[Ed: Erika Kerekes heads social strategy and product management for Business.com. She'll be contributing to this blog frequently on business social media topics. Learn more about Erika by clicking here.]

Enquiro put on a great webinar this week: Making B2B Fun Through Social Media, an in-depth look at the social media programs run by Kinaxis, an Ottawa-based provider of supply chain management solutions.

Social media for supply chain management? Yep. And it’s delivering for Kinaxis. The company won an award for best integrated social media campaign from B2B Magazine, for starters. And, more important, Kinaxis says it has seen a 2.7x increase in traffic to its domain and a 3.2x increase in leads generated online since adding social media to its marketing mix.

Kirsten Watson, Kinaxis director of corporate marketing, walked us through all the social media channels they support:

• The 21^st Century Supply Chain blog – 21 contributors write nearly daily about everything from case studies to customers’ stories to industry events and trade shows
• The Supply Chain Expert Community – a year-old proprietary owned community for supply chain folks, with about 2,500 registered members, 75 percent of whom are prospects (not customers)
• An “expert bloggers” widget that aggregates the voices of supply chain experts and promotes them under the Kinaxis brand
• Extensive use of relevant LinkedIn Groups – Watson’s team identified 46 active supply chain groups in which they participate actively and monitor conversations
• Video interviews with Kinaxis in-house supply chain experts on YouTube
• Watson uses Twitter (@kinaxis) but confesses that she doesn’t quite get it yet. (Hint: If you’ve got Twitter advice for Kinaxis, sounds like Watson would be all ears.)

What drives success in social media?

So why is social media working so well in this ultra-B2B slice of the market?

• They went into it armed with data. Before starting most of the activities outlined above, Kinaxis hired Forrester Research to poll its market. Forrester interviewed some 250 supply chain management execs about how they connected with peers and found information online and concluded that Kinaxis would likely have a significant first-mover advantage in the supply chain space by building its own online community.
• They syndicate like crazy. Every piece of content they produce gets pushed out via all the other social media channels. Blog posts show up in the community, in the LinkedIn Groups in which they’re active, and on Twitter. The audio track from webinars and videos gets repurposed for podcasts. And more.
• The top dog is a believer. Watson said their CEO (she didn’t name names, but I’m assuming she means current CEO Douglas Colbeth) pushed her group to explore social media channels, even though there were few companies modeling social media success in B2B.

Kinaxis’s unique spin on social

It all sounds pretty basic so far, right? Well executed, to be sure, and well thought out, but inside the lines.

But here’s the kicker: Kinaxis did one really crazy, unexpected thing that drove viral sharing and gave the company a personality in the market’s eyes.

They invested in making people laugh.

Almost in passing, Watson mentioned the “comedy” angle they took with part of their social media campaign. Comedy? About supply chain management? Well, yes. Turns out they’ve got some pretty funny people up there in Ottawa. They’ve got a whole series of YouTube videos on supply chain management and enterprise software – some produced in-house, some professionally scripted and acted by an outside production company. You may not believe me, but I’m telling you, you will laugh until the tears come. At supply chain management and enterprise software jokes.

Here are a few samples:

There’s clearly some serious money invested in some of these videos. Was it money well spent? I’ve got my opinions, but I’d rather hear yours, so leave a comment below. Was this the “secret sauce” in Kinaxis’s social media campaign? Can this kind of nontraditional approach really drive business results? Would this approach work for your company?