Introduction – The Rising Significance of Software Markets

Why spend time thinking talking and writing about marketing in the software industry? Here are three answers.

Firstly, the argument of size. It should come as no surprise to anyone who spends time using a computer or portable device that the software industry is big business. There are strong brands – Microsoft, Google, Facebook – and a multiplicity of types of software for business or leisure use, often with price tags in three or four figures. Exactly how big is the software industry though? The industry body, the SIIA [Software and Information Industry Association] estimated in conjunction with Datamonitor that the worldwide value of software sales in 2008 was US$304bn and estimate a 2013 value of US$457bn (Datamonitor 2008). Microsoft employees 100,000 people, a similar number to Exxon Mobil.

Secondly, the argument of cohort. If you are a relatively young person, software and the hardware it runs on has probably been fully integrated into many aspects of your life – you write email using a web-based application – a word we’ll see again shortly – like Googlemail or Yahoo, you use one or more of a console, PC or portable device to play games and make calls, you relax to music delivered by data files passing through something like iTunes and you sign up for tutorials and submit assignments via a VLE. You are as likely as not to be aware of many different brand names and the people and companies behind them. Software is important to you, it is going to go on being important for the rest of your life. If you aren’t involved with the marketing of software as a career, you are necessarily still going to be involved as a customer.

Thirdly, the argument of culture. Software is now advertised on the high street and TV. There are films about the development of software – The Social Network, Pirates of Silicon Valley and one of my all time favouritess, Sneakers – software capability and fallibility is now a common plot device in literature and drama. Images, tropes and concepts from software have been co-opted into polular culture. See above.

Datamonitor (2008) Software: Global Industry Guide New York, Datamonitor

Social Media - for Business to Business Marketing as well as Consumer Marketing

I've been spending a little time recently thinking about how useful social media are for business-to-business marketing (B2B). A few weeks ago I attended an excellent training event, organised by the Chartered Institute of Marketing, with the rather melodramatic title of 'Digital Marketing Bootcamp'. Mostly this was concerned with B2C, rather than B2B. I think most marketers would recognise the relevance of social media to consumer marketing. But what about B2B? This I had to check out for myself.

Now, the ever helpful Dr. Harker has already assisted me in my embryonic stabs at using Facebook, while some time ago, more or less in complete ignorance, I signed up to something called LinkedIn. At the same time, I have one or two extremely up-to-date colleagues who are never without their iPhones and iPads, and whose every movement I can follow through foursquare, twitter and Facebook. I reckon this means that I am probably a little ahead of the social media curve compared to most people in their sixth decade of life.

It turns out that Facebook is already used to some extent for B2B - meaning, you can find quite a few B2B Facebook fan pages. (Although, in a recent development, you don't become a 'fan' any more, you just 'like' them. But I guess they're still called fan pages.) Two interesting, and contrasting, ones to look at are www.facebook.com/sodexocareers and www.facebook.com/cisco. The Sodexo Facebook page has lots of interesting exchanges between people who work in the catering business, with advice provided by Sodexo on how to register your c.v., how to apply for jobs with Sodexo, what jobs are coming up, and so on. So it's basically a recruitment site. The Cisco page is a different matter, and has a great deal more going on. There are clearly aspects of 'soft' corporate marketing - like nice, friendly posts from senior execs. But there is also genuine mutual cooperation going on to exchange useful information - it looks like a useful user community for techies who like to play with Cisco systems. So, there is some 'co-creation of value' going on here, as we marketing academics like to call it.

LinkedIn is clearly the social network that is designed for business professionals. You can use the search facility at LinkedIn, for example, to look for purchasing professionals in the environmental services industry (I just did). Then, potentially, you have the makings of a B2B marketing list. However, compared to Facebook, LinkedIn is a midget. One question doing the rounds at social media blogs is whether Facebook could just wipe LinkedIn out if it chose to.

Right now, the use of social media in B2B marketing is embryonic and evolving rapidly. No doubt there will be plenty of opportunities for bright marketing graduates over the next few years!