Leveraging Social Networks for P2P Collaboration – Are We There Yet?

by Beth Vanni, Vice President

Virtually all companies are now beginning to engage in some type of social media with their customers and their partners.  Facebook and Twitter icons are familiar sights on corporate website homepages, as are links to corporate weblogs. In five short years, social media has become the rule rather than the exception, and conspicuous only by its absence in today’s highly collaborative environment. But for all the customer-facing social media activities, what are vendors doing to foster either Partner-to-Vendor (P2V) or Partner-to-Partner (P2P) collaboration and network building using this powerful medium?

Partners’ Use of Social Media

By Diane Krakora – CEO

My day 2 at the Cisco Velocity event in Barcelona started with a press and analyst briefing with about 10 Cisco partners and a discussion around their use of social media. They tried valiantly to communicate three main points. First, the partners are using Facebook primarily to recruit new employees into their organization. They’re not using it as a customer lead generation tool as of yet. Second, they’re using Twitter to keep up to date with their VENDORS’ quarter channel promotions. And third, they’re engaging in blogging and commenting on blogs because they say “conversations are happening about our industry and technologies, why would we not want to participate?”

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zF_4UXNFrFI

Fitting Social Media into Channel Communications Frameworks

Sandra Glaser Cheek

By Sandra Glaser Cheek, Director, Consulting & Client services

Social media is forcing businesses to be better. With customers and competitors having more access to what companies are doing and saying in real time, it raises the ante for more transparency, better services and better products.

The next generation of partner marketing strategies will be more responsive, collaborative, and focused on the needs of the partner and customer, not just on the fastest way to close business. Time to market with these social technologies and tools will determine who the winners in vendor community will be. The keys to success will be flexibility, executive support, and the willingness to make mistakes along the way.

As we develop Communications Frameworks for our clients, it’s interesting to see where social media and web 2.0 technologies fit within an organization.

Most major vendors do have some sort of social media plan/strategy and most have begun using some next generation communications tools. This is interesting, because it is unclear that anyone really knows how to formulate and articulate a clear social networking strategy or social media plan for channel partner integration — or provide clear metrics for measurement.

Despite this, it’s clear that it’s time for channel marketers to embrace and prioritize social media technology, as it will be an integral part of the next generation channel program. The impact that sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. have had on the way that users interact and use the Internet for communication, purchasing, and collaboration is clear. Some of this technology, like blogs, podcasts, and RSS are being utilized by vendors — but this is just scratching the surface. To meet the changing customer needs for immediacy, personalization, and participation (sometimes simultaneously), channel programs and the supporting marketing will need to be built with Web 2.0 leading the charge and encompassing social networking, virtual communities, video on demand, wikis, podcasts, and web based collaboration.

Getting to Know You

By John Wilkinson

Have you seen the commercials?  Chemistry.com says that more than a million people have been rejected by eHarmony.  Seems a shame, doesn’t it?   (And a nice revenue opportunity for Chemistry.com to boot!)

But why were all those nice folks shown the door?   I suspect it’s got to have something to do with a pretty rigorous profiling process, which is one of my favorite bugaboos.

Having been in technology channels for more than 20 years now, I’m firmly convinced that having solid, validated and up-to-date partner profiles is the key to any successful recruitment  and on-boarding process.   I’ve seen too many (well funded) recruitment efforts deliver disappointing results because vendors aren’t focused on specific (but flexible) partner profiles.  By specific, I mean profiles that focus on both where a prospect partner does business (their market or industry), as well as how they do that business (their business model attributes).   Consequently, nets are cast too wide (or focus on the wrong characteristics), and recruitment campaigns never achieve the anticipated return.   All too often, it’s a waste of time and money.