Should Business-to-Business-Companies care about Social Media?

When we talk about successful usage of Social Media one often talks about nice brands targeting end customers. Not only because there are many of good examples but also because they are more visible than others. But being a company doing business to business products or services one wonders what to do with social media. You barely establish your brand with it, only few try to do business to business over the social networks like Twitter and Facebook yet. Asking themselves: Should I care about Social Media?

[Should I care about] Fans and Followers?

Social Media is mass media. More than 500 Million users in Facebook, more than 160 Million on Twitter. I am sure you know the numbers. But what about your Fanpage or your Twitter account? Are there are lot of people around? Is it even neccessary to have the ultimate goal to boost those numbers? Really: should I care about my Fans and Followers?

[Should I care about] Location-based Services (LBS)

Even before the latest peak in downloads of scvngr  Location-based Services had a huge buzz in the internet community; Foursquare's and Gowalla's (both launched last year) growing user base put Facebook under heavy pressure. So heavy that about a month ago they launched their competitive service called Facebook Places.

Location-based services promise to "socially engage" users for your local business like cafés, bars, museums and similar public places. But how do these systems work? Why is there a hype about them? How do they try to keep this promise and what would I - as a business owner - have to do to participate? All boiling down to one major question: Should I care about Location-based Services?

[Should I care about...] Microblogging

A new services type emerged over the last two, three years in the internet: microblogging. With his most popular representative Twitter Microblogging became very well known and widely used. But what is Microblogging? How does it work? What services are out there and how do they differ? And most importantly: As a an owner of a [BUSINESS_TYPE_HERE] business: Should I care about Microblogging? 


I say yes, if you want to use a service which helps you to provide your community with information and which doesn't take up a lot of time updating it. But...

What we've been working on

It is time to unveil what we have been working on the last couple of weeks. As I already said earlier we wanted to bring more value to you as the reader of our blog. Therefore we decided to start two new series: "The Insider" and "Should I care about...". We want to have one new article at least one a month for each series. They will be tagged with theInsider and ShouldIcareAbout to make it easier for you to find new and old articles. Don't forget to bookmark the links!

But first, let me explain you what they are about: