5 Suggestions to Help You Be Successful with Social Media (with little money and/or few resources)

1. You don’t need to boil the ocean–it’s not necessary to have an account or fan page or profile on every single social network. Figure out where your customers and potential customers are. Often the best place for you to engage in the online conversation is in smaller niche networks/communities. This site might help you research. http://sites.google.com/site/socialmedialistproject/networks
2. You don’t need to spend a lot, but you’ll want to spend some money to create a plan on how to participate. Social networks and online communities are usually free to sign up, but you don’t want to waste a lot of time figuring out which network or community to get involved with if you aren’t familiar with them and once you’re set up, you need a plan for what to say, when to say it, who to listen to, how to respond to questions and mentions, etc. so that it actually benefits your business. I recommend hiring a consultant to help you do this.
3. You don’t need to spend a fortune on social media applications or tools. There are many free social media management, engagement and research tools available. Check out my Delicious bookmarks for Free SM Monitoring tools, SM research tools, and see the Social Media Project wiki for other 3rd party tools and social media locations.
4. Be sure to keep the 5 keys to conversation participation in mind:
   • Listen to current customers, prospects, industry experts and other influencers in the market space and internalize what you hear to improve your business.
   • Speak to the overall market conversation with quality, supportive and helpful content that people want to respond to, inquire about and pass on to others.
   • Care about what is being said about your products, your company, your competitors and your industry, but even more important, care about helping your customers and prospects fulfill their wants and needs.
   • Share your experiences—positive and negative—and your insights as you grow your company and evolve your product lines.
   • Build relationships with market conversation Influencers, Participants and Listeners based on the mutual interest of the consumer problems that need to be solved with product innovation.
5. Spread the work out among more than one person. As a small company or non-profit, you don’t need a full-time person to make social media efforts work. Many of the social media management tools, even free ones, will allow you to create logins for multiple people and assign tasks to different people. Encourage your staff to help spread your word. Talk about guidelines for speaking out so that you’re all on the same page. I’ve set up CoTweet for a couple of small companies and non-profits. It works great for them to manage their Twitter stream.

Politicians are stereo-typed as “baby-kissers” for the media cameras and back-room deal makers with individuals and companies who carry a lot of influence, but President Obama is the first presidential candidate who really took relationship building to the extreme and out into the general public. As a marketing case study, his campaign will be written in the history books as brilliant–even those who don’t agree with his political opinions can’t argue against that. So what did he do during the campaign, and now into his presidency, that epitomized what companies should be doing to build relationships?

What Does it Mean to Build Relationships? Who Do I Want to Get to? How Do I Do that?

1. Identify who the Influencers in your market space are. These are individuals and entities (organizations, conferences, groups, etc.) that most often raise new conversation topics and have their own audiences who listen and respond. Influencers can be press, bloggers, trade groups, business executives, vendors, customers, regulatory bodies, analysts and many others. By starting some simple research into what type of product/service you offer, what want/need your offering solves for people and basic brand name and competitor searching, particularly in social media outlets, will quickly show individuals or entities who appear over and over. They’ll have multiple ways in which they’re influence manifests itself (i.e. they write a popular blog, they’re a book author, they often speak at events, they hold a prestigious position, etc.)
2. Once you’ve identified the major Influencers in your space and made note of all the ways in which they’re influence manifests itself, then put your company in a position to get to know those individuals or get involved with those organizations. Consider all the ways in which you can find mutually beneficial opportunities to work together, speak on the same panel, hold joint events, etc. It could even be as simple as inviting the person for drinks after a conference to talk about your industry and discuss what opportunities you may have together. If they write a blog, read it regularly and offer constructive comments or questions–but resist the urge to advertise your company in those comments. Start referencing the Influencers by pointing other people to their articles, presentations, Twitter streams, etc. Be visible about it, too, by recommending their articles on your Twitter account or blogging a response to an article they wrote or writing a public review of their books.
3. Ultimately, your goal as a company is to build a relationship with the Influencers so that they will in turn talk about your and your company to others and so that you can get in front of their audience. Their audiences are the market conversation Participants and Listeners, which are essentially your target audience and potential customers. Participants include the Influencers, but in large are individuals who are responding to the topics raised by the Influencers. These individuals may be your customers, prospects, industry experts, competitors or anyone else with an interest in your industry. Listeners comprise the vast majority of the population—they are the individuals who look to Influencers and Participants to help them make purchase decisions and formulate their own opinions. Items 1 and 2 above are how you start to get noticed by these two groups and start to build relationships with them.
4. Keep in mind that your market conversation Participants and Listeners include your current customers, so look for ways to stay in touch with your customers beyond trying to up-sell them or get them to renew their subscription. And don’t just talk at them through email campaigns and newsletters when you have a new product or a sale. Use those mediums, as well as blogs and Twitter, etc., to give them helpful information about fulfilling their wants/needs. Don’t just sell to them and leave it at that. Provide tips and tricks, links to articles that may be of relevance to their want/need and ask for their feedback on how to improve your product. Watch for mentions by Participants and Listeners and reach out to them to thank them for their comments or to show that you care about their want/need and helping them fulfill that want/need when their mentions of your product are negative. You have a bigger opportunity to make yourself look good and gain more awareness when you properly respond to someone’s negative comments. If the person blogged that they purchased your product and it sucked, contact them or comment back offering to make amends or invite them at your expense to visit your company and be part of a focus group on improving the product. These are just some ideas, but I’m sure you’re starting to see how this works.
5. Finally, provide as many ways as possible for Influencers, Participants and Listeners to voice their thoughts and opinions back to you. A generic email address or form on your website doesn’t cut it. Have someone monitor social media and web content and respond accordingly in real-time. Give your company a human personality–give real names and email addresses of someone, anyone, so people feel like they have a person to talk to about their product issues. Follow other people on Twitter and invite your customers to follow your company–but give it as much personality as possible. If you don’t want to have a single person as the face/voice of the company, than at least have those people who are adding content be personable.

Don’t be stingy, share!

What Does it Mean to Share? How Do I Show that?

1. Through your company’s established communications/conversation channels, let your audiences know what’s new. Depending on what news you have to share and the information outlets you establish as applicable for your company, you’ll want to consider: press releases, new content on your website, Tweets (twitter or microblog postings), blog posts, individual communications to influencers, forum or other online community posts, newsletters, email blast, traditional on and offline advertisements, social media network page mentions, and many others. This is about letting the world know what’s new! Be proud, let people know. But don’t forget, not everyone cares and different people like to receive information in different ways, so share, but be considerate–don’t spam or smam people/networks.
2. Share positive customer experiences. You’ll still want to consider the same outlets listed above to point people to the stories, but here you’ll also want to seriously consider the format. Be fun and inventive, but true to your brand personality: videos, podcasts, testimonial quotes, case studies, slide decks, etc.
3. Share negative company experiences. What! you say? Yep, sometimes it can be a boost to your audiences to see a company take ownership of mistakes. Here’s an example: An online retailer experiences a glitch in their systems and looses all of a day’s orders (probably wouldn’t happen, but got with it for this exampe.) What are their options? They could ignore it and wait for all those customers to complain that they didn’t receive their purchase. Hmmm, that would probably be a lot of pissed off people who are likely to start telling other people what a shitty company you are. Probably not the best option. What else could they do? They don’t know who made a purchase that day, because they all got lost, so they can’t just contact the people to let them know. But they do have the emails of all the people that have purchased from them in the past. They also use Twitter to tell people about special deals and many of their customers follow them on Twitter. Well, those are a great place to start. They could own up to the computer failure and email their customers and Tweet to their followers that they had this problem. They’re very sorry it happened and have taken additional steps to ensure it will never happen again. They appreciate their customers and want to offer a 10% discount for everyone for the next week so that individuals who need to redo their purchase have an incentive to use come back. Getting the word out may be showing a weakness, but it’s also showing that the company is human AND responsible. They’ll loose some of those customers, but at least it will help head off a bunch of online complaints about how terrible the company is and may bring in new customers because of the offered discount.

There are many other things a company can share, as well. For example, you could share links to third party endorsements or industry reports or a blog post that advocates the method your company takes for fulfilling a customer’s want/need. You can share things that don’t have your company or product mentioned, too. The most important thing is to keep in mind what the best method of delivery is, what format is going to have the biggest impact and what is helpful to share (both for your company as well as your customers.)

To truly participate in the market conversation, companies need to actually care about helping their customers and prospects fulfill their wants and needs. People don’t buy a product because it’s there, they buy because they have a need or want that has to be fulfilled–understanding this and acting on it can create a lot of Whuffie (See Tara Hunt’s The Whuffie Factor) for companies and help them retain customers, sell more and generate positive word of mouth. Of course companies also need to care about what is being said about their products, company, competitors and industry.

What Does it Mean to Care? How Do I Show that?

1. Monitor: Set up searches/alerts to monitor what is being said online, especially on social media networks and publishing. Watch for your company’s name, name of your products, competitors’ company names and products. You’ll also want to watch for mentions of keywords that are applicable to the type of product/service you offer and your specific industry/industry niche, but it’s more important to go beyond that. Define key words that are focused on the need/want that your product fulfills. Joe needs a more efficient way of tracking his customers and their orders and what stage of the sales pipeline they are in for his small business than doing it manually on spreadsheets. He doesn’t need a CRM system. He may ask people in online communities what the best way to track customers and their orders is without ever saying “What’s the best CRM system?” He doesn’t care about CRM systems, he cares about fulfilling the need of more efficient tracking.
2. Respond: When you see a mention of your company or product find ways to respond. Sometimes that might be directly to the person, sometimes that will be responding to their blog post for public view. If it’s a negative mention, you want to stop it from proliferating by reaching out to that person to find out what went wrong and how you can help them have a better product experience. If it’s a positive mention, thank them. Show you appreciate that they’ve shared their positive thoughts. If it’s a mention of a something someone needs or wants, like in the case of Joe above, consider what would be appropriate. Don’t just try to sell at them, but find a way to help them fulfill their need or want. For Joe’s comment, you could reply with a vendor neutral link to information about CRM systems to show him how they can help him. Then tell him that you’re with a company that offers a CRM sollution and you’d be happy to talk with him if he’s interested. Make sure your online persona is clearly visible so he can see what company you’re with, but don’t try to cram your product down his throat. Just be openly helpful
3. Participate: Jump into the communities that are specific to people who have a need/want for your offerings, but don’t just advertise there. Offer supporting and helpful information on how people can fulfill their needs or wants. Point them to additional information like industry reports, expert blogs, or case studies. Create content that is about the needs or wants that people have that your company can help them fulfill. Content doesn’t always have to be a “brochure” tooting your own horn.

For some reason, when Jim Madison, Benji Franklin and all their buddies were sitting around in Philly, I don’t think they had TV commercials, pop-up ads or email blasts in mind. Companies started “talking” (back then it was mostly barkers in front of market stalls and Burma Shave signs) to let consumers know they had a product for sale. And the consumers wanted to hear it because there was no other means of finding out what was available.

Today, the times have changed and people actively work at avoiding listening to companies (i.e., spam filters, do-not-call lists, DVRs, caller IDs, etc.) Yet companies are still creating more and more noise. In the 1970s, laws regarding noise pollution and standards for noise reduction began to appear. It’s time marketers took cues from these acoustical reduction advocates and average consumers who are tuning them out.

Speaking

In the context of participating in the market conversation, the speaking objective is not met simply by speaking anywhere and certainly not by speaking only about your product. To really get people to listen, companies need to consider speaking to the overall market conversation with quality, supportive and helpful content that people want to respond to, inquire about and pass on to others.

1. Where to Speak: It’s 2009, people! Speaking doesn’t just mean words coming out of your mouth. Companies are “speaking” whenever they put information out into the market conversation: speeches and podcasts as well as white papers and emails. The “location” for “speaking” will be widely influenced by your industry, type of product, target audience and many other factors, including what it is you have to say. To determine the best places to speak look closely at all of these factors and consider who you are trying to speak to. Look at budgets and other resources and map them against the expected number of listeners for different locations.
2. Who to Speak To: Every business has different groups of people they need to speak to and those groups will likely want to hear different types of information given in different types of formats and locations. You certainly want to be speaking in an appropriate way to current customers and prospects, but keep in mind other Influencers like industry experts, trade organizations, publications, investors and partners. Influencers have an audience of their own and you want to try and speak to those people through the Influencers.
3. What to Say: In this new concept of engaging/participating in the market conversation, this aspect seems to be the most challenging for companies (either that or they are just ignoring common sense and continuing to use their same old stale, self-serving, product messages.) Keep in mind that people are specifically tuning out marketing messages and ignoring/avoid marketing emails, ads, pop-ups, etc. So stop feeding so much of these things to the noise beast. Turn your messaging key words and points around and consider that your product fulfills a need or want for people and focus on speaking about how to fulfill that need or want. Use your speaking opportunities to help people understand more about their need/want in general and not just what your product can do for them. Be supportive of their needs/wants and offer advice, information, other options and extend ideas that go beyond just that single need/want.

This series of blog posts looks at what is means to participate in the market conversation. True participation requires a company to look at meeting 5 objectives: Listening, Speaking, Caring, Sharing and Building Relationships. (Read 1st of 6-post series for more details.)

Listening
Your current customers, prospects, industry experts and other influencers in the market space have things to say and want to be heard. Listening and internalizing what that information can have a major impact on improving your business, increasing sales and driving product development to meet the real needs and wants of the market. Set your company up for a successful Listening strategy and action plan:

1. Who to listen to: Certainly you want to listen to your current customers and prospects, but to answer this question further, go back and consider what your product or service offers–what need or want does it fulfill? Identifying the Influencers–industry experts, analysts, technology gurus, academics, reporters/publications, industry events, etc. requires a bit of research, but the place to start is with keywords that focus on the need or want and not necessarily the product/service marketing keywords. Whether you use an outside agency like Idiom Strategies, or you look to do the research in-house, you’ll notice Influencers begin to emerge as people your customers and prospects are listening to.
2. Where to Listen: For current customers and people who stumble upon your website, be sure to offer an easy option for them to speak directly to you. Outside of this, consider your ideal customers? What do you know about them and who theylisten to and what can you conclude about where they are talking about their needs/wants? Market conversation locations can be both the physical and online places where Influencers, Participants and Listeners are interacting, such as:
   • Social Media Networks
   • Blogs and other Social Media Outlets
   • Forums
   • Chat rooms
   • Conferences and Tradeshows
   • On and Offline Publications
   • User Groups
   • Industry Trade Organizations
   • Webinars
   • Sponsored Events
   • Podcasts
   • Webcasts
   • Research Reports
3. How to Listen: Wow, this is a big part of the marketing industry’s market conversation right now. There are so many emerging companies offering services for web and social media monitoring, not to mention traditional press monitoring. Check out these sites for links to some of these Conversation Monitoring Tools companies: How to listen in a bad economy- 67 social media/web/reputation management tools and sites and Social Media Monitoring Solutions Wiki.
4. What to Listen for: Certainly monitor for mentions of your brands/products/company and you’ll probably want to listen to what is being said about your top competitors. But if you listen a little deeper, you’ll find terrific data for product improvements, new product offerings, ways to improve your customer relations, opportunities to encourage word of mouth mentions and terrific proofpoints to counter sales objections. Go back to those need/want-focused keywords–people may not mention a specific product or brand, but they’re still talking about their needs and wants and looking for advice and options for fulfilling them.

• Listening to current customers, prospects, industry experts and other influencers in the market space and internalizing what you hear to improve your business.
• Speaking to the overall market conversation with quality, supportive and helpful content that people want to respond to, inquire about and pass on to others.
• Caring about what is being said about your products, your company, your competitors and your industry, but even more important, care about helping your customers and prospects fulfill their wants and needs..
• Sharing your experiences—positive and negative—and your insights as you grow your company and evolve your product lines.
• Building relationships with market conversation Influencers, Participants and Listeners based on the mutual interest of the consumer problems that need to be solved with product innovation.

I had a meeting with a client today who had never thought of marketing in this context before, so I thought it was a good time to reiterate it here.

There is endless advice on how to engage with customers, how to build relationships with influencers and how to use social media for marketing. These bits of advice and best practices are usually written for a general audience of marketing or business professionals and is intended as general knowledge, not as specific suggested courses of action for your business.

The amount of each participation element your company should engage in to meet your goals will be specific to your company, taking into account your industry, your goals, your resources, your product roadmap, your current customer base, your brand personality and corporate culture, etc.

Not every company needs to put the same amount of focus on each participation element, nor is there a set percentage that is standard best practice for the amount of resources to devote to each element. Over the next couple of weeks I’ll be doing a series of blog posts to cover each element that should help give you guidance on determining how much your company should be devoting to Listening, Speaking, Caring, Sharing and Building Relationships.

At Idiom Strategies we provide conversation marketing services and guide clients on joining the market conversation. We didn’t coin the phrase Conversation Marketing, but rather adopted it because it fit our approach better than anything else. Today, as I heard the gears in my mind click into place, I realized that the term Conversation Marketing is even more fitting for what we do than I had thought–it is exactly about finding your own voice and listening to the voices of others.

A conversation is dynamic by nature. Older forms of marketing are static by nature (print ads, online banner ads, sponsorship at conferences, marketing brochures, commercials, radio spots, etc.) Sure, there are new forms of interactive marketing, especially online, that try to engage the viewer by clicking something or typing in specific info, etc. But that is so one-directional. As Seth’s blog post points out, “Avoid obvious mistakes, don’t follow obvious successes.” Just because one type of marketing campaign worked for one company doesn’t mean it will work for another, even in the same industry. So stop trying to take on the best practices that successful marketers have laid out and use your own voice to join the market conversation.

Conversation is an art form, not a science. There’s no hard and fast rules for success nor formulas to follow that can help you reach your goals. But there are basics to learn to help you find your own voice. What does that mean? Research different marketing strategies and tactics. Understand why people buy things and listen to the market conversation to know so you know what people really want or need and why they want or need these things. Ask them what would help them fulfill their needs and wants best. Introduce your ideas and experiences in a real voice, not “messages” writen by someone else. Once you do this, these things being the ABCs of marketing, then consider how to have a conversation with your audiences.

We wanted to share a new conversation marketing eBooklet with you. Conversation is the Thing: Tips for Engaging in the Market Conversation (plain old pdf version.)

While looking at different options for publishing the eBooklet, I came across this really cool site, Issuu.com. There is a free version that looks fantastic. Basically you can publish documents as different types of publication looks (books, journals, presentations, etc.) with some very nice visual effects. It lets you embed the publications on your own site as I’ve done here.

I hope you’ll find the conversation marketing tips valuable and subscribe to our publications on issuu.com/idiomstategies.

I just watched the movie Fight Club (again) and it inspired me to adapt Tyler Durden’s ‘8 Rules of Fight Club’ and create the ‘8 Rules of Conversation Marketing’. If you haven’t seen the movie or read the book, I highly recommend you do. So here we go…  

#1 The first rule of Fight Club is, you do not talk about Fight Club.

#1 – The first rule of Conversation Marketing, is you do not market AT people.

Forget what you learned in Marketing 101.

Times have changed. People are no longer sitting back and having their wants and needs dictated to them. They are now speaking up and telling you. Listen to them.

Believe it or not, there are people out there that have a better understanding than you of how to improve your product/business/service, and also very willing to share it with you. Learn from them.

Your customers are also now closer to you than ever before. This creates an incredible opportunity to establish trust and create relationships with them. Be authentic in your communication. Fewer scripted emails. Quicker response times. Ask them questions. Share with them your process. Interact with them.

Conversation marketing practices provide for a two-way dialogue, where traditional marketing practices are one-directional, only sending information out. When a company opens itself up to having a two-way conversation—listening, speaking and sharing—with all audience members—Influencers, Participants and Listeners—the benefits are beyond what traditional approaches can provide.

#2 The second rule of Fight Club is, you DO NOT talk about Fight Club.

#2 – The second rule of Conversation Marketing, is you DO NOT market AT people.

This bears repeating. You must participate in the conversation with content that enhances the Influencers’ conversation topics, motivates Participants, and addresses the Listeners’ needs. If you just simply blast out your marketing messages via social media tools, you will be viewed as a SMAMer (Social Media Spammer) – losing the attention and loyalty of your audience. Be sure to interact with, not market at your audience.

#3 – If someone says stop, goes limp, taps out, the fight is over.

#3 – If someone says something, pay attention.

Here’s a great quote I came across:

“In the old days, brands wanted everybody to pay attention to them. Now, brands need to pay attention to everyone else.” – Anonymous

Listen to what is being said before joining the conversation. Find out what people are talking about, what they like/dislike and what’s being said about your company, your competitors and the overall industry. Learn from what you gather and participate in a way that addresses the current market conversation.

Be sure to also identify who are the ‘influencers’ behind those conversations. Understand where they converse (blog, twitter, conferences, etc.) and what their views are. At a point where you can actually add value to the conversation, participate.

#4 – Two guys to a fight.

#4 – Two or more people are needed to have a conversation.

Conversation Marketing is not one-directional. It’s about the dialogue. Many companies take the first step of posting, sharing, uploading, tweeting, etc. – but jump to the next initiative without paying attention to the conversations that emerge. If you ‘say something’ – be committed to listening and responding to others.

#5 – One fight at a time.

#5 – Participate where it makes sense, not just because it’s available.

Being everywhere can be dangerous as it can spread your resources thin. Remember, it’s about quality versus quantity. Sometimes it will make sense to get involved, other times it won’t. Have a clear understanding of why you would participate and the resources needed to do so. Have a strategy.

#6 – No shirts, no shoes.

#6 – Be transparent, be authentic.

Don’t be afraid to share your experiences—positive and negative—and your insights as you grow your company and evolve your product lines. It’s also OK to make mistakes as long as you explain/apologize/learn from them and communicate that. People appreciate transparency and authenticity. This type of interaction will add a personal touch to your brand that is greatly lost through mass-marketing.

#7 – Fights will go on as long as they have to.

#7 – Conversations will go on as long as they have to – monitor them.

Just because you’ve moved on to other things, doesn’t mean people have. Use monitoring tools to keep up-to-date on new developments of old topics/conversations you’ve had, as well as current topics. There are plenty of free and paid tools to help you monitor the conversations that take place.

#8 – If this is your first night at Fight Club, you have to fight.

#8 – If you join the conversation, you must be committed to follow through.

Even if you don’t choose to get involved, the conversations about your product/service/industry will go on with or without you. Pretending they don’t is dangerous.

Just as bad is initially getting involved, but not following through. I’ve seen plenty of companies jump onto the hot new trend (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), but after some time, fail to be active (or even reactive). To the audience, it’s as though you’ve set up a store, with the front door open, but no one is working inside.

This is why it is essential to have a strategy. Social media is not a strategy; social media are tools and locations where communication takes place and where you can interact with your audience. Social media should also not be looked at like a campaign.

Conversation Marketing identifies the people behind the market conversation, locations where they interact (online and offline), and how businesses can become qualified participants and influencers in that conversation. Creating a conversation marketing strategy is a holistic way to align your marketing efforts and be sure they support your business goals.

As Tyler once said, “Look, the people you are after are the people you depend on.”  So listen to them, learn from them, and get to know them. Otherwise, you may get knocked out…