Social Media Plays Growing Role in Business

"Speakers at Salesforce.com's Dreamforce '11 in San Francisco last week shared stats that continue to reinforce the idea that people are far ahead of companies in their adoption of the social web in their personal and business lives," reports ClickZ. "In their business lives, 84 percent of B2B [business to business] buyers begin their research for information on the social web, roughly the same as B2C buyers. They are looking for product and service specs and information, performance stats, pricing, and delivery/implementation info in an easy research and purchase experience, same as B2C. And they are actively seeking out objective information (e.g., testimonials/references) from others like them who use the product or service; user-generated content (UGC), same as B2C. There are both similarities and differences between B2B and B2C. B2B marketers can benefit from the B2C learnings on the social web, and cut the time in half to realize tangible, measurable benefit." Read more.