As social media becomes more prevalent in marketing, we’re going to have to rethink how we gather information from prospects.

We’re starting to see social media have a positive impact on driving traffic to websites and on lead generation. In our recent Web 2.0 survey, (all ITSMA clients can download this executive summary), we found that “increased web traffic” was the most frequently cited benefit of Web 2.0 efforts so far (by 67% of respondents). “Increased lead generation” was farther down the list—24% are seeing it.

Now that may be due in part to the fact that most B2B marketers have only recently begun using Web 2.0 in their marketing—fewer than 35% of marketers in our survey have been using blogs or podcasts for more than one year, and just 3% have been using social media (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) for at least that long.

Social media and lead generation go together
But there is a natural link between social media and lead generation. It is a natural way to drive traffic back to your site for registration—as long as you have great content to offer. And those who are beyond the experimental stage with social media are already seeing this benefit (24% ain’t bad given the nascent nature of this stuff). Indeed, some B2B early adopters are seeing 10-15% of their lead totals generated through social media, according to this survey by DemandGenReport.

Given the potential for lead generation through social media, the question then becomes how much information should we try to get from people coming to us through social media? I think the inherently casual (social!) nature of social media means that we should err on the side of less information.

Should we not capture any data at all?
B2B marketer Tom Bottom got me thinking about this issue this week with a daring post that questions whether we should be doing any data capture at all. He argues that putting a data form in front of a prospect displays a lack of confidence in the quality of our work and at worst drives people into the arms of competitors. In the epiphany stage of the buying process, we should be offering people great information, not turning them off by trying to sleaze information out of them when they’re nowhere near being ready to buy. Data gathering should be reserved for the interest phase, when people are creating a short list of providers and will more willingly put up with being a prisoner of data capture.

Meanwhile, Blake Hinckley cites a stat from Marketing Sherpa that says that the data we’re capturing is garbage anyway because 71% of people lie on the forms. I’m a little skeptical about taking that stat at face value. There are plenty of cells on data forms (too many, in most cases) so people may be lying about things that don’t really matter anyway. In my experience, IT prospects tend to lie about their titles and their level of interest because they’re afraid that they won’t get the best content or treatment if they admit that they’re trapped on the help desk instead of wielding that big stick of decision-making. But is that lead totally useless? I don’t think so.

Get data through actions, not words
But Blake is on to something when he talks about a concept called passive profiling, in which marketers gather data based on the kinds of content they are offering to prospects rather than through forms. Prospects are only required to give up their names and emails to access content that then tells the marketers how interested the prospects really are. He offers a great example from a client:

“For example, in our campaign with Level 3, a leading fiber-based communications company, we tracked whether prospects downloaded a vbook. Since the vbook explains the need for reliable connectivity (Level 3’s product), if the user browsed through several sections, we could reliably consider them a warm lead. The vbook also contained a Level 3 Network Map embedded as a PDF. If prospects downloaded it, we can assume they were checking if their building or business is within Level 3’s fiber network. PDF-checkers were hot leads, interested in Level 3’s solution, so we quickly passed these leads off to Level 3’s sales team to make the call in time.”

Sync your content to the stages of the buying process
He later says that the decision between active and passive profiling shouldn’t be so binary—that you can mix a little bit of both. But I think that assumes that we are actively (sorry) thinking about how much data we should be capturing before we start to piss people off. I don’t think we’re doing that. By default, we try to get as much as we can, because we figure sales is going to rip us up if we don’t—or because we figure free content (that wasn’t free to us—we killed ourselves creating it) should have to come at some kind of price.

But I think Tom has a great point when he says that there’s not much reason to be asking people for a lot of information during the early stages of the buying process. That’s why it’s important to sync your content to the different phases of the buying process and let that drive the kind of data you try to gather.

Stop collecting this data
For the epiphany and interest stages of the buying process (which is where most of us play anyway), I think we need to practice passive profiling wherever possible, and when it isn’t possible, we should slash the data forms to the bare minimum. Here’s what I think the forms should ask for:

• Name
• E-mail
• Would you like to subscribe to content about this business issue? (Writing clear headlines and descriptions is important.)

That’s it.

Things to banish forever:

• Address (Why would I want to engage with anyone who wants to send me snail mail?)
• Title (totally meaningless and a prime reason to lie)
• Company (so we’re a client/not a client; what does that have to do with anything at this stage of the buying process?)
• Level of interest (we’re here because we’re interested in learning about business issues, not your products)
• Budget (with the complexity of the stuff we’re selling, this data would be crap anyway)
• Phone (c’mon—it’s a new century)

Data forms act like social media doesn’t exist. A combination of conversational engagement and great thought leadership content are what we need to engage with customers in the coming years, not qualification forms.

What do you think?

Check out the B2B Marketing Zone

In keeping with my recent post about being part of the B2B online marketers guild, I wanted to point you to the B2B Marketing Zone, where Tony Karrer has done a nice job of building a list of relevant B2B marketing blogs (including mine—thanks, Tony!) and offers a handy summary of all of them so you don’t have to visit a bunch of different sites to see what’s going on. Another great example of the aggregation blog strategy that I was talking about.