also a really interesting roundtable session I attended where the differences between B2B and B2C were discussed.

Campaigns are always going to be different from company to company and industry to industry, but I think companies that are B2B-focused face different or unique challenges.

In some ways, these challenges are easier to overcome. As Will McInnes suggested in the roundtable, social media is very powerful for niche groups, so if you are targeting a specific segment of business users (IT managers for example), then it is potentially easier to target them using social media than if your campaign was looking at consumers in general.

Know your audience

I was pleased to see this theme discussed throughout the day as it is central to our approach here at Wildfire. Any campaign must start by truly understanding a target audience and this is even more important with social media and, as I suggested above, with a B2B campaign.

Challenges of running social media campaigns in big organisations

This is a favourite topic at social media conferences; the challenges of getting social media accepted in a business. I’ve seen a real change here in the last year driven in part by the media’s obsession with Twitter and other social networks.

Whereas a year ago, most advocates for social media came from pioneers lower down within an organisation (or from agencies), in the last year there has been a greater awareness from the CEO down that social media is something to try and implement. This brings its own challenges of course, with marketing teams suddenly tasked with the job of implementing social media campaigns, often with a lack of guidance, education or support (or budget).

Risks of social media

Linked in many ways to the last point, are the risks of social media. Those all too familiar ’social media case studies’ including Dominos and Motrin made an appearance during the day as examples of what can happen when things go wrong online.

As both those examples show, disaster management is much much easier if a company already has a presence on key social media channels and this is equally true for B2B.

Generation Y

Another of those common themes at events like this, is the argument that the next generation to enter the workplace will expect to be using social tools in everything they do.

Two interesting points relating to this came through. Firstly, many of these predictions are overblown; yes, generation Y will want to use social tools, but they will also embrace ‘business tools’ like email, so potential issues or problems are often overstated.

Secondly, the point was made that social media is increasingly being used by older generations, generations that are already in businesses. Don’t forget that Twitter is used mainly by people that are 25 plus.

Tools like Yammer were cited as effective ways of weaving social media into the very fabric of a business.

Overall, this was a great event and I hope Neville and Kerry consider running similar days in the future. Thanks also to the speakers including Steve Lamb and Benjamin Ellis.

Here are some round-ups of the day from some other great people:

Neville Hobson, Neil Denny, Joining Dots and SocialOptic

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I’m a bit late with this one, but it’s been a busy few weeks! On Tuesday 3rd November I attended Figaro’s Social Media Marketing Conference in London.

As with all these types of events, some of it was good, some was less good, but once you looked past the vanilla presentations/salespitches from the sponsors and a few large-ego-ed ’social media gurus’, there were some really interesting case studies and some concrete advice from the people that are actually out there doing this stuff we call social media marketing.

Rather than do a blow by blow account of the day, I thought I’d pull out some of the themes and key ideas I came away with.

Too many brands fail to see social media campaigns all the way through

This was covered by Andy O’brien from Amaze and Jonathan MacDonald. The problem is that although the interaction on social media or shareable content is often well-conceived and thought-through, when users try to go to the next stage, they are often let down. It’s like having a great conversation with a brand on Twitter only to click through to their site and find it impossible to navigate.

Customer service is the next big thing?

Andy from Amaze suggested that customer service will be the next big thing in social media. I’d suggest that it is already, but I know what he means! For me, the way we link customer service (or not) to social media marketing is an interesting challenge/question.

It’s all about innovation and content is still king

There were some great case studies throughout the day (kudos to Scott Burton and the T-Mobile dance flashmob, Stuart Parkinson from VCCP and Comparethemeerkat, Charles Williams from British Red Cross and Anna Rafferty from Penguin Digital).

What these examples all had in common was bundles of creativity, innovation and ‘wow-ness’. They also all found great ways to use all this ‘goodness’ to deliver content or allow their users to create content that stood out from the crowd.

Social media as a phrase is meaningless – social is everywhere

Euan Semple commented that “everything has become social and the word has lost all meaningless”. I agree that there is a danger that social media just becomes a catch-all term for everything and anything digital.

Stuart at VCCP revealed how he felt the Meerkat campaign was a ’social’ campaign not a ’social media’ campaign. Alan from SMLXL probably said it best: “human beings are a social species”.

Organisational challenges

Many of the speakers and audience members spoke about the organisational challenges of running social media campaigns. Some revealed that they just got on and did it without any formal, top-level approval. Others shared the ways in which they got buy-in from senior staff. It seems there is no easy answer to this one and that individual circumstances can radically change the goal-posts.

Distributed content

Most of the case studies explored the idea of ‘distributed content’ and for me this is a huge development area that we are finally seeing come to fruition as technology advances.

Social media in 2012

My vote for presentation of the day was Freddie Laker from Sapient. His look at the social media trends we will see by 2012 was great! Rather than try and mis-quote what he said, I’d urge you to visit his blog for more!

Exhibitions and trade fairs. The ideal opportunity to meet face to face with your target audience? Or a logistical nightmare that just uses up valuable time, effort and expense?

We sat down with three of our clients, each from a different market sector, to harvest their views on the role of the trade fair in today’s marketing mix, the key benefits to getting involved and their top tips on getting them right.

Round table participants:

• Graham North, Commercial Director, Humax
• Cliff Guy, Marketing Director, dotDigital Group
• Sean O’Connell, Head of European Marketing, Kaseya

WF: Why bother to get involved in exhibitions?

GN: We see them primarily as a networking event, giving us with the opportunity to meet up with customers and partners. It’s also a good way to show off our latest products.

CG: I agree with Graham, exhibitions allow us to set up extensive, face-to-face meetings and to demonstrate products.

SOC: For Kaseya, it’s more about generating a buzz, using product launches and conference programmes to demonstrate innovation and market leadership. Lead generation is also an important element.

CG: We also expect any exhibition we get involved in to capture leads for the dotDigital sales team to follow-up. Involvement in seminars and presentations also helps us to raise brand awareness and provide further lead generation channels.

WF: Do you think exhibitions and events are still important?

GN: I think you need to be selective. For us, some key trade shows are important for networking and showing your peers, partners and competitors you are fully involved in the market.  Not being there can quickly send out a negative message to the rest of the industry.

SOC: Exhibitions definitely have their place, but only once all the other marketing disciplines are working well for your organisation. There’s no point spending money on exhibitions if you’re a small company or start-up until you have a good number of customers and can spend the money required to get it right.

WF: What’s your top piece of advice about using exhibitions?

GN: Check out who is attending, from both an exhibitor perspective and also the target customer. If your main competitors are there and your target customers are attending, then you should definitely be there too.

SOC: Don’t expect to come away with “ready to buy” leads. An exhibition should be thought about as part of a long term lead generation and awareness strategy. The people who attend exhibitions tend to be influencers and not buyers, and they generally come to exhibitions to see what is ‘new’. As a result, it’s probably going to be 12 to 18 months before they are in a position to buy.

GN: That can also be the case with the digital TV industry. And going back to Sean’s point about spending money to get it right, I agree that if you can’t afford to do the show well, then you shouldn’t do it at all; a poor display will have the opposite impact to that you want to achieve.

CG: For dotDigital it’s all about being able to measure the impact – as should be the case with any marketing activity.  Make sure you carefully track the return on investment from every event you attend, so you can learn exactly which kind of activity and approach, at which particular events, reaps the best rewards for your business.

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For the second year in a row, five Wildthings will be taking to the streets of London as part of Byte Night to sleep rough for a night (with quite a few other people in the PR/Media IT industry), all in aid of Action for Children.

We’ll be in the fortunate position of only having to do it for one night with plenty of warm clothes, hot drinks and brollies, but plenty of children sleep rough every night without such luxuries so we’d be really grateful for any support you can give.

Last year, our clients, partners, friends and family helped us raise over £5,000 which helped contribute to the £470,000 that was raised in total. This year we are hoping to go one better! We’ll be working hard to raise even more with car boot sales, car cleaning, face painting and cake decorating at the Surbiton Fair, amongst other things.

Donating is easy: just go to http://www.justgiving.com/wildfire2009/

Thanks in advance for your support.

The rise of Search Engine Marketing has been monumental in the last few years, something that was confirmed this week following e-Consultancy’s valuation of the industry in the UK at £2.75bn, rising by 24%.

With this stat in mind, on Tuesday evening, I attended an event organised by Chinwag, held – in true ‘New Media style’ – at a Soho Pub. Here the debate was between review sites (supported by The Filter, Reevoo and Trusted Places) and Search (Media Vest and SEO Blog).

The initial premise was perhaps a bit folly as on the one side you had content creators and on the other, a vehicle for helping users find content – hardly conflicting aims. And, unsurprisingly, the overriding conclusion was that the two could and should happily co-exist and even influence or work closely together for mutual benefit (for example with Google now using reviews in its local searches).

There were however a few other interesting points that I picked up during the evening:

The continued rise of social media and the question of trust

One of the main challenges to review sites in addition to (and perhaps instead of)  search was from social networks. This was of course a very tech savvy crowd but there were several anecdotes that centered on using Twitter or Facebook for example to get recommendations from friends. This fits in nicely with the ‘taste profile’ idea used by The Filter and Last.fm and is surely the end goal of Google’s personalised search. This argument all boils down to trust: who do you trust to give you the best recommendation? Most people would say their friends (or like-minded cyber-friends in the case of Twitter!!).

What will the effect of mobile be?

The question of mobile wasn’t really raised but I think it is an interesting one. With the growth of mobile internet with the addition of GPS on devices like the N95 and the iPhone, local search is surely going to be a huge growth area. Combine that with social networks and recommendations and you have a really powerful service. You can already twitter your precise location from your iPhone for example.

Google is everywhere 

At the end of the day everyone (or at least every online business or surfer – review sites included) needs search and, in the UK at least, that means Google. Throughout the evening when people mentioned search or SEO, Google was front of mind. This isn’t a new revelation but it was particularly poignant as at the same time as the debate was raging in Soho, many miles away the search engine was making another very bold move.

Thanks to Chinwag for organising the event (anyone interested in new media should check out their forthcoming events) and to the panelists: Jon Myers – MediaVest, Lisa Ditlefsen – Base One / SEO Blog UK, Walid Al Saqqaf – TrustedPlaces, David Maher-Roberts – The Filter, Luke Errington – Reevoo and chairman, Steve Johnston – Google Consultant.