Questions from the client base #10: “Does all this B2B digital/social stuff have a shelf life...?”

I was on a call with a management team recently.

We ran through what being a Social organisation means, the reason it's important, how it all works and what results they should expect to see.

One of the team asked a great question…“Does all this digital/social stuff have a shelf life...?”

My answer…."yes, it does".

Our commercial worlds are in, and have always been in, a constant state of flux.

Let’s look at email…

It burst onto our computer screens in 1991 but it had been around for many years before its public launch.

Suddenly we could contact millions of people, quickly and efficiently. What would have taken us months to do was now taking us a few minutes.

Then people worked out how to game the system – just send out thousands of marketing emails every day to random people, entire businesses, entire regions….and spamming was born.

The shelf life of email started to show in 1998 when Data Protection rules came into play.

GDPR, spam filters and our own tastes ate further into the efficacy of email marketing – We all started our days by deleting last night’s spam…. delete, delete, delete.

Let’s look at Digital Advertising…

Once a powerhouse in the history of digital commerce, but it’s all changing.

In March 2021, David Temkin, Senior Director, Product Management, Ads Privacy & User Trust at Google announced that “once third-party cookies are phased out, it wont build alternate identifiers to track individuals as they browse the web, or in its products”. This is a huge move from the worlds biggest enablers of internet tracking and has massive impact on industry.

The advertising world as we’ve come to know it is evolving, with new/upgraded privacy laws and restriction son app tracking cookies are fading away into the history books…the shelf life at work.

Everything has a shelf life; everything changes and evolves.

What was the hottest news 10 years ago, morphs and flexes with the changing demands and tastes of the users.

We are in the midst of the biggest evolution in commercial history since the industrial revolution. The Digital Commercial Transition is bigger than all above, yet many organisations are either ignoring it or dragging their feet.

The Digital Commercial Transition

What we are witnessing is the creation of a Digital Twin of your sector, an active and dynamic Digital Twin.

I explain it like this…

We all know the analogue worlds we grew up in, we know people and we think we know how things work:

We call ‘X’ or email ‘X’ at company 'Y'
we get a meeting
we get some project information
we get on the bid list
we propose/tender for the work
we win or lose.

This has likely worked for you for many years but, if you are anything like many of the organisations we know, this is losing or has lost its effect.

Pipeline down
Leads down
Opportunities down
Less meetings
Less proposals
Less orders.

You might supplement all of above with events:

You buy the stand
you print the brochures
you pay the expenses

But what did it really mean for you....what return are you getting on that investment...?

The organisations we meet tell us what they used to do doesn’t give them return they were used to…

Why…?

Because of the Commercial Digital Twin effect.

The curtain between your analogue sector and your digital sector

Imagine a solid curtain, a force field, between your analogue commercial sector and this digital twin.

Your sector is building in this digital twin and organisations are staking claim to the centre of the industry. The interesting part of this is that that its not always who you would expect….mere company size alone doesn’t guarantee success.

In this Digital Twin of your sector, the rules are different. There is a different strategy, mindset and set of plays.

In this sector twin success comes from budling digital ecosystems, partnerships and communities.

All of this is anchored in competence and trust.

Your buyers have moved to digital, and your sector is moving to digital. Your organisation needs to know how to become the leading technical and Commercial Digital Influencer in your sector or, you are leaving profit, ebitda, growth and relevance on the table.

The access point to get into the Digital Twin of our sectors is through Social Media.

The smart money already knows the status that their digital sector is in, what their plans are, what they are doing and how it all works.

We work with management teams across a range of sectors. We always come across someone who has strong views on this platform or the next and why its not relevant to business. When I explain it like this, they start to see things differently.