The philosophy of conversational thinking is quite simple and as old as the hills: the best advertising comes from an existing customer convincing a non-customer to work with your company. In consumer markets, people had the opportunity to strongly influence people’s perceptions through clever, creative advertising for years. In times without social media, this communication screamed out about everything and everyone. As a result, the impact of word-of-mouth decreased. B2B marketers have had this luxury to list to data a much lesser extent. As a result, conversations have always been important in B2B.
I am also convinced that B2B marketers have many advantages that B2C marketers do not have:
Knowing customers : a good B2B marketer knows who the company’s customers (especially the top customers) are.
Co-creation is ingrained in the mentality : many B2B companies have the habit of involving customers in R&D projects.
Customer feedback has always been direct : In a B2B organization, you get direct feedback from the customer very quickly. Sales and service people work closely with customers, so feedback on the operation and service is shared very directly.
Limited conversation volume : When it comes to online conversations, the volume of an industrial company will be lower than that of a food producer. On the one hand, it is therefore somewhat more difficult to get the conversation going, on the other hand, it is less burdensome to manage and follow up.
2. What is the profile of a Conversation manager?
When observing the many vacancies for a Conversation manager, I notice that two profiles are sought. On the one hand, there is the strategic interpretation and on the other hand, the more operational interpretation. Both jobs have value and are necessary to score with Conversation management. To describe both routes, I have found inspiration in various papers by Jeremiah Owyang .
The Conversation Manager as a reactive helpdesk
Many descriptions of Conversation managers remind me of the profile of a modern webmaster. They are china numbers people who send Facebook and Twitter updates and in this way start the conversation for the brand. Every day, people are looking for a bit of content to spread online. Such people optimized resource utilization and superior roi speak on behalf of big brands and help companies move forward in conversation management. These tasks are all important, but very operational.