B2B Social Network: Your Website by Customer Design

Provided by: xiete

If all you B2B marketers thought I was crazy when I wrote about giving up control of social media to sales, this one will really take you into the Twilight Zone. 

Imagine if instead of designing your website your customers did.

You provide the template and content.  Your customers choose what content is in the space, like a Facebook page or Google dashboard. Think about it.  Your customer enters your website today and has to drill into the content that suits them best.  If you are a solutions company, they may click into specific solutions, industry, or even your support area.

For all intents and purposes, your website today is a controlled environment not too unlike a printed brochure.  How traditional!  How boring!

If you use cookies and can track at some level who is coming to your site, maybe after the first entry you customize content based on their previous traffic and interests.  It could be as simple as the type of news alerts scroll on the main page.  You could also customize forums and discussion groups to align them with similar profiles or interests.  For something more sophisticated, you could provide a custom start page that is specific to them: articles, solutions, news, forums and discussions.  But, that is old web thinking.

Ultimately, I would love to see us be able to allow customers to design their experience.  We could provide categories of content and allow customers to drag and drop them.  We could allow them to choose the feeds they want be it offers, events, or product updates.  We could allow them access to discussions with other similar customers for support or ideas on product use.

Personalization has been the holy grail of marketing.  Social networks have provided a straw man of sorts to consider ways we can interact with customers outside of our traditional ways.  We should not be afraid to loosen our grip on our message and the view we give to our customers.  In the end, customers are already making choices on what they are interested in, how they want to interact with us, and if we provide value.  Let’s make it easier for them.

Let the customer create their experience, we could learn a lot about them and they will learn about us.

Filed under: social media, b2b, b2b social network, collaboration, customer experience, dashboards, discussion groups, Facebook, forums, Google, Internet forum, marketing, personalization, social marketing, social media, Social network, Twilight Zone, web 2.0, web 3.0, web customization