“We cannot solve the significant problems we face today at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them…” Albert Einstein
When I was a kid I couldn’t stop reading comic books. I loved superhero adventures. When DC and Marvel comics came to life and started appearing in theaters with advanced storylines and special effects I was once again captivated. Certain to thrill, I anxiously made my way to the theater. The one that stuck with me the most, with similarities to the emergence of Social Media in business and life, was Iron Man.
Every business in the world right now is trying to tap into the power of the collective voice of social media. The problem is in order to do that, businesses are first, sending their customers away, and then yelling to try and get them back. How is this a good system?!
Every time someone thinks they’re being a savvy marketer, and puts one of those ‘Follow me on Twitter’ or ‘Check out our Facebook page’ buttons on a website, what they’re doing is telling customers to leave their space – where they control the message – and go into the world of social media. What are those customers going to do when they get onto Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or LinkedIn? Are they going to remember the message, or will they find a million reasons to be distracted?
These customers are going to do the exact same thing you do when you hop onto a social network – check your messages, catch up on gossip and comment on the latest episode of Game of Thrones… If you go to a social media site, you’ve done more than left a website; you’ve left the marketing message behind. This is not great relationship building. Clicking a ‘Like’ button may mean you get a fan, but it doesn’t mean you’re getting engagement! Marketing like this will not create a valuable customer relationship.
Posted by: tim in myths, conversation marketing on
Jun 22, 2011
Can you think of anything more romantic than meeting your future partner for the first time?
“Hi, I’m Tim. What’s your name?” They turn to you and your heart melts. You say to yourself “this is the person I’ll spend the rest of my life with.”
Then, being the charmer you are, to seal the deal you say, “I’d like to get all of your information so I can manage our relationship better for the future!”
Marketing shouldn’t be a verb. I firmly believe that marketing isn’t something you do to someone, it should be a conversation. I’m not the only one who’s convinced marketing needs to be better, and that’s why you hear so many experts today talking about Conversation Marketing.
The market today is basically a bazaar. Everyone’s mingling and everyone’s stuff is on display - view any global village market and it’s pretty easy to see the similarity between the internet and a busy street in Dhaka.
The problem with the ‘bazaar’ state of the market is that everybody is yelling. You’ll soon discover what the caliber of the conversation is when you see a business trying to join the market. Businesses are yelling at potential customers “buy ours, buy ours, no, don’t buy theirs, buy ours!!” and yelling at other businesses, “mine’s better! No my product is better! We have a testimonial!” Blah blah blah.
The way people use the internet is changing.
Most people don’t even make it all the way through a YouTube video before they lose interest and go onto the next thing. When you get a long email, do you read the whole thing or just skim the relative parts? Twitter is massively successful because the 140 character limit boils updates down to only the most essential details. Meanwhile, more and more websites are offering interactive chat as a customer service tool. Internet users today are more than willing to spend a few minutes chatting to a real person, but they’re not interested in trying to read a long FAQ…
Online behavior tells us internet users are rapidly becoming more impatient but conversely, they’re far more willing to interact and to get engaged on a one to one basis with companies online.
So clearly this means the website is dying.
Did I lose you? Let’s think about this for a second…
The internet is obsessed with bacon. In about 15 minutes of research (delicious, mouth-watering research) I found recipes for Bacon Cupcakes, Bacon Salt Caramels and even Bacon Jam! Unfortunately, just as Spam became SPAM when the word came to refer to unsolicited email, bacon is transforming into BACON: unwanted, but legitimate email, sent by legitimate senders. Do you have a BACON problem?
Think about your inbox. How many mailing lists are you on? Every day you probably see deals, updates, newsletters and coupons from a huge variety of businesses: Amazon, Chapters, Godiva, The Gap, Atlus, Groupon, Expedia, Apple, Sephora, American Apparel… and those are just the ones that just pop up in my inbox that I can think of off the top of my head. You could probably add 10 more without trying.
The popularity of BACON is staggering. You might even get more BACON than you do actual email, considering over 27 billion BACON emails were sent last year - that’s 4 emails every day for every person on the planet! We know BACON has grown almost exponentially, but why?
It’s all over the news and hard to miss – comedian Gilbert Gottfried has been fired from his advertising gig for tweeting insensitive jokes about the tragedy in Japan. While this garnered quite a bit of media attention, it certainly wasn’t the first poorly thought out tweet that made the news – less than two months ago, the entire internet went up in arms when fashion designer Kenneth Cole made a glib comment about the revolution in Egypt was about access to his spring line.
A poorly thought out tweet can cause big time pain and negative publicity, but it’s not just big companies and famous people that are starting to feel the sting when they screw up in the increasingly important sphere of social media. From individuals fired for complaining about work on Twitter or Facebook, to small businesses that felt the wrath of the internet for incredibly stupid publicity campaigns, there is a whole new minefield of social media etiquette to learn.
Here are 4 simple tips to keep in mind should you be on the wrong side of a social media screw up!
According to most sales experts, no matter how many leads you receive only 2% of them are ready to buy right away. At least 25% of your leads will turn out to be no good, and the other 73% will need a whole lot of nurturing, coaching and maybe even cajoling to get them to a point where you’ll know if they’ll convert to sales.
Nobody ever said the business of selling was easy – so how can you make your lead management more efficient and cut down the amount of time your sales staff (or you) are wasting on go-nowhere leads? Here are the top 4 tips to improve your lead management and fine tune your sales processes!
1. Start with better leads
That’s not just a glib piece of advice! Which is more efficient -trawling the entire ocean floor and spending hours picking garbage out of your nets, or only hooking the specific the type of fish you want by using the bait they like best? By pursuing quality leads and making sure they’re qualified buyers ahead of time, the quantity of leads you bring in might be lower, but you’ll spend far less effort trying to convert them.
That’s the iQ3 Rule.
2. Talk it Out & Lead the Discussion
People usually don’t know what they want right away. Don’t just present them with your sales options; take the time to ask a lead what they think they need from you, and what they want as the ultimate goal. Don’t turn yourself into a free consulting service - become a trusted advisor and a thought leader in your area of expertise. If they’re still researching their options, give them the advice they need and see if they come back. Chances are, if you look like the experts in your field, they will.
3. Pay attention to what they’re doing.
With the
tools available to you today, there’s no reason to be in the dark about what your clients are thinking. It’s easy to know if they’re downloading your white papers, clicking your links and reading what you send them. If they’re opening, reading and responding – pay more attention to them, but if they’re not looking at your product pages, or they haven’t done anything since watching the webinar, downgrade the lead and cut your losses. By knowing what your leads are doing, you can use your time far more efficiently.
4. Know your leads and your customers
It’s not rocket science to know you want more leads like the customers you already have – so set up landing pages to help you capture the information you need to know ahead of time. For example – your company sells safety equipment to a huge variety of people all over the world. If you know what industry the lead is in you’ll be able to recommend products other customers in their industry have asked for and know what they’re not interested in. Knowing more about your leads means you can analyze what works and what doesn’t based on the demographic or industry information you keep.
Ever gotten into a good natured argument with a friend about a fact neither of you are totally certain about? For example, are Baboons monkeys or apes? This simple question, completely unrelated to anything important became a hotly contested item of debate for one CMAEON staffer. She solved the problem the way so many people in her generation do – she checked Wikipedia. Victorious in her assertion that Baboons were monkeys, life went back to normal.
Situations like this probably happen millions of times a day, all around the world. Why?
Today, people are increasingly dependent on the Internet and sites like Wikipedia for instant information. If you have a question, you don’t ponder or go to the library – you Google it. Need to check some facts? Settle a bet? Want an opinion on a restaurant? Get an opinion from your peers? Internet. The quest for information isn’t a one way transaction where the consumer passively absorbs it from a book, a map or a newspaper anymore – it’s a conversation now.
“Can anyone recommend a good Italian restaurant for my big date?” “What’s the best route to get to the train station?” “Who is a good realtor?” Our conversations and quests for information drive us online to websites like Wikipedia, Yelp, Twitter and Facebook in a way that’s completely new and still evolving.
So what does this mean for businesses, and more importantly, what does this mean for a small business without the money to sink into Google adwords and expensive online marketing campaigns? How can they be successful in this business climate? It means a successful business is able to tap into the conversations that are already happening online.
People constantly want information; therefore, if a business can join the conversation and respond to people with the specific information they want, that business is going to leave a positive impression. It’ll become a trusted brand. It’ll become the Wikipedia of a specific area of interest. It’ll be truly connected to its market and the needs of its customers. That’s the power of the Connected Market Space in the Age of Wikipedia.
Photo: Cartoonist Bill Amend's somewhat sarcastic take on the power of Wikipedia - from Ross Mayfield's Flickr (licensed under Creative Commons.)
However, the question that comes up a LOT is how can you measure the ROI on social media? Are you reaching customers or just making noise? Sure you can measure how many people are clicking your links thanks to platforms like
Hootsuite, but how many clicks does it take? How many friends or followers are real, passionate brand advocates? How much do you have to engage before you make the sale?
Unfortunately, there isn’t a realistic scale for measuring how effective each click, friend or follower is. Each of those measures represents an individual. As anyone in sales knows, everyone needs a different level of comfort before they are willing to buy your product. So does that mean you can’t measure ROI at all? Is social media just a black hole?
Digital Media Analyst Brian Solis wrote a
very in depth article about a study Bazaarvoice and the CMO Club recently conducted a survey on social media.
Almost all the Chief Marketing Officers surveyed indicated they wanted measurable ROI out of their social media strategies. 53% were unsure of their return on Twitter, and 15% believed there wasn’t any ROI. 1 in 10 figured there was no ROI from LinkedIn or Facebook. HOWEVER, those same CMOs reported a 400% increase in twitter comments to inform decisions about products and services, a 59% increase in customer reviews and ratings and a 24% increase in the use of social media for pre-sale Q&A.
So… how can you know that people are talking about your product, but be unsure of the value of the medium where they’re talking about it? It all comes down what you’re actually trying to measure.
Driving a conversation around your brand creates awareness and back of mind recognition. It might not create a sale every time (or even every 1 in 100 times) but it provides value all the same. If customers feel they can trust your brand and trust the people behind it, when they do want to make a purchase the awareness is there, no matter what the product. Every marketer in the world will tell you that brand awareness is something to strive for. You could make anything from software to soft drinks and still need to make people familiar with your brand.
So, of course you should be measuring social media! Measure it
quantitatively: how many people are talking, where they’re sharing and who they’re telling. But keep in mind your social media goal shouldn’t be to drive sales, it should be to drive conversations and awareness. Social media is conversation marketing; it expands awareness, engages people and creates personal relationships between consumers and brands. The worth of a real, one on one relationship is almost impossible to measure, but that doesn’t mean it's not valuable.
One of the most important things any business is measurement. You have to know if you’re spending money wisely. We at CMAEON think it’s important too - so important we list 