"It's as important for us to be in social media as it is for us to be doing search marketing," says Jeremy Bevan, chief marketing officer at networking giant Cisco in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Russia (EMEAR). "We calculated that our social presence in EMEAR is equal to putting on 10 major events every day."
Suhela Dighe, social media marketing director, EMEA, for global information management company EMC, also affirms the importance of social media marketing. "Research by Sirius Decisions and Forrester points out that 70% of B2B and over 80% of IT decision-makers are using social media to learn and validate information about their B2B purchases," she says.
Social media, as technology platforms, are of particular importance to businesses in the technology sector. In some cases, this synergy even extends into the products. "We have the ability to fully integrate social media into our products," says Liam Houghton, product director at London-based mobile apps and services company Yuza.
Adam Stewart, marketing director at online tech retailer Rakuten's Play.com, has put some numbers on the value of social media. He says: "Social has become a core part of our business and is now our most efficient marketing channel. We generated over £2m of direct sales from social platforms in 2012 and over the past year we have seen a 122% increase in orders from social networks. With social, we're also able to accurately track the value of socially engaged fans. Our research has shown that average revenue increases by 24% once an existing customer becomes a fan."
Rakuten's Play.com also feeds social media content into its product pages. "By using the EngageSciences platform to search the social web for advocacy content, we can serve this into our product pages to socialise the commerce experience with credible peer-to-peer recommendations."
A presence in social media is critical for today's technology businesses, then; but working out how to make best use of them can still be a puzzle. "I started looking at a social media strategy a month or two ago and realised I was pretty much duplicating our PR strategy, so I went back to our PR strategy and integrated social media into that," says Amy Crimmens, PR and events manager at IT consultancy Waterstons, making the point that you cannot successfully do social media marketing in isolation.
Technology companies also soon discover that people expect support as well as information from businesses on social media. "It doesn't make sense for marketers to start engaging from a customer-service perspective, but it does make sense for customer-service professionals to do that," says Nokia's Thomas Messett, head of digital and social for Europe. "So we have the Nokia Care Twitter accounts, we have our Nokia forums and we have Facebook pages, where we hand over from the global marketing team to the care teams, to allow them to engage with issues such as, 'I've broken my phone, what do I do?'".
Phil Stewart, customer services director at Virgin Media Business, says: "More than half of our incoming customer-service traffic is now email or social media, whereas, four years ago, it was mostly phone calls and letters. It is a radical change and we want to give customers the ability to use their preferred methods."
Getting the most from social media, though, means going beyond marketing or support departments and involving the whole company. "We encourage active engagement in social media for all of our employees, based on some simple rules of engagement, published for all to see," says Caroline Taylor, vice-president marketing for IBM UK and Ireland.
One consequence of this is what she calls "amplification" as hot topics get debated. Taylor describes how this worked for an ebook distributed after a business and sustainability summit. "The link was sent to around 500 summit participants, half of whom had been participating via a live stream and Twitter. We promoted it on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and IBM blogs. Three months later, 18,000 copies had been downloaded. That amplification is extraordinary and very cost-effective."
Nokia has found an innovative way to involve its non-marketing employees via a social media visualisation tool called Agora, "It's a big, six-screen display that is in three or four different locations throughout our global offices. These sit in high-traffic areas, they don't sit in someone's office. You're getting a cup of coffee and the first thing you see is that my product is being really well received, or whatever it might be. It makes the organisation aware that they are being talked about all the time and helps us to put our customers first. We try to socialise the organisation."
Nokia also uses tools, including Radian6 from Salesforce and Analytics Pro from Socialbakers, to gain insight. "That helps us to validate or change our marketing campaigns," says Messett.
Nalden, co-founder of Dutch file-transfer company We Transfer, puts it simply: "We consider ourselves a social company. Platforms like Facebook and Twitter have to be part of your organisation and spark two-way conversations with your users and future clients. It's that transparency people love."
From the largest to the smallest technology companies, there is remarkable consistency in that message.