Social Media is a Two Way Street for Business

I like social media and use it on a daily basis. However, there is one facet of  this channel that looks remarkably old school. If you study marketing, you know that Baby Boomers like to shout messages at a target using a megaphone. You might also know that younger customers and prospects tend to not to follow or friend compaines that see a channel as a pure sales play and here is why…

We are creatures of habit and environment. We also carry certain assumptions with us that influence the way we interact with technology. Let’s say I meet someone at a networking event and we exchange cards. In that exchange there is an implied agreement that one of us might contact the other. When a business decides to move into the social media the same axiom applies and it has less to do with the company’s intent and more to do with its customer’s view of social media.

Your customers and prospects use social media everyday to interact with friends, They carry on conversations, they let people know what they are doing, they look for comments & reactions. This is the habit that influences how the world of Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and blog users view your company. By entering into the social media spectrum, your business has extended its hand and said, call me anytime, I’m listening. Here are a few things to consider as you move your business into soical media.

1. Know Your Targets
The social media fire hose makes it easy to forget who is listening and why they started following your company in the first place. If you target a particular group, learn their behaviors and personalities before you start communicating with them. This will go along way to getting them to encourage others to follow you business.

2. Don’t Fall in Love With The Sound of Your Own Voice
Do we need to say anything more here? Have you ever attended a party and listened to someone talk about themselves for an hour? So enough about me. Let’s hear you talk about me for a while. Social media is 10% your business and 90% your customer’s world view.

3. Make it About Your Target
Do your best to convey information that is valuable to your target. When a customer or prospect follows you, they are doing it for a reason and that reason may not be to hear “I just bought a double pump latte – have a great day”. What can your target do with this information other than processes it or see it as an interruption? Depending on the age and technical ability of your target, they may not have a client that can filter out the dribble. Which leads to the fourth point.

4. Respect Your Target
I just mentioned processing a message. If your average target follows 500 people and each one of them tweets 30 times a day. In just eight hours, your target has spent 90 minutes processing those tweets. Respect your target’s time.

5. Plan Your Message
If your message is an offer, time the delivery of the message to be in sync with your target’s behavior. A Happy hour message at 6 am will most likely be ignored. Repeating it all day to the same group will cause people to stop following you. You only need to send something a few times. If it is important enough it will get noticed.

6. Most Social Media is For Short Messages
A few nights ago I watched as a stream of messages came across Tweetdeck rapid fire. A person I follow and might have partnered with decided to tell a story using Twitter for the third time in under a week – 23 tweets later, I stopped following him. Twitter is not a Blog. If it is that important, figure our how to say it in 140 characters and point your reader to a blog.

7. Solution or Commodity
Multi-million dollar solution sales are not transactions, they require time, effort and typically begin with a relationship. Short message type services are transactional and are better at driving commodity type sales. Look at the stats, follow the numbers. Decision makers with signature authority have more important things to do than follow 500 people who are tweeting 30 times a day. In eight hours that is 1,500+ tweets per hour. What is an executive’s time worth an hour? High value targets buy on relationships and typically use value added networks of people they know. Most of social media is a transaction based network.

8. Corporate Voices are Mostly Ignored
Social media is about relationships between like minded people and while corporate voices may have a lot to say, they don’t spend their days on the front line with customers and prospects. A genuine message crafted by your front line will will have far better reach then a missive from marketing simply because the front line spends more time with the customer. They get it. They talk the language. They have names that customers remember. The front line is your relationship.

Social marketing is a valuable tool that works well when the target is defined and the business understands that the front line is the key to the customer

In our next posting, we will talk about how to engage the front line in a way that provides the controls large companies require yet keeps the conversation organic.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 24th, 2009 at 1:33 pm and is filed under Marketing, small business, social media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.


You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.