The Social Butterfly

By now the initial buzz of social media is beginning to die down.  We’ve all placed clever little logos on every page of our websites and used integrated tools like ‘adthis’ to socialize page and downloadable content.  That’s all well and good but now that social media has become an initiative for many companies and an actual department for many others the question of results is creeping more and more to the forefront.  How can companies utilize social mediums to yield real results?

First we need to clarify what results mean.  If it’s rapid monetization of social efforts, please, wake up.  To approach social media with the intent of seeing a rapid boost in topline revenue is beyond optimistic into the realm of the unreal.  However if your strategy is a bit more rooted in reality and the conversation that social media can stimulate then by all means keep reading.

Email is a great way to communicate.  We are seeing email move farther back in the marketing cycle however as B2B buyers have become inundated with spam’y messages that are unsolicited and don’t speak to them about their true needs.  That’s very much a topic for another discussion or you can read further on our site in regards to Creating the Conversation.  But once you’ve created that bi-directional exchange and a prospect is moving further toward your sales funnel, social can be a great way to continue conversations more inline with personal preference.  For me, I love Facebook.  Probably not in the way that many do.  I ‘like’ many of the vendors I use day to day on facebook and it gives me the opportunity to scroll through the news feed on my ipad late in the evenings.  Content that most of the organizations I follow on Facebook tends to be more interesting than the email communications I get daily from the same organization.  Being a Salesforce.com partner I get about 100 emails per day on partner program updated, release notes, usage stats and so on.  I read very few of them.  But when I engage with Salesforce.com on facebook the content is more dynamic.  Just the other day they posted a video of Marc on Mad Money which I watched – all the way through.  Good luck getting my attention with that during the day – or via email.  So this tells me something and it’s something we assist clients in all the time.  Behaviors change around the medium through which the message is distributed.

Knowing this, why don’t we just ask the buyer how they would like to receive information – along with the types of information they would like to receive.  We can then use email that delivers something simple like a content download to also set communication preferences.  Would you like us to communicate with you on LinkedIN instead of email?  Ok, lets give them that option.  Now we know that buyers aren't always honest with us because we are all evil sales people right?  We can also track these preferences and correlate them against behavioral info.  Where are they visiting on your site, what are they downloading, and are they watching your Mad Money video?  Using that info we can tailor follow up marketing that is truly of interest.  That’s creating the conversation.  Social is just another path to get it done – and sometimes it’s a lot more stimulating exchange.