Even though our Charlotte ad agency specializes in shopper marketing, we still have a lot of clients who need strong, impactful B2B campaigns. And if that sounds like an odd combination (shopper marketing + B2B), it’s really not if you stop and think about it.

Whether you’re a teenager shopping for a new pair of kicks or an engineer at the San Diego County Water Authority in the market for a new wastewater filtration system, you still research your purchase online. You still look for the best price. And you still use social media as you move down that path to purchase.

Here’s part 1 of a 4 part B2B social media strategy

1. Monitor

• Track the Conversation. Monitoring can be used to discover customers and prospects that are most relevant for your offerings by observing the patterns and topics of their conversations. All of the major social media tools have search capabilities and specialized monitoring tools.

• Trend the Conversation. Some of the tools let you analyze the direction and popularity of conversations over time. This is helpful during important periods like new offering launches or in the aftermath of a crisis.

• Gather Research. Social media are great (free) repositories for discussions and content on every possible topic, and search tools can help you mine that data.

• Determine Share of Attention. You should track the amount of conversation about you versus your competitors.

• Identify Influential Sources. By monitoring conversations online, we can find the people both inside and outside your company who demonstrate thought leadership. Monitoring tools help determine how much impact these smart folks are having on our target audiences. For example, the number of RSS subscribers a blogger has, the number of comments to a blog post, the number of page views, etc.

Next week: How to engage a B2B audience in virtual space