I am always hunting for the best of the best practices out there on Social in the B2B world!    Avnet is a value added distributor and a Social Business.  

Take a look at Avnetconnect! 

AvnetConnect Ville, is a Smallville type of map where each icon (building) represents a specific community.  Most of the icons represent what the community is.  For example the police station is for the security community, power plant is the power i/p community,  bank – finance/banking industry etc.   When placing your cursor over an icon, a bubble pops up with the name of the community.

There are two ways  users can access the community.  They can either click the community name from the legend on the left or they can click on the icon.

As one of the “Social” executives Fred Cuen commented: 

“We are excited about the early traction we are experiencing with AvnetConnect.  AvnetConnect, built on IBMs premier collaboration software, IBM Connections, provides Avnet a scalable, secure environment to engage with our partners and accelerate their ability to deliver IBM solutions to the market. Our new site map, AvnetConnectVille, will allow Avnet to highlight focused communities in AvnetConnect, as well as giving our partners an easy way to navigate to those communities.” 

 They set up a Community for their B2B resellers to drive:

  • Sharing of information
  • Driving innovation

AvnetConnect Facts(as of 3/15/12)! 

  • 107 total communities
  • 59 public communities (including subcommunities, for Anet and business partners)
  • 48 private communities (Avnet internal only)
  • 300 users and growing daily (Feb -27 requests to join,  March – 50 users request to join.  Includes 40 for the new private NGP community)

Their most popular communities are around the top areas of interests to their clients — the resellers!    Storage, Destination Analytics Cognos, Destination Industry (retail, government, finance/banking, healthcare, energy)

Click to Join Avnet’s Social Business Community
 
Do you have a great B2B example?  I’d love to hear about it!