B2B marketers and communicators I talk to are worried about their IT department. On the one hand, they know the useful role IT plays in many different ways to enable the company and to keep things on track with respect to compliance, security and so on. On the other hand, they see IT’s push for standardization across systems as something that stands in firmly in the way of keeping up with competitive, up-to-date marketing practices. And they’re right – the traditional IT department agenda and processes do present challenges for doing a good job as a B2B marketer.

One of the evils out there, seen from a narrow standpoint of best-practice communication, is our dear friend SharePoint. And that’s particularly the case if your company is running SharePoint 2007, for example. Here’s what I learned in a recent conversation with a medium-sized pharmaceutical company running SharePoint 2007:

• SharePoint 2007 makes it difficult to provide an “electronic magazine experience” such as that of, for example, our Wordspin (www.wordspin.dk) publication
• SharePoint 2007 does not enable content rating and tagging without significant customization, and even when enabled it is not intuitive or user-friendly.
• SharePoint 2007 does enable the use of rich media from multiple sources but it’s again far from user-friendly.
• SharePoint 2007 cannot support the use of unique visual identities such as those that might be required in a more flexible “brand as a publisher” world since the Corporate Communication department typically demands strict use of standard SharePoint templates, unless otherwise agreed. In other words, visual creativity is too limited.
• SharePoint 2007 can only be reliably used with the Internet Explorer browser (!)
• SharePoint, in general, takes too long to make changes to – particularly in comparison with a tool like WordPress. And fast changes are in the nature of the marketing task, no matter how well planned things may be.

SharePoint 2010 goes quite a way to solving issues like those above, but let’s face it – it is still a corporate-size, tough-to-work-with solution administrated by the IT department. If yours is like most companies, don’t count on getting cutting-edge (ouch, propaganda word!) marketing capabilities or fast re-programming unless you have a high-priority business case.

B2B marketers need to be thinking how they can manage IT department requirements and expectations while trying to sneak their way past with new, non-corporate-standard tools wherever they can. At least when it comes to content marketing needs, IT departments need to allow greater flexibility and autonomy than elsewhere in the organization.

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