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:

1. It’s Social media and social networking audiences are growing fast
2. Even small audiences that are well-targeted or influencers are quite valuable
3. 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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