It SOUNDS like a good idea, but…

Bulldog Solutions recently produced a Webinar titled, “The Art and Science of Forming Online Communities.” It was a great event, and something we’re involved in, support, and evangelize. During the event, we received the following question:

“B2B is a significantly different culture and has a very different way of creating relationships than B2C. I find it harder to encourage those in B2B to utilize online communities - vs. the “free time” of a high volume of consumers. When B2B is more about the bottom line and traditional relationship-building, how do you successfully encourage the use of online communities by a more time-strapped B2B audience?”

In the debrief after the event, our marketing staff had a little fun with this question, as we too often struggle to manage all of the time-consuming things involved with growing our business (as a frame of reference, scroll back to the date of my last posting). So, this is a real issue that we, too, feel as players directly in this space.

I don’t know that I have the deepest of answers for this question, and I guess it’s a bit ironic that I’m posting the response. But here are a couple of things we’ve done around here.

For the production/management of the blog:

1. Assign a quarterback other than the executive/poster. In our case, it’s our fearless Amy Bills. She’s the one that gives me dirtly looks every time I start to pontificate (which is about every two mintues around here) about some strategic concept or project that we’re working on. “Sounds like a great blog concept” is a pretty regular, not too subtle, prodding that she dishes out.

2. Open up the dialogue. At Bulldog, we try to hire and inspire great thinkers in this area, so the obvious thing to do was to broaden the contributers. My guess is that the same is true in most BtoB organizations. No matter what you’re blogging about, you would assume and hope that there are others out there with meaningful input as well.

That’s really all I can offer, so far (we’re getting better here). Blogging is so new, and so experimental, that it hasn’t reached a mainstream adoption that justifies lots of additonal resources to support. Until that changes, the competition for time will always be a challenge.

For encouraging organic blog participation:

At Bulldog, we are including Web 2.0 issues as a part to every discussion - at almost every level, so our long-term goal is to institutionlize the culture. I believe that as these cultures evolve into the mainstream, and new cycles of college grads enter the workforce, the challenge to support the dialogue will lessen.

In Bulldog’s world of thought leadership marketing, we see a lot of investment in time in learning, and consumption of content (Webinars, white papers, etc.). So the bridge to blog participation - given good content, isn’t that far a leap.

Now if we can just get Koen to post -