Had an interesting conversation with Matija Martek, former Marketing Team Lead @Mediatoolkit, currently Head of Digital Marketing at Semos Cloud about the online reputation of B2B companies. Mediatoolkit is an online media monitoring and analytics tool – they monitor online sources – web, forums, social media.
What type of companies need media monitoring services?
The size of the company does not matter – we have a small bakery as a client. They are very active on social media, produce a lot of press releases, and use influencer marketing. Their online footprint is rather big.
On the other hand, I was negotiating with a multibillion-euro company from B2B sector. They don’t care about online reputation, produce no press releases, they have social media but with zero engagement. Their approach is only direct sales – PR, communications, and marketing are irrelevant to them.
Increasingly, B2B buying decisions are based on online research. Why some big companies are so careless about their online presence?
It does not mean that they don’t care at all, they care about other channels apart from Google and Facebook. They care about their presence and reviews on paid channels like Forrester of Gartner research reports. The sources are important in the procurement process.
However, with the new generation of executives, Google and social media channels are also gaining importance. But the changes are not very fast.
Large B2B corporations are often very bureaucratic, their decision-making processes are very slow.
It is slowly changing. 10 years ago it was unthinkable that multibillion-dollar companies would buy media monitoring services with a credit card.
But often the procurement processes are very slow.
Sometimes it’s even forbidden to use the free trial as a test.
Many traditional companies do not realize that social media is no longer a playground for young people. Very often we can see mismanaged social media pages – no response to customer posts, spam posts, etc. My recommendation would be to close down the pages you cannot manage properly – quality is more important than quantity in social media.
These days we see that many stories in mainstream media – TV and national press – start from Facebook or Instagram posts. And if social media is mismanaged, some serious media crisis may start from there. Mismanagement of social media is potentially dangerous for the reputation of the company.