We were having a conversation about social media’s impact on customer reference programs. It was agreed that there haven’t been any significant writings on this specific topic since Jeremiah Owyang’s 2007 blog entry. This was a pretty thoughtful piece and received A LOT of comments. Warning:  It’s long to begin with, but add in the comments and you’ve got a novella. Plan accordingly. Nevertheless, what we liked about this piece was that it wasn’t the typical “sky is falling” proclamation associated with consultants drumming up new business. Jeremiah discussed the need to adapt customer reference program practices to account for emerging social media (SM) tools and communications channels.

While our clients aren’t asking us about SM’s role on a daily basis, we do see it trickling into the customer reference program arena. Mainly in the form of how to insert customer comments/insights/experiences into SM discussions. As one commenter on Jeremiah’s blog pointed out, he may be in the 1% of the population using the heck out of social tools. Our guess is he’s the guy who was well-networked before social media existed. Take that into consideration.

I recently posted a link to a study done on CEO use of social media. While we’re talking about a very narrow demographic in this study, we think the barriers to social media use by enterprise decision makers is a natural one:  time and priorities. B2C and B2B customers and their respective contributions to communities, blogs, etc., are different; and will continue to be for another generation (our prediction). For a B2B executive to believe and base a multimillion dollar business purchase on other customer opinions, the owner of each opinion must be known, reputable, transparent, and frankly, there needs to be a reasonable volume of consensus. Ever go looking for consumer opinions online for an electronic device and found 6 entries where half were a 1 or 2 on a scale of 5 and half were a 5 or 6? What good is that? If I knew 5-10 people who had recently purchased such a device I wouldn’t have need to look elsewhere, but I didn’t. What was my remaining option? CNET, which had some professional, thorough, unemotional reviews. Better.

Our field will evolve, as it always has and always will, but we believe it will happen more gradually in the enterprise space of B2B. A well-known consultant in the customer reference program space 5-6 years ago predicted the end of written case studies in just a few years. We’ve produced more written case studies for clients in 2009 then in 2005. Go figure.

Your comments, as always, are welcome.