enterprise

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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.

AttributionShare AlikeSome rights reserved by Azimo

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

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Infinite Touches – Segmentation on Steroids

In the previous posts in this series, Social Media is Not Advertising. Duh! and It’s the End of Segmentation As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) we took a look at brand marketers’ penchant for seeing social media as another advertising channel – the hammer and nail problem. We examined the lessons brand marketers can learn from the Big Data and microsegmentation techniques of the Obama for President campaign in 2012.

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In sum, we believe that the way most marketers approach social media misses the point. And the point is: Social media provides a means to not only microsegment but to establish actual relationships with your customers and prospects. To show that we’re not totally out in left field on this, let’s take a look at what some of the most advanced brand marketers are currently doing with microsegmentation.

Television, always on the vanguard of customer analysis, offers a good paradigm to understand social media microsegmentation. In an article in Broadcasting Cable magazine,[1] Steve Silvestri, director of advanced advertising sales at DirecTV, described how his company is approaching their addressable base of about 11 million DirecTV homes. DirecTV can know a lot about their customers simply by knowing what they’re watching. This can enable them to very finely tailor their marketing.

“We want to get down to the household level, and that’s exactly what we can do today and that’s exactly what we are doing,” Silvestri said. For example, DirecTV could target dog-food ads to dog owners, cat-food ads to cat owners and, to a home nearby with three kids, a minivan ad.

Cable and entertainment giant Comcast has tested addressable-advertising technology, including a Baltimore market test that involved 60,000 homes, and plans more extensive testing. For example, homes already getting cable, phone and Internet could stop seeing triple-play bundle ads and instead see promos for Comcast’s home-security offering, said Kevin Smith, group vice president at Comcast Spotlight.

These efforts are trying to realize the destiny of marketing as described by Peter Drucker:[2] “There will always, one can assume, be need for some selling. But the aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous. The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself.”

This future is trying to be born in TV advertising, but there’s a network that exists today that can deliver similar addressability with even better results: social media.

SMPG’s Infinite Touches™

Social Media Performance Group has developed a process – called Infinite Touches – that leverages social media’s ability to enable microsegmentation and also incorporates the power of personal recommendations.

Let’s take a quick look at the effect on buying recommendations by friends have.

Josh Mendelsohn, Vice President of Chadwick Martin Bailey, sums it up nicely:

While social media is not the silver bullet that some pundits claim it to be, it is an extremely important and relatively low cost touch point that has a direct impact on sales and positive word of mouth.

Companies not actively engaging are missing a huge opportunity and are saying something to consumers —intentionally or unintentionally — about how willing they are to engage on consumers’ terms.[3]

Mendelsohn’s company surveyed 1,500 consumers and found those who are Facebook fans and Twitter followers of a brand are more likely to not only recommend, but also more likely to buy from those brands than they were before becoming fans/ followers.

A study across 20 brands by analyst firm Syncapse[4] found:

  • On average, fans spend an extra $71.84 they would not otherwise spend on products they describe themselves as fans of, compared to those who are not fans.
    • McDonald’s saw the largest variability, with Fans reporting spending $159.79 more per year than non-fans
    • Oreo saw the lowest value with a difference of $28.52
  • Fans are 28 percent more likely than non-fans to continue using a specific brand
  • Fans are 41 percent more likely than non-fans to recommend a product they are a fan of to their friends
  • An average fan may participate with a brand ten times a year and will make one recommendation. But, an active fan may participate thirty times and make ten recommendations.

Lest you think that social media only works for B2C brands, take a look at some supporting evidence that shows B2B brands can also benefit from social media: [5]

  • In a June 2010 Harris Interactive poll, when asked what sources “influence your decision to use or not use a particular company, brand or product” 71 percent claim reviews from family members or friends exert a “great deal” or “fair amount” of influence.
  • ROI Research for Performance found that 53 percent of people on Twitter recommend companies and/or products in their tweets, with 48 percent of them following through on their intention to buy the product.
  • In the January 2009 study, “Tech Decision Maker” by Hill & Knowlton, when considering purchases, tech decision-makers gave user-generated sites equal importance with traditional media sources. Decision-makers first consider their personal experience (58 percent) when short-listing tech vendors, followed by word-of-mouth and industry analyst reports, tied at 51 percent. Advertising (17 percent) and direct marketing (21 percent) were listed as the least important information sources when short-listing possible vendors.

So how can you use this powerful segmentation and recommendation tool for your brand? That’s a question for tomorrow’s post.

Next up: Infinite Touches vs. Advertising

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

[1] Advanced Advertising: Obama Campaign Showed Value of Targeting Viewers bit.ly/10tYmG2

[2] Republicans lost because they forgot marketing fxn.ws/TPUjOi

[3] Chadwick Martin Bailey is custom market research and consulting firm:  bit.ly/izHMWz

[4] Gigaom’s How Much Is a Facebook Fan Really Worth? bit.ly/pw924DLink to the report PDF: bit.ly/mV67os

[5] Quoted in Nuanced Media’s How Important are Online Customer Reviews? : bit.ly/ulgULg

It’s the End of Segmentation As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

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It’s the End of Segmentation As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

OK, it’s a sensationalist headline. I don’t really think segmentation should be ditched. Far from it.

But segmentation based on high-level, limited demographics and not behavior is dead in brand marketing because it ignores the real promise of social media.

Obama segmentation

Segmentation as practiced in marketing and advertising today seeks to group people into narrow categories based on demographics. Typical market segments might include the stereotypical soccer mom, limousine liberal, weekend warrior or other combinations of the standard variables age, life-cycle stage, gender, income, social class, and lifestyle.

These variables don’t even begin to describe the whole person, but they are close enough for current practice. However, relying on segment stereotypes can fail to reveal important behaviors.

Back in the late ‘90s, I met with the CTO of the Nielsen Company (my boss’ boss) and offered a heretical thesis: Demographics are crap.

She let me explain this shocking assertion, and then thought of an example from her own life. “We’re a double-executive-income family living in a pricey Zip code, and you would never know from that that we consume about a case of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese a month,” she said. Right. There’s no accounting for taste . . .

But flippancy aside, she was right. No marketer would target her family as a brand-loyal mac and cheese consumer. They’d be more likely to try to sell them truffles and expensive French cheese.

It makes you wonder what other outlier behaviors families like hers (or yours) exhibit. Are you a wine-lover living in a beer and pickup truck neighborhood? Or a Republican living in a Democratic district?

That’s the problem with the current practice of segmentation: It’s too imprecise. Yet it does work, however imperfectly.

A great example of data-driven segmentation working very successfully was the Obama campaign during the 2012 presidential election. The campaign was not satisfied with addressing broadly general segments. Instead, by combining Big Data techniques and social media, the Obama campaign used micro-segmentation and targeting to pull off a striking victory. By understanding the electorate at a deeper, more personal level, the Obama campaign was able to better-target their fundraising and get-out-the-vote efforts.

According to KPDi[1], this degree of “consumer segmentation” had strategic importance in two respects:

  • The Obama campaign was able to show a genuine appreciation of each person’s role in the re-election effort. People were made to feel important.
  • It reflected a “customer-service” orientation that was projected outward from all campaign touch points. The get-out-the-vote superiority was just one of the benefits. More esoterically, the voter-centric model got the campaign out of its own head, and focused on the task at hand: winning vs. ideology.

So you might think that this example shows that the old model works. Well maybe, but it needs to be adapted to the fact that there are more people using social media today than were using the entire Internet in 2008.

An article in by Bob Garfield in MediaPost[2] reveals the lesson of the election: “It should now be blindingly obvious to every marketer, and to more evolved bipeds, that nothing that comes out of the mouth of a brand or any other institution has remotely the influence of what comes from the mouths of 7 billion bystanders freely trading opinions online.”

Time magazine[3] states that social media was extremely important to the get-out-the-vote efforts of the Obama campaign:

Online, the get-out-the-vote effort continued with a first-ever attempt at using Facebook on a mass scale to replicate the door-knocking efforts of field organizers. In the final weeks of the campaign, people who had downloaded an app were sent messages with pictures of their friends in swing states. They were told to click a button to automatically urge those targeted voters to take certain actions, such as registering to vote, voting early or getting to the polls. The campaign found that roughly 1 in 5 people contacted by a Facebook pal acted on the request, in large part because the message came from someone they knew.

The numbers also led the campaign to escort their man down roads not usually taken in the late stages of a presidential campaign. In August, Obama decided to answer questions on the social news website Reddit, which many of the President’s senior aides did not know about. “Why did we put Barack Obama on Reddit?” an official asked rhetorically. “Because a whole bunch of our turnout targets were on Reddit.”

According to Ad Age,[4] for the period between Sept. 1 and Oct. 14, the Obama camp had 497 creatives deployed across the Web compared with the Romney camp’s 90.

So advanced segmentation works, both on and off line. What does that mean for the future of brand marketing? That’s an answer for the next post.

Next up: Infinite Touches – Segmentation on Steroids

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

[1] Obamatrix – the Consumer Segmentation Model of the 44th President – Part I, bit.ly/WiNuXM

[2] Advertising Loses In A Mudslide, bit.ly/UgOKek

[3] Inside the Secret World of the Data Crunchers Who Helped Obama Win ti.me/Q93ygB

[4] Obama Outslugs Romney in Digital bit.ly/UHedf4

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Get Found on Social Media – Part 4 – Real-Time Social Search

In our previous post, Get Found on Social Media – Part 3 – SEO, we continued our series on how you can make it easier for people to find your social media efforts and talked about basic Search Engine Optimization techniques. In this post, we take a look an emerging trend – Real-Time Social Search – can help get you found on social media.

Image by Hubspot

Real-Time Social Search

As the social computing phenomenon gains momentum, search engine experts are increasingly talking about the growing importance of real-time search, or social search, by which they mean search that can tell you what’s happening on social media sites. Google recently revamped their search to add a real-time component, and has reached agreements to index Twitter[1] and Facebook[2] content.

Some pundits worry that the primacy of traditional search engines like Google, and the cottage SEO industry they support, may be threatened by the rise of social search, wherein recommendations and referrals from within social networking communities outpaces the referrals from Google, et al.

For example, after the 2009 Oscars, celebrity gossip blogger Perez Hilton recorded a single-day high of 13.9 million page views, and the site’s top traffic source was Facebook.[3] So what, you say? Well, Google is generally the top referrer for pretty much any site — the undisputed king. That Facebook dethroned King Google as the top referrer for a popular site was big news, and demonstrates the changing nature of search.

Google itself recognizes this trend, and has introduced social search features to its traditional search listings, as we discussed in the post Advanced Google Searching for Social Media. To summarize from that post, if you belong to the popular social media sites, and if Google can identify you (by you logging in to one of their services, like Google Docs, for example), you may be presented with search results ranked based on information from your social network.

Get Found on Social Media – Part 4 is the 65th in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’re just past page 208. 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 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

Next up: Dealing with Negatives

[1] ReadWriteWeb’s article on indexing Twitter: bit.ly/c1Rtd1

[2] SocialBeat’s article on indexing Facebook: bit.ly/cnsF2p

[3] GigaOm’s article about Hilton’s traffic: bit.ly/9zUexn

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Get Found on Social Media – Part 3 – SEO

In our previous post, Get Found on Social Media – Part 2, we continued our series on how you can make it easier for people to find your social media efforts. In this post, we take a look at how Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can help get you found on social media.


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Search Engine Optimization

It shouldn’t be news to you that Google is most often the top way users find Websites. Your site will probably be no different. So you need to make sure that Google can find you and that when they do, they categorize you properly, and rank you highly.

The art and science of ensuring high placement on Google and other search engines is known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO). A related technique known as Search Engine Marketing (SEM) encompasses SEO and also adds online advertising on Google and other search engines. We talked about advanced Google usage to find your community in the post Advanced Google Searching for Social Media. Now let’s turn that idea — finding interesting people using keyword searches — around: How can you be found via keyword searches? That’s what SEO is all about.

The basic goal of SEO is to ensure that when people use search words that are relevant to what you do they find you on the first page of search results. This is generally done, at least in part, by selecting a set of keywords that are highly relevant to your site, and then optimize your site to feature these keywords. We led you through this exercise in the post Partner and Cross-Promote on Social Media.

There are lots of SEO consultants out there that will guarantee first page placement, and some are quite good, while others haven’t a clue, so it’s best to have a basic understanding of SEO before you consider using one.

All of them do some combination of the following SEO techniques. We only scratch the surface of a very deep subject here, but many of these techniques you can do yourself without high-priced consultants.

We’re indebted to a very fine post on ClickZ by P.J. Fusco[1] for much of the structure and material in this list. It’s one of the most concise and comprehensive lists of SEO techniques we’ve read.

  • Optimize Title Tags
    The title of a page is the part that shows at the very top of your browser window. It’s the part that is above the toolbar. It must describe the purpose of the page and it should also identify your site.The title tag of every page should begin with a uniquely optimal keyword phrase and end with consistent branding, such as the name of your business, or the name of the site.The words at the beginning of the title tag have more prominence and weight than the words at the end. The target length for title tags should be 65 characters (with spaces). The major engines recognize and index title tags beyond 120 characters, but only 65 characters are visible in the search results.
  • Ensure Each Page Has a Theme
    Just as you were taught in school that every paragraph needs a topic sentence, so each Webpage needs a topic, or a theme. This helps the search engine categorize your page correctly. If you’re tempted to dump all sorts of marginally-related information onto your yard-long pages, the search engines aren’t going to like you.
  • Optimize Heading Tags
    Second to the title tag, the <h1> is the most prominent location to accentuate your keywords. If you’re not familiar with the HTML <h1>, or heading, tag, it’s generally the first and largest heading on the page. It often is the title of a post or a section of a Website.There should be only one <h1> heading tag on a page, and like the title tag, it should begin with the optimal keyword phrase. Additional <h2> and <h3> tags, which denote secondary and tertiary heading tags, should help complement the targeted theme of each page. Unlike <h1> tags, there can be more than one <h2> or <h3> tags per page.
  • Optimize Body Copy
    The text of each page should contain introductory copy or a summary of the page text. Body copy should consist of at least three sentences with a minimum of 150 words. You should try to mention your target keywords as many times as you can in your body copy, without becoming annoying or unreadable. The general rule is to try for four mentions of a keyword per page. Of course if you have a set of 10 keywords, the result could be gibberish, so here’s where the art comes in.
  • Create a Meta Description
    A meta description is an invisible page component that is part of the HTML page header. You see it only when your page shows up in search results. Each page should have a meta description even though having one won’t improve rankings in the search engines. The major search engines ignore the meta description for the purposes of indexing your page. Having a good meta description can, however, increase the likelihood of users clicking on search results.Meta descriptions should be unique to each page and should contain no more than 265 characters. Typically, however, only the first 150 characters (including spaces) are displayed in the search engine results pages, so the meta description should include the relevant keyword phrases and end with a call to action.
  • Create Meta Keywords
    Meta keywords, like the meta description, are invisible parts of the HTML page header. They are lists of words that the page author think are important to describe the content of the page.Google and Bing pay no attention to meta keywords. Yahoo only reviews meta keywords for misspellings that might affect their indexing of the page. You should insert three or four keywords per page, ensuring that the words are pulled from the page. If they’re not, don’t bother producing keywords at all. Nonetheless, don’t make meta keywords a critical part of your keyword strategy.
  • Optimize Alternative Attributes
    You may have seen descriptions pop up when you run your mouse over a graphic or a link on a Webpage. These are known as alternative attributes, or alt tags for short. Create keyword-rich alt tags for all graphics and images. Also create mouse-over text[2] for any links on the page.
  • Optimize Videos
    If you are embedding videos on your Webpage, follow conventional title tag and meta data standards as already outlined. Embed one video per page and organize video content around the structures of your pages, sections, and the site.If you are using a YouTube channel for hosting videos, ensure that you optimize the following YouTube fields using your keywords:

    • Title
    • Description
    • Tags

There are plenty of other aspects of SEO beyond optimizing your site and its content. One very popular and effective technique is to increase the number and quality of the inbound links to your site.

An inbound link is when another site links to you. Google assigns a rank to all sites, and if a more-highly-ranked site links to your site, it confers some of its rank — its prestige — to your site. Plus, the more inbound links you have, in general, the more highly you will rank. And the more highly your site ranks, the more highly placed it will be on Google search results. Google takes a dim view of such site and may penalize you for linking to them.

A common way to increase a site’s rank is to run an inbound link campaign. This involves contacting other, highly-ranked sites, and asking them if they’ll link to you. It can be tedious, but it can also be quite rewarding. Beware of those who want to link to you in return for a reciprocal link. Be sure the requesting site is reputable and not what is known as a link farm — a site that exists to try to game the Google system so that they’ll get increased ad revenue.

As we’ve said, SEO and SEM are very deep and complex topics and you really may need a consultant to move much beyond the advice we’ve given here. Just be careful of too-good-to-be-true claims. It generally costs hundreds or thousands of dollars per month to stay on top of search engine results. Those who claim to be able to do this for you for less may not be able to deliver.

There are few absolutes in the world of SEO, but one of them is that as soon as someone figures out how to game the search engines, they’ll change their ranking techniques, and perhaps penalize previously-effective SEO techniques.

Get Found on Social Media – Part 3 is the 64th in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’re just past page 208. 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 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

Next up: Get Found on Social Media – Part 4 – Real-Time Social Search

[1] Fusco’s Site Redesign SEO Considerations for 2010: bit.ly/d5VTjh

[2] You’ve seen mouseover text when you’ve moved the cursor over a link on a page, and popped up a little description.

Get Found on Social Media – Part 2

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Get Found on Social Media – Part 2

In our previous post, Get Found on Social Media – Part 1, we started a series on how you can make it easier for people to find your social media efforts. In this post, we continue the series with some more ideas on getting found on social media.

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Establish an Inner Circle

Groucho Marx famously said, “I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.” Most people don’t feel that way, thankfully. Consider creating an exclusive club and offering some kind of benefit — perhaps only prestige — to its members. It might be as simple as first dibs on tickets to one of your events, or attendance at special briefings, or other exclusive access.

You might have various circles within the club, with the highest circle reserved for those who are your true evangelists, and who do the most to help build your community.

If you offer things for sale, consider creating a coupon club that lets participants get discounts. However, be careful not to establish the idea – in your mind or your community’s – that the only reason to interact with you on social media is to get discounts. Remember: social media is about creating and maintaining relationships.

Triangulate Your Social Media Presence

At the most basic level, what we mean by triangulation involves linking your social media properties together. So you should:

  • Tweet about your blog
  • Blog about your Facebook page
  • Link your blog to your Website
  • Link your Website to your YouTube channel
  • Link your Twitter feed to your LinkedIn and Facebook statuses
  • Put all your images on Flickr and link to them when you need images on your site or your blog

You get the idea: Send people who find you on one social site to your offerings on all your other sites. We mentioned the concept of social media as an echo chamber in a previous post. You’re trying to set up your own echo chamber to reinforce your presence. Of course none of this will work if you’re boring and don’t add any value on all your sites.

Beyond this rather mechanical view of triangulation, though, are other considerations such as your online brand. On all your sites you should use consistent graphics. Have your graphic backgrounds and logos professionally created, and use the same graphics everywhere. Include photos of you and your staff to personalize your brand.

Include links to your social media presence everywhere:

  • Email signature
  • Company letterhead
  • Traditional advertising

The idea is to maximize the ability of your community to find out all you’re doing online even if they just happen to glimpse a single tweet and check out your profile. Not only will your Twitter profile point them to your other sites, but when they arrive, they’ll see a consistent graphic and branding treatment. If they later run into another of your sites, this consistency reminds them of their previous experience and builds your brand.

Get Found on Social Media – Part 2 is the 63rd in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’re just past page 190. 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 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

Next up: Get Found on Social Media – Part 3 – SEO

Get Found on Social Media – Part 1

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Get Found on Social Media – Part 1

In our previous post, Influence via Blogging on Social Media, we finished up our look at ideas for increasing your influence on social media. In this post, we begin a series on how to be found on social media.

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Get Found

Yes, you’ll need to do some work to get found on social media. There is no build it and they will come. The best way to get found is to provide something your community finds valuable. But that alone will most often not be enough. You’ll need to use a variety of online and offline techniques to build awareness in your community.

We take a look at several ideas for getting found in the this and the following posts.

Run Contests

The most sure-fire way to attract users on the Internet has long been to give something away for free. Years ago, this caused us to create the aphorism: “On the Internet, everything devolves to free.”[1] Well, what if you start out with free? Free is a crowd pleaser.

Years ago, Internet marketing guru Seth Godin promoted his book, Permission Marketing,[2] by offering the first four chapters to anyone who would email him at free@permission.com. He gave away 150,000 free copies. Was that stupid, or did it contribute to the book’s success? Godin went even further with Unleashing the IdeaVirus:[3] He gave the book away for free — two million copies worldwide. Sheer folly, right? Wrong. According to Godin, the hardcover edition went to number 5 on Amazon in the US, reached number 4 in Japan, and is the #1 most downloaded eBook in history.

So don’t be afraid to give away valuable stuff for free.

One way to give stuff away, attract attention, and create a little buzz is to run a contest. We can’t pretend to know what kind of contest you should run, but it should be fun, have a significant prize, and generate enough excitement that your followers tell their friends. In fact, make a secondary prize for the person who refers the most entrants.

Most of the time you’ll be giving away prizes that cost you something. But you can also give away something that costs you nothing: prestige. The prize could be nothing more than bragging rights, and be represented by something as simple as the ability to display a badge or other notice of the honor as part of the winner’s profile, or on their blog.

Microsoft figured this out more than a decade ago with their Most Valuable Professional (MVP) pro­gram.[4] MVP is an award presented by Microsoft for exceptional technical community leaders who voluntarily provide technical expertise within Microsoft support communities. This award has value to the awardees — helping convince potential clients that they know their stuff — and the winners in­variably have given hundreds of hours a year in service to Microsoft by helping people solve their technical problems with the firm’s software.

So your contest could not only be cost-free for you, but it actually could benefit your business.

Get Found on Social Media is the 62nd in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’re just past page 190. 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 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

Next up: Get Found on Social Media – Part 2

[1] Are we devo? bit.ly/an3gnK

[3] Godin’s Unleashing the IdeaVirus: amzn.to/dsGGpw

[4] Microsoft’s MVP program: bit.ly/drOKhY

Influence via Blogging on Social Media

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Influence via Blogging on Social Media

In our previous post, Facilitate Viralocity on Social Media, we took a look at ideas for helping your social media efforts go viral, thus expanding your influence. In this post, we examine blogging as a way to make your voice heard.

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Blog to Influence

A major way you can influence your community is by blogging. Don’t let the sobering fact that tens of thousands of blogs are created each day stop you from starting your own. Make sure you know what you want to say, and what your point of view and style will be before getting started. You’ll need to do more than just start a blog and hope they will come; you’ll need to promote it. And once you get people to your blog, you must be sure you’re giving them something of value, not necessarily just your opinion.

You should include a blog on your Website for sure, and also on as many blog sites as you can. However, cross-posting – posting the same blog on multiple sites – is discouraged by Google’s latest site ranking algorithms. It’s possible to use a site such as Ping.fm[1] to put the same material on each site, but it’s best for your readers and for search engines if you modify it for the intended audiences on the other sites.

If possible, get yourself invited to be a guest blogger by a more-influential site. It’s a great way for both sites to benefit, and for you to find an audience. By the same token, having guests post on your blog can introduce their audience to your blog.

You can even ask other bloggers to blog about you, but you should have a good reason why they’d want to.

When blogging, always remember, like all social media, blogging is not a one-way channel. It’s not just a way for you to present your agenda and point of view. It’s a way for your community to respond to you. So you should definitely enable comments on your blog. Doing this may cause you a little extra work — monitoring and responding, and even removing offensive posts — but you’ll find the interaction not only stimulating, but traffic-building.

Everywhere you are on social media, think about making an offer of some kind, like offering help or more information if a reader takes some action. A good place to do this is as a standing part of your blog’s author bio. It can be as simple as, “Email me for more info on _____” or as a link to your site for more information. You can also take a page from Hotmail’s viral success and incorporate your offer and a link to your blog into your email signature.[2]

Influence via Blogging on Social Media is the 61st in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’re just past page 190. 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 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

Next up: Get Found on Social Media

[1] Ping.fm: bit.ly/dwbqG3

[2] Advice on email sigs: bit.ly/9eCOfM

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