Ideas and Strategies on Applied Social Media, Marketing and Business Development
Axel Schultze, founder of the Social Media Academy, recently challenged Xeesm.com users to review their social
Xeesm - Social Business Relationship Management
visit graph generated by Xeesm.com, and compare with others by posting on the Xeesm Facebook page. I was surprised at what the visual said about the trends in where people go and which ones have grown or shifted over time. [Read more...]
Its always fun to share insight on the latest social media tools for business. I had a few quick minutes to talk about three I am reviewing for Carleen Wild, Channel 15 NBC News Madison WI. I looked at Xeesm.com, Gist and AddressBookOne to try and compare the attributes of each.
Online presence matters more today than it ever has. Your home page is not the carefully designed and interactive website home page. Its Google’s SERP. As a manufacturing business are you ready to step into this space? Where do you start?
Consider that we have moved from a Web 2.0 environment to an Enterprise 2.0 space with the use of software between companies (think SaaS). Now we need to be ready to take on social business, where your business is focused on being “social” and social tools are used in reaction to and to facilitate participation in the social web.
We have a few things working against us in the meantime. Do you recognize the buying selling disconnect that exists for traditional marketing that many b2b manufacturers primarily use? Are leads down? Traffic to your Website dropped off? No more opportunities for needs analysis and no calls for demos?
What types of things should be done to realign our sales process? What might that alignment look like?
Focus on a process and methodology for listening and collecting information on your social ecosystem. Find one that makes your organization and 
management team feel comfortable. Ask yourself, is it repeatable? Keep your social strategy aligned with business goals. Proceed with an action plan that will move your resources forward – assign resources, allocate time, define actions, pinpoint tools to use.
An assessment is important and Social Minutes Initiative is a great initiative focused on 20 minutes a day or week working on finding and connecting with clients.
Now that you find everyone, how should you react? Your social media strategy should clearly align with your business goals. What are you looking for – thought leadership, brand awareness, driving traffic, humanize the product or company?
Your policy should be balanced with your strategy and should come after the strategy and action plan has been developed . If it doesn’t reflect your culture, or is too restrictive to allow the social media team to implement the action plan, then you may need to rework. Call it your ‘guidelines’ like IBM, or the ‘ethics statement’ for blogging, it doesn’t matter, but you need to do three things with this policy:
1. Set guidelines for the behavior, boundaries, and limits of your employees
2. Set guidelines for behavior by operational roles within the company
3. Set guidelines for your audience on what you will or will not allow on your site/blog/profile/comments
These might all be in the same document.
When you begin to build this policy look first to your email policy. For some professions like accounting, financial services, health care, email policies have been around a long time and can at times cover everything you need. Additional steps in building a policy that supports your culture and goals as indicated by the Social Media Business Council
Several wikis are being constantly updated by the social media community with links to public social media policies;
What have you posted for a social media policy on your company Website?
In the business to business (B2B) space the buying and selling relationship has changed.
When was the last time you sat down with your clients and socialized?
The disconnect has been accelerated by access to information via the Internet. We trust our referral network and contacts in our social ecosystems more than the sales professionals who represent the products and services we buy. Those of us in the sales engineering role, as I was, have had to change our process. Developing social business relationships through social media as well as traditional channels can accelerate the process and we need to consider SocialCRM solutions to help sales professional manage this.
Thirty years ago, when I first came to Wisconsin as a young sales engineer for a bearing company, I called on Harley Davidson. I enjoyed being a resource of information for the Engineering department, negotiated a variety of contracts with purchasing, worked with the manufacturing team on problems with products, and tested new designs with the R&D team. I spent at least 4-8 hours each week working and socializing with a variety of employees.
This time allowed me to get to know them. I could appreciate the internal dynamics of the people, politics and business. It also made it fun and successful for both sides. The evangelism from everyone – engineers to the machine operators – in their support of the product was electric. And no doubt about it, they were fun to be with on a personal level as well.
In fact it was due to that very personal relationship, that I was able to help solve a problem. A product defect literally shut down the production line at the Capitol Drive plant in Milwaukee. I was 9 months pregnant(and my due date) but still managed to deal with a problem on the manufacturing floor. I helped test product to OK enough to keep them going for the next two days. You don’t do that for just anyone!
Today, the buying-selling cycle is vastly different. Access to information allows the “company” to do their own research for information and sourcing from companies far and wide. Referrals and recommendations come from contacts on the Internet are trusted more than the sales engineers (like me) that visit them in person. I am using social media as a “social business relationship” development and networking tool. Used strategically, with a plan and business goal in mind, both outside and inside sales professionals can make their time more effective as well.
I am not alone. A recent survey by OneSource shows that sales professional indicate that a mix of social media and traditional information are the most effective in qualifying and prioritizing leads.
In today’s companies there are 5-8 people involved in every purchase. You may not meet them all during your sales visit or ever. Nonetheless, the ability to understand the business, social and political connections within an organization is important. Managing your connections on social sites with a business focus is admittedly difficult from a time management standpoint. There are new tools that are being developed to help.
Just like Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems manage business relationships, SocialCRM solutions manage the relationships outside the firewall in the social space. It could be as simple as a spread sheet or as complicated as a traditional CRM like SalesForce.com. I have been using Xeesm for the past year and recently started using the Xeesm Edge (SocialCRM) solution. Xeesm is one of the leading tools that provides ability to manage the social side of the equation in terms of listening and engagement. I also just recently started to evaluate Gist from a due diligence perspective. Watch for a future post on the comparison.
We need to consider social engagement one person at a time. If I were to apply Xeesm today in a social business relationship with Harley Davidson, my efforts might look something like this this. Build a Flight (basically a group in Xeesm), add the names of possible contacts within Harley Davidson I find in my social spaces. This is where I will manage and track my touch points and contacts as I move from stranger, to connection, to opportunity, to proposal and ultimately to a sale. Over a two week period of time, my activities might look like this
Day 1 – review all social sites that Harley Davidson as a company is present in. Review all employees I can find in social spaces who are currently employed. Evaluate my connection depth.
Day 2 – Listen/Read several posts by individual people and on corporate blog
Day 3 – Chime in the conversation
Day 4 – Comment on relevant blogs, forums, groups
Day 5 – Ask or answer a group questions
Day 6 – Make a introduction to someone
Day 7 – Suggest an interesting site or post
Day 8 – Invite key contact to my own group
Day 9 – Have a conversation over the phone
Day 10- Bring others to the conversation
The important thing to remember is to care but not sell. Be social first and the selling comes at the end.
Xeesm gets all your social links in one place for better management
Best practices for managing and choosing your social media profile name is not discussed but should be. Your name, is of course, your ultimate personal brand. Gone are the days of cute but anonymous profile names. In the age of authenticity and network building, people find you by keywords, real names and your email. Managing your online reputation can be best done if your profile name is claimed across all the social media channels you intend to use now or in the future. Finding the right tools to help you manage all these social sites is the next challenge and solved by a social business application like Xeesm.
Consider first your reasons and goals for being on social media sites. Just as a business should answer the question of ‘Why’, you should also define your goals and objectives for any particular site. Whether you are managing your online reputation, a budding entrepreneur, connecting with alumni friends, looking for a job, changing careers, or looking for venture capital be clear about what you are doing here to define what you need to accomplish.
You should first make a list of the different variations of your name that are acceptable. If you have a more common name, your middle initial is a must. Use nicknames only if you are also known in business by that name. My brother is a third generation Donald with his son also called Donald (IV). He has been know by the name “Skip” since he was 3 years old. I don’t even think his business associates even know his real name. In that case he would use his nick name incorporated into his profile.
There are several sites that can save you some time to find out if your name is available across several social sites at one time. Knowem and Namechk are two of the more popular ones. Both are continually adding new social sites. Knowem has monetized the service nicely by adding the paid feature of creating your profiles on any selected sites for you. They even have an ongoing service
If you have an understanding of your goals and have created a strategy about your activity you should know the type of social media sites that will best serve you. You can choose to signup for those sites one at a time or claim them all at one time (its just time and money after all). Just as we would recommend using the same profile picture across all your social profiles, especially if you are new to social media, use the same profile name across all your sites if you can.
As a business owner, author or even a celebrity, its important to reserve your name. There is some squatting going on for user names, so don’t regret waiting around to claim your name.
If you haven’t done it yet, several of the top social sites provide ways to customize your personal profile. If you are on Facebook go to www.facebook.com/username. If you can’t get your first choice it will suggest other variations for you. If you are building a business page on Facebook, you can’t actually name your page with a custom URL until you have 25 or more people following your page (or liking as the terms go these days).
Twitter does let you change your profile name in midstream from the settings page of your profile, but you will have to let your followers know about it so they can find you in a search. One of the key points in Twitter is to make sure your name in the account settings is your full name, and then if you have to shorten it for the username, its possible to find you under either variation.
LinkedIn is the one place to customize your profile URL to your complete name. Although you can change it, you do want to promote your LinkedIn profile link, and making changes just doesn’t help your presence. You can edit the URL under Edit My Profile tab and click on the edit link beside the URL link in the boxed profile section of your profile. Remember no spaces or hypens as the characters are limited.
I have found that on Youtube and Slideshare that I have taken a slightly different approach. On Slideshare, a social site for sharing presentations and documents, I have classified my account name under my business name (Wendy Soucie Consulting) as opposed to my personal name, even though my personal name is the actual URL Slideshare.net/wsoucie. On Youtube I have created a Business channel under Youtube/wendysoucie and then created a separate personal video channel for miscellaneous videos that don’t fit with my business focus directly but which I still want to share.
One tool that I have used to minimize the problem of managing social media site links is Xeesm.com. It has a free social address link page and it lets me add as many links here as I need while only using one link on my emails or my business card. This is one site that you definitely need to create with your fixed name as you can’t change it later.
Take your time before you decide, but the default will be the name you enter into the first name and last name fields. If there are multiple users with similar names, but default it will auto generate numbers to add to the end. I don’t think this looks professional at all – so before you save it, try to find another acceptable combination with your middle initial etc.
Your name is your personal brand. Don’t let someone else be the first to abscond with your identity. Consider your strategy, your goals, check what’s available, claim it and then manage it with Xeesm.
Did you get your name?
