That’s what comes up for me whenever I see research on the usefulness of Facebook for B2B.  IDG came out with a study that says 30% of tech buyers use FB every day, compared to 8% for LinkedIn.  It set off a whole new round of questions as to whether B2B should embrace FB.  But that’s a black & white choice in a world of gray.

Sure, some people live completely blended lifestyles with no boundaries between work and business.  They want to engage on B2B FB walls, get customer service questions answered, look for jobs and share industry info.  And there are plenty of great B2B FB pages that prove the return can exceed the investment.  But we can’t deny that this group is a minority.  And unless there’s a further culture change, people will be much more interested in discussing B2B topics on LinkedIn, Nings, blogs, etc. (Conference and trade association private communities are picking up steam.)

I’d suggest asking your customers the DEGREE to which they think an FB presence would be useful.  Then test it as a hypothesis and allocate your resources PROPORTIONATELY.

A new Worldcom study has found a big gap in the way B2B companies use their social media channels:

“In North America, thought leadership promotion is the primary use of digital tools (30%); but it was not mentioned by any of the respondents in Western Europe. European companies focused primarily on social media to communicate with potential clients (31%) and current clients (25%).”

I’d love to see metrics in another year to see whether there’s a performance difference in the approaches.  No doubt this divergence could be attributed to cultural variance, but since social media for B2B is relatively new, it’s not like there’s been time for the best practices to be fully hammered out and shared.  Here’s the full release with lots of great data about channel usage and budgets. If anyone has a link to the full study, please leave it in the comments.