eROI Days Email Agency

User-Generated content will be an ingredient in most business website launches (and nearly all consumer sites). In 2006, YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook got all of the press. Wait, they still do. But, legions of major consumer brands launched their own primary sites or campaign micro-sites with clever concepts that drove consumers to feel a sense of ownership of the future of those brands. Notable examples include HBO’s Justin Timberlake show FutureSexLove, ABC/Disney’s 13 Nights of Halloween, and Doritos user-generated Super-Bowl ads.

In 2008, B2B companies will follow suit, but it won’t be easy. User-Generated content needs to be used in a way that accomplishes specific marketing objectives, and oftentimes B2B companies meet those objectives through Resource Centers (whitepaper, case study, and guide downloads), web forms, giveaways, or surveys. None of these online marketing tactics allow for community building, commenting, rating, “digging”, or creating profiles.

Extending this to what we do as an online marketing company that works with other businesses (not consumers), we just launched our own site, eroi.com, and there simply aren’t any social networking tools built into our primary site. We have done a tremendous amount of Web 2.0 tactics outside of our main site – four distinct blogs with built-in RSS feeds, Pageflakes, delicious, and digg capabilities, our own Facebook Group page, MySpace page, YouTube Channel, and Flickr feeds, but we haven’t pulled them all together and integrated social networking tools into our primary site. As a self-fulfilling prophecy, we could look at implementing some of these tools into our site or, even better, our products. Online support can leverage the wisdom of other customers and allow searchable discussion threads for product support issues between multiple customers. B2B technology companies can learn from Salesforce, Google and Facebook and open the API to their products to allow for anyone to build modules that easily integrate into their online products.