Which clubs should you be joining?
Jinfo Blog

23rd October 2010

By Tim Buckley Owen

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As yet another specialist online community gets a kick start, there’s new evidence to suggest that smaller companies don’t really know what to do with social media yet. Meanwhile at the larger end of the scale, the global dominance of LinkedIn and ZoomInfo is by no means guaranteed. B2B Buzz (http://www.b2bbuzz.org) is a new community of business information professionals that’s currently recruiting members. It has an impressive range of backers – including Shore, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online and Hoover’s – and it’s aimed squarely at sales & marketing and small business. ‘Your journey to small business success begins by taking the Business Information Adoption Path Self Assessment for Small Business Leaders’, B2B Buzz proclaims.  But as it invites you to ‘answer 10 simple questions and then compare your level with other small businesses’, you do start to wonder what the mix is between genuine community and showcase for its founders. All the same, it may be just what the sector needs if a survey from the United Kingdom’s Forum of Private Business is to be believed. Just over half of the Forum’s members use social networking sites – but over half of those nevertheless express serious doubts about their value, and 6% regard them as downright useless. Despite this, the Forum believes that they do offer potential for SMEs because their conversational, real-time nature make them ideal for small, dynamic firms, which it says ‘often have much more relaxed attitudes towards public relations than big corporations’ (http://digbig.com/5bcqxp). It trots out the usual big networks as examples – but if you’re looking towards the fastest growing markets, those may not be the ones to target. According to technology consultant Gartner, social media in the Asia Pacific region are developing in different directions from those in the United States and Europe. Consumers in countries such as China, Japan, South Korea and India have tended to favour their own niche sites – and the same seems to be true, to some extent at least, of their business communities (further details at http://digbig.com/5bcqxq). Take for example Ushi (http://www.ushi.cn or http://digbig.com/5bcqxt for an explanation in English). Launched in beta mode by invitation only last March, this Shanghai-based community has grown to over 60,000 members. As Leo Chen of the VentureBeat blog points out in the New York Times, that’s tiny compared with LinkedIn – but it has attracted an impressive list of Charter Members, including some of the most influential individuals in China’s technology and finance industries (http://digbig.com/5bcqxr). So what’s going to make social media work for business? Conventional wisdom says scale – but the range of niche sites is growing all the time (see for example Nancy Davis Kho at http://www.vivavip.com/go/e29149). So maybe a better measure is quality.

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