Marketing Technology Blog

Social media platforms are tools. Social media platforms are software. There are other tools and software out there. There will be better tools around the corner.

Twitter doesn’t matter. Facebook doesn’t matter. LinkedIn doesn’t matter. Blogs don’t matter. They all just help us get a little closer to what we really want.

• What we really want is the truth.
• What we really want is to trust.
• What we really want is to understand.
• What we really want is friendship.
• What we really want is help.

This month is a HUGE month for one of my good friends in technology. He’s moving his social media company from Indiana to California. He’s going to be embedded in the heart of The Valley with some of the other sharp minds that have grown their social media applications explosively. (Yes, I’m a little bit jealous).

The application that his team built is simple (so is Twitter!) but it gets to the heart of what people really want. They make it easier. The platform is simply the means to get to the social part. I’m not underestimating the incredible talent and imagination it took to launch such a cool application, there’s no doubt. But the popularity is because of what the application enables. It enables a social engagement we’ve not seen yet.

I educate clients and customers about the technology so that we can fully leverage it and maximize their social impact. So, when clients ask me, “How do I get more [insert followers, fans, subscribers, buzz, retweets], I’m always a little put off. If your company is not a social company, if you don’t care about your clients, if you don’t write fantastic content, if you don’t have a great product, if you don’t have special people, if you’re not remarkable… then the big numbers won’t do you any good.

I keep saying it…. Social media is an amplifier. If you have nothing to amplify, then the biggest amplifier in the world won’t help! Stop searching for bigger and better social media experts to keep building bigger and better amplifiers for you. It’s what they’re amplifying that makes the difference.

It’s the equivalent of someone who can’t sing asking us to fill a stadium. After we fill the stadium, then what? If you can’t sing, we had no business selling a single ticket! Folks like me can get people to show up to the concert… then it’s your job to put on a heck of a show!

So… quit asking me to get you more if you can’t handle the ones you have now. If your 500 followers aren’t doing business with you, then how is getting you 5,000 more going to improve your results? Here’s a tip… it will result in ten times the impact.

Ten times zero is zero.

Some day Twitter won’t be here, Facebook won’t be here, LinkedIn won’t be here… and we’ll be working with newer channels that may continue to make things just a little bit easier. Those new media platforms still won’t be able to fix the core issues challenging your strategy, though. Let’s fix those first.

I’ll always remember my high school economics teacher, Mr. Dilk. Aside from his hilarious self-censorship when it was obvious he wanted to curse (“Well … BUGS!”) his repetitive use of cliches actually managed to drive certain bits of wisdom into my hormone-addled brain. Among his favorites:

If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.

Now, this is before the invention of those awful motivational posters with pictures of whale tails and people climbing mountains you see in every corporate office. The dispensation of sage advice was the territory of your parents, teachers, and PBS. Despite the hackneyed nature of such counsel, this one stuck with me.

Now in my professional life, planning takes up a significant portion of my time, and for good reason. When putting together a content and social media strategy, the single most important task is to establish which platforms and services are most useful for your needs and plan your approach accordingly.

Not only does taking a willy-nilly approach dilute your brand personality, it’s also financially wasteful. Without an accurate accounting of what’s been done where–and the time spent doing it–your online efforts are a complete waste of time and money.

Any digital shop worth their salt will pitch you their planning process. If they don’t, ask them about it. If they hem and haw or outright don’t have one, run away. You will find your online marketing budget shrinking and have nothing much to show for it besides canceled checks.

To that end, if your company is in a position to go it alone in the digital space, I highly recommend you look at CMO’s Guide to the Social Landscape. It’s basically a social media cheat sheet to the benefits and shortcomings of the top platforms and services. The analysis was performed by 97th Floor, and it’s a great one-sheet resource guide.

There are numerous social network services out there; no single one is the right one, just as trying to utilize all of them isn’t effective. There is no one answer, no single social media content approach that works for every client. By engaging in thoughtful, constructive planning, you make the best use of your time and money.

This is the second time I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with Steven Woods from Eloqua, author of Digital Body Language. At Webtrends Engage conference, Steven did a fantastic job of describing a typical scenario of a purchase made online… and how our data may be failing us.

I can’t stress how important it is to recognize the changes in marketing and sales that are needed to handle the changes that are happening in the buying process. One of the reasons social media has become so important is that we know that decision-making is now happening within and around our network. It’s a disruptive shift that companies must adapt to.

Social media isn’t always a finite measurement… I believe it’s one that can be measured enough to provide a positive return on investment, though. That’s the responsibility of marketing and social media consultants. That return is becoming much greater than what we can accurately measure!

I recognize, even with my clients, that its far more complex… but we start with the very basics and move forward. I don’t typically finish the social media and integration projects I work on – it’s a moving target and we must continue to refine and enhance as demand requires. Get a solid foundation out that incorporates best practices and that can be accurately measured. Then measure, test, and adjust your execution to maximize results.

This morning I was reading a great whitepaper found through Aprimo’s site, on integrating social media.

Marketers don’t have to start from scratch to build social media’s game-changing capabilities into the existing communications mix. By treating social media as an extension of new media and Web 1.0, marketers are exploiting its new capabilities within their available bandwidth and resources.

The whitepaper speaks to the roles of sales and marketing being somewhat reversed. Marketers – who typically never had contact with the public – are now required to communicate and manage the brand publicly. They’re having to accomplish this with no training whatsoever in objection management. I discussed this as well in my presentation at Webtrends Engage.

At the same time, our salespeople are expected to assume positions in Social Media, implementing one-to-many marketing and communication techniques that they’ve never perfected.

The whitepaper makes four recommendations:

• Establish a focal point by putting someone from the marketing staff in charge of social media. This individual should be responsible for crafting marketing’s social-media strategy, including the creation of a process that will set boundaries on which vehicles will be used, how they will be managed, and which people should be assigned to them in accordance with corporate policy.
• Collaborate with other functions that participate in the larger buying cycle, including customer service and product management. By 2010, more than 60% of Fortune 1000 companies with a website will have some form of online community that can be used for customer relationship purposes. However, it’s important that marketing discern social media’s role in presales activities from those that are postsales customer service oriented to ensure ownership is properly allocated across the various functions that participate in the execution of the firm’s larger CRM strategy.
• Get people from the marketing staff into sales training, especially those that engage in social forums that enable one-to-one communications. Marketers with no training or experience in “objection management” are particularly vulnerable in a world of social media, because customers freely criticize a provider and its products in public forums.
• Act as a go-between with sales leaders and salespeople wishing to participate in social media, particularly places where they communicate one-to-many, and be trained with the same editorial direction given to marketing and communications professionals to ensure the brand protection and consistent messaging.

I’ve provided some direction for salespeople to begin adopting Social Media – but the whitepaper details much more from an overall corporate strategy. I’ve also been attending sales training over the last year and would highly recommend it to all marketers! I’m interviewing Bill Godfrey, CEO of Aprimo today, and will be discussing this phenomena – look for a video to come!

Aprimo’s integrated, on demand marketing software enables B2C and B2B marketers to successfully navigate the changing role of marketing by taking control of budgets and spend, eliminating internal silos with streamlined workflows and executing innovative multi-channel campaigns to drive measureable ROI. from the Aprimo website.