SXSW: B2B Companies Need Strong Community Managers

(Source: Social Media B2B by Jeffrey L. Cohen)

Aaron Strout is the CMO of Powered, a social media agency in Austin, Texas, and he talked to me at the end of the SXSW Interactive Conference about how his agency approaches social media for B2B companies. He recently wrote a blog post entitled, Social Media for B2B: It CAN be done, which is why we connected.

Aaron recommends business to business companies create communities with a strong community manager, because the number of content creators are very small. Content creators in this case are readers who leave comments and add their thoughts to the conversations. It is important that community managers encourage and nurture these communities. Another tactic he recommends is to follow customers, prospects, competitors and industry thought leaders on Twitter and interact with them, but not as a product manager, more like a community manager. This strengthens your relationships with existing customers as you learn more about them.

Aaron Strout from Jeffrey L. Cohen on Vimeo.