Social Trends

Apr 21 2015

Social Selling: What Could POSSIBLY Go Wrong?

Ready to bleed out of your eye sockets? I certainly am – and it has nothing to do with the usual corporate PR missteps or business foul-ups that we often study here on the blog.

I have heard the term “social selling” way too often this week. Everywhere I seem to turn on social media, there’s another pundit talking about social selling. It’s often done in the context of one tool or another – “Use LinkedIn to grow your network and sell to them,” or “Spend twenty minutes a day on Twitter to maximize your funnel.” Social Selling – an awesome concept in theory, but…What Could POSSIBLY Go Wrong?

Lots, people. Lots and lots and lots could possibly go wrong. And I’m here to share a few of the things I’m seeing – “ripped from the headlines,” so to speak.

1. You’re Thinking “Tool (or Technology or Tactic) FIRST”

So you know where I’m coming from…I have worked with some brilliant people in my 20-plus year career. Marketers. Sales Executives. Operations Leaders. Front-line Dynamos. I’ve watched as people created magic out of thin air, or “sold the sizzle” in sales speak.

The common theme is that they either understood the strategy or created a clear strategy that optimized everyone’s chance for success. You knew, for instance, exactly WHY you were doing something (putting all of the Trade Show Calendar into a spreadsheet) and WHAT that something would be used for (discussion with the CEO on which events were most important and what sort of budget and staffing would support the Trade Show Calendar). It’s a lot less painful to do that research when you know exactly why you’re doing that research. Excel and your love of Pivot Tables does not drive your Trade Show Calendar – the chance to drive real business outcomes (in the form of a ginormous stack of leads that can be turned into either qualified prospects or people who might want to receive more information over time) drives your Trade Show Calendar.

Ages ago – in Internet time, maybe epochs ago – Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li wrote a book called “Groundswell” that was, at the time, groundbreaking. The key learning from this book (for me, at least) was the concept of “POST.” People (who you’re wanting to connect with), Objective (what you want to accomplish from connecting with them), Strategy (the series of tactics that will get you to the desired objective), and then and only then…Technology (Twitter, LinkedIn, Your Blog, etc.).

Today’s “Social Selling” Love-Fest seems to stem entirely from love of Technology, Tactic, or Tool. And that is part of what’s driving me insane.

The guy or gal who understands LinkedIn is leveraging his or her ubiquity on that platform into “let’s do a social selling thing!” gigs. They then meander into HQ, signed up by someone in a sales role who says “let’s get the social person here,” and then…BOOM! There’s a training session! There’s a rah-rah speech! The needle is moved!

That last part is highly questionable.

Why doesn’t it work? Scroll back up there to the WHY behind the WHAT. Which brings us to point two:

2. You’re Just a Number, Just Moving Through the Funnel

Yup, that’s the other problem here – You actually ARE just a number.

I don’t mean to diminish the fine work being done by some folks in “Social Selling.” However, those people are rare birds.

What is more likely is a process that looks like this:

Boss says “do social selling.”
Given a playbook, front-line sales person starts blasting out notes, or focusing on scattershot “content marketing,” or decides to build their LinkedIn network purely for the purpose of having a spreadsheet of contacts.
Front-line sales person then tracks everything – because you have to prove the value of social selling, and because Boss has likely paid big bucks for some solution (LinkedIn, Salesforce, etc.).
Numbers are tracked and…
It doesn’t work. Something breaks down somewhere.

I’ve seen this movie over and over. There’s rarely a strategy, rarely an objective. Instead, it’s just someone protecting his or her own turf.

Time to Move On to the Next Hot Thing

I had a consulting project several years ago that was eerily similar to a lot of the above. “Social Selling” was…well let’s just say there was a different social media tactic, and the idea was that it – could have been Twitter, could have been Facebook, could have been Plaxo – was going to change the way this company did business.

But the company didn’t even embrace clarity around what the heck they were doing, instead holding onto a “dog” of a product, and wanting social to dig them out of a hole that social wasn’t going to dig them out of.

It was a short project for me, doomed to fail; we met some of the objectives but it was an impossible task.

What Wins? CLARITY

If you’re selling something enterprise-wide, you’re not going to win through a Social Selling campaign alone. You know that, and management should know that. What you should demand is clarity:

Clarity of Objective. What are we trying to accomplish?
Clarity of Message. What message are we looking to convey, when, and to whom?
Clarity of Strategy. Why are you building the trade show calendar again?
Clarity of Tactics. At some point, you will need to figure out which ones to cross off the list. You can’t be everywhere – and you can’t fall in love with LinkedIn or Twitter or Facebook just because it’s cool. Go back again to point 1 and repeat.

I don’t think “Social Selling” is inherently bad. I just wish it accompanied some good old fashioned thinking. And wasn’t a substitute for a real, live strategy.

Feb 21 2012

Internet Marketing Vs. Social Media Marketing

Hi. If you’re new here, be sure to learn more about our FORWARD:MARCH program, with private coaching starting March 1 and webinars kicking in on March 6.

We have often said that the work we do here at Area 224 – and the 12 Minute Marketing program we launched last year – has been at the intersection of Internet Marketing and Social Media Marketing.

Guess which camp we think Pinterest is in?

But what do we mean by that?

Good question…and, even though we see some real differences between the two – in approach, in positioning, and in numbers – we think both sides can learn lots from each other. Here are some key learnings:

Internet Marketing is All About Numbers.

Social Media Marketing – while getting better at it – is more of a “soft science.” Here’s what we mean:

Uber-Marketer Frank Kern has talked quite a bit about specific programs he has done – and he has opened the kimono and shared the nitty-gritty numbers. Like this:

10,000 emails sent
27% open rate
97 sales
$1397 per sale

The ROI here is unclear – we don’t know how much was invested in all facets of this campaign, but we can tell you this: Internet Marketing focuses on Sales Numbers.

To take it a step further, there’s a guy named Ryan Deiss – also someone who falls into the “Uber-Marketer” camp – who has often said that he zeros in on one absolute number before deciding whether or not to get involved in someone’s product launch:

Earnings Per Click. (Or, if 100 people click on a landing page, and 5 of them order a $49 product, take 5, multiply it by $49 and you get $245; divide that by 100 and you come up with $2.45 per click.)

Meanwhile, Social Media Marketing is Less Mature about Bottom Line Impact

Very simply put, if we have to explain any of the above concepts to you, you are probably NOT an Internet Marketer. You might be a Social Media Marketer.

OR, at the risk of being even more direct, you might just be “in Social Media.”

This is one area where big brands and big agencies have failed in the past: they’ll hire based on soft numbers that might be rather suspect. 5000 Facebook friends (the limit). 25,000 Twitter followers (many of whom may well be bots).

And, to expect “Social Media” to translate immediately into “Social Media Marketing,” you MUST have an Objective.

Gone are the days (and these were a couple years ago, mind you) where brands can say “get me on Twitter” or “get me a Facebook fan page” and have that translate into some definition of success.

Campaigns and Landing Pages are more the domain of Internet Marketing

Yes, I said it out loud: Social Media Practitioners – the experts, gurus, ninjas and rock stars you have heard so much about – these folks tend to NOT be very good at running a campaign that goes beyond really soft sciences like “engagement.” You’re possibly going to hear terms like “number of Retweets” and “number of Facebook Fans” – but, from the Social Media folk, you will not hear anything that makes the ears of the sales people ring.

“We drove 1000 people to the landing page, and 125 of them filled out a form. All of them received a white paper from our firm; we were able to reach 15 of them by phone in the first week after the white paper arrived. We have appointments with 5 of them to talk about their business needs.”

A hypothetical quote…but which type of person produced it?

Internet Marketing is always wearing a Sales Hat

This might be the greatest difference between Social Media Marketing and Internet Marketing:

Internet Marketers always have a number attached to their name.

One reason yours truly got out of traditional PR back in the middle of the last decade: fighting for budgets and not being able to quantify the value you bring to an organization is TIRING stuff.

Our Point: if you’re in Social Media, think first like an Internet Marketer.

May 24 2011

4 Steps to Avoiding the Echo Chamber

Thanks, mrbubble.com
Tired of hearing social media experts talk to other social media experts about social media?

I’ll admit it – I can’t stand the echo chamber. It’s mind-numbing of late – signal-to-noise ratio is really tilted toward blowhards talking a good ballgame.

There’s a better way. Actually, here’s a 4-step program. 1/3 the steps of a 12-step program. Go!

1. Ignore “Influence.”

That’s right – don’t give a hoot about whether someone has a Clout-a-riffic score of 8000 degrees Kelvin, or whether they are a best-selling author of self-help books for descendants of Vikings.

This means that you should interact with people on the social channels – Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, VikingDate.com – with one question in mind:

Is this person interesting?

2. Exit the Bubble.

Everyone reads blogs about social media. Everyone blogs about social media. Social media blogs exist so people who blog about social media can be read by everyone who blogs about social media.

Does this make you want to scream?

Don’t get us wrong – there are dozens of GOOD social media blogs out there. But once you start getting out of the bubble, you discover that there are actually people who are writing about stuff that you might be interested in.

Exit. The. Bubble.

3. Have a POINT – and only visit blogs that have one.

Our point behind blogging is simple: thought leadership and positioning of our firm – StraterEdge Consulting – as people who know what we’re talking about when it comes to Sales Velocity and Marketing Effectiveness.

When you visit a blog that says “Random musings” or “Ramblings” or “One twenty-something’s journey toward” something…this is likely a blog without a point.

4. Don’t Believe the Hype.

Everyone. Is. Awesome!

If you visit enough blogs it will appear that the same 15 people seem to comment on the same 15 blogs and then they cross-pollinate on each other’s blogs and it becomes a circumlocution of awesomeness.

You can do one of two things: hang out and try to crack the code, or realize that the Awesomeness Cliques will always be there, social media is like high school, and it’s time to move on.

There’s a world OUTSIDE of the Social Media Bubble. Go find it.

Mar 01 2011

March 1, 1944

Today would have been my Dad’s 67th birthday; I think I learned a good chunk about business from him.

Missing my Dad, Tom, lots lately; he left this earth on June 1, 2009. He was – fittingly – born on March First: he had leadership qualities and was one of the guys you wanted on your team.

He never took the time to write a book – but what I learned about business from him would take up more than a few cocktail napkins. Here are a few highlights.

1. Don’t be afraid to reinvent yourself.

It was bound to happen: Northern Indiana’s economy was not doing so well, and the factory that had been the family’s lifeblood decides it want to relocate to Georgia. Not being much of a Dawg, not wanting to uproot everyone with three kids in high school, Dad did what everyone should do at least once in their life.

He reinvented himself.

Always Smiling

Turns out, as is the case, “Quality Control Director” was not as fitting for him as the new life he invented: “Real Estate Agent.”

You may want to (if that industry you picked in college isn’t what it’s cracked up to be in the real world), you may have to (in walks the boss, pink slip in tow). But, at some time in your life, you NEED to. Reinvent. Yourself.

2. Play to your strengths.

We joked that Dad grew up on 7th Street, got married and moved to 8th Street, then, when the kids were grown up, moved to 13th Street.

This was true: the Belgian-American enclave of the West End of Mishawaka, Indiana was his home and, even when he and Mom moved for the last few years to a street without a number, he was still in the same 2 mile radius for his entire 65 years.

Hey, guess where he sold the bulk of his houses as a real estate agent?

Dad would do one deal a year that was outside of his normal zone, but his business was pretty much The Guy on The West End.

While he reinvented himself rather easily, he sure didn’t reinvent himself as something he wasn’t.

3. Show up.

Wish I had a dollar for every time Dad called me from a boring open house. Of course, he would never say that out loud; it was always something like “well, we’re waiting for the crowd to show up.”

He couldn’t just hang up a shingle and expect the business to start coming to him – he had to actually put in the work. That meant a lot of events – not just open houses but rubber chicken dinners and local sporting events – that were probably not ideal places to spend your time then…

But those events paid dividends down the road.

4. Give.

There’s something that is important to you. A charity. An organization. Your church. A club. A cause.

It doesn’t have to be financial – heck, Dad wasn’t rolling in dough – but he sure did give of his time.

I still remember him getting the frequent donor club card from the Blood Bank. As a kid, I thought it was nuts – I mean, who in their right mind would let you take their blood?

It’s not about “my cause is better than your cause.” He found the causes that were important to him. And he gave.

5. Please have fun.

I am 100% certain that my Dad did not take himself all that seriously.

I’m guessing, if Dad were around today, he’d probably chide all the “Social Media Gurus” for being “Guru” first, “Media” second. And “Social” third.

Dad would talk to anyone, and listen to anyone. And drink a beer with anyone.

His last birthday, March 1, 2009, found him at the casino, having gotten his faculties back and being good to go after his first stroke. He had a nice payday at some exotic sounding game – Mississippi Stud or some such – and was thrilled to tell me all about it.

I’m sure my Dad picked up quite a few lessons in business, and life, from his Dad.

So I always wondered, not totally “getting it,” why my Dad made a big deal out of his own father’s birthday, years after his father had passed away.

I get it now.

Notes: since it was a stroke that marked the beginning of Dad’s last days, consider this an invitation to understand the warning signs of a stroke:

Directly from the American Heart Association’s web page, be on the lookout for these signs:

Sudden numbness or weakness of the face, arm, or leg, especially on one side of the body
Sudden confusion, trouble speaking or understanding
Sudden trouble seeing in one or both eyes
Sudden trouble walking, dizziness, or loss of balance or coordination
Sudden, severe headache with no known cause

If any of these things are happening, don’t mess around: Call 9-1-1.

Here’s a link to the American Heart Association’s web page. You can learn all sorts of things there and, even though February 28 was the last day of “Heart Month,” well, you can learn tons there. Please do.

Thanks, folks.