Your social assets now have a solid base and you’ve built a routine of engagement. Social media has become a functional and valuable part of your business model. You’re ahead of the trend, but where do you go from here?

The following is the final adapted excerpt from the white paper “8 Tips for Social Business,” which provides an eight-step roadmap to social success. In this portion we offer insight on why to amplify all of your social efforts once you have developed a concrete social media strategy. To view the white paper in its entirety, you can download it below.

Tip 8: Amplify

Photo by Bill Selak.

When you have a piece of content that is a “hit,” double down. One of the benefits of good measurement and understanding of your data is the ability to hone your messaging and understand what did and didn’t work from a content perspective. Organic social is testing your content for you. Paid social allows you to commit dollars with data-backed belief in your programs and messaging. Invest in promoted tweets, accounts or trends across social platforms or accounts that have already demonstrated the highest yield.

With paid social companies can drill down to microtarget users – either their own followers or people “like” their followers – based on literally hundreds of different interests, by country and city, gender and even device. Companies only pay when users “engage” with the Promoted Tweet in some way, i.e. by clicking on a link or retweeting it. Native ads are also very agile. Members of an organization can log in at any time, create a message and instantly push it to a global audience as a Promoted Tweet. An eBay-style bidding system means prime ad spots always go for the lowest price, minimizing ad spend. The time-consuming (not to mention pricey) requirements of traditional ad campaigns – design teams, creative agencies and media buyers – can’t make the same claim.

Conclusion

With these 8 Tips, you’re better positioned to go forward and succeed in social business, whether you’re at the Social Advocate, Team, Business or Enterprise stage of Social Maturity. With the next generation of consumers and employees adopting social as their media of choice, the future of business and the future of social are inextricably linked.

The time is now. One day, in the not-too-distant future, there will be no more social business. The adjectification era of social as it relates to business will be past as social’s integration into business completes itself. Social will simply be business, business will simply be social. Today you have eight more ways to get you there.

Want to read the rest of the white paper? Download “8 Tips for Social Business.”

We all know that art is in the eye of the beholder. However, cash is in the hand of the potential buyer. So, should the 200,000 US-based fine artists and their ecosystem run like a business? First Research states there are close to 5,000 art dealers and galleries that generate about $6 billion and the overall global art business generate over $15 billion annually as stated by the Art Market Monitor. So, yes! I’d say that the art business is a real business and artists need to work like a well-oiled operation and … social media are a part of that operation. They have bills to pay too, right?

5 Big Social Business Mistakes I Found At the Rittenhouse Square Fine Art Show … That Can Easily Be Painted As Opportunities

As I perused the paintings, etchings (yes, I finally discovered what an etching was!) and mixed media offerings I found five key opportunities that each artist needs to pause and consider to sell more art. Integrating social media into your business will make it easier for your fans to spread the word to their friends and family of your work. And THAT viral message will help you sell more work!

• Use Hashtags To Be A Part Of The Social Conversation. Every art showing or event like the Rittenhouse Square Fine Art Show is very social. Using a hashtag will connect you or event and will help you amplify your message! Let’s think of the application of hash tags. Smartphone photos + artwork + hashtags = free viral promotion. Artists should relax about fans taking a cell-phone picture of their work. No one is going to reproduce this work from a less-than-ideal setting. If a fan snaps a smart phone picture of your exhibition booth or a favorite piece of work, they are probably going to post it on a social media site. So, if you promote a hashtag that can be added to their post you then you will be associated with it. You are then letting someone else do your marketing for you! No marketing bill there! Yes, I know that this is the Philly Beer Week hash tag. That’s what got me to Philadelphia in the first place!

• Use On-site Social Call-outs. Remember, art lovers and patrons are consumers and want to understand how to continue the art conversation with you and others. Not everyone is going to buy your work when you are the first booth they visit in a 143-artist show. Social media, not email or websites, is a preferred way to make that dialogue happens on the buyer’s terms. By extending the art conversations after the purchase or during post-show consideration, you have an opportunity to make more sales. Do you know how many artists asked me “Do you own any of my pieces?” Also, kudos to 3 of the 143 exhibiting artists who displayed a QR code at their booth! Some advice … drive ‘scanners’ to a special landing page that connects their attendance to the event, even giving a special offer.

• Check In With Foursquare. Foursquare is THE location-based service (LBS) application that drives local event awareness, reaching friends of those who attend and check in. With 33 million Foursquare users, this geo-based social platform will help drive extra visits to your event. If you are an artist and will be attending a show, ask about the event’s Foursquare strategy. You should expect an official check-in selection and at the minimum a call-to-action message to drive incremental attendance from each show that you attend.

• Integrate Social Media Channels Into Promotional Hand-outs. No questions asked, artist businesses need to be on Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and a blog. Each channel has a separate role to meet with the client on their terms. These social media channels are essential client follow-up:

1. Pinterest and Instagram help to reach the crowd who’s searching and engaged with the ‘visual’. Imagine hash-tagging your Philadelphia-themed painting with #Philadelphia #art and then having someone inquiring about purchasing it. Yes, it happens!
2. Blogging drives web site traffic since fans and prospects will find you based on Google searches and blog post syndication.
3. Facebook is a great venue to build your social community. However, only 5-15% of your Facebook messaging ever gets out to your followers. This limited distribution cannot be counted on to drive your business or messaging. For instance, the Rittenhouse Square Fine Art Show’s Facebook page promotion probably only reached between 34 and 103 people.
4. Twitter lets you connect with influencers, who will let others know about your work and shows. Twitter also lets you have a great conversation with followers and non-followers.

• Make Sure You Have Updated And Correct Information. Artists work so hard to make their business work. Many artists and association site are making critical errors on their handouts and on-site presence. For instance, one artist I researched at the Rittenhouse Square Fine Art Show had a Twitter icon on their site, and it linked to an account that was not even theirs. That same artist had a Facebook icon that linked to my account! Remember, do it yourself marketing can cost more than you imagine!

Are you an artist that strategically integrates social media into your business? If so, please comment below and share your success! Or contact me directly at MarketingThink.com or on Twitter @GerryMoran.

Whether you are an artist, an art gallery or event a small business that has nothing to do with art, I urge you to look to integrate social media into your business and become a social business to help you amplify your art’s and your business’. That social business approach will help you paint with a little more green … and pay the bills a little quicker!

In our work at Leader Networks, we noticed that companies are starting to discover that the real value of social lies not in marketing alone, but in leveraging the insights that they have gained – both offline and online – to be more responsive to key stakeholders such as current / prospective customers, employees and partners.  We were curious to better understand the outcomes of social business on the business.

Therefore, my colleague Peter Ward and I, embarked upon a study called the Social Business Benchmark Project.  With the support of The Society of New Communications Research (SNCR), we conducted a study to examine what companies are really doing with their social business activities and to benchmark organizations readiness for social business.

Through this study, we were curious to learn

• Are companies differentiating between social media marketing and social business?
• What is the norm among organizational strategic intent, operational alignment, staffing, policy, and governance structures?
• How are organizations measuring the impact of their social business initiatives? Are they going beyond social media marketing measures to include operational impact factors?

The research is far from over (it is a longitudinal study) but we are thrilled to offer the preliminary findings to date.  At the point of writing this benchmark report, there were 75 respondents (we now have well over 175 and continue to grow – the study remains open for participation).  The respondents represent a range of industries and company size. For example, 30% of the respondents were from Business Services, 13% Nonprofit, and 12% from the Computer Products industry. 35% have over 50,000 employees and 62% of respondent’s have business models focused on Business-to-Business (B2B).

Findings Highlights

The lines between social media marketing and social business sometimes blur.

52% of benchmark participants differentiate Social Media marketing and Social Business within their organization.

Organizations show greater advancement in social business staffing and governance, but many struggle in the area of strategic intention. 
Almost half (44%) report that staff are experimenting with social tools within the organization. And, four in ten respondents report that their organization has a formal written social media policy that has been reviewed by their legal departments. 

While strategic vision for social business is strong, implementation sometimes falters. 
50% of survey participants report that their organizations have a strategic framework or vision, however, only 38% have integrated social strategy development. 47% report that social strategies are integrated into the larger organizational operations.

Few believe their organizations’ social strategy is being well executed.

When asked “How well is the social strategy being executed within the organization?” 11% reported excellent, 66% reported somewhat well, 7% reported not well, and 16% said we do not have a well articulated strategy.

Social strategy stakeholders are shifting – more operational involvement.
72% of respondents reported that marketing was involved in the development of their social media marketing strategies, and only 50% cited that their social media marketing strategies were led by Marketing.  54% of respondents indicated that key cross-functional teams participated in the development of the social business strategy.

Here are the preliminary findings:

Social Business Benchmark Study Results from Leader Networks

Peter and I will be doing a webinar with SNCR to discuss the findings on Wednesday, June 26, 2013 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM EDT. You are invited! register here to attend.

As the study is ongoing so please participate if you haven’t already!

But Social Selling takes concerted time and effort to truly take root and flourish. Many companies attempt to make social “stick,” only to see their efforts dwindle due to lack of widespread adoption.

How can your organization embrace Social Selling and ensure it becomes part of the culture and not a short-lived fad? Here are five key action steps.

1. Champion Social Selling from the top down. Upper management needs to embrace and understand social media as a way of supporting sales and other corporate functions. Rather than just giving it lip service, they need to use social media themselves to demonstrate that it is important to the enterprise.

Unfortunately, many top executives still make excuses for why they can’t or won’t use social media. With the exception of some highly regulated industries, there are few reasons left for managers to ignore social media. That sends a message to everyone below them that it’s not mission critical, or that it’s “not their job.” The fact is, everyone with a vested interest in the company should utilize social media to their advantage, starting at the top.

2. Develop a strategic plan to include the use of social media across departments. Sales may be a primary consideration for using social media, but just using social media to sell may make a poor impression in your customers’ and prospects’ minds. Instead, consider all the ways social media will support your communications efforts, both internally and externally. Get input from people in marketing, public relations, HR, legal and customer service. Document your overall goals in a plan, and identify who will be responsible and how they will be measured.

3. Empower people throughout the organization. Provide appropriate guidelines and training so people throughout the company can use social media in a professional manner. Make it clear that you do not want people using social media inappropriately during work hours…but avoid the tendency to scrutinize or criticize people for “wasting time” on social networks when they are legitimately using them for professional purposes.

Remember that not everyone will feel comfortable using social media for anything other than personal reasons. However, you need to remind them that there’s a fine line between personal and professional today, and things they post on social media can impact the company’s reputation—even if they think it is just between them and their friends.

Besides training, give people the proper tools they need to succeed. Instead of letting everyone use random tools, pick key platforms for your needs and set up user licenses. Finally, make it easy for everyone—especially those in sales—to become micro marketers by posting approved social media contents to their networks.

4. Monitor and measure results. As part of your plan, set up regularly metrics that are shared within the company. In terms of Social Selling effectiveness, these must go beyond non-revenue specific numbers like fans and followers. Instead, correlate referrals from social networks to sales conversions and momentum-building events such as requests for more information.

5. Celebrate successes. Make sure people throughout the company hear about “wins” through social media. These can be case studies of how you helped a customer solve a problem, or examples of how social leads turned into a qualified prospect. These will go a long way toward improving the image and use of social media in the workplace.

Has your company successfully embraced Social Selling? If so, please share your tips on what make it “click” in the comments below.

This article originally appeared on Solution Selling and has been republished with permission.

The following is an adapted excerpt from the white paper “8 Tips for Social Business,” which provides an eight-step roadmap to social success. In this portion we offer insight on what Key Performance Indicators to monitor, and how to monitor them, to better determine the success of social campaigns. To view the white paper in its entirety, you can download it below.

Tip 7: Measure ROI

Effectively monitoring specific Key Performance Indicators may help you illustrate how social media impacts your bottom line. Photo by 401 (k) 2013.

It’s important for social data to be relevant to stakeholders within organization, but often they speak only to the practitioners. This makes it difficult to communicate value, or to make important decisions related to the use or investment in social media for the organization. It does not need to be so. Tie social to the big picture by linking it to organizational and departmental goals. Users can start with tracking the Like, @mention, Retweet or Follow, but tap in to the power to go much further and deeper. Build the capacity for measurement into every social action. Use URL shorteners, like our own ow.ly links, to track your click-throughs. Integrate Google Analytics and Facebook Insights to track on-site conversions or drill in to geographic disparities in data.

One of the more powerful, recent integrations at HootSuite is our partnership with Adobe SiteCatalyst. For the first time ever, you’re able to track the path from social message to conversion and attach a dollar value to individual social messages against Key Performance Indicators. You’re able to see which social platform performs best against certain kinds of messaging, analyze which of your Social Advocates is driving more revenue per message and understand what times of day work best for which kinds of communication. MediaLeaders, working on behalf of The Palms Hotel in Las Vegas, ran a compelling pilot study of this capability in 2011 where they were able to directly link room reservations to individual tweets.

Reporting is important. With HootSuite you can use data gained from Adobe SiteCatalyst, Webtrends, Facebook Insights, Google Analytics, Google+ Pages Analytics, Twitter Profile Stats, our own custom ow.ly Click Stats to generate easy, drag and drop social analytics reports shared easily by email. More importantly, you can analyze that data to optimize future programs and messaging.

Want to read the rest of the white paper? Download “8 Tips for Social Business.”

A short time ago, Kara Swisher at All Things Digital broke the news that Yahoo! was instituting a categorical no-telecommuting policy for its employees beginning in June. According to an internal memo written by CEO Marissa Mayer, “Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.”

As it turned out, Swisher originally got hold of the memo by way of several disgruntled Yahoo! telecommuters, who were more than a little upset by the news. And they weren’t alone. Once the story got out, debate quickly erupted throughout the blogosphere over the pros and cons of telecommuting. Was Mayer’s sharp reversal on employee policy ill-conceived, or will it prove to be a boon for internal communication and collaboration just like she intended?

To telecommute or not?

The immediate reaction to a decision like this when it goes public is to take sides. Virgin CEO Richard Branson quickly took to his own blog to condemn Mayer’s actions, saying, “This seems a backwards step in an age when remote working is easier and more effective than ever.” As this conversation has played out in the past several weeks, the majority of analysts and employees have tended to take a similar stance.

More recently, Rebecca Cooper, writing for the Washington Business Journal, wrote, “Mayer has been tasked with remaking a brand that has been seriously diminished and needs a major boost of adrenaline. Read any account of the culture at Yahoo and you hear horror stories about just how many of the 14,000 employees are literally and figuratively adrift—no longer a part of the team trying to rebrand and rebuild the company.”

Faced with such a challenge, Cooper argues, Mayer had to try something different to get her employees’ attention. Sure, no one likes to have a privilege taken away once they’ve enjoyed it for so long, but if they’re not performing their jobs to the best of their abilities anyway, perhaps it’s time for Mayer to take a “shape up or ship out” attitude. In fact, according to a Business Insider article by Nicholas Carlson, Mayer may indeed be banking on this tough love strategy precisely as a way of weeding out the less driven employees at the company.

It’s not about where you work – it’s about culture

In another All Things Digital article, Kara Swisher examines other leading brands’ relationships to telecommuting, and the policies they have in place for their employees. After examining leading brands like Google, Microsoft, Cisco, and IBM, Swisher found that many of these businesses didn’t have hard and fast policies to dictate telecommuting practices, but all of them were flexible with their employees’ needs. For many workers, securing permission to work remotely was a simple matter of having a conversation with their manager in order to discuss their specific work and personal needs.

As we explore in our upcoming book The Social Employee, (@SocialEmployee) driving innovation isn’t about what tools you use or where you work, it’s about building a sustainable, exciting culture that your employees want to be around. The error in Mayer’s decision has nothing to do with telecommuting at all, but that she failed to invite her employees into the long, difficult process of culture change. To the employees at Yahoo!, the announced change of policy came as a blindside. It’s easy enough to understand why Mayer made the changes she did, but it’s the how that needed a little work.

The Social Employee, out late summer through McGraw-Hill, details the success stories of several major brands as they sought to redefine their culture and organizational structure in the dawning of the social era. When tasked with improving employee culture and expanding communication channels in order to drive innovation, brands like IBM, AT&T, Dell, Adobe, Southwest, Cisco, and Acxiom learned to put the challenge to their employees and let them take the lead.

Through direct engagement, these brands were able to foster employee buy-in for major organizational changes. Employees were given the opportunity to provide input into the decision-making process, and they were given the support necessary to transition effectively into new ways of doing business.

It’s telling that the now-infamous Yahoo! memo was leaked by not one, but several, angry employees. In an era where social technologies make internal communication easier than ever, one can’t help but wonder how differently Yahoo! employees may have reacted had they been allowed to comment on company culture and join the conversation surrounding potential policy changes before they were made.

Photo: McCombs Today

The following is an adapted excerpt from the white paper “8 Tips for Social Business,” which provides an eight-step roadmap to social success. In this portion we offer insight on how to secure your social media assets with the help of HootSuite, from securing profiles to instituting limited permissions. To view the white paper in its entirety, you can download it below.

Tip 6: Secure

Secure Profiles and Limited Permissions are two features developed by HootSuite to secure your social assets. Photo by Alexandre Dulaunoy.

Fear over losing control is an understandable barrier to implementing social media across an organization. It is important to note that mistakes are preventable. In many popular cases the missteps were handled well and the damage to each organization was more along the lines of temporary embarrassment than anything permanent, but why not stop them before they occur?

HootSuite developed Secure Profiles specifically in response to instances like these to put a solid measure of prevention in place. This provides an extra prompt when publishing to important branded accounts, preventing errant posts intended for personal accounts.

Limited Permissions is another unique security feature. HootSuite offers multiple levels of account access and places limits on which team members can participate in outbound social conversation directly. The Limited Permissions puts control over publishing firmly in the hands of those who are most trusted. Your social tools should too.

Team members are also easily added and removed as organizations expand and contract. Removal is instantaneous in the event that a team member isn’t exiting on good terms. The now infamous @MarcJacobsintl intern meltdown where CEO, Robert Duffy was described as a “tyrant” by an over- worked intern would have been prevented by using HootSuite’s Limited Permissions setting to limit his access to publish without approval.

Want to read the rest of the white paper? Download “8 Tips for Social Business.”

The most recent CSR campaign doing the rounds is ‘Cool a School’ by Daikin India, a 100% subsidiary of Daikin Japan and a manufacturer of commercial and residential air conditioning systems. Children in rural India have to travel long distances to go to school even in intense heat and sometimes many stop attending school because of this. Daikin’s ‘Cool a School’ aims to adopt one school at a time in rural India and provide cooling solutions for it. And the plan is to start with Neemrana in Rajasthan.

Daikin is asking us to join the cause by merely viewing and sharing a film that throws light on the plight of these school kids. With a million views, Daikin claims there will be more awareness leading to more participation and ideas to cool a school. With every other million views support, Daikin will extend its sustainable cooling solutions to another rural school.

Uploaded on May 24th, the video stats show 41K+ views, that might get a boost with the brand’s social media activities around it. A dedicated microsite gives more information about the initiative, and the solutions that are being explored – landscaping, reflective barriers, green roofs, selective air conditioning among others.

Also, Daikin’s Facebook page that has a new cover photo, had shared quite a few teaser updates a week prior to the film’s release. The 125K strong fan base have now been invited to view the film and join the cause for sustainable cooling solutions. The same can be seen on Daikin India’s Twitter page for its 1.3K followers, often using #CoolASchool in its tweets.

It is undoubtedly a noble initiative by a company that delves into providing cooling solutions, unlike a certain section of media that has disregarded it as a scam. But executing a CSR campaign on social media is always tricky. Nevertheless, in this scenario, it would be interesting to see how the campaign shapes up to get the first million views. Daikin will have to resort to support through social media and get brand advocates to further the cause.

There’s confusion spreading across the business world today with respect to what social means in business. Is “social” the tweets, Facebook® contests, LinkedIn® articles and other social media outreach practices companies implement to gain an online following and spread brand and product awareness? Is it the Facebook® statuses, tweets and other personal communications customers (and even employees) share about a company? Or is “social” the business tools we use to improve communication and collaboration within organizations and with external business partners that, from a user interface and engagement perspective, often mirror social media sites? The answer: all of the above.

So how can businesses distinguish between these seemingly parallel yet considerably different social practices? The key is in clearly defining the two social initiatives that have become the cornerstones for business on a global scale: social media vs. a newer and growing trend, Social Business Collaboration.

In this infographic, we aim to summarize not only the difference between social media and Social Business Collaboration (also commonly referred to as social business or social enterprise), but to also examine” 1) the emerging workforce’s expectations with respect to social technologies and 2) steps to successfully implement Social Business Collaboration in your organization.

Why Transforming Business Now Is Critical

Social Business Collaboration is a strategy that can work for companies that are preparing to position themselves as “best of breed” employers. Because social and technology plays such a significant role in Millennials’ selection of employers, companies can use Social Business Collaboration tools to their advantage to attract and retain talent. As we are already beginning to see, a commitment to social innovation today and in the future is fundamental.

To learn more about Social Business Collaboration and how you can make it work for your business, download our latest white paper, Setting the Record Straight on Social Business Collaboration. 

In May of last year, Aberdeen Research Group released a study on social selling in which they revealed that sales reps who have leveraged social selling in their sales process are 79% more likely to attain their quota than those who don’t use social selling in their sales process (15%). The study also cites that the industry average of reps who hit their goal is only 43%.

Recently, Lattice Engines sponsored a study done by CSO Insights in which they looked at Sales Performance Optimization: Sales Strategy and Key Trends Analysis. In the report, they discover that less than two-thirds of sales reps hit their own quota last year and only 57% of companies reached their targets for revenue. One of the key findings is that sales reps spend 20% of their time doing qualifying research (approximately 1 full day out of the work week).

This is time comprised of LinkedIn research, the company’s website, identifying trigger events and talking points from news or press releases, etc.

Want more proof that it’s time to have your sales team be more social? The Sales Management Association surveyed 140 firms this past spring and found that 96% of them use LinkedIn at least once a week and spend an average of six hours per week on the professional networking site. That’s approximately one full work day spent researching prospects or potential prospects. The study also found that two-thirds of the responding firms have no social media strategy for their sales organizations and that 80% believe their sales force would be more productive with a greater social media presence, which lends further support to the Aberdeen statistics mentioned previously.

The reason I cite these statistics is that it still seems to me that companies have yet to embrace social selling or implement any form of a social selling into their sales process. But, there is hope! LinkedIn’s Head of Marketing for Sales Solutions, Ralf VonSosen, believes there will be a strong need for social media training in sales forces and it will be widely addressed “within the next 9-12 months”.

Here are five reasons why your company’s sales team needs to be more social:

1. Shortened sales cycle: Everyone has heard now that the buyer’s are 60-70% through the buying process before they are ready to speak to a sales rep about their solution. The buyer’s are engaging in online communities, asking questions from their peers to provide feedback on products, and researching solutions prior to any sales conversations. You want your sales team in a position to listen and monitor what is being said in these forums and allow them the freedom to respond to the conversations through thoughtful, value-adding responses, not with sales pitches

2. Relationship Building: Social media channels offer the opportunity to build relationships with a limitless amount of possibilities globally. The best part is that most of these channels are free to join or create accounts. Through these social media channels, your sales organization has the ability to access unlimited information, prospects, and alliances or channel partnerships.

3. Lead Generation: This is an activity that is usually at the forefront for most sales teams; generating new revenue opportunities. Once your sales team has established themselves on the appropriate social channels (where your prospects are), they should be constantly monitoring and listening to what is being said and engaging when the discussions warrant it. Within many social media outlets are sub groups of prospects; ones who will “raise their hands” when they are interested in looking at certain products/services.

4. Competitive Intelligence: Some social sites, like Twitter and LinkedIn, allow you to categorize, list, or “file” prospects into specific segments. One of these segments should always be your competition. Follow and listen to what your competition is saying and identify which contacts your competition may be targeting. This can be an ideal situation in which you are able to “steal” a deal from your biggest competitor.

5. Increased Productivity: I have already addressed this point with some of the statistics shared above, but it still bears mentioning. Your sales team is already losing one full day of their time that should be spent establishing new relationships, nurturing accounts and closing new business. Social intelligence provides the ability to minimize the time wasted researching, prospecting, and identifying trigger events. It also provides new opportunities if your sales team is monitoring and listening to their channels properly.

Barbara Giamanco recently discussed social selling as “a way to define an evolved sales process that is based on changed buyer behavior.” She has been one of the early proponents of social selling and working with businesses to implement a social media strategy for their sales teams. She has defined social selling as “the process of using social media to network, prospect, research, engage, collaborate, teach, and close all with the purpose of attaining quota and increasing revenue.” Considering most sales teams look to accomplish these same goals, doesn’t it make sense for your sales team to be more social?

So I ask you, isn’t it time for you to train your sales team on how to be more social?

I am working on a few slices of social selling initiatives at SAP. We are focusing on creating a social selling center of excellence, a scalable enablement process, internal sales communities, advocacy content tools, off-the-shelf training materials and even a Social Selling Office Hours educational series, where we connect sellers with best practices and success stories. By focusing on social selling strategies, to reach unreachable decision makers, B2B sales executives can be more successful. In fact, InsideView reports that 90% of CEOs are not answering cold emails and cold calls any more. The response trend is also occurring with sales decision influencers. So, social selling is becoming more important to be successful.

In fact, I just returned from SAP’s SAPPHIRE NOW, where I had many discussions with enterprise software sales executives. These “feet on the ground” sales professionals confirm that it’s getting tougher every day to break through the noisy sales clutter. Phone calls and emails are not successful to reach some customers. Many shared that layering on social media to the sales process is making it easier to connect with the ‘unconnectable’.

5 Layers Of The Social Selling Birthday Cake

Take a look at these five layers of social selling to get a better understanding of how to use social media to help your selling efforts.

• Right Ingredients For Successful Selling. You cannot bake a tasty birthday cake unless you have the right ingredients. And, you cannot be a successful sales executive unless you are already have the right ingredients of being smart (are you reading what the customer is reading?), efficient (are you using your time correctly), creative (are you using the right tools in new and different way to break through the clutter?), and … the list goes one. Make sure you are already a solid seller before you layer in social media.

• Base Selling Skills. Any good birthday cake starts with its base or foundation. You cannot bake and build a cake that cannot support the accoutrements that make it an incredible eating success. The same goes for selling. The base selling segments are prospecting & preparation, the first contact, getting a prospect to attend an event like a webinar or SAPPHIRE NOW, nurturing a warm prospect and working on your own brand, to be easily to be found. You need to have a strategy for each selling segment and determine how social media can make each part of that strategy more effective.

• Layering In Social Media To Increase Success. If you are a smart, efficient, and creative sales professional, you are already thinking how social media can be used to make your selling efforts more successful. IBM reports that 75% of B2B decision makers will be using social media to help make a decision, so why not leverage it? The key to successful social selling is not becoming a social seller, rather it’s knowing how to layer in social media at each step of your current sales process. You need to decide what to do less (e.g., using the phone to make the first contact) and what to do more (e.g., connect with customers with Twitter).

• Spreading On The Icing To Move The Sale To Next Level. Some cakes without icing are OK. However, when a cake is iced just right, it makes people go Mmm. Sales professionals who use social media to put their special creative approach and touch on the sales cycle often reap the rewards over those who are not. Think about how you can own the sales moment and break through a customer’s clutter by doing something as easy as retweeting a customer or commenting on a prospect’s blog with a shared link to great, relevant content.

• Blowing Out the Candles To Celebrate. Blowing out candles to celebrate your birthday is often the best part of the cake. The singing and celebrating are very exciting! Layering in social media to the selling process will help you or your team reach sales success so you can celebrate. Social Centered Selling reports that 72.6% of sales people using social media outperformed their sales peers in 2012! Now THAT is cause for celebration! Social selling success might also take the form reaching someone with whom you have had trouble connecting. Or, it might move your sale to close more quickly . Whatever your goal is social media can help get you to the candle-blowing experience a little sooner.

If you enjoyed this slice of advice to approach social selling you might enjoy these other articles:

• Social Selling. Tweet Better. Sell More.
• 7 ways To Listen For Social Selling Triggers With Flipboard
• How To Cold Call Don Draper Like A Social Selling Mad Man
• 5 Social Selling Mistakes To Avoid
• How To Create The Perfect LinkedIn Profile

I’d love to know your thoughts on your approach to social selling. So, please leave a comment below or contact me directly at MarketingThink.com. You can also Tweet me @GerryMoran.

Think about how you can use social media to layer on to your selling activity vs. trying to become a social selling expert … and then you will truly become a social selling expert. By developing these skills, you can have your cake and eat it too!

In response to my post defining social selling, I realized that I needed to take a step back and define “What is a social business?”

There is a lot of talk about the social business and too often it involves a discussion of social tools and channels. In this article I’ll offer my own definition as well as plenty of links to other resources you can check out for more ideas on how to help your organization transform into a social business.

A social business is not a business that sends a lot of Tweets or has a ton of Facebook likes. A social business is one that realizes that it operates in a more transparent and social world. And so it makes customers and employees equally as important as its shareholders and profits.

What is a Social Business?

A social business places equal value on the needs of its customers, employees, partners and shareholders.

This is not all that different from the concept behind one of the first posts I wrote 3 years ago this month. In that post, I talked about a book called “The Service Profit Chain” that inspired a lot of my early professional thoughts on marketing strategy.

The basic theory presented in the book was that happier employees generate more customers who create more profit for the business. Makes sense, right? Yet in the race to quarterly profits, many businesses still struggle with the concept.

More recently I talked about the many reasons why social business is important and I presented my own roadmap to become a social business including the need to define a social strategy that empowers social employees, activates effective content strategy and addresses the issue of culture.

Peter Kim from the Dachis Group offers his own definition of the Social Business as well as a Social Business Design. He identifies “culture, connections, participation and analytics” as the main drivers of an effective social business.

Charlene Li from Altimeter Group recently presented on the Evolution of Social Business and talked about the 6 stages of transformation: “Planning, Presence, Engagement, Formalized, Strategic, and Converged.” They surveyed a large swath of companies and found a small minority (28%) have achieved any level of social business maturity.

And then there’s my friend Jeremiah Owyang who not only nailed how to bring content strategy into the social business but also defined the next phase of social business as “the collaborative economy” which he defines as “where brands will rent, lend, provide subscriptions to products and services to customers, or even further, allow customers to lend, trade, or gift branded products or services to each other.”

Edelman’s Michael Brito writes that “social business is not about communication. It’s not about technology or Enterprise 2.0. It’s about change management. I believe this to my core.” And I think he’s absolutely right.

But what is the role of the Marketing leader in this emerging social business and collaborative economy?

In my view, marketing is uniquely positioned to lead this transformation. As more employees become socially active brand ambassadors and build their personal brand, marketing can act as the shepherd guiding the flock with good old fashioned marketing communications techniques that put the customer first, that are aligned to the business strategy and that deliver business outcomes.

Let me know what you think in the comments below. 

Photo Source

For example, what if you sell food?  The impact is huge.  You are feeding the world.  You are sustenance, you are nutrition, you are life.  You have a much bigger job.  You have inserted yourself as part of the food chain.  You have a responsibility to be aware of your social impact on the public.

Look around, and start to get some idea of the ecosystem inside which you operate.  In the coming years, we have an impending drinkable water shortage, enormous cost increases in proteins, a heavy draw on corn or wheat, the tremendous environmental impact of processing beef, growing obesity and the associated diseases.  You must be part of the public discourse.  A socially aware company is obligated to participate in the solutions.  Below, I am suggesting four simple steps to ignite your social consciousness:

Pick a flag to bear.  There is so much out there that needs to be addressed.  If you are able to bring potable water to the masses, plant crops in under-served regions of the world, or open shop in the “food desserts” of the inner city, pick a cause and be very open in your support.  As a company, your advocacy for the cause will bring greater awareness and further the cause.  Pick up the flag and carry it up the hill.

Make social awareness part of your culture.  Your team can be an engaged army of socially aware members of society.  Give special time off for social projects, encourage participation at all levels, reward those who give of themselves.  It is not okay to solely have an environment of “just do your job”.  In today’s society, you have got to give something back.

Improve your impact.  Yes, your products have an impact on society.  If you can invest in the technology to lessen the fat content of your food, then it is your imperative to improve the health impact.  If you can eradicate trans fats or high fructose corn syrup, and maintain or improve taste, then do it.  If you can package your product with less cardboard, then do it.  Finding a way to improve your impact on society is part of the social contract.

Look at emerging countries holistically.  Emerging countries, especially those in Africa, should not be entered solely for the purpose of selling more product.  Of course you’ll sell more, but these countries need so much more.  They need infrastructure, they need security, they need an educational system, they need jobs.  When you enter a society that needs more than your product, it is imperative upon you to help contribute to their overall improvement of quality of life.  Entering an emerging market should be seen as a two-way road.

As companies in this world, we have such a tremendous opportunity to embrace how we impact society, how we improve the social environment, how we can make a better world.  The stage is set and the curtain is rising!

The following is an adapted excerpt from the white paper “8 Tips for Social Business,” which provides an eight-step roadmap to social success. In this portion we offer insight on the benefits of — and tools for — internal collaboration on social media. To view the white paper in its entirety, you can download it below.

Tip 5: Collaborate

Share learning internally. Encourage your Social Teams to distribute new learning both within the Team and your organization as a whole. Keep an ongoing loop of discovery and dissemination where best practices, positive messaging or common questions are put forward for comment or collaboration. Social platforms like Yammer and HootSuite Conversations are exceptional tools for supporting secure internal conversation and exchange of ideas.

Ultimately better internal collaboration supports improved external engagement, keeping messaging consistent, intelligent and brand-appropriate. The New York Public Library @NYPL uses HootSuite to coordinate a decentralized team of experts.

The New York Public Library capitalized on social media by tapping into the knowledge of librarians who were trained and empowered by social media. Photo by TristanReville on Flickr.

Rather than impose a centralized Social Team to respond to inquiries, @NYPL tapped into the existing, extraordinarily deep knowledge base of librarians by training and empowering them to use social.

As the largest online public library in the world, @NYPL receives a very high volume of inbound requests. Using HootSuite, the @NYPL experts are able to, through a shared dashboard, assign inquiries to the appropriate area of expertise, collaborate departmentally on a response, share and edit as necessary and schedule the response to go out at a time their audience is most likely to receive and read it. Visits to the library’s website coming from Twitter increased more than 350 percent in one year.

Want to read the rest of the white paper? Download “8 Tips for Social Business.”

One might think it’s an easy task for consumer brands. Tweet a coupon and customers will buy. Folks tend to have personal connections (think Apple, the Green Bay Packers, Chevy, Coke and so on) with these products and brands. B2B marketers challenge themselves all the time to create the environments that encourage these interactions.

But how strongly does one feel toward a B2B brand? As it turns out, pretty strong. AdWeek recently featured some insight into how these brands are making strides to become a social business.

Here at Rocket, we’re getting our feet wet with social. And we get to do it on two fronts: building employee proficiency while also tackling the moving target known as social business, or social selling. To get there, we’re experimenting on LinkedIn, where we’re challenging customers, partners and employees alike to engage.

Here’s a fun example:

Last month, VentureBeat asked “Why your 8 year old should be coding?” Since Rocket is a software company with lots and lots of smart engineers who code a lot, I posed the question to our LinkedIn discussion group. What resulted is phenomenal, considering this group is fairly new and Rocket employees haven’t had any formal training or exposure to “social business.”

Over a three-week span, over 45 comments were posted to this question. Each person commented, often many times, on how they got started in the coding game. The conversation quickly centered on each individual’s own memories of when they first got interested in coding, perhaps as a hobby, or later as a profession.

A lot of insight was revealed. Most obviously, we could begin to see how customers and Rocketeers (that’s what we call ourselves) interact. We could see the dynamics prevalent in a simple conversation. We essentially created an online cocktail party. Folks were quick to share and just as quick to engage each other in thoughtful commentary.

Over a simple chat about a common experience we helped put a face and personality to a B2B brand finding its way into the social business world. Powerful stuff.

And if you’re curious, I first learned to write in BASIC back in the 1980s. I was around 12 years old.

In my role as Chief Technologist over at ArCompany, and from a general love of technology in general, I test, play with, compare and recommend all sorts of different platforms, software technologies and solutions.

There’s just something about the promise and potential of data and technology – when used properly and for the benefit of customers as well as the business – that gets my motor running (sorry, Steppenwolf fans!).

An interesting side effect of this is you get to see firsthand why certain social software technologies succeed while others fail, even though on paper they may look the same.

The ironic thing is, the ones that fail could easily avoid their fate – or at least have a better chance of avoiding it – by simply being better prepared.

They Don’t Understand the Space

One of the biggest mistakes where I see companies tripping over is building a platform for a space they have no experience in. Being a great coder or developer is one thing; being a great developer of coder for a space you don’t understand is another.

With social media offering a real-time and often pervasive invitation to look at how people converse with each other, and what opportunities this offers for brands and organizations, the potential for true customer understanding is huge.

But this level of understanding comes at a price – you need to understand text analytics, ontology, and how these two interconnect when it comes to identifying emotional triggers in a conversation.

Because each social platform has its own little nuances, this task becomes even more convoluted. If you, as a software company, don”t have the personnel that understands these nuances and what that means for data analysis and filtering, your platform will be rendered ineffective.

Too many companies would rather place this important part of the puzzle in the hands of developers only, instead of partnering developers with the kind of data analysts and human language scientists that can turn a so-and-so platform into something so much better at connecting the human dots.

This immediately limits the usefulness of the platform. After all, you wouldn’t ask a learner driver to get behind the wheel of an F1 race car, would you?

They’re In It Just for the Money

Businesses need to make money. That’s a given. As I’ve said several times before when talking about influence marketing and how companies should be using it, I challenge any business to stay afloat on goodwill and social proof alone.

But here’s the thing – when you create something purely with the intent of making a lot of money, and not really caring about the quality of the product or the customers that will be using it, it will more often than not bite you in the ass.

While he receives a lot of criticism about his platform, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg always struck me as having the right mentality when it came to this issue.

We don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.

Fourteen words. A simple mission statement in fourteen words. Yet it’s one that has seen Facebook become – arguably – the biggest social software platform in the world.

It’s a mantra the likes of Apple and Google follow. By putting the needs of the user first, and building solutions that will actually benefit them and solve their problems, success is the organic end result.

The way Apple products seamlessly connect to each other via the iCloud platform; the way Google+ drives every Google product touch-point when it comes to interacting with Google’s customers.

It wasn’t luck or chance that saw these three companies, and others like them, make this focus on the end user the core product feature. Each company knew that by offering something that just works, and isn’t complicated or trying to be something it’s not, money would follow.

Too many social software platforms enter the space thinking that social media is the golden goose for profit. It can be; but not if the sole intent is to make money and to heck with the user experience.

They Don’t Understand Community and Content

For many startups, marketing dollars are a luxury. While some companies are fortunate to have generous investors from day one, the majority of startups, especially in the social space, don’t enjoy that umbrella.

For these companies, content and community are two of the core methodologies for getting people to know about you and/or your product, and why they should use you over your competitors who have been established for a while.

Not only that, but you’re walking the talk as well as just sharing cool soundbites. This is just as true for established companies – the social space is a hive of conversations, groups, communities, chats and more. Get the right people for that part of your company’s growth and you’re giving yourself a fighting chance of success.

Look at companies like Marketwired, with Sheldon Levine; or Salesforce MarketingCloud, with Trish Forant; or InNetwork Inc., with Daniel Hebert and Kelly Jennex. The first two companies are well-established, while InNetwork Inc. has just come onto the scene in the last few months.

All three, though, share the mindset that content and community will help them not only grow awareness of their products and what their company does, but also create a loyal user-base as well as drive innovation through the feedback from their communities, and the content that community leaves points of view on.

Too many social software platforms, unfortunately, see content and community as a burden rather than an opportunity.

So instead of hiring the right people that can truly drive this part of the strategy, they instead do nothing or, perhaps worse, hand over the reins to engineers or developers that – through no fault of their own – are clearly out of their depth.

The three companies mentioned above show what happens when your social footprint strategy is as key as the social software you’re developing.

Wake Up or Break Up

In the last 12-18 months, there’s been a lot of consolidation in the social space. Some of this is through choice; some, through financial needs.

Either way, these companies have continued to evolve and, for the most part, improve. Because they’ve continued to keep the right people; stay on the right path; and concentrating on the user experience as much as the cool development experience.

Newer platforms coming into play continue this mindset. Guys like oneQube, TrendSpottr and SqueezeCMM, for instance, place utility and solutions over features and vapourware.

They understand the marketplace: what works, what doesn’t, and – more importantly – why. It’s not rocket science, yet so many social platforms make it look that way.

Then again, they only have themselves to blame. A CEO of a company that’s struggling in the space right now once said to me,

It doesn’t matter what we build. Good marketers can market shit.

While that might be true, it’s also a damning statement on your goals and vision, or lack thereof. While you might be able to sell shit, customers and users that can’t use that shit will soon move elsewhere, where there needs are actually met.

Leaving you to wonder why it’s your company that’s now in the shit…

UX image: headspace

What many companies still don’t understand is that simply deploying a social network within an organization isn’t going to make employees automatically more engaged — it just means they will be better connected. At Spigit we have a saying, “Your people know.” Executives within an organization should be leveraging the right technology that allows employees to engage and collaborate to drive revenue and guarantee their firms survival.

In the enterprise, we are seeing a shift towards directive social software. That is, social software with a purpose. Directive social software is about reaching specific groups of people at an organization to solve real business challenges. Not only will this help you achieve a measureable outcome, but it also leads to a much higher level of employee engagement. Social software without a purpose eventually leads to more noise.

An example of a company that has been incredibly successful in deploying this type of social strategy is Citi. My company provided Citi with the social technology that enabled it to launch a “Global Ideas” challenge in which it tapped 263,000 of its employees for ideas on improving company culture. In that challenge, 46,500 participants across 97 countries worked together to generate a total of 2,307 ideas. By developing a purpose-driven social strategy and leveraging directive social software to support it, Citi was able to get direct feedback from a large number its employees around ways to transform the company’s culture.

People were engaged because there was a purpose. Employees were aware that executives within the company would be looking to implement their ideas, and so the challenge became an opportunity for employees to raise their own visibility within their organization. Additionally, the diversity and density of the participants led to unexpected outcomes. Asking the same crowds the same questions will only yield solutions you already know.

A stat that I came across recently, which I found to be very discouraging, said that 67 percent of employees are either actively disengaged or under engaged in their current job (source: Modern Survey). Again, this is a problem that cannot be solved with a passive social strategy. In many cases, social won’t help. But, a directive social strategy will significantly increase engagement and from there, managers will have a foundation to better distinguish talent from those employees that are genuinely disengaged. While this might not be the sole purpose of your social initiative, it is certainly an upshot that will improve your organization.

Overall, one of the most important things that entrepreneurs and decision-makers need to keep in mind is that social for the sake of social is no longer enough. When it comes to social strategy, think about what your company needs to do and then figure out how social technology can help. Purpose-driven social strategy increases employee engagement and collaboration which in the end will lead to more valuable results and a better place to work.

If you looked me up on Twitter you would learn that I am a Business Development Rep at AG, I love social media, and I also love television, particularly sitcoms.  I am not using the word love lightly here, I seriously LOVE sitcoms.  Few things make me happier than watching a group of crazy characters stuck in an elevator with a pregnant woman who (uh-oh) is about to have a baby, a husband and wife switching roles only to find out that their partners life is more difficult then they imagined, and of course a wacky ladies man trying to juggle two separate dates with two different girls at the same time. Classic!

Modern Family presented a scenario that I, as a high level internet creeper, could relate to.  Claire Dunphy and her brother-in-law Cameron have been working together to flip a house and the time has come to put the home on the market. Unfortunately, they are having trouble finding a buyer willing to pay their asking price.  Naturally, Clair’s pre-teen son has a friend looking to buy a house and he is their last hope. With the help of Clair’s teenage daughter they look up the prospective buyer online and find out everything they can about him. His name is Zack Barbie, he is a graduate of MIT, a Blackhawks fan, likes old school funk, enjoys beer and Indian food, takes kickboxing classes, and has a dog named Otis.  They use this information to transform the house into Zack’s dream home.

At first things seem to be going in their favor.  Zack is happy to hear there is an Indian restaurant within walking distance, he is super exciting about the kickboxing gym the home happens to have, and is pleased to see that there is a Blackhawks poster already hanging on the wall.  Unfortunately, Cameron does something that is every internet creepers worst nightmare, he lets it slip that he knows things about Zack that have not yet been revealed.  Cam asks Zack “how much is little Otis going to enjoy this doggie door?”  Zack never said he had a dog named Otis.  He gets freaked out that the family stalked him and knows so much about him and goes running from the home.

Because it is a sitcom everything worked out in the end and they find another buyer for the house, but Zack’s reaction got me thinking.  Before he knew that they creeped on his online profiles, he thought he had found his dream house. Why would that change after he found out that this wasn’t a coincidence?  Why is Zack so offended that the family took the time to learn as much as they could about him and personalized the home to his needs and wants? If anything, he should be flattered.  In defense of the Dunphy’s, Zack put all that information online for anyone one to read.  Why would he share it if he didn’t want people to see it?

Individuals and businesses are sharing more and more on social media and inside sales reps should be taking advantage of this to help connect with prospective customers.  Barbara Giamanco and Kent Gregoire give a great example of a sales rep using Twitter to help uncover prospects in their article “Tweet Me, Friend Me, Make Me Buy”.

He used TweetDeck to alert him when specific keywords appeared in a tweet, even if the tweet came from someone he was not following.  A message with one of his keywords came up, he clicked on the Twitter handle and found that it was from a company’s account. The tweet was a complaint about how poorly specific services works.  He called the main number and asked to speak with the person who manages their Twitter account and a few minutes later he was chatting with the CEO, who was blown away by the power of Twitter.

I was recently working with a company that provides software for higher education.  When I started on the campaign I joined a few Linkedin groups for higher education management and leaders.  I searched one of the groups for the type of system we provide and found a comment from a Director of Admissions.  He explained what system he was using, why he didn’t like it, and asked for recommendations on what systems he should take a look at.  This brief comment allowed me to customize my pitch based around his pains and needs before I even got him on the phone.

These are just a couple examples of ways to utilize social media in your sales prospecting.  With all the different tools available to help make the most out of your various social media accounts, there is no excuse for not taking advantage of social selling.  If a prospect is freaked out that you researched them on social media beforehand, just ask them why they are being such a Barbie and then share one of Phil Dunphy’s Phil-osophy’s, for example: “success is 1% inspiration, 98% perspiration, and 2% attention to detail.”

What social media platforms are you using to uncover prospective customers? Feel free to share some of your success stories in the comments section (…or a favorite sitcom).

Sellers Can Use Social Media To Relate To Consumers

Businesses who use social media as a means of promoting a brand must understand that there is a fine line to walk. Most people join social media networks to connect and stay in touch with their friends and loved-ones across the country, oftentimes around the world. You must understand that your audience didn’t join the network to better connect with your brand. The first important step in relating to consumers is to just use a little common sense. People don’t want to be manipulated, so don’t try to pretend that you are anything other than a business. Your marketing strategy must be totally transparent if you are to be successful.

Social Media Helps Salespeople Establish Authenticity And Credibility

Just like any good relationship, businesses and consumers need to feel that their connection with social media is benefiting them. The needs and concerns of the general public must always be the main concern. Social media is much different than handing someone a business card and validating who you are. Your social media content must scream results. The facts about who you are and what you do must be proven by references to other social proof like business blogs, references, client testimonials, guest blog posts and more. It must be totally obvious that you are an expert in whatever you do.

Social Media Allows Salespeople To Stay Visible

Building relationships and staying connected are crucial to your social media marketing efforts. You must give a consumer a reason to stop by your business. Some may have forgotten about you, while others may not realize that you have introduced a new product or service. Business owners must maintain their social media presence. Remaining visible takes time and planning to determine just the right methods to keep your business in front of your audience.

Even though social selling isn’t anything new, trying to conduct business in the ways of yesterday just doesn’t work anymore. Placing marketing tactics above strategy is a business-marketing mistake. Without an effective strategy, the best tactics in the world just won’t work.

In 2012, My New Red Shoes served 4,253 school-aged children in Santa Clara, San Mateo, San Francisco, and Alameda counties. Learn more about how you make a difference here.

Recently Jennifer Tanabe and I went to visit Jennifer Yeagley and Becca Moos from My New Red Shoes and interviewed them about their journey. And we captured the story for you to view. Enjoy!

To learn more about My New Red Shoes check out this article.

While social media has opened new channels through which to communicate with our customers, it’s also caused us to be much more tactically-focused.  In effect, we’ve created silos within our marketing teams handicapping efficiency and productivity. When it comes to launching a new product, getting every marketing discipline together at the same time and aligned on strategy can be like herding cats.  When we add on the additional layer of a global marketing team, it’s shocking we ever get anything out the door because we don’t have one central place to coordinate, share and learn from each other. In the end, too many new products launch late and/or are over budget.

It’s time to move away from operating tactically and instead strategically “network” our marketing organizations to drive the greatest potential productivity. Taking the skills we’ve honed working in social media can help us cross the chasm into becoming a social business.  Social business technology offers marketers the ability to bring all key stakeholders into one place (regardless of where they’re physically located) to develop strategy, to plan and assign tactics by discipline, to execute the strategy, and to review performance data to identify opportunities to optimize the campaign.

Today, I’m throwing down the gauntlet – it’s time for us to move our marketing organizations into the 21st century and become social businesses.

Social Media, Social Marketing, Social Business – what’s the difference?

As marketers we’re really great at coining terms and using them to mean different things across B2B, B2C and our industries.  For the purpose of our discussion, I will define them in a business context as:

• Social Media – a communication channel through which to engage prospects, customers and professional acquaintances.
• Social Marketing – a collection of tactics that leverage social media to execute a marketing strategy (e.g. new product launch)
• Social Business* – an organization that has put in place strategies, technologies and processes to systematically engage all the individuals of its ecosystem (employees, customers, partners, suppliers) to maximize the co-created value

As Nilofer Merchant notes in her article “What we talk about when we talk about social”

No term is ever complete. Each of us are building on each others’ ideas as we collectively grapple with understanding and decoding what is happening, and what we think it means. . . . When we focus on tools alone, I think we’re making a mistake. . . .The bigger point is that major changes are afoot that change value creation, the meaning of work, and the structures for our institutions.

Semantics aside, our focus for 2013 should be on realigning the culture of our marketing organizations to first focus on the people – the marketers – who are doing the work and secondly on the tactics they need to execute.

If it’s good enough for our customers, why isn’t it good enough for us?

Today most marketers at least know about social technologies and many of them have been executing on an external social strategy.  At Disney, connecting with guests wherever they were was important and key to our success. We had dedicated resources to developing content and to engaging with guests across the social web. But until 2011, social media was something we leveraged as an external communication channel. This didn’t just happen at Disney, it happens every day across marketing organizations (B2B and B2C) – we continue to use social media to develop relationships with our customers, but we haven’t taken it inside our team to drive productivity and competitive advantage.

How do we bridge that gap?  How do we take the best practices we’ve developed around connecting, sharing and learning with customers in social media into our marketing teams?

Let’s start with a story.  Say you’re launching a new product.  The first thing you need to do is develop your go-to-market strategy. Typically as a brand or product marketing manager, you consult (or conduct) research and learnings from previous product launches, determine the benefits of the product features, assess what the competition is doing and take your first pass at a high level strategy. After that you probably review your ideas (in PowerPoint) with your manager and maybe your manager’s manager…and the VP…and the SVP…and finally there’s a decision.  Throughout all of these conversations you’re the person behind the curtain building and rebuilding PowerPoint slides or Word documents based on everyone’s feedback.  You send along copies via email and get more feedback.  A couple weeks or months (depending on your company culture) later, you’ve got something that you could turn into a creative brief and share with your cross-functional team to “kick off” the launch plan.

Even at this early stage in product launch planning, you’ve had to consult many different resources for historical information; you’ve sent around about 50 emails; you’ve gathered feedback manually from several stakeholders (some of which is conflicting); you’ve had to plan and re-plan meetings due to crazy schedules; and, you’ve iterated on PowerPoint slides 10 times.

Now imagine if all of your key stakeholders had access to the documents and could provide feedback in one place. You wouldn’t have to worry about the administrative tasks in setting up and rescheduling meetings.

Once the strategy was baked, you could open up your product launch “war room” to your cross-functional teammates and your agencies. You’d have one virtual area where you could bring in anyone around the world to connect, share and learn when it was convenient for them.

All of the steps to launching a product are heavily reliant on the people doing the work.  Yet, we’re still so focused on marketing automation tools and the tactical elements. Given that you’re investing 70% of operating costs on the marketers thinking and developing strategies, getting input from leadership and collaborating with colleagues to drive business forward, our focus seems misplaced.

What social technologies do best is connect people to each other.  We realize that from our interactions with customers and our friends on social media. If it’s good enough for our customers, why isn’t it good enough for our marketing organizations?

Becoming customer-centric starts with us walking the walk.  To drive competitive advantage, marketers need to evolve into a social business – an organization that has put in place strategies, technologies and processes to systematically engage all the individuals of its ecosystem (employees, customers, partners, suppliers) to maximize the co-created value.

How is your marketing organization evolving into a social business? For best practices on transforming your marketing team, download this best practices paper.

We had a lively Q&A session and gave an exclusive offer combining both an online and live learning experience with the We First community. If you missed it you can watch the replay here and download the slides below.

Key takeaways from 8 Steps to Becoming a Contagious Social Brand:

1. It’s a new marketplace. We’re at the center of a new economy, new customer behaviors, and new social technology- and the speed of change can be dizzying. But that means we all must develop an enduring curiosity for new technology that can build engagement and profits. Stay educated by reading the latest tech blogs like TechCrunch or Mashable , and have some fun experimenting with new channels like Instagram or Vine. Most importantly, observe how your customers relate to their peers and ask them how they’d like to interact with your company.

2. Understand your audience. Here’s the dillemna: “You can’t see the label from inside the jar.” It’s easy to get so caught up in your company’s products and services that you kind of forget what moves your audience. But did you know that, 73% of global consumers say they would switch brands if a different brand of similar quality supported a good cause? That means you must identify your brand’s core values and ask your customers what they care about. Then you can find shared values and purpose to make the authentic mission of your brand.

3. Balance story and telling. Story transcends technology, and the success of your business will be in direct proportion to the emotional impact you have on your customers. In turn, the emotional impact on your customers will be in direct proportion to the social impact of your purpose- so that means your social impact is directly tied to your company’s bottom line. Too many companies rush past telling what they stand for and get lost in all the specific marketing tactics (PPC, Facebook ads, email blasts, etc). But your first concern must be to make sure you’re telling a story worth telling. Enough about your product- tie it to how you change the world. Coke unites around Open Happiness and Starbucks says it’s a Shared Planet. What’s your rallying cry?

4. Define your brand. What’s your company’s purpose, what are its values, what are you the only one of… and why does your organization even exist? If you can’t articulate your company’s vision for the world, it’s very hard for consumers to understand or want to join in and help you. Once you’ve clearly defined your purpose, you need to frame it in the context of the customer. Your customer should be the hero of your story, and your role is to be the celebrant, not celebrity, of your customer community.

5. Align contribution. Only make a contribution in alignment with your company’s core values. If you aren’t transparent and accountable, consumers will easily sense your insincerity and you might be accused of “cause washing.” A good example of aligned contribution is United by Blue -the company will remove 1 pound of trash from the ocean for every product sold. United by Blue has made themselves much more than another beachwear company- they’re a movement for change. You too can turn your company into a badge of honor.

6. Engage customers consistently. Your goal is not just more marketing activity for activity’s sake. Disjointed or conflicting messages can confuse or even alienate your audience. Instead, plan each tactic as a chapter in a longer brand story. Use you and your customers’ common purpose as a guide in your marketing strategy and the channels you choose to leverage.

7. Grow community. As soon as you have an engaged audience you need to reward them and engage them in a new initiative. There’s nothing worse than watching your community slowly wither after the end of one successful campaign. Identify brand ambassadors or mega-fans, and figure how you can inspire them to co-create your brand and share with their friends.

8. Measure and Manage. Stop guessing and commit to pinpointing which tactics work best for your brand. Define your success metrics, create a dashboard to for easy reporting, and adjust your strategies based on data.

WF Webinar 4.17.13 – Eight Steps to Becoming a Contagious Social Brand from Simon Mainwaring

The truth is your brand is all of these things and more. It’s what you tweet, post, pin, +1, Instagram and offer as a call to action. It’s what you write in emails, and what you don’t. It’s whether you talk about yourself all day on Facebook or if you offer real value.

Your brand is what you say, do and think. It’s what your employees do online and offline. It’s everything from your privacy policy, social media policy to the amount of spam email you send.

It’s how you manage crisis or how you don’t. It’s how well you listen and most importantly how quickly you respond when people request help or engage with you online or offline.

The Living, Breathing, Human Brand

The human brand is much like a living, breathing organism. It’s true definition is determined by those that love, like or even dislike you. A brand is made up of humans within your organization and finally defined by those outside your organization.

You can’t create a brand with a robot or algorithm. Yes, you can use data, analytics, research and more as inputs to develop your brand, it’s brand promise, core messages, vision and mission. Yet, it’s people that select the final colors and tagline. It’s humans who post the status updates. It’s humans who read them. It’s humans who click like, pin, post and share the content the humans in your organization write.

On average it takes a minimum of 6-7 brand touches for someone to remember your brand. You better make every touch count. It’s humans who decide if they like you or not, if they tell their friends good or bad things about you.

The sooner you can acknowledge the importance of becoming a human brand and the need to truly inspire and connect with your audiences, the sooner you will see results and progress as you integrate social media into the DNA of your organization.

Below are 13 characteristics of the human brand. I could write 100 of these because you can’t simply define a human nor a human brand in a short list of characteristics. However, here are 13 straight forward characteristics of human brands. If you are wondering what human brands do and think this is a good place to start.

This post is part of a series I am writing on the topic of brand humanization. Subscribe to the series, “Talk Human to Me” for updates, free webinars, brand worksheets, podcasts, tweet chats and more.

13 Characteristics of the Human Brand

1. Think like humans. You may be thinking that brands can’t think. Well, yes they can. Human brands have people on the inside that think like humans. They don’t think like a cash register or corporate building. They think about things that human beings do, eat, like and believe.

2. Care about humans. They care about the humans they engage with. They care if they are happy, sad, satisfied, frustrated, hungry or full. They care about their needs, wants, problems, desires and offering them real value, not just non-sense marketing tactics. It matters to them that they are cared for. They care about all the people in their ecosystem from customers to board of directors. They keep them at the front of all decisions.

3. Value relationships. Human brands value the people more than the dollar signs. They are not willing to trade a dollar for relationships gone bad. They know that investing in people is the only way and that relationships are both the cake and the icing of business and personal or professional success. You won’t see the human brand buying fake Twitter follower or Facebook fans. They value real human to human interaction and authentic relationships.

4. Listen to other humans. Human brands listen more than they talk. They speak when they need to speak but always have an ear to how their audience, clients, partners and stakeholders respond. They know their Google Analytics and other website data and analytics is a gold mine. They use the data to listen and learn about their audience, not only convert the transaction to a sale. You may find them listening more than talking when it comes to social media.

5. Talk like humans. Human brands don’t talk like robots or corporate collateral. They speak in language other humans read, listen to and understand.

6. Have a personality. What is your brand personality? Is it serious? Fun? Engaging? Inspiring? All of the above? Human brands have a personality that inspires and connects them with their audiences.

7. Show their “human”. Right in line with the personality, human brands aren’t afraid to let their human show. They laugh, giggle, sing, dance, talk, and may even get frustrated sometimes. They often let you see the people behind the avatars as they know they are their own best ambassador.

8. Make and own their mistakes. No human being is perfect and no brand is perfect because it is made up and defined by humans. Human brands are humble. They make mistakes just like you and me and they aren’t afraid to own it..

9. Are available. Are you available when your online or offline audience wants you to be? Do you respond to questions in a timely manner? Are you even available to answer questions? Or do you hide behind a corporate web form, fill your Twitter and Facebook stream with corporate speak? Human brands make themselves available. Even if they aren’t available 24/7 they let their audience know when they are available.

10. Know themselves. They know who they are and what they offer their customers, partners, online community and friends. They know their strengths, weaknesses and sweet spots. They know how to talk, listen and what makes them shine. They don’t guess what to post or pin as they engage in social with confidence and pride.

11. Know their audience. Just as they know themselves, they also know their audience. They know what their audience wants and how to provide it. They know how to inspire them, connect with them and help them achieve their goals. They know if they inspire, connect and help their audience achieve their goals that they will by default achieve their goals as well.

12. Agile. Human brands do not sit static, they evolve. Because they are always learning, listening more than talking, they are able to move with agility. They don’t have to jump on every shiny new object. They are able to jump with confidence at the right time. This offers them an extreme level of competitive differentiation. As those brands who are not in touch with their audience, who aren’t listening, and not focused on the goals and objectives of their audience have difficulty saying no to shiny objects as they’re always looking for the next best thing to magically bring them success. Human brands evolve with confidence and agility combined.

13. Invest in people. Human brands know they can never go wrong by investing in people. They invest in listening, learning, training, empowering, building teams and creating a culture that enables their brand to shine from the inside out. As Sandy Carter of IBM says, “Culture eats strategy for lunch.” Even though I am a strong believer of strategy, I agree with her. Without investing in culture and the people both internal and external brands can’t be human.

What You Say?

Is your brand human? Do you wish it was more human? What about your brand is human? What is your favorite human brand? What is it that attracts them to you? Is it the way they talk, think, act, or simply everything about them?

Talk Human to Me Series

This blog post is part of a series titled “Talk Human to Me“. It includes a deep look at brand humanization and the power of the human brand.

Subscribe to the series for updates and access to special videos, webinar training, worksheets and more. Would love to hear your input and have you participate in discussions and debates as we challenge each other to be more human from the inside out within our lives and business.

Additional Resources:

• Worksheet: Download our POST audience analysis worksheet to help you identify and prioritize your top audiences. It is based upon the Forrester POST methodology.
• Whitepaper: Download 15 Tips to Zoom Your Brand Whitepaper
• Social Brand Humanization: Authenticity vs Transparency
• Talk Human to Me: 20 Tips to Humanize Your Brand
• KitchenAid: Bad Tweets Happen to Good Brands
• Are Your Employees Your Employees 24/7?
• Social Brands Can’t Be Perfect Because Human Beings Aren’t Perfect
• 20 Tips to Avoid Being a Social Brand Gone Wrong
• Social Trust Factor: 10 Tips to Establish Social Business Credibility
• How to Build a Social Brand That’s a Sweet Orange in a World of Bitter Apples

Soma’s Success and Latest Announcement

In December of last year, I covered an awesome Chrome extension that the creators of Soma created to help them manage their Kickstarter campaign across platforms. The Kickstarter Status Board is a very useful extension and can help make reaching your Kickstarter fundraising goals a much more organized and easy-to-manage process. While that’s good information, it is old news. Time to get to the new.

After reaching its fundraising goal of $100,000 on Kickstarter, Soma has continued its work and dream of reaching more and more people with well-designed and quality water filters. I recently heard from Mike Del Ponte, Soma Co-founder and CEO. Just yesterday, Mike and the rest of Soma announced a partnership with Charity: water. Charity: water is a non-profit which helps to bring clean water to areas of the world in desperate need of safe drinking water.

Charity, Branding, and Helping Others

Mike wrote that “Soma customers have already become part of the solution. Every time a Soma water filter is purchased, we give clean drinking water to someone in need.” Of course, this is a charitable move by the company, but it also helps to improve the branding of their company.

For businesses and agencies looking to improve their own and their clients’ brands, partnering with charities is an excellent way to do good in the world and also help your business. The better you do the better the charity does, it’s win-win situation, and more importantly, the people in need win. Soma is taking things one step further and focusing on storytelling.

Partnering with Charity: water gives customers of Soma a chance to identify with a greater cause. It gives the Soma team a chance to give back to those in need and to help a cause close to their hearts. Ultimately though, success will be determined by how well Soma can tell this story and keep in touch with customers who are interested.

As Ariel Schwartz writes on Co.Exist, “Soma … wants to take its storytelling to a new, multisensory level.” The company has also teamed up with Justin Boreta, Swoon, and Amy Jo Martin to provide customers and followers updates on the charity work as the project moves along.

More of this Work Would Be Welcome

Soma isn’t some massive multinational corporation undertaking this work. However, they are a team of committed and innovative individuals who have demonstrated that doing good is not only the right thing to do, but it’s good for business, too. Running partnerships and campaigns like this is only getting easier and more accessible to smaller and smaller businesses with social media and the spread of the internet in many areas where charities are working.

For businesses and agencies looking for a way to create a more consumer-centered brand, looking into a charity related to what you or your clients do could be a great way to spread some goodness around the world and also improve your image. Earlier in March, I wrote about the wrong way to approach social media, and in that article I stressed the importance of showing what your brand says about the individual, not telling the individual what your brand is. This is yet another example of that in action.

If you want to sign up for updates and more info, head to Soma Thrive and follow them @somawater.

Here are six key aspects that becoming a social business that deliver value to your company.

Deeper Relationships

Close to 90% of consumers don’t trust communications from companies on social networking sites. This may be due to companies pushing messages and not actually being social, or simply that human nature trusts individuals more than it does companies. We commonly hear the phrase ‘people buy people’, and this is especially true in B2B channels with long buying cycles and multiple decision makers. In an increasing array of social media channels, the most effective ways to build relationships with people is at an individual personal level. The best way to manage and implement this is through a social business, where a social culture exists and individuals are empowered to be socially active. Out-sourced and agency managed services can commonly fail deliver the same personal level of relationships.

Greater Trust

No one can replicate the credibility a CEO brings by operating effectively on social media channels.  It carries the perception of leadership, transparency and authenticity. The BRANDFog 2012 CEO Survey says more than 82% of respondents are likely or much more likely to trust a company whose CEO and team engage in social media. The study also reports that 77% of respondents are likely or much more willing to buy from a company whose mission and values are defined through their leaderships’ involvement in social media. Yes, some comments can ghost written, agencies and consultants can advice on strategy, yet the authenticity of C-level interaction cannot be replicated. Board level participation also acts to lead by example. If a framework, support and guidelines is in place it helps to enable uptake of social media throughout an organisation.

Thought leadership

In complex B2B channels, subject area expertise is vital in creating compelling, engaging content that drives online authority and thought leadership. Delivery across many social media channels is the same. In technical professional forums, discussions and debates, conversation is typically held at a technical level. A level that many communication agencies may not be able to offer value in. Responses and postings are also held at an individual level therefore communication from an agency lacks authenticity and screams marketing message. From a research and development perspective vital insight on market desires, challenges, issues and opportunities can also be crowd sourced and monitored across social channels.

Nurture to sale

With relationships being central to effective social media practice, sales professionals are key in driving prospect progression towards a sale. Effectively building and nurturing relationships is strongest at a personal level with relationships between people and teams, not just brands and companies. Social media channels provide a new avenue to identify sales opportunities, with both new prospects and existing customers. Additionally, it represents much more than just a channel for communication by helping sales keep up to date with customers experiences, challenges and successes, all of which provide opportunities to deepen relationships and reasons to pick up the phone with a positive conversation.

Improved Transparency

Dealing effectively with customer issues can go a long way to minimising potential risks, and demonstrate good levels of customer services and customer. If a customer is unhappy, they may take to social media regardless of your blessing or visibility. With an open channel of communication, social media allows responses to help manage the situation. Monitoring brand #hashtags and products is a good way to understand sentiment and identify any items for action promptly.

Efficient Recruitment

A key element of any business is recruitment. Attracting and retaining top talent is a long term must for any company wishing to succeed over their competitors. Social media provides an platform to research prospective employees, just as they would research and prepare for an interview with you. More proactively you can nurture individuals with demanded skill sets and desirable experience for when suitable opportunities arise.  Word of mouth is also more visible, with peer endorsements and skills validation often publicly open helping to create a broader picture than traditional references may. Whilst many recruitment agencies can also utilise these benefits, the internet has provided companies the ability of reducing dependency on these suppliers thus lowering recruitment costs.

Agencies and suppliers can effectively help with integration and social media management at a corporate and brand level, but are challenged to replicate the scope of services and coverage a social business can. The role of agencies and suppliers has evolved. In addition to offering value in their knowledge of the channels, skills and experience in using them, and promoting best practices, the greatest value they offer is through helping to reform and evolve organisation culture – helping to transform them into a social business.