A colleague asked me today if we were doing anything interesting in the social space for our B2B clients. Since many of our social engagements are strategic in nature, they sometimes don't make it to our portfolio, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to share my response.

Here are a few examples of social marketing we've been doing for our B2B clients:

For Adobe, we've created a Facebook app called FLEX Spotlight and run several campaigns to get developers to "show off their skills" by uploading and sharing apps that they've created with Adobe Flex.

For SAP CRM, we identified a value chain of potential customers from prospects to leads to customers and planned an multi-channel strategy to move them up the chain. We developed an influencer strategy and articulated a "converstional positioning statement" around the emerging topic of Social CRM. The core strategy spanned Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, SlideShare, blogs and the SAP's own developer community. 

For one client, we are currently developing a "social portal" to bring together all the disparate content Intuit has across social properties like YouTube, Vimeo, blogs and Twitter. It's been an intensive exercise in content strategy and user experience design with the objective of reinforcing this brand's position as an innovation leader to its various audiences. It has not launched yet, but may be presentable.

We also won the Intuit Innovation Competition with a mobile/social concept for SMBs called Board of Advisors (similar to Quora, but financially focused and integrated with Intuit's community and products). It's an interesting story on 2 levels: (1) how Intuit is crowd-sourcing innovation from its partners and (2) the concept itself is very compelling. Out of 50 ideas submitted Intuit selected two winners, Traction and IBM. 

A bit older, but probably most colorful and interesting was how we launched the Web 2.0 Expo to a business professional audience. 

We did everything from using blogs to generate customer insights; to integrating social with traditional and online to generate awareness, interest and drive registrations for the event; to using a wiki to get people collaborating before the event; to infusing social media into the very fabric of the event with the 1st ever use of a Twitter board, allowing conference attendees to nominate and vote for sessions, even created "user-generated t-shirts"; to using Flickr and YouTube to extend the conversation after the event. Results were fantastic: 

- doubled their registration goal (goal = 5,000, actual = 11,000), 

- 4500 photos posted on  Flickr

- created the leading brand for all things Web 2.0

Social media today is like digital has been for the past decade. Table stakes. Just as everything is interactive in today's media landscape, everything should also be considered social in nature. Customers are people. B2B customers. B2C customers. They're all people. It is important for every brand to consider how people interact with messages and with one another today.