Culture Cliques

April 18, 2010 By Lynette Young Leave a Comment

It’s been said time and time again for a business to succeed in social media, they need to understand their customers.  Designing and incorporating a strategy for social media isn’t a checklist, it’s an evolution.  Jumping in and talking is fine if  you are a person, but as a company, there are some things to consider first.

  1. It’s important to understand the culture of  the platforms you are interested in engaging on.  Fark or Digg has an entirely different persona than LinkedIn.  If you are interested in talking to college-humored males with a penchant for Photoshopping funny pictures – Fark and Digg are the place for you (hey, they spend a lot of money…)  Looking for sales professionals?  LinkedIn is where you need to be.  Know your audience, know your platform.
  2. Don’t start with the technology – start with the goals.  Just this week a project came across our desk from a company looking to enter social media. They had already determined what technology and social media sites they wanted to be on, without having the slightest idea who they wanted to talk to, what they wanted to talk about, and who actually hangs out on these sites.  Backwards.  Goals first, tactics second.
  3. Don’t just talk about your business.  Be a person first and have fun.  While it seems counter productive to chit-chat about personal items on company time, the fact that you present yourself as a human being goes a long way to building trust.  No one is saying tell everyone what you eat for lunch every day, but sharing some volunteer efforts your company engages in or publicly thanking co-workers for decorating your office (and sharing a quick picture) for your birthday shows you aren’t just about the end sale.
  4. You have to be a listener, not just a broadcaster.  Ever take part in a conversation where the other person talks about themselves for 20 minutes, and when you finally get a word in, they are gazing over your shoulder looking for the next person to pitch to?  Try practicing ‘active listening‘ on the social channels before starting to start your own agenda.
  5. Does it blend?  How does social media fit with your entire PR & Marketing plan?  Social media marketing is a subset of a larger comprehensive plan to launch your company into a new era of customer communication. Abandoning everything that’s worked in favor of something you know little about is a guaranteed failure.  Stick with what works, and add to it.
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Show Me The Money

April 13, 2010 By Lynette Young Leave a Comment

This article is part of a series on social media success.

So you’ve got a decent handle on listening and your ‘fans’ and followers are interested in what you have to say.  Then the dreaded ROI (return on investment) phrase starts coming up from management.  Sale numbers that have a direct line back to social media output is demanded.  Just when you thought things were humming along, you’re told to PROVE your time and their money have brought a significant increase in the bottom line.  Before we go any further, one question needs to be answered.

What’s the ROI of your telephone?

Your phone is a critical tool to communicate and listen, just like social media is a tool.  Who ever said that social media is a direct pipeline of prime leads for your sales team?  Twitter isn’t a fat database of people sitting around waiting for you to pitch to them.  Facebook is not an e-commerce site.  Yes, you can make money from social channels (Dell claims $3 million in sales from Twitter alone).  When planning your entry into social media, items like ROI need to be addressed early and revisited often.  On the other hand, we are not saying that efforts in social media shouldn’t earn money.  How you earn (or save) money for your company should always be taken into account, but sometimes items like brand awareness, employee retention, idea generation, or customer satisfaction don’t have hard numbers or formulas to follow.

So how do you make money from social media?  It depends on why you use social media.  If you are using it as a customer service outreach (Your Call Is (Not That) Important to Us is an amazing book on the topic) then not only can you save hard money on the cost of an employee’s time picking up the phone, but the frustration and negative word of mouth so rampant with bad customer experiences.  How much money does it take to win back (assuming you even can) a customer that you’ve lost due to poor service?  How many customers do you loose even before the sale due to weak brand awareness or negative word of mouth?

Utilizing social media for sales generation?  Be there *before* the sale.  Offer help even if it means suggesting a competitor’s product.  Ask questions.  Listen.  Do more than sell – do anything but ‘sell’.  Be human.  Be well-rounded and showcase other facets of your company.  Talk about philanthropic efforts.  Provided your product or service is top-notch, all this is building trust between you and “people that may-or-may-not someday purchase your product or refer someone to you that might.”  Funny thing is, social media being structured the way it is, everyone gets to witness your efforts online and draw their own opinions on your company based on interactions they see you have with others.  In the past, the sales transaction took place ‘behind closed doors’ and not many people outside of the people involved saw the process.  That means a very limited amount of people could form their own opinions on your company outside of their own experiences.  Now the entire world can see how you treat customers, before, during, and after the sale.  The idea is scary to a good number of companies that aren’t used to operating in the new social economy.  Those companies that ‘get it’ realize that you could never put a price on (let alone actually pay to have done) the amount of positive exposure you get on social platforms.

How about using social media for talent acquisition? Product research and development?  Competitive analysis? Each group has very unique goals and should have very different strategies to using social media.

Sometimes the goal isn’t even to make money, but to save it.  Pepsi saved $20 million dollars on the 2010 Superbowl and put it towards the year-long Pepsi Refresh Project.  PepsiCo is getting much more than $20 million dollars in media coverage from the move.  Pepsi can afford to take chances like this, but can your company?  Social media is supposed to be a supplement to already successful outreach programs.  Dropping newspaper ads (if they work) to launch a Facebook Fan Page is not a smart business move.  Dumping your email campaigns (if they work) in favor of Twitter is a setup for failure.  Incorporating social media means having to take a good hard look at what you are involved with right now and cutting every single item that operates in the red.  For example, car dealerships may cringe at the thought of abandoning newspaper ads.  Just because your company (or your industry) has always done it a certain way – doesn’t mean you need to keep doing it that way.

End result, if you don’t know what your goals are, you will never reach them, social media endeavor or otherwise.

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More Friends Please

April 11, 2010 By Lynette Young Leave a Comment

This article is part of a series on social media success from Purple Stripe Productions.

Whitney's amazing 'message' #pcb4Soon after the first status messages go up on Facebook, there is a panic when the number of people following your accounts don’t reach critical mass within the first two weeks.  The comparison to mailing lists and distribution databases start to come up.  (Can’t we BUY followers?)  More followers equals more people to broadcast cleverly-crafted marketing messages to.  What good is spending all this time (a.k.a. money) on these channels if we don’t have a hundred thousand followers consuming our messages? Why don’t more people want to read what we are broadcasting? Why don’t they like us?

To put it bluntly, numbers matter.

Collecting numbers just for the sake of having numbers isn’t the goal.  Often times the quality of “the numbers” is overlooked.  Easy question – would you rather have 10,000 ‘fans’ that don’t really care what you are about and ignore you, or 500 ‘fans’ that are actively seeking information on your products or services?  Of course even with 500 ‘fans’ you can get impatient and wonder why your widget isn’t flying off the shelf or customers aren’t lined up out the door.  Christopher Penn has always said if you are selling Gulfstream G5 jets, and only need to sell one every two years to live like a king – you only need two followers, one of which is ready to buy a jet, and one that knows someone that wants to buy a jet.  You need to find the right numbers. [Read more...]

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Publish SOMETHING!

April 9, 2010 By Lynette Young 4 Comments

This article is part of a series on social media success from Purple Stripe Productions.

Without a tangible status update and ‘friends & fans,’ it feels like there is no *proof* of our social media efforts.  The sooner we can hit ‘publish’ – the sooner management sees we are actually working and not playing around all day on FarmVille.

Taking a step back, listening, and learning are all nice in theory, but ‘lazy’ in the business world.  Action produces results.  Listening is inaction.  We define success in how quickly we rack up the number of fans, friends, status updates, ‘likes,’ and re-Tweets.  Numbers we can count and reproduce on a chart.  How can you be considered successful if you gained less fans this week than last?  How can you justify to your management that your efforts are successful if you LOST a few followers?

The listening precursor is a real sticking point in a good number of companies.  You can see the results of not listening in multiple facets of a company.  Customer Service is reactive to problems and always on the defense.  The Sales team struggles to keep up with unique product offerings until the demand of customers hits the tipping point.  Research & Development work in silos far removed from end users.  Marketing follows a safe and predictable path that fits nicely within the niche and genre of their industry.  Human Resources is seen as the ‘heavy’ in the company.  Information technology departments treat employees like teens that cannot be trusted with the Internet for fear of rampant porn viewing and personal online socializing resulting in millions of dollars of lost revenue due to unproductive worker bees.

The bottom line – handing in a status report with slow-gaining numbers is perceived as a failure in Corporate America.  Fast. Quick. Instant.  NOW.  Because the technology (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.) produce instant content, the perception is that success should be instant as well.  Trust takes time.

Solutions are easy to identify, but hard to implement.  Change is hard. It’s disruptive.  It’s unproven.

[Read more...]

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Secrets to Success on Social Media

April 7, 2010 By Lynette Young 6 Comments

The answer is simple – BE SOCIAL. Now of course if you get that part, you won’t need my company’s help or to even finish this article series. For the rest of us that realize we are learning every day no matter how successful or experienced we are – read on…

It’s 2010 and while it may be old hat for some, most companies had technologies such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn on their radar at least from last year (other companies realized the revolution started in 1984).  Wait it out, be safe, see what others in their industry are doing (and if it works…)  Without realizing what goes on behind the scenes and viewing only the tweets and status updates, many are tempted to jump right in.  Show progress, DO SOMETHING.  Great from a personal perspective, but it doesn’t fare as well professionally.

After working in this field for well over a decade, we are finding patterns in the resistance, adoption, and implementation to social media.  Understandably, not all companies are set up to be ultra-progressive and on the bleeding edge of technology.  The thing is, the curve is starting to see the crest, and holding out any longer puts you on the dark side of the slope.  Even a 70 year-old brand can adapt.  Hell, a 360 year old company can adapt.  If they can – YOU can.

There is no more ‘wait and see’ in this economy.  Results are proven, so long as you are not expecting social media to be a direct line to your company’s bottom line.  If you treat social media as a telephone, and not a sales database, you will see results.

Becoming engaged in social media doesn’t mean a mad rush to smash on the ‘publish’ button and produce content.  A good part of the ‘need’ to get on social media platforms is a result of several factors, in a very predictable course.  With each step, there are traps to avoid and strategies to accomplish goals.  The dangerous part?  The process that leads to success and the (multiple) ones that lead to failure look very similar to the untrained eye.  Trying to tackle social media endeavors using the same tried and true tactics and initiative you’ve used in the past will FAIL.  In the past being active looked like productivity.  Activity = Progress.  Not so anymore.  Sales people thought that the way to make more sales was to call more people.  The game has changed, and fact is, you need to learn the new rules (or make your own) – but it is NOT the same as it’s always been.

Over the next few days the Purple Stripe team will be publishing the following articles related to the different steps involved in developing a social strategy.

A few additional topics may surface as well.  We welcome your comments and thoughts, and hope that over the next week we can help you find some soft spots in your social media plans and set the course straight!

(Be sure to subscribe to get the articles as soon as they are published!)

This article is part of a series on social media success from Purple Stripe Productions.

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Does Every Company Need to Be Involved in Social Media?

December 14, 2009 By Lynette Young 1 Comment

Short answer – NO.  Not everyone needs to be concerned with having a professional business presence in social media networks.  How do you know if you can get a note to skip gym class?  Here’s a quick and easy checklist to determine if you should take social media seriously:

  • Do you value what your customers are saying about you?
  • Do you need more customers?
  • Is customer service important to your company?
  • Are you looking for ways to stay ahead of your competition?
  • Do you sell goods or services?
  • Are you actively expanding your customer base?
  • Would you like to gain additional business from existing customers?
  • Are customer referrals important to your business?
  • Is becoming the first place people look when purchasing the goods and services you sell important to you?
  • Do you need to build a brand outside of your existing customer base?

If you answered ‘yes’ to any of these questions, then a social media plan could be beneficial for your bottom line.  I’ve met plenty of companies that have answered ‘no’ to all of the questions.  While they may not admit to answering ‘no’, their actions prove otherwise.  Incorporating a social media strategy into your business plan is not difficult or time consuming, but it does require expertise and planning.

Do you know where to start?  Start by listening!  Two places to start – your Google and Twitter.

You don’t need accounts to perform searches.  Start by searching on your company name, industry,  and relevant phrases and terms (as well as competitors) to find out what conversations are already going on.  Surprised at what you found – or didn’t find?  Social media content is essentially “Google food” and together with a well-crafted plan, can get you actively involved with potential customers.

So what’s holding YOU back?

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Who Uses Social Media?

October 22, 2009 By Lynette Young 2 Comments

Ever wonder about who is on the receiving end of your Tweets, Facebook updates or blog entries?

During this presentation, we will be giving an overview of what social media is, what makes it social, who exactly uses social media, and the five basic reasons for using it. We hope you enjoy what we’ve shared with you today!

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