By Nick Johnson - September 27th, 2011

Hi everyone, As you may know, the whole USM team has been researching social media trends and growth areas for 2012. I wanted to share a few of the broad conclusions we came to last week when we...

Hi everyone,

As you may know, the whole USM team has been researching social media trends and growth areas for 2012. I wanted to share a few of the broad conclusions we came to last week when we met up to discuss our findings:

  1. Europe is still behind the US. OK, it's not quite a year any more, but after discussing social media best practice with European practitioners, it became evident they are struggling with things the US market is slightly further along with
  2. B2B social media is a different beast to B2C, with different best practice. Perhaps you knew this already - we thought so, but our research only reaffirmed this. There's a totally different audience for b2b marketing (in particular) and a completely different set of priorities, skills and challenges for b2b marketers. And yet there is very little best practice out there. Yet....
  3. Social media for product development isn't very interesting - or advanced. This was something I thought would be our next area for growth. Emphatically not. There are so few companies that have the requisite volume of followers to use social media for this stuff. And those with the followers don't actually want their product release strategy dictated by a load of Facebook friends it seems. Fair enough.
  4. Social media for customer service is rocketing ahead and will very soon be expected of every company with consumers: Again, we kind of called this one too, but it's good to get reassurance. Every kind of company - b2b/b2c, big/small, international/local - all of them are thinking about this now, if not already using social for customer service. And to be honest, now your consumers are on social sites, and you're using it for marketing, you don't have much choice. It's a conversation remember...

Obviously we found out a fair bit more than this, but you'll have to wait until we release our next series of conferences until we tell you any more... ;)

Thanks

Nick

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