business

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Your Salesforce is Not Ready to do Social Selling

You say you’re interested in this concept you’re hearing so much about: social selling.

You may even have invested some money in social selling Webinars or in actual training.

But your salesforce is not ready to do social selling.

Not all of them.

LinkedIn's Social Selling adoption curve

LinkedIn’s Social Selling Readiness Spectrum

Think of how many times you’ve sent your salespeople to training. CRM training. Sales 2.0 training. SPIN Selling.

How much of this training did your sales folks actually absorb? How much did they implement? And how much success did it generate? We’re thinking not much.

Why? Because sales people hate sales training. If they are honest with you, they’ll tell you they’d much rather have you pull out their fingernails with rusty pliers while their eyes are gouged out by rabid pigeons than go to a sales seminar. And the main reason they think this way is that most of them – not all to be sure – think what they’re doing is just fine, works as it always has, and always will. They can do 40 dials and 40 emails a day and like magic, some sales fall out the bottom of the funnel.

If you’re honest with yourself, though, you know that smiling and dialing is becoming increasingly less effective.

So on the subject of social selling, a groundbreaking leap forward that actually works, 75 percent of your sales staff either won’t change or hates the idea. Of the other 25 percent, about half can pick it right up and start seeing results in 90 days.

But you have two problems: You don’t know who is in which group; who are the laggards and who are the leaders who are ready to embrace social selling.

So you train them all. What a waste. You’re throwing away 75 percent of your training dollars, if you’re lucky.

So what’s the solution? Do a social selling readiness assessment first. Don’t bother Googling it. You’ll find only a few companies even talking about it, and even fewer equipped to help you execute an assessment.

Save Money on Social Selling Training

Here’s how you can save 35 percent of the cost of a social selling training plan. First, do a social selling readiness assessment (coincidentally, we can help with that.) Figure out who the top 25 percent are. Do some further analysis to find the 12 percent who are really, really ready to get moving on social selling. (Hint: they’re probably already among your top performers.)

Then train the 12 percent on social selling techniques. Give them plenty of space and time to start producing results. It will take at least 90 days, perhaps longer. Be patient. You may need to mentor and train them a bit more along the way.

Once this group starts generating impressive results with social selling, you can expect to see increases in revenue productivity per sales rep of 17 percent or more, according to a CSO Insights study. This is sure to pique the interest of the other portion of the 25 percent. Train them next.

Once the 75 percent see the success of these first cohorts, their attitudes toward social selling will change. Assess their willingness to now embrace social selling. Perhaps half or maybe even more will be interested and ready to change. Train them, but be prepared for more mentoring and refreshers than with the first groups.

Fire the rest and replace them with (fewer) social sellers.

So we just saved you a bundle. Contact us for more details.

Infinite Pipeline book cover

Get our new book, The Infinite Pipeline: How to Master Social Media for Business-to-Business Sales Success online here. You can save $5 using Coupon Code WXG8ABP2

What Others Are Saying

“Infinite Pipeline offers practical advice for using social media to extend relationship selling online. It’s a great way to get crazy-busy prospects to pay attention.”
—Jill Konrath, author of SNAP Selling and Selling to Big Companies

“Sales is all about relationships and trust. Infinite Pipeline is the ‘how to’ guide for maximizing social networks to find and build relationships, and generate trust in our digital age.”
—Sam Richter, best-selling author, Take the Cold Out of Cold Calling (2012 Sales book of the year)

“Infinite Pipeline will be the authority on building lasting relationships through online social that result in bottom line business.”
—Lori Ruff, The LinkedIn Diva, Speaker/Author and CEO of Integrated Alliances

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Social Media on Less Than Two Hours a Day

I’m an enterprise social media consultant, as are my two partners. We obviously spend more than two hours a day on social media, so what’s the deal with the title?

The title refers to the amount of time I spend on keeping our social media presence going. If I can do it in two hours a day for our business, so can you for yours.

Here’s how and where I do it:

Processing New Twitter Followers – 10 minutes

Twitter sends me emails whenever someone follows me. I get probably 10-20 a day and, rather than respond to them as they come it (and interrupting my flow), I respond to them in the late afternoon or evening. This works out well, because the biggest audience on Twitter tends to be after about 5:30 Eastern time. The East Coast folks are getting off work and checking Twitter, and the West Coasters are thinking about an afternoon coffee and quick social media check-in.

I open my emails and quickly decide if I want to follow the person back. I have a bunch of rules that I use, and they probably are generally not that interesting, but a big determinant is how many followers the person has. If they don’t have many, I may decline to follow. If they don’t have a lot of tweets, I may decline also. And if they’re a bot (lots of follows, drastically fewer followers, and only a dozen or so tweets), I delete the email and move on.

If the follower passes my initial screen, I click to go to their profile. I still might not follow back unless I can find a tweet of theirs to retweet. Retweeting gets you noticed, may get you more followers, and gets you gratitude from your follower, if they’re savvy.Using this process, I can churn through 20 followers in about 10 minutes.

Tweeting – 5 minutes

I rarely do tweets from the Twitter service itself any more. The reason is that I use the various curation platforms that I describe in the following sections. I check the @Mentions tab on the Twitter Website and, if I’ve been mentioned, I send a nice thank you to the person who mentioned me. Same with retweets. I might do a couple of searches for hashtags – a keyword preceded by a hash or pound sign (#). If others have directed tweets to me, I respond.

Curating My Paper.li – 0 minutes

One of the fastest growing trends in social media, curation means helping others make sense of the daily firehose flow of information, links, pictures, and videos. There are several free platforms that enable you to create a publication based on either the flow of your Twitter, Facebook or other social accounts or on hand-picked articles you encounter and want to share.

Paper.li offers a powerful interface to shape your newspaper around a particular topic. Here’s my paper: paper.li/MikeEllsworth/1308248319

The Mike Ellsworth Daily

The Mike Ellsworth Daily

After an initial startup period of one or two months, I let my Paper.lis go on their own. They select material from the feeds on a variety of topics that I’m interested in, including social media, social networking, and curation. The paper automatically generates a new edition each day (or, for lower-volume topics, whenever there’s something to publish), and I can leave it alone or I can tweak it by deleting articles, promoting them, and blocking certain people’s articles from being automatically included.

To be honest, when I first started the paper, it took about a week of perhaps half an hour a day to get the keywords and feeds tweaked so that I could then leave it alone, which I mostly do now.

Curating My Scoop.it Topics – 15 minutes

Scoop.it enables you to create a newspaper based on a particular topic that includes only the articles you select. The topic I spend the most time on is Enterprise Social Media (the others are Social Media and Marketing Research, Social Media for Workforce Development, Social Selling for Lawyers, and Social Selling for B2B), and I spend probably the biggest portion of my daily social media routine on curating this topic. You can read it here: www.scoop.it/t/enterprise-social-media and here’s what the paper looks like:

Enterprise Social Media Topic

Enterprise Social Media Topic

Because it is hand-curated, Scoop.it takes more time. The service suggests various articles based on your Twitter and Facebook feeds as well as blogs and other social properties. You can add a bookmarklet to your browser and add any URL you happen to be viewing to your paper.

The cool part of this process is that Scoop.it enables you to not only add an article, but to comment on it, automatically tweet it, post it to your Facebook wall, and add it to your Tumblr or WordPress blog. If you’re concerned with keeping up with a regular blog posting schedule, this last is a godsend. Depending on the article, I may send posts to both our Tumblr account (mellsworth.tumblr.com) and the Social Media Performance Group blog (smperformance.wordpress.com).

Thus a single article can become a tweet (that can be echoed onto my Facebook wall), a post on the SMPG Facebook page (facebook.com/SocialMediaPerformance), an article in my Scoop.it newspaper, and a post on Tumblr and WordPress. (BTW, you may find those who recommend against cross-posting. Tell that to famous social media guru Guy Kawasaki.)

One of the coolest things you can do with Scoop.it is spread out your posts over the day, or over several days, using Buffer, which plugs in to the Scoop.it platform. I love Buffer; it also has a bookmarklet, and it’s a great way to not overwhelm your audience with dozens of posts.

So I spend a chunk of time finding, reading and curating articles on Scoop.it, often while watching last night’s Conan or Jimmy Fallon on my DVR. ;=}

Storify – 5 minutes

Storify is another hand-curated site. Whenever I encounter a lot of articles around a single subject, I’ll go to Storify to create a rollup, known there as a story. Here’s what one looks like:

Tools to Create Facebook Like Pages - Storify

Tools to Create Facebook Like Pages – Storify

I do this as much for myself as for others, since I’ll be returning to this particular story when I go to renovate the Social Media Performance Group Facebook page in the near future. I don’t do this every day, though.

Empire Avenue – 30 minutes

OK, I’m on record as saying that Klout – which with 100+ million members is the most popular service that purports to rank one’s social media impact – is superficial, wrong-headed, and a waste of time.

When I ran into Empire Avenue, which calls itself the social media stock market, it occurred to me that the site may turn out to be a much more accurate representation of social media influence than Klout. There are some leading social media lights on the site, but many of the top names don’t participate that much. I’m intensely interested in the operation of online marketplaces, so I joined, and in less than two weeks, became a “Vice President – Social Networking.” A year and a half later, the Avenue has changed, and no longer awards such spiffy honorifics.

Mike Ellsworth on Empire Avenue

Mike Ellsworth on Empire Avenue

The concept is simple: You connect up your social presences and the site establishes a share price for you. Other members – or perhaps more properly, players – buy shares in you, and get dividends based on your social media activity. The more they buy, the higher your price goes, and so on, like any stock market. Members can leave shout outs – often very breathless and punctuated with lots of exclamation points – for one another, and are encouraged to follow one another on other social sites.

Members are from all walks of life, but the most successful seem to be in social media or real estate.What has been the result of my dalliance with Empire Avenue? Lots more twitter followers, more Facebook friends, an invitation to join an exclusive group on Facebook, and lots more likes for the Social Media Performance Group Facebook page. Join me on Empire Avenue using this link: empireavenue.com/?t=04p2zobi

Blogging – 45 minutes

This daily total represents the amount of time I spend on the weekend setting up the week’s blog posts. We aim at three posts per week on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Since we’ve written six social media books, I spend some portion of this time adapting book chapters as blog posts. I also write the week’s blogs. We try to write at least one original blog a week (and this is it for this week!) I use WordPress’ scheduling capability to publish the posts throughout the week. So you’re reading this on Thursday (or later) but I wrote it on Saturday.

Facebook – 10 to 15 minutes

Frankly, Facebook could take more time depending on whether my friends are having interesting discussions. Recently I’ve spent more time on Facebook because I recently joined that closed Facebook group I mentioned, and whose members discuss social media topics and retweet each others’ tweets.

But in general, Facebook takes a little bit of my time and I often spend that time on my smartphone while I’m walking to my parking deck in the evening – yes, I’m one of those . . .

Not included in this time is various other social media activities specifically intended for building our business, and that’s the way it should be. If your business is not social media consulting, you’ll be spending the rest of your day on your business as well. You don’t need to spend two hours a day on social media, of course, but you should select the most effective activities and set aside some time each day to work on your social media presence.

Also not included is time spent building and nurturing relationships with those you find common ground with via this process. But since that’s a key element to business development, I lump that in with the time you’d be spending working on building your business anyway.

The effect of our emphasis on curation, starting in 2011, was a fairly dramatic rise in my Klout score:

Dramatic Increase in Mike Ellsworth's Klout Score

Dramatic Increase in Mike Ellsworth’s Klout Score

Since then I’ve risen to a robust 60. Not that that means anything, of course . . .

Social Media with a Slow Hand

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Social Media with a Slow Hand

Back in the day, I was confused when I heard that guitar god Eric Clapton’s nickname was Slow Hand. His playing, always tasty, always appropriate, seemed fast enough for me. But as I pondered this apparent contradiction I noticed that, unlike some of his flash guitar peers, such as the unbelievable Jimmy Page, Eric rarely broke out a really fast solo. He wasn’t obsessed with notes per minute, like today’s YouTube subculture of BPM guitarists.

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A few years later, I came across a Clapton quote that put his approach in perspective: He said his goal in life was to make his audience cry with just a single note. That’s impossible, I thought. A single note without a context to prepare the audience means nothing.

So what does this have to do with social media?

Two things:

  • It’s not all about the speed, but rather about tastefulness and appropriateness
  • In order to have your audience respond to a single note, you need to build context

I don’t want to take the Clapton metaphor too far, but his guitar playing does have a couple more lessons for social media.

First, he is probably the most tasteful and economical guitarist currently playing. He doesn’t embellish needlessly like an Eddie Van Halen. He’s not trying to impress you with his virtuosity like a Joe Satriani. He plays no more than what is required, and always in service of a cohesive solo.

The second Clapton lesson is that he rarely repeats himself during a solo, unlike pretty much every other guitarist, including other great guitarists like Joe Walsh and especially Carlos Santana, he doesn’t have a bag of clichéd musical phrases that he trots out frequently.

Slow Hand Social Media Messaging

Put all these Clapton attributes together and you get a pretty nice framework for your approach to social media messaging.

  • Don’t overload your audience. Adopting the Old Media advertising paradigm of more impressions and more repetition equals more sales can be ineffective. You need to strike a balance that enables you to be heard above the noise while not causing your followers to ignore your boring repeated messaging.
  • Be tasty. The Online Slang Dictionary defines tasty as “something really good, attractive, or just cool.” In the guitar world, taste refers to choosing what to leave in and what to leave out. Often, less is more. Martin Smith of Atlantic BT refers to online marketer’s penchant for spewing a torrent of information as Chinese Army Marketing. You don’t need to overwhelm your community with every little detail of what you’re selling. Leave space in your music.
  • Create the context for an emotional response. This is a big one, and a hard one for most marketers to get. We make decisions primarily from our gut, like Homer Simpson. Yet most social media marketing is geared toward our Spock-like rationality. During the 2011 holiday season, the social media ninjas at Coke showed us all the best approach. Coke selected several Filipinos working in America, sent them back home for Christmas and followed them with video cameras. They posted a YouTube video that had not a single mention of the brand in it. It’s about family and people and feeling good. And it makes me choke up a little as I write this because it is so sweet and compelling. I have told dozens of people about this in the intervening time, and have included it as an example in the books I write. What’s that worth?

Provide context and an emotional connection when using social media and you’ll see better results.

The bottom line? Social Media isn’t advertising. Overwhelming your audience with repetitive messages may work in the short term, but your goal should be to forge a relationship and an emotional connection with your community (not your target demographics). Be tasty. Strive for that one note that makes people respond. Avoid Chinese Army Marketing and use a Slow Hand, like the Pointer Sisters preferred.

P.S. I love all the guitarists I mention in this post so haters, don’t hate . . .

Infinite Pipeline book cover

Get our new book, The Infinite Pipeline: How to Master Social Media for Business-to-Business Sales Success online here. You can save $5 using Coupon Code WXG8ABP2

What Others Are Saying

“Infinite Pipeline offers practical advice for using social media to extend relationship selling online. It’s a great way to get crazy-busy prospects to pay attention.”
—Jill Konrath, author of SNAP Selling and Selling to Big Companies

“Sales is all about relationships and trust. Infinite Pipeline is the ‘how to’ guide for maximizing social networks to find and build relationships, and generate trust in our digital age.”
—Sam Richter, best-selling author, Take the Cold Out of Cold Calling (2012 Sales book of the year)

“Infinite Pipeline will be the authority on building lasting relationships through online social that result in bottom line business.”
—Lori Ruff, The LinkedIn Diva, Speaker/Author and CEO of Integrated Alliances

Create Your Internal Social Media Policy

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Create Your Internal Social Media Policy

In our previous posts, we’ve examined how you can begin to engage your social media community and create a plan to engage them. Now let’s take a look at how you can create an internal social media policy. By first understanding how to use social media behind the firewall, you can lay the groundwork for your external social media policy.


Social Media Engagement
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Sections of Your Internal Social Media Policy

Here are some suggested headings for your enterprise’s social media policy.

  • Company Philosophy — Clearly define why your organization is using social media, what its goals are, and its general approach — formal, informal, collegial, peer-to-peer. Use this to ensure that all social media participants have a common understanding of the basics of your approach.
  • Definition of Social Networking — It may not be immediately apparent what kinds of sites or activities your policy refers to. Is tagging photos on Flickr[1] included? How about helping create a wiki on someone else’s site?[2] Be sure all involved understand the domain your policy covers. You may decide the policy covers all Internet activities, including email and instant messaging.
  • Identifying Oneself as an Employee of the Organization — This could get tricky for some enterprises, especially if you are in a regulated industry. Should you require employees to identify themselves as part of your organization? When? Should all who speak in your name post disclaimers (comments do not reflect the opinions of [enterprise])? We recommend that you limit this type of requirement because we think the best way to use social media is to Be a Person.
  • Recommending Others — You may want to have a policy about recommending others outside your enterprise. You may be concerned that the common social networking practice of recommending others may be construed not as a personal recommendation by a staffer, but as your organization recommending the person or group.
  • Referring to Clients or Partners — Your enterprise may have guidelines about referencing clients, especially about revealing Personally Identifiable Information. Similarly, you may have a policy about revealing the identity of, or otherwise referring to, your partners. Make sure you cover these policies in your social media policy.
  • Proprietary or Confidential Information — Your organization probably has a policy about revealing proprietary of confidential information. Incorporate this policy explicitly into your social media policy.
  • Terms of Service, Privacy, Copyright and other Legal Issues — If you create social media areas of your enterprise’s Website, or if you create your own online community, you’ll want to spell out the terms under which you provide services. Google “terms of service” to see how other providers handle this matter. You’ll also want to post a privacy policy and a notice of copyright if it is appropriate. Note that if you don’t want to restrict all uses of the material in your social media site, you can use the Creative Commons Copyleft process, which allows you to reserve only some rights to your content, while encouraging others to otherwise use or modify it. Find out more at the Creative Commons Website.[3]
    • Productivity— Pretty much every enterprise worries about the affect social media can have on the productivity of its workers. There are lots of studies that prove that generally the negative impact is non-existent or negligible.A July, 2009 study[4] by Nucleus Research found that companies who allowed employees to access their Facebook sites during work hours could expect to see total office productivity decline by an average of only 1.5 percent.

On the other hand, an Australian study[5] showed an increase in productivity among social networking users. “People who do surf the Internet for fun at work — within a reasonable limit of less than 20 percent of their total time in the office — are more productive by about 9 percent than those who don’t,” said Dr Brent Coker, from the University of Melbourne’s Department of Management and Marketing.

Because of the potential benefits of staff use of social networking, we recommend a policy that stresses that social media use should not interfere with normal duties, and spells out how much use is acceptable.

  • Disciplinary Action — Going hand in glove with the acceptable use policy should be a policy on discipline for staff whose productivity suffers due to excessive social networking use.

Your organization may develop other policies for social media use, but if you cover the points above, you should have a good basis for your initial social media policy. Like everything else regarding social computing, you’ll probably revise your policies as you and your enterprise learn how best to use this technology.

Next up: Sample Internal Social Media Policy

Create Your Internal Social Media Policy is the 24th in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Media Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at http://bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

See the previous posts What is Social Media?, Social Sites Defined, Why Social Media? How is Social Media Relevant to Business? First Steps Toward a Social Media Strategy, and Decide What Your Business Will Do About Social Computing, pt. 1

[1] Flickr is an image and video hosting website and online community: bit.ly/9O2NeP

[2] Wiki definition: a Website that allows the easy creation and editing of interlinked Web pages via a Web browser, generally around one or more common themes. The most famous wiki is Wikipedia: bit.ly/b4hIR7

[3] Creative Commons is an alternative to copyright: bit.ly/dfZ5dM

[4] Nucleus Research is global provider of research and advisory services: bit.ly/clpkIx

[5] “Freedom to surf: workers more productive if allowed to use the internet for leisure,” University of Melbourne: bit.ly/aUCblU

Elements of an Engagement Plan

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Elements of an Engagement Plan

In the previous post, Engage Your Community, we examined how you can begin to engage the social media community you’ve identified in previous steps. Now let’s take a look at how you can create a plan to engage your community.


Social Media Engagement
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Your engagement plan is the tactical realization of your social computing strategy. As such, each tactic should tie back to a strategic initiative — increasing sales, spreading the word, encouraging legislative action, increasing brand awareness, and the like.

You should consider including the following elements, as appropriate, in your engagement plan.

Goals for Engagement

You can expect various types of results from engaging with your community, and they can be categorized broadly into the following:

  • Listen and Identify — Learning about your community via audience analysis that identifies what your community values and will respond to
  • Inform — Increase the knowledge about your company within your community
  • Consult and Involve — Band your community together to improve and amplify your enterprise’s activities — a related concept is known as the wisdom of crowds:[1] the ability of masses of people to suggest accurate or innovative solutions to problems
  • Collaborate and Empower — Encourage community participation and effectiveness by working together and providing empowering tools online and offline, for example, to brainstorm new ideas and approaches, collaborate on messages and themes, or to enable supporters to tell their stories and help recruit new evangelists

Chances are good your types of engagements will fall into the following categories:

  • Identification of problems, opportunities and issues — Use community to keep a pulse on your market
  • Policy consultation — Get your community’s opinion on the direction of your organization, or about desired policy changes in government
  • Customer service and service delivery — Find out what you’re doing right, and wrong, and how you can improve your service to your clients
  • Marketing and communications — Inform your community about significant activities of your enterprise or related entities in close to real-time (Twitter) or through regular updates (Facebook, blogging)

Ensure that your plan covers the following topics.

  • Guiding principles— Lay out your target audiences, target outcomes, what you are offering, your key messages and success metrics. Example guiding principles:
    • Relationships sustain our community. Nurture them.
    • Action is more important than endless discussion
    • Our members are at the center of our community, and control its development
  • Channels— Determine how you’re going to use complementary on- and offline channels (print, TV, other social networks, ads, etc.) to let people know about and get them to contribute to your community. Examples of complementary channel use:
    • Include your social media presence in PSAs
    • Link your Facebook status to Twitter
    • Run a print promotion for a Facebook-based event
  • Activities— What kinds of actions can your community members take on your site and elsewhere? You’ll want to make these actions easy to find and easy to accomplish. Design your calls to action and the high-value interactions you are trying to encourage accordingly. Examples of activities:
    • Tell a friend
    • Like your Facebook page
    • Invite a friend to an event
  • Incentives— Consider offering prizes, points, rebates and other benefits to community members who visit, contribute, or help other members use the site. Examples of incentives:
    • Special achievement badges members can display on their blogs
    • Two-for-one admission to your next event
    • Enter those who comment in a prize drawing
  • Roles and responsibilities— Determine who is responsible for content creation, animation, promotion, outreach, tech support and other functions. Design the production and approval workflows. Ensure that all participants are well-informed about this process. Example roles and responsibilities:
    • Management funds the social media effort
    • The community manager manages social day-to-day activities
    • Outreach crafts the messages for distribution via social media
  • Messages— Well in advance of launch of your social media effort, draft all the on-site and e-mail messages you’re likely to need as you get started. Example messages:
    • Use AddThis[2] to add the ability for Website visitors to comment about you on social media
    • Embed YouTube videos on your Website and ask for comments
    • Include announcement of your social media effort in email newsletters
  • Timeline — Any well-run project needs a plan that specifies what gets done when. Be sure to include all activities, including a periodic evaluation of success metrics.
  • Do’s and don’ts— Create a style guide for your staff to use in order to present a consistent voice. Be sure to address at least the following:
    • How often will the content be updated and posted to social media sites?
    • What type of content will be posted (topics, categories)?
    • How and who will approve content?
    • How will the site look? How is your logo to be displayed? What is the color palette?
    • How will you ensure the site is usable? Accessible (Section 508 compliant)?
    • How will you launch? We recommend a gradual, soft launch so you have time to work out the kinks.
    • How will you collect and safeguard Personally Identifiable Information (PII)?[3]
    • Does the site have privacy and legal disclaimers? What kinds of content need legal review? What legal jurisdictions do you need to take into account?
    • Ages of community members? Do they need to be 18 or over? How do you filter out the kids?

Next up: Create Your Internal Social Media Policy

Elements of an Engagement Plan is the 23nd in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Media Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at http://bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

See the previous posts What is Social Media?, Social Sites Defined, Why Social Media? How is Social Media Relevant to Business? First Steps Toward a Social Media Strategy, and Decide What Your Business Will Do About Social Computing, pt. 1

 

[1] The concept of the wisdom of crowds (defined: bit.ly/a9cUC3) was articulated by James Surowiecki in his 2005 book, The Wisdom of Crowds (amzn.to/buJlFO). Further discussion of this intriguing concept is beyond the scope of this book.

[2] AddThis: bit.ly/d6oL2B

[3] Definition: bit.ly/aX2Swd

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Engage Your Community

In the previous post, Reaching Out to Your Community, we examine how you can begin to reach out to the social media community you’ve identified in previous steps. Now let’s take a look at how you can engage that community.

Engage Your Community

“There is no demand for messages.”

Doc Searls, The Cluetrain Manifesto

Creating community is one of the hardest things to do, online or offline.

Yet online, communities can easily and spontaneously form, grow, age, and disappear in a matter of days. So forming communities is one of the easiest things to do online, right?

Confused as to what these opposing effects mean for your community? You’re not alone.

Despite what you’ll read online, and even in this book (see the section Building Your Community on page 385), there is no foolproof method for creating a community. There are some principles that seem to be tried and true, but the reality is the personalities who inhabit your community will have more effect on its viability and effectiveness than you will. Of course, you’re one (or more) of those personalities, and controlling your actions and activities is extremely important if you are going to have a chance of being successful.

This means think before you post.

We suggest you create a poster of the slogan below and distribute it to everyone in your organization.

Think Before You Post

Many people have alienated others online through ill-considered statements and toxic encounters. To avoid making a mistake, never say anything online you wouldn’t want

  • Your own family to see
  • To see on a billboard
  • To be published on the front page of the Wall Street Journal

You also need to consider the heft your enterprise may have. What you say matters when you are a “someone.” Your enterprise stands for something. Thus, people are likely to listen closely to what you say. Think before you Tweet/post — and think this: “If someone said this about me, would their organization or good name be harmed?”

Another thing to remember: Inauthenticity is the enemy of your social media effort. This means you need to truly understand the difference between using social media as just another one-way communication channel, and truly engaging your community.

One of the main techniques your community will hate is known as sock-puppetry: the disingenuous use of a real or fake user to parrot the enterprise’s party line — just like sticking your hand in a sock puppet and expecting to be immune to criticism.

We collect a rogue’s gallery of bad social media moves in our Social Media Hall of Shame at bit.ly/HallOfShame. It’s a good primer on what not to do with social media. As far as what you should do, first you should create an engagement plan.

Next up: Elements of an Engagement Plan

Engage Your Community is the 22nd in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Media Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at http://bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

See the previous posts What is Social Media?, Social Sites Defined, Why Social Media? How is Social Media Relevant to Business? First Steps Toward a Social Media Strategy, and Decide What Your Business Will Do About Social Computing, pt. 1

 

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Reaching Out to Your Community

In the previous posts, we explained how to find where people are talking about you on social media using Google. This post takes a look at starting to reach out to your community.


Social Media Buzz
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Once you find your constituency online you need to determine how to reach them. Your objectives in this phase are to determine:

  • Networks your community is using
  • How engaged your community is on these networks
  • The conversations already happening about your organization or cause, and where they aren’t happening
  • Types of interactions your community is having within each network
  • What others in your field are doing online

Based on the research results, you can:

  • Measure the average frequency of relevant conversations
  • Identify the more active hubs and communities
  • Recognize the context of the conversations in order to determine time and variety of resources required

Once you’ve found where people are talking, you can determine the magnitude of the ongoing effort to monitor what they’re saying. In his free e-book, The Essential Guide to Social Media,[1] Social Media expert Brian Solis lays out a formula calculating the effort necessary to stay current with what’s going on the relevant communities and the pertinent conversations.

Now the following formula looks complex, but it’s actually quite simple, so bear with us.

Solis’ formula is:

Brian Solis' formula for calculating social media effort

And it is calculated this way:

  • The number of average relevant conversations per day per community — Cn
  • Multiplied by the quantity of relevant communities — Qc
  • Multiplied by 20 (minutes required to research and respond and also monitor for additional responses. You may increase or decrease this based on your experience.)
  • Divided by 60 (minutes)

The calculation results in t, the amount of time you’ll need to spend monitoring social media.

For example, let’s say your community produces 100 relevant conversations per day per community, and you need to track 10 communities. The formula is thus:

Solis formula result
Solis formula result

That means, in this example, your organization must spend five and a half hours per day monitoring your community. Obviously, your mileage may vary, but this simple calculation indicates that to really get a pulse on your community requires a not-insignificant amount of time.

Next up: Engage Your Community

Reaching Out to Your Community is the 21st in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Media Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at http://bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

See the previous posts What is Social Media?, Social Sites Defined, Why Social Media? How is Social Media Relevant to Business? First Steps Toward a Social Media Strategy, and Decide What Your Business Will Do About Social Computing, pt. 1

 

[1] Brian Solis’ free e-book: scr.bi/uzYfb

How Social Search Works

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How Social Search Works

In the previous post, Advanced Google Searching For Social Media, we got a little deeper into finding where people are talking about you on social media using Google. This post delves even deeper into the subject.


JObs Commandments
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For social search to work, Google first has to know who you are. If you’ve logged in to any of Google’s services — from Gmail to AdWords — or created a Google Profile,[1] or joined Google+, Google knows who you are. Think about that for a moment.

OK, if it didn’t creep you out, you’re probably a GenY’er[2] <smile>.

So they know who you are. They can then connect up with all your Google accounts to find your friends. Of course, your Gmail address book is a primary source of information about who your friends are. Here are the areas from which Google says[3] it gathers information about your social circle:

  • People in your Gmail (or Google Talk) chat list
  • People in your Friends, Family, and Coworkers groups in your Google contacts
  • People you’re publicly connected to through social sites, such as Twitter and FriendFeed that appear on your Google profile or in your public Google Buzz stream.
  • People you’re following in Google Reader and Google Buzz
  • People who are connections of those in your immediate, public social circle. This means that if you have a friend on Twitter, and he follows five people, those additional five people may also be included in your social circle.

Google uses your social circle to give you social search results from:

  • Websites, blogs, public profiles, and other content linked from your friends’ Google profiles
  • Web content, such as status updates, tweets, and reviews, from links that appear in the Google profiles of your friends and contacts.
  • Images posted publicly from members of your social circle on Picasa Web and from Websites that appear on their Google profiles
  • Relevant articles from your Google Reader subscriptions

If you want to see more such results from people in your social circle, click More Search Tools on the left panel of the search results page and select Social to filter your results.

Here’s what Google says about the privacy (!) of the information they use:

  • Public: Public social connections that appear on your Google Profile are visible to your friends and the Internet at large. Because all of these connections are public on the web, your connection to some of these people may be included in another person’s social circle when appropriate. For example, if you follow Bob on Twitter, a friend of Bob’s may see you in his social circle.
  • Private: Private social connections like your Google chat list and Google contacts are not shared by Google. If you and Adam are chat buddies, we won’t use that connection to expand anyone else’s social circle. You cannot see Adam’s other chat buddies or Google contacts, and he can’t see yours. However, if you are connected to some of Adam’s other chat buddies through other public networks, they may still appear in your social circle.

Google used to have a way to see your social circle in a beta test mode, but as of this writing they appear­ed to have pulled it, possibly in preparation for releasing Google+, their own social net­work.

Depending on whom your friends are, you might find the social search content interesting, inspiring, or insipid. Google has a nice introduction to social search on YouTube[4] that can help you better understand how it works, but the company is relatively mum about its further plans for the feature.

If you want to use Google social search to help market your organization, Debra Murphy[5] has a good blog post on the subject that we adapt below. It suggests you:

  • Create a quality Google Profile and include all your important links
  • Stop worrying about personal vs. professional connections being mixed together. Connecting with your customers and clients is critical.
  • Don’t fall for SEO companies claiming they will get you first page results — the game has changed and first page search results will be different based on who you are, where you are and who you are connected with

Take a look at Debra’s last point above. Your best approach online, whether you believe all this social media stuff or not, is to ensure that who you are, where you are, and who you connect to reflect your online goals, because search is going social, whether you like it or not.

If you have a large online social circle and you post content relevant to your organization and cause, you are almost guaranteeing that anyone in your circle who searches for relevant terms will see your information on the first page of search results. Organizations pay hundreds to hundreds of thousands of dollars per month to get on the first page, so having a large, relevant social circle can create essentially free targeted advertising.

If Google’s hypothesis is correct — that people will trust content from people in their social circles more than they trust random search results — social search will be even more effective than traditional targeted ads or SEO techniques.

Think about that for a minute. At least in these early days, you can beat the large brands with huge marketing budgets just by tending to your community. The next section talks about reaching out and connecting with that community.

Next up: Reaching Out to Your Community

Advanced Google Searching for Social Media is the 20th in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Media Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, for the impatient the book is available in paper form at http://bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

See the previous posts What is Social Media?, Social Sites Defined, Why Social Media? How is Social Media Relevant to Business? First Steps Toward a Social Media Strategy, and Decide What Your Business Will Do About Social Computing, pt. 1

 

[1] Create your Google Profile here: bit.ly/bgn3s2

[2] GenY defined: bit.ly/bfh9bz

[3] Google’s social search page: bit.ly/anrcsb

[4] Google’s YouTube video about social search: bit.ly/aeLBCl

[5] Debra Murphy is a marketing coach: bit.ly/catyrM

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Advanced Google Searching for Social Media

In the previous post, Find Your Community, we got an intro to finding where people are talking about you on social media using Google. This post delves a bit deeper into the subject.

No matter what you’re searching for, you should be sure to check out Google’s More button. It offers a wealth of ways to specialize your search, including searching for:

  •  Maps
  •  News
  •  Shopping
  •  Books
  •  Blogs
  •  Updates
  •  Discussions

Clicking “Show search tools” offers you ways to restrict your search by time and type:

  • Any time
  • All results
  • Standard results
  • Latest
  • Social
  • Sites with images
  • Past 24 hours
  • Nearby
  • Fewer shopping sites
  • Past week
  • Standard view
  • More shopping sites
  • Past month
  • Related searches
  • Page previews
  • Past year
  • Wonder wheel
  • Translated search
  • Custom range…
  • Timeline

Wow! Be sure to check out the additional search types; they’re pretty interesting. Here’s a result for our “small business accounting software” search as a timeline. It would be great if you’re doing a history of the subject.

Google accounting search timeline

Google accounting search timeline

Figure 8 — Google Timeline Search Example

As interesting as these options are, the one we really want to concentrate on is a relatively new one: Google’s Social Search.

If you’re active in social networking, you may have noticed that you often see little notices below the search results, like in the following figure. You can make this explicit by selecting “Social “by dropping down the “More” in the left column of Google search results. This causes Google to present results based on what those in your social network have tagged or otherwise recommended.

Google social search

Google social search example

The concept that seeing results from people you know is going to be more interesting and relevant to you is called social search. Knowing that people in our social network have written or tagged related articles might make us more likely to click on these results. And any traffic generated to their sites was not so much due to any SEO techniques discussed in the previous section, but to their connection to us.

Next up: How Social Search Works

Advanced Google Searching for Social Media is the 19th in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Media Operating Manual for Enterprises. The book (itself part of a series for different audiences), is available in paper form at http://bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

See the previous posts What is Social Media?, Social Sites Defined, Why Social Media? How is Social Media Relevant to Business? First Steps Toward a Social Media Strategy, and Decide What Your Business Will Do About Social Computing, pt. 1

 

Find Your Community

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Find Your Community

“Social media is no more than an extension of what we do naturally.”

MC Hammer, formerly-famous rapper
and creator of DanceJam, a social network for music/dance
with more than 100,000 visitors

Google is your friend. Using Google you can find your community, if you do a little thinking about the keywords that community members are likely to use.

For example, if your product category is small business accounting software, Google that term.[1] Currently, that search, without quotes, yields more than 12 million results. OK, that’s a bit hard to put your arms around. If you try the term as a phrase, by surrounding it with quotes, you get under 800,000 results.[2] That may seem a bit more manageable, but it still may not give the results you can use to locate places where your community is talking.

Incidentally, you’ll notice when you type a search string into Google, a little window drops down from the entry area with suggestions for similar searches and Google instantly shows you results based on what it thinks you’re looking for. You also may notice that after you do a search, little ads — call AdWords — appear on the right side of the search results. Refer to the next figure to see what we mean.

Google search accounting software

Figure 6 — Google Query with AdWords Sidebar — Example

You may find interesting search suggestions when Google offers them. If not, be sure to take a look at the AdWords on the right side. These organizations might be worth investigating, as they may share your cause, and could be good partners, or at least visiting their sites may give you ideas for how to find your community online.

Be aware that each time you click on an AdWord, somebody pays Google some money, from cents to dozens of dollars. If that bothers you, you can copy the Web address from the AdWord into your browser’s address bar and visit the site for free.

Back to our example. What you really want to do is to find people talking about small business accounting software on social media sites. So one thing you can do is to restrict your search to social media sites. This tip works with any type of site. Simply append a qualifier similar to the following to tell Google to only search a certain site:

site:facebook.com

Substitute any site after the colon and Google will only search the information it has indexed from that site.

Adding site:facebook.com to the Google query we’re working on produces 3,800 results. OK, now we’re getting somewhere. Here’s what we got when we ran that search:

Google accounting search facebook

Figure 7 — Restricting a Google Search to Facebook Only

From these results we can see that people are indeed talking about small business accounting software on Facebook. Following the various links yields a group entitled “DIY Tax Accounting Software group,” with more than a hundred members. If you’re make small business accounting software, you’ve just found a potential place to engage with your community.

You can repeat this exercise with other social media sites. Doing it with LinkedIn yields 206 people you’d probably like to know. Doing it with Twitter yields dozens of posts. Doing it with YouTube pro­duces more than 575 links to videos.

You get the picture. Google is your friend, and using the site qualifier — and other advanced features available either by clicking Advanced Search up at the top of the page or clicking More on the left-hand column — you can tailor a search to find where your community is talking.

Next up: Advanced Google Searching For Social Media

Find Your Community is the 18th in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Media Operating Manual for Enterprises. The book (itself part of a series for different audiences), is available in paper form at http://bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

See the previous posts What is Social Media?, Social Sites Defined, Why Social Media? How is Social Media Relevant to Business? First Steps Toward a Social Media Strategy, and Decide What Your Business Will Do About Social Computing, pt. 1

 

[1] Google search for small business accounting software, with no quotes: bit.ly/poUVZM

[2] Google search for small business accounting software, with quotes: bit.ly/ocs9Sf

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