Now try to tell me how social media works.

Stop Evangelizing Social Media

About 200 Million people said it and about 99% of business leaders heard it. But what they hear is as compelling as you and me explaining how a piano sounds. Have you ever tried it? So let’s stop talking and help people hear it – in our case get a feel for social media.

20 Minutes a day for an educated decision

Business leaders!

give your market facing teams 20 minutes a day for 4 weeks. Let them find their customers. Let’s say from 8:00 am in the morning till 8:20. That’s all. Stop guessing whether social media is good or bad, stop outsourcing your love to the customer, stop wondering what you really need to do – make an educated decision based on your own experience.

1) Your Sales Team
Let your sales teams find their customers – not only the purchase manager but the consumer of your products that influence the purchase decision. Then give the sales teams 20 minutes a day to visit the customers and learn everything about them.

Guest post by Mike Dubrall

Despite the popularity of social media at the street level, many channel organizations have been holding back. Slowed by a potent mixture of financial, organizational, cultural, and intellectual impediments, some partnering professionals have not been willing or able to present a compelling case for social media investment. Instead, they have been hunkering down and hoping that they can be successful by working harder with familiar programs and tools.

Presenting Social Media Benefits

There are exceptions. Social Media for resellers is now all the rage at some companies who have been smart enough to envision the potential of thousands of channel partners Twittering away about their products. They are not hunkering down. Quite the opposite. These corporations have incorporated channel partners into their social media plans and are moving ahead with social media training and program support.

I know this sounds crazy. And people who know me may even ask if this is a faked identity. No - it's me. Here is what triggered me to this post:

Let's be clear on leads:
Leads are basically inquires for information initiated by a prospect of any kind. Either inspired by advertising, direct mail or other means of attention creating measures - right? So far so good.

What is going on today?
If you are telling me that you are inundated by sales leads, don't read further and be very thankful. For the rest of us, I guess it looks like this:

1) At first a prospects searches for things in the Internet [not yet a lead] at best an IP address in our weblog which we call "traffic".

2) The search unearths a lot of information and that information is typically written or shown on blogs, in Youtube, in forums, groups, communities. Still no inquiry is coming in - unless you are active on all those places.

3) The prospect digests the information and tries to ask questions. The most asked question: "Does any body have experience with..." You find those questions in LinkedIn groups, Yahoo Groups, on Blogs etc.

4) With the answers coming in, the prospect is now exploring websites, compares products, experience, suggestions and price of course.

For sales people, the social web is a blessing. If sales is all about connections and relationships, then social media is the best invention since trade 3,000 B.C. But as always – it isn’t quite that easy.

If you continue the beaten path of sales processes developed by our fathers, we will soon come to the conclusion not only they no longer help – but actually PREVENT success.

The biggest problem in selling into the social economy are our leaders and teachers:
People who built their career 10 or 20 years ago only hear from social media, put it into the marketing box and continue business as usual. More so, they force and train others to do so as well.

Relationship selling is nothing new – yet the tools and models of engagement have changed with the ever more connected business world. Also our customers are more connected than ever before and they know how to ask others for their experience and find solutions themselves.

Selling into a socially connected business world
- Lead flow slowed down
- Customers connect with customers for experience exchange
- Knowledge and information is omnipresent in the Internet
- Price information are more transparent than ever before

Do a step back and think about your sales process:

While the following examples are based on the experience with the social business applications from Xeesm, it demonstrates in an interesting way how businesses can leverage social media today, way beyond blogging and tweeting. The following use cases are grouped by 8 categories including Sales, Marketing, Partner Collaboration, Product Management, Logistics & Supply Chain,  HR and the executive bench.

(1) Sales Contact Management
Sales teams use Xeesm to keep all their clients in one place. Like the old address book where they had street address and phone number, the modern day sales people know the LinkedIn profiles, Twitter names, Facebook pages, Slideshare Accounts, YouTube channels, Bookmarks and more about their clients to truly socialize.

(2) Outbound Call Centers
Sales teams also use Xeesm as a replacement to the old cold calling processes. Instead of calling 100 people a day, being able to leave 20 voice mails and reach 3 people, the social sales outreach connect with people in the social web, connect and develops a more social and therefor more successful relationship.

I did some research over the past 12 month correlating customer experience and profitability.
The result in a nutshell:

1) You won’t find a company with a great customer experience that is not profitable
2) You may find profitable companies with a mediocre CM
3) You will find that all companies with a below average customer experience have no track record of profitability over a longer time period.

Take Cisco, Salesforce.com, Star Bucks, IBM, Apple, WholeFoods, Zappos, Virgin… You find the correlation of a great customer experience, corporate culture and profitability across all industries, technologies, B2B, B2C, producing companies, service organizations or reselling businesses.

I tried to understand the motives, processes, influence factors and desire to change a certain situation within an organization towards a better customer experience:

1) Organization
Investor driven organizations or engineering driven organizations have the cultural focus either on the shareholder value side of the world or on the technology side of the world. Business driven companies have the cultural focus more on the customer or market side of the world.

This post was inspired by an Australian Law Firm raising the question for Social Media Laws – given a series of risk that were stated on the companies blog. And as more and more company officers wonder how to deal with it and what kind of rules to establish and what kind of measures IT should take, I thought about the approximately 500 Million People who discuss those companies, their teams, products or services and how some LAW could stop the conversation:

1) Adding a statement on every advertising that customers shall not share or redistribute, discuss or blog about the particular advertising they were confronted with. Could be in a similar way like the drug industry is doing it.

2) Phone systems shall add to the phrase “this call may be monitored ….” the phrase, “you agree to not discuss, share or redistribute parts or the full content of the conversation you are going to have with any of our employees, agents, call centers, partners or anybody directly or indirectly related to this call in any media otherwise known as social media”.

3) Customer contracts may need to be augmented that a user of the product is not allowed to share the experience with the product, adjacent products, the company, the partner or any other third party the company is associated with, in any media in particular social media.

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from Jesse Thomas on Vimeo.

Can yuo raed tihs? Olny 55 plepoe out of 100 can.

i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg.The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno’t mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are,the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef,but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuot slpeling was ipmorantt!

If you cuold raed tihs you deonmsrtaetd you are ideend open minded. Tihs is acutllay iopmtrnat to ptraiicapte in the Scoail Mdeia Adacmey Calss.

Sitll wrroeid aoubt scoail mdeia – hpoe this hepled :-)
Aexl

http://xeesm.com/Axels
(my scoail ntewroks)

2008 - One morning…
… a small group of sales and service people from Company-Red realized that they could go to Facebook, LinkedIn, Yahoo Groups and YouTube and get a list of all the people who were discussing the good, the bad and the ugly about their products. After spending some time and doing some digging, Company-Red realized that this list was not small but more like 50,000+ names. And they were shocked to see how these names looked a lot like their customer list. That was a frightening idea.

One general said “Hey, this is a huge threat – because anybody can get the same information. Frggin Social Media is a wide-open and completely accessible public space. As a matter of fact, this is even worse than publishing our customer list because the comments and postings actually describe our new products, they discuss what we do right and why they bought our products in the first place. Worse, they expose all our weakness – and some of that stuff we don’t even know ourselves.” The Chief of Staff consulted some experts and Company-Red launched Operation “Big Dig”.