Social Media: If I Want It I’ll Buy It. Don’t Sell Me.

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Truth be told.. I am getting immersed in Lisa Hoffman’s blog over at New Media Lisa. She has been KILLING it the past few weeks. She wrote a post recently called Social Media Isn’t About the Selling Cycle – It’s About the Buying Cycle. The post is about the concept of shifting the focus on an individual from a selling cycle to a buying cycle. From her post:

“More than ever before, people are expecting and demanding exactly what they want in every facet of their lives. What does this say about the typical hyper focus on the selling cycle? And what would happen if we turned the telescope around and considered the buying cycle instead?”

I don’t know about you but (as a sales generator) it is kind of nerve racking to shift from a selling cycle to a buying cycle. Does that mean I can’t actively sell? Good God… and no it doesn’t.

Don’t get me wrong…there is some romantic notion behind the thought of creating a meaningful relationship and allowing the buyer to find you in the process but how do you plan and measure for that? Don’t you need to balance between a selling and buying cycle when using social media marketing as part of your strategy?

There is only one problem between a relationship building sales approach when you are building a company: bringing sales in initially. There is a long and short tail approach to selling. Social media is the long tail.

It takes time to build up relationships and create the trust factor that allows people to come to you. That is the whole idea isn’t it? So work towards building the buying cycle to the point where you are the qualified destination for people searching for a solution. Work your butt off to create that special point where selling becomes secondary..

So the answer?

Building the Trust Factor: blogging, testimonials, social media, writing articles.. etc. etc. etc. communicating!

Building a Company: off-line networking, creating relationships in your community, traditional marketing

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Small Biz Use of Social Media to Double in 12 Months

My father, Dan Lacy, sent me a SearchEngineWatch.com link in my email today that talked about the number of small business and social media. Now, I am a huge fan of small businesses and I am a huge fan of social media. I had to open it.

According to the Access Markets International (AMI) Partners, the number of small businesses using social networking services and strategies will double in the next year. Now, this is good news for companies like man that want to help small businesses leverage social media. It is good to see a tool being adopted by the small businesse market (my favorite).

I do have one word of warning to small business owners wanting to leverage social media. If you are wanting to enter the social media space whether it is through social networking sits, a blog, podcasts, wikis, blah blah blah make sure you have a strategy in place to complete your efforts. Get the right training and social media partner. It is a must.

Danny Brown made a great comment on the post saying:

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Notoriety to Aspiration: 5 of 10 Social Media Commandments

As a collective group we have been working through the 10 Commandments of Emotional Branding in Marc Gobe’s book, Emotional Branding. We have been applying the ten concepts to social media marketing and how you should be applying them to your social business strategy.

The fifth commandment is the concept moving from notoriety to aspiration.

From Marc Gobe:

“Being known does not mean that you are also loved! Notoriety is what gets you known. But if you want to be desired, you must convey something that is in keeping with the customer’s aspirations. (pg. xxx, Emotional Branding)”

This is my favorite commandment in the entire list because it one of the more important principles in social media: QUALITY over QUANTITY. Anyone can spend twelve hours a day adding everyone and their mother to their social profile. The question is, what makes them different from everyone else spending an ungodly amount of time online? Nothing. It takes a little personality to push you over the edge. Scott Stratten at Un-Marketing does this the best way possible on Twitter. Add him.

There is a split down the middle for small business owners. Many of us want to create relationships online but there is no guarantee for return on investment. This is especially important if you are using social media as a customer relationship and marketing tool. The truth of the matter is this…

It takes time and resources to truly utilize social media. It should be implemented into your marketing budget as a piece of the pie. And remember…

You can add as many people as you want but don’t be upset when you have thousands of followers and no revenue.

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4 of 10 Social Media Commandments: Quality to Preference

We are still working through the 10 Commandments to Social Media and social media marketing. The 10 Commandments are taken from Marc Gobe’s book, Emotional Branding. He has a great list of the 10 Commandments of Emotional Branding and the points were pretty much identical to my views on social media.

What is the 4th Commandment? From Quality to Preference.

From Marc:

“Quality for the right price is a given today. Preference creates the sale. Quality is a necessary offering if you want to stay in business; it is expected and had better be delievered. Preference toward a brand is the real connection to success. (pg. xxx)”

When I relate this concept to social media I think back to the building of a brand and the development of a customer connection. The modern day consumer wants to feel an emotional connection to a brand. Each individual that interacts with your company or brand wants to MATTER. What does it mean to matter? It means you are constantly responding to problems and situations that arises pertaining to your product or service.

You can use sites like Twitter and Facebook to connect on a personal level with customers and clients. People EXPECT quality. There is too much competition in the world to tout a quality product. When it comes to the first and second levels of marketing quality is not going to sell your product.

Consumers want to see the human side of a brand. They want to become “friends” with a service. We strive for an emotional connection. Always. We are human.

And when you take your product or service from quality oriented marketing to preference oriented… you create customer evangelists that will flood the world with your story.

“–there is no stopping a brand when it is preferred.”-Marc Gobe

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3 of 10 Social Media Commandment: From Honesty to Trust

Good morning everyone! Here is the third installment of the 10 Commandments to Social Media Marketing. We have been talking about listening to consumers and about transforming your product into an experience but now it is time for the main enchilada: Honesty and Trust.

In his book, Emotional Branding, Marc Gobe talks about taking a brand from honesty to trust. We have been relating his 10 Commandments of Emotional Branding to social media and the third commandment hits it home for me.

From Marc:

“Honesty is expected. Trust is engaging and intimate. It needs to be earned…Trust is something else altogether. It is one of the most important values of a brand and it requires real effort from corporations. It is what you would expect from a friend.”

Honesty is expected? Absolutely it is expected! This is not only a moral and ethical obligation for a company but YOU (the corp) are going to be found out anyway. With millions of bytes of content being produced on a daily basis it is important to remember to be honest with all the content being developed surrounding your plan.

Social media allows you to take ENGAGE with your clients. It creates multiple tools that allows you to build a relationship and interact with the people that will spread your message to their friends and eventually the masses. Trust can be built in an online environment. It can be built by using the tools available to you through Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, LinkedIN… etc… etc… etc…

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The 10 Commandments to Understanding Social Media

I am obsessed with a book by Marc Gobe called Emotional Branding. It was written in early 2002 and is (in my opinion) a staple to understanding the concepts of emotional branding and marketing. He has a section in the introduction of the book (pg. xxviii) called The Ten Commandments of Emotional Branding. I was reading through the ten steps and realized they fit perfectly with understanding the model of social media and how to use it to better communicate with your clients and potential clients.

The Ten Commandments to Understanding Social Media

1. From Consumers to People.

2. From Product to Experience.

3. From Honesty to Trust

4. From Quality to Preference

5. From Notoriety to Aspiration

6. From Identity to Personality

7. From Function to Feel

8. From Ubiquity to Presence

9. From Communication to Dialogue

10. From Service to Relationship.

We are going to focus on each one of the ten commandments in the next couple of days. The concepts outlined in the book by Gobe were not dedicated to social media but they are essential to understanding how to use the tool. They are based completely behind the idea of understanding the emotional relevance of the communication tool called the Internet. Joel Desgrippes of BrandImage says it best:

“Branding is not only about ubiquity, visibility, and functions; it is about bonding emotionally with people in their daily life. Only when a product or a service kindles an emotional dialogue with the consumer, can this product of service qualify to be a brand.”

First on the docket: Consumers to People. I can’t wait. Stay tuned.

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Why Is It Important to Listen?

There have been many conversations surrounding the value of social media. How do we measure a return on investment using these tools? How do we guarantee that the tools are going to work in our favor?

There are a couple of things you should be using social media for in the near future. That will give you an intangible benefit to your company. The first thing is customer service. We will talk about the concept of using social media as a customer service tool in the future. I wanted to focus on the second reason which is reputation management.

Are you listening to what people are saying about you online? I can give you two bad examples and one good example of companies who are listening to what clients and potential clients are discussing.

The first bad example is that of Independent Federal Credit Union in Anderson, IN. I had a bad customer service experience at one of their branches in Anderson. You can read the entire post at An Example Of Terrible Customer Service: IFCU. The problem isn’t necessarily that they had bad customer service. The problem is that they had NO IDEA I had written a blog post about my experience.

When you are not listening to what people are saying about you… how can you change opinions?

The second example is from KSM Business Technology and Digitech in Indianapolis. You can read about the entire experience at the post about KSM Business Technologies Being Worst than Godaddy at customer service. The sad thing about this post is that they are a business technology and hosting company. They had no idea I had a bad experience with a couple of their reps and now it is blasted out over the masses on the Internet. They still have no idea.

This has nothing to do with the size of the company (the offending or the offended). This has everything to do with caring about the customer experience.

You want to know… You NEED to know… You SHOULD know…

If you can think of a reason why you should not be listening to clients and potential clients on the Internet. Please let me know.

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A Look Into The Brand of Twitter

Today’s guest post is by Jon Gatrell of Spatially Relevant

———————————————————

I’m always appreciative to meet good folks and develop relationships with folks online and this post is by way of one of those relationships. Kyle was kind enough to reciprocate with an opportunity to do a guest post in a response to my offer which started as part of my examining my Twitter network. Yup, Kyle and I met virtually by way of Twitter, so I think I have to make a confession based on the recent content around here. I use an Auto-DM capability which isn’t high on Kyle’s respectometer, but I do this for two reasons:

• I’m fairly confident folks just click and add with no additional context, so I want to engage them in some fashion so they can potentially start a conversation. Net-Net – It works.
• I travel a good deal, do a fairly large amount of tweeting from my phone, so I’m not always able to engage “in person” for a while and Auto-DM’s help validate that I’m “there”, if not in person.

The important point is I’m not trying to sell anything, just provide a snapshot into my views and to provide access to me while providing an introductory insight into my personality. In the end, I agree that it is about emotion, which is why Twitter is such an interesting topic for many.

Twitter is essentially an ecosystem with continuous growth and increasing capabilities which are core to the platform, but also market driven by the users. Twitter more so than any other online community does generate emotional responses from some and I think the graphics help do this while reinforcing the brand. That little bird is just something we all want to be free, open and happy. Right?

The Bird is the Brand

Brand is the culmination of many things, but it is often considered what is conjured up in your mind when you think about a brand. For Twitter, at least for me, it is the bird. I suspect I’m not alone and that this imagery is intentional. When you think of twitter there are probably 3 images you think of and probably in this order, depending on when you started using twitter:

• The Bird
• The Whale
• The Robot – I think the robot is gone, so here is what it looked like

While I cite three different images, the common theme in all of these images is a bird. Twitter has from the beginning focused on delivering a simplified user interface and a single visual. The bird has become so integrated that the developer community has embrace iterations of the bird. Magpie (arrgh), Tweetlater, Twitterfeed, Twittad and Qwitter all have integrated a bird into their core visuals and UI. You go to these sites and the first thing you know is they do something for Twitter, you don’t even need to read a thing. Each of these platforms and their use of birds are riding the brand tails of Twitter and the promise of Twitter.

At some point in time, Ev and folks made a conscious decision: Develop a single creative which can represent the community and integrate it throughout the user/community experience. This isn’t an accident. Creative represents a key brand element that if contemplated as part of the original brand roll out and subsequent activities can drive increased visibility of the brand and develop a promise visually. While I don’t know what the official brand promise is for Twitter, I will take a guess based on what I think of:

• Quick, easy and simple – “Effortless enagement, like a bird in flight”
• We try real hard – “look our birds are trying to pick up a whale”We are different – “I know that teal/weird blue is odd, but the bird looks better in this color and we respect our bird”
• We are everywhere – web, SMS, mobile apps. “No matter where you go you can see/hear a bird”
• We are open and free – API and dev community. “When was the last time a caged bird sang?”

Brand and creative go hand and hand, so as you look to develop a brand, you also need to put together a strategic creative roadmap/plan.

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Two Rules of the New Web: Be Simple and Be Sticky

Mark Evans had a great blog a couple of days ago called Is Anyone Paying Attention? Talk about some great everyday life visuals to relate to the transitioning of the web from cluttered to de-cluttered. I’m pretty sure I either just made up the term “de-cluttered” or someone said it to me sometime. All of that aside, Mark has a line in his post that was funny and hit me hard at the same time.

The lack of attention is troubling but, ironically, no one seems to be paying much attention to it.

The millennial generation is slowly seeping into the workforce and using productivity tools more often than not. Mark was right when he said online services and websites have one shot to get the attention of the over-used and over-supplied public.

You have ONE shot. ONE.. Numero UNO. Single.

Just one shot to catch the attention of the consuming public. Simple and Sticky. That’s our creed. That should be everyones creed.

Make your website as simple as you possibly can. Use good, smart design to untangle the maze of sales content and information you want to display and put up what gets attention. You have less than 10 seconds to capute MY attention.

Are you going to stick me to a message or push me towards a competitor?

5 Steps to Internet Marketing Success Not Four

I was reading Lorraine Ball’s blog over at Roundpeg.biz and she has a post called Four Steps to Internet Marketing Success which piggy backs off of a Hubspot post called 4 Components of a Successful Internet Marketing Strategy.

In the post they both talk about the concept of:
Data + Software + Skills + Network = Internet Marketing Success

The formula makes sense. You need all four components to realize marketing success. I couldn’t figure out how the time involvement fit into the equation. Time is THE most valuable asset to a marketer, small business owner, or entrepreneur when it comes to social media marketing.

In the Hubspot post it talk about time in the skills category but that didn’t make much sense to me. Skills and time are not related in my opinion. You can have all the skills in the world but if you do not make the time to use the data, tools, skills, and software… the 4 components are kind of a mute point.

A new equation could look something like this:

The new equation takes in the time aspect of social media and internet marketing success. You need to divide time evenly over the four tools of success. Time is the crucial element in this equation without time you have nothing.

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