How Well Do Vendors Use Social Media?
We've just published our latest Vendor Positioning Review (VPR) benchmark of the IT management software market. This vendor-oriented report discusses how vendors market their solutions to you in collateral and on their Web sites. We focus on how well they talk Business Technology (BT) over IT — how well do they speak YOUR language. And we recognize how important B2B digital media has become in communicating with you — our most recent data shows that the percent of technology buyers that are most advanced in using social media, what we call the Creators and Critics, is nearly double that of the US consumer population in general.
The VPR report highlights a best practice (or two) in each of the categories that we evaluate.
In terms of providing you with social media facilities, the vendors are a mixture of active, indifferent and inactive. The good ones offer you a community Web page from their Home Page to access forums, join communities (even if only a support community) and see their blogs: kudos to BMC, CA, ManageEngine, newScale, Spiceworks and Splunk. EMC, HP Software, IBM Tivoli, Microsoft, Nimsoft, Quest and Symantec have the facilities as well but you need to be good to find them (who would think of looking under “About Symantec”?). ASG and Compuware aren’t there yet.
We also checked for Twitter accounts and found that most vendors have set themselves to be found there – we didn’t include event-based Twitter accounts in this. ASG and IBM Tivoli (unless you include “IBM_tivoli_de”) don’t have accounts. Many of the vendors even have several accounts. Last not least, we looked at their involvement in Facebook. Some would argue that LinkedIn might be a better source for networking (newScale do great work in there!) but we had to choose one. They are all in except for ASG, CA, HP Software, and newScale (sorry!).
So, here is an invitation. Please let me know how important you think these social media are now in your search for suitable solutions and in your vendor relationships. And, if you think that one of your suppliers could qualify as a best practice, then let us know and, if we agree, then we will highlight them in our research. I look forward to hearing from you.
Always keeping you informed!
Check out Peter's research