Last week I participated in a panel discussion on social media for SugarCRM. One of the questions that came up was ‘how do you keep business and personal separate?’ The three panelists gave various answers, the main theme being whether used for business or personal, as a salesperson or an employee, remember that it’s there forever so be careful, professional and aware.
However, a more advanced way to help keep them separate is to go in with a plan and share it with all company participants. Give them the tools and training they need to be successful in this new arena.
Don’t Just Dive-in – Social Media is a Marketing Tool
I’m often heard to say that using a social media platform is just like any other marketing tool. Before jumping in you should figure out who your target is, where to find them (Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn?) and what they’re looking for from a company like you. You would use this information to strategize on the best way to communicate with them and use your marketing tools effectively.
Are you using social media to raise awareness, educate about your service or industry or stay in touch with existing customers? What are they doing there? What’s their pain?
Social Media and Your Brand
Also like any other marketing tool, you’d need to hold it up to your brand and consider it in relation to everything else you use, like your website, brochures, etc. Chances are you’ve developed a look, a voic
e, a style, and specific marketing objectives. Though social media is often more of a personal approach, corporate brand should apply here too.
Your Social Media Marketing Plan
Your plans for social media should include:
- Where you should focus efforts (Twitter?)
- What you should do there (ie: discussions on LinkedIn)
- What you should talk about, your angle
- How it fits in with other efforts
- What are the objectives and guidelines for our participants (ie: no personal political comments)
With this basic plan in place it will be much easier to keep business separate from personal.
Educate Your Team
Just as you provide brochures and help prepare presentations, give your people the guidance they need to represent your company using social media. Remember that if you’re asking your professionals to be active like blogging, they may not be aware of brand guidelines at all and need briefing. It doesn’t hurt to do a little awareness education with other employees as well so they know what you’re doing and a little guidance as to what you’d prefer they did or didn’t do with their personal accounts. You can’t control their personal accounts but it doesn’t hurt to say ‘because our message is ____, we’d prefer if you didn’t mention ____.’
e, they’re turned off. They think it is not important or relevant to their business after-all, or at least not enough to pay so much. ‘We’re B2b, we provide a professional service, not sell products. People find us through word-of-mouth, not Google.’ I used to feel that way myself, but now I’m a convert.
So what this means is, it’s not hard to build a website with good search-ability right from the start, like conversion forms, alt text for images, meta descriptions, etc. but then why not use social media to generate the content to be found? Google is a hungry beast, give it something to gorge on.
Except those same experts are often getting paid $500- $1,000 an hour (or more) to do client work. And if the marketing budget includes internal time…things can get really expensive, quickly. Or if the professionals in the firm don’t think blogging helps build business, the challenges can be even greater.
one of the most easily accessible lines of communication a company has, providing exposure to people that actually care about what your experts have to say. People that could easily become future clients.
outsource). Get your support team to find appropriate pictures. If all else fails, have your expert verbalize their opinions and have someone else write them down. Don’t forget to enhance the blog for search. That too can be outsourced.
d they start ignoring it. Meanwhile, if they also see an ad, an update pops-up on LinkedIn, then notice you’re speaking as an expert, or spot your brochure on a colleagues desk, then get the newsletter again; suddenly you are top of mind for whatever you do. Plus, you provide more opportunities for them to sell you to decision makers and more ways to refer you (ex: send your newsletter to a peer). You provide more opportunities for them to see your brilliance and understand all of what you do.
s great for bringing people into your funnel – the most fun projects for Rapport actually. However, if you succeed in bringing people in, then what? You need to have other points of contact ready to go to keep them engaged and coming back, or leading them to your pre-sale action step. For this particular client once she brings them in en masse, she needs to build trust with them to move to the next step in the buying cycle, so we have to make sure mechanisms for doing that are there to support the initial big effort.
to do and then plan and budget for them over a quarter, if not a year. An action plan really makes things much less daunting.
ortant to them?
ers.
– the hidden opportunities for business, jobs, friends and ideas happen become much easier to find. Just by sharing information on a social media platform, you have much more opportunity for being heard by this invisible network.
But, most of us know what Skittles are. What if you landed on a site like this and had no idea what they do or who they are? B2B companies are in a much different boat than popular candy.
Looking Legit
Some of the basics of usability are to make information really easy to find and fast to get to. People have no patience anymore. When they arrive at your website they need to see something engaging and a short blurb with the basics of what you do to let them know they are in the right place and entice them to keep clicking. Traffic analysis repeatedly shows that when visitors arrive at a site with a lot of text and too many navigation links to choose from they are overwhelmed and leave. This is how I feel when I arrive at the type of sites I mentioned above. Especially when it’s all blog entries – it’s like joining in a conversation halfway through and being totally confused when I just wanted to find basic information.
I think this split in valuing is also occurring because so many people are participating in public dialogues about brands. Most of us use the internet to research before we buy and find thousands of real people’s opinions and feedback. We used to just buy into whatever we were told by advertisers. Now we have much more information available to develop our own opinions. Regarding the discrepancy – perhaps the people behind ‘financial market valuing’ aren’t paying enough attention to the public and or simply using out-moded metrics.
