With great appreciation to Chris Brogan, Paul Gillin and David Meerman Scott for inviting me to participate in their New Marketing Summit this week, I’d like to share and expand on my talking points. This doesn’t “map” to the actual panel, it’s the logic flow I prepared.
When the tape video is up I’ll be sure to let you know what all we actually said. Speaker’s amnesia.
1. Tough Economic Times are Predicted.
It’s time to start teaching others how to “fish” and derive value using social media. Social media can create value throughout the enterprise in many different practice areas. Asking who should “own” social media is as ludicrous as asking what department “owns” email? In any context, the focus must remain on effectiveness
2. “Step Off.” Get Over Your Enthusiasm.
Step off your enthusiasm about how “cool” all this stuff is and cut straight to the value. Speak their language and address their needs and pains. Demonstrate how core business processes and challenges can be done better.
Case studies are good. So is mainstream media coverage. That’s validation they trust. But if you really want to dangle a carrot:
SHOW THEM. For example: Twitter search your company’s brand, products, keywords and product class, and show them in real time precisely what your customers want and how they are interacting around your products and the entire product class.
FREE Samples rock. SHOW the business significance, using examples from your own business in action. Show direct applicability and context to their challenges and opportunities.
3. Manage Objections.
Here are five objections (budget, audience size, loss of control, priorities and uncertainty) and ways you can address them:
Budget
Don’t limit yourself to a new “social media” budget, and don’t even remain within the confines of marketing, publicity and other outbound communications. Look long and hard at the company’s full budget mosaic. Social tools can make substantive contributions across the organization — HR, R&D, project management, customer service, administration, IT — again, think of social tools the way you think of email: a tool to adapt and execute on within many segments of the enterprise.
Taking this idea one step further, be as clear as you can about the value or potential value social tools can contribute within each of these areas. What can be done less expensively or more profitably?
Audience Size
The audience value proposition just does NOT work the same way old school “tonnage based” advertising via expensive mainstream media buys always did. You’re not just trying to scoop up tons and tons and tons of eyeballs, hoping to extract actual business results out of some crap small percentage of those that you “reach.” Things can be more closely targeted and more tightly mapped onto fundamental metrics of business success. “Tons of eyeballs” metrics at their best are usually just proxies for “a hope of selling more.”
Three takeaways about social media/social networking audience sizes:
- It’s Social media and social networking audiences are growing fast
- Even small audiences that are well-targeted or influencers are quite valuable
- Off-platform benefits.You’re not always just trying to reach the direct audience. On Twitter in particular, we see massive applicability and advantages in SEO, market knowledge, word-of-mouth “passability” to others outside of the platform, and as a content-generation engine the pulls together flows of content that can be displayed and syndicated using widgets and other RSS-based tools.
Loss of Control
You can argue that they’ve already lost control. You can argue that they never even *had* control. Instead, underscore the increase in learning. Companies can learn an incredible about of information about their products, their customers unarticulated wants and needs, how to make it easier for customers to buy, how to serve customers better, and THATS’s just talking about the customers. This magnitude and value of learning is also available for the engineers, the researchers, the manufacturers — compare notes, parse problem-solving, crowdsource and figure out more, faster.
Priorities
Get laser focused on management’s existing business problems and pains. Apply the tools and opportunities you know about to the priorities they know they already have. Be very diagnostic in understanding and maturely articulating what could be achieved and how.
Uncertainty
Don’t forget folks, this stuff can be really SCARY. That’s okay. Encourage them to take a flexible stance, to start dipping their toes in, and to remain learning-focused whether or not they are ready to jump in whole hog. Some of my social media agency colleagues may disagree with this, but I think it’s okay for a company to engage in an extended listening period, where they dive deep into social media listening without necessarily responding.
Yes, ideally, the company should start to respond and manage its message contributions as soon as there are issues to respond to. But I don’t buy that they should not engage in formal listening until they’re ready to engage in formal responding. In many cases, the longer they listen first, the better their response skills will be.
If something major breaks, by all means address it, but it’s MORE important that the listening period not be delayed by fears over how the company can respond. It’s NOT okay to clap hands over eyes and ears just because the mouth – and corporate mind – need more time to prepare.
5. Call in the Cavalry
Well OF COURSE I’m biased. Pistachio obviously provides these services. But sometimes nothing beats bringing in an outside consultant, speaker or evangelist to inspire, instruct and lay out a map for “what could be.”
Your turn. How do you “sell” social media up within your organization? What challenges have you encountered and how have you worked them out with productive results? What have you *not* been able to address that you would like to find better answers and solutions for?
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- New Marketing Summit Round Up – Thanks Chris Brogan and, of course, Braintree
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- Hear Chris Brogan Speak at the New Marketing Summit
- World Wide Rave Talk at New Marketing Summit by David Meerman Scott
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{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
I’m preparing a presentation to the leadership team here after spending the last three months in exploration, research and practice mode. Beth Kanter gave me a great suggestion at nms08: phase in the roll out in stages, giving reasonable objectives to each stage. That combined with Paul Gillin’s pragmatic suggestion that a vital community can take a year of effort to establish has helped me from the mistake of the oversell. Finally I’ll be able to demonstrate the type of resource allocation it will take to gain traction through the efforts I have put into blogging and participation in Twitter these three months.
One way I have been building interest is simply leading conversations with some of the insights I’ve gained engaging in this space. Those conversations inevitably come round to the source: social media.
I have found that people never “get” Twitter until you give them lots of examples of how it’s used. I would cite how @TheHomeDepot used Twitter in a crisis during Gustav & Ike, and how the media is changing because of it (@statesman here in Austin are really doing it right and of course @RickSanchezCNN is a given– also Current TV displaying tweets during their debate coverage). My #ClutterTweetTip is another example of doing a daily bit of content that draws followers.
- Lorie Marrero
Creator of The Clutter Diet®
” how YOU convince management that social media is worthwhile. what works best?”
I dont think the question is worthwhile or not. Conversation is now an expectation. The question is shifting from “Do We?” to “How Do We?”. It reminds me of working with small companies in the early 90s when being on the web went from something early adopters, first movers and silicon valley startups did to “a given” – its stopped being a question and became a part of the media mix. New Media became Media (and yes, I am a little sad, ’cause I think then and now we were/are doing something different and special).
They know they need to be IN the conversation. They are treading water trying to figure out / get their courage up to figure out how to jump into the deep end. I think most marketers know they need to engage more deeply and more honestly, but they are scared of screwing it up. We also have a huge problem with coordination. The digital marketing kids arent talking to the PR kids. They are both ignoring the CS folks and the Events guys. This is happening inside the company and within the agencies they have “representing” them. Suddenly there are MULTIPLE experiments that aren’t coordinated or organized or actually compete with each other. It’s because the marketing guys are measured (leads, eyeballs, sales) differently than the PR kids (mentions, articles, influencer blog posts), who are measure differently than the CS guys (time spent, customer satisfaction surveys, etc.). It seems like we forget the only person we all REALLY answer to are the users/customers.
What has worked for me?
Well defined goals
Tactics that fit those goals and need
Client education so they see the need for commitment
Defined Success metrics that are relevant to the user and the strategy
Doing small strategically oriented projects and executing them savagely well.
I made it less scary. After talking about how social media is a growing market, I suggested we test the waters with a Facebook page for only one demographic that we engage. Bringing up all of the site options and multiple strategies at once would have been overwhelming.
Lowering the cost of lead acquisition.
It helps that my VP actually read “Groundswell” and got it.
These are great comments, thanks everyone. Sean, you’ve got yourself a full post there! Let me know if you post it so we can add a link.
i was gonna leave a 2 liner, kept writing, went to a meeting, added some more, was gonna post it…
Its all yours lady!
Regarding loss of control, I like to frame it a different way. Your customers are already having the conversation. The choice isn’t about control, but of choosing wether or not you will join in and be part of that existing conversation.
Well said. I’m on a big “show don’t tell” kick with this stuff. I’m a big fan of demonstrating that it’s easier to show a result and then demonstrate how to replicate it versus getting out the pom poms and cheering.
Seems the comments reflect it as well. : )
I agree with you when you say that “it’s okay for a company to engage in an extended listening period, where they dive deep into social media listening without necessarily responding”. As you mentioned, as long as this stage is not prolonged, it can be beneficial. Not only will it give that company a chance to see what it takes to effectively utilize social media, but they will also learn how to effectively participate.
This “listening period” will also help them to understand the forum “etiquette”, how is it that people expect them to interact/behave? Similarly, it will help them to better understand how it is enhancing other companies.
Great post!
I work with a lot of small business owners and entrepreneurs and I find that they are aware of social media but in some ways afraid of it. The main concerns are why should I use it, how to use it and how to maintain it. Once I link the benefits of social media directly to their organization or venture, they are more likely to consider it. I have also found that starting them with a Facebook page to take baby steps is often more comfortable for them because they just don’t understand Twitter. Once this foundation is laid, we can now venture out into other forms of social media and existing tools to streamline use. The key: approaching it in phases and manageable steps with them.