Professionals don’t get much coverage when it comes to using social media and at first glance (or two) it’s not obvious how those that are in the B2B marketplace could successfully use social media for their business.

I was doing a social media presentation earlier this week to a group of business owners and a couple of questions came up that I get a lot.

The first question was triggered by covering several examples of businesses successfully using Facebook and Twitter to promote their businesses:  “Can you show us a good example of a Business to Business company using social media for their business?”.

The second question was kind of related to the first one, but it had a bit of a different spin to it:  “We only sell to other businesses and for us it’s all about building relationships – how does that fit into all of this technology?”.

They’re both good questions – most of the discussion / press / examples of social media tends to focus on business to consumer types of businesses – and even more specifically it’s the type of B2C business that people get excited or emotional about (photography – especially kids, food, entertainment, clothes, etc.).

However there are great ways to use social media for business to business situations – let’s take a look at a few ideas:

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    photo by covilha 

“If a good reputation is like Gold, then having Integrity is like owning the mine.”  John C. Maxwell / Jim Dornan – Becoming a Person of Influence

I had a great opportunity to sit in on a Core Advocates training session this morning that focused on the importance of Reputation when it comes to building your business by word of mouth.  I’m going to be doing some work with the Core Advocates team in the future and I’m impressed with what the ‘core’ ideas behind the training.

Reputation is a critical part of anyone’s business success (or success overall), but how often do you actually hear anyone talk about it or take the time to really think through what their reputation actually is and what they’d like it to be?

Your reputation is up for discussion every single day.  “I’m looking for a good plumber…do you know one?”  “I’m going to that new restaurant on Metcalf this weekend – what did you think of it?”  People will talk, and with the explosion of Social Media, they have an easy platform to share their opinions and they’re doing more than ever.

Do you know what your reputation is? 

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  photo by marnox1 

Search Engine Optimization has become a mystical term, invoking the idea of wizards laboring in their lofty towers to get websites onto the first page of Google.

The reality is that SEO for really competitive online sites is an arcane art and if your business is going up against the big boys then you need to seek out professional help. 

However if you are a typical small business and you are in a well defined, narrow niche or you’re in a contained geographic area then there are a couple of basic SEO principles that will make a world of difference to you and won’t cost an arm and a leg to implement.

The challenge I’ve had is how to explain these basics to business owners that don’t know HTML, don’t want to know HTML and really don’t want to get bogged down in the details.  Here’s my attempt – let me know what you think.

Think of Google as a Giant Library…in fact it’s the largest library in the world!

Instead of physical books, this library is made up of virtual ‘pages’, each of them like a book on the shelf of the library.

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  photo by ms.tea 

Halloween is just around the corner, which means it’s time to start thinking about carving pumpkins.  I remember learning how to carve a pumpkin around our kitchen table from my parents and older brothers.  There was always an element of creativity in terms of the design and certainly some of us were better than others in terms of drawing or actually cutting, but overall we used a consistent system to create our art.

Now imagine that you want to create a really cool Jack O’Lantern this Halloween, but you don’t have a clear process or system for how to do that.  You’ve seen the end result, but you’ve never actually gone through any steps…and in fact you don’t even know what steps there might be!

Odds are your pumpkin is going to look more like road kill than a cool, scary design!  Without a systematic process, you’re stuck with making it up as you go and even though it’s not that hard (once you know how to do it) there are lots of points where you can trash your pumpkin if you do it wrong.

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We all love buying something with a great guarantee – it takes the risk out of an unproven product, it gives you confidence that the vendor really stands behind their work and it generates a lot of credibility that you are getting what you pay for.

Guarantees are a great thing…for the buyer, but not the seller…right?

Wrong! – Guarantees are great for both the buyers and the seller!

We had a great discussion this morning at one of my Peer Group Advisory Board meetings about one of the business owners rolling out a guarantee as part of his latest marketing campaign.  It was a tough topic with lots of things to consider.

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