Yesterday I attended the B2B 2.0 Expo organized by the MarketingProfs.com. It was a virtual expo hosted on the web. The user experience was terribly wrong because the system ran very slow, but I must also say the content was good. So I had to offer my great tolerance to finish all the virtual conference sessions.

The whole virtual event was about B2B marketing in the Web 2.0 world. Many interesting issues were discussed including how to create small niche through social networking site and how to build capture mechanism for lead engagement strategy.

My two favorable sessions are, “What’s New in Data Collection and Customer Research” and “Leveraging Social Networks for B2B Marketing.” Both sessions’ panelists have given their professional views on building a community as a marketing vehicle for B2B business.

So why B2B professionals use social media? The social network panel has this answer,

As part of professional workflow to solve problems and stay current from front line, compare vendors, plan and execute projects. It also helps to increase productivity and efficiency by accessing experience-based best practice information and to create support structure through peer-based collaboration.

Another interesting notion shared by the data collection panel that all the individual metrics such as CPC, CPA, impression, unique users, etc, are no longer relevant to our business. Because after all, only one metric that will count and that is “Sales.” The panelists also suggested that all marketers should start profiling the discrete visitor behaviors from the organic traffic.

I certainly agree. In fact, behavioral targeting has long been ranked the most effective online advertising targeting methodology since 2006 by the AAF, American Advertising Federation, among other targeting methods such as demographic, contextual, and geographic.

So I guess it is time to stop pretending we know our customers by reading the conventional metric that was invented in the last decade.

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