I spoke this week at Radio Ink Convergence on the Silicon Valley Microsoft campus with James Hipkin, Alejandro Reyes and Bryan Fikes. I thought the show organizers were spot on with this opening statement “Interactive Media is Radio’s Next Big Boom. You cannot manage it if you don’t understand it.”
Our panel was on Sales 2.0 and geared towards the sales teams. It’s a pretty big subject to cover on a panel in less than an hour, and as usual I’ve got a bit more to add. So let’s talk about social media and sales shall we?
The social media sales cycle
As I mentioned several times today, listening is the first step of any entrance to social media no matter what your business is. Who’s your market? Where are they hanging out online? How can you best approach them? Which networks have the most concentration of people you want to reach?
Remember, you don’t want to spend all day nurturing multiple networks right off the bat. The learning curve is relatively shallow for these networks, but all together they can aggregate into a mountain. Pick one or two to start. Establish your presence, make sure the brand is visible and the profile contains information about the station and who to contact for more information. Expand your reach later as your network grows organically.
Listen locally
For a local station leveraging the local social media sites is just plain smart. Get out there and listen for opportunities to help. Here’s a short list of social media listening tools that can help. The idea is to engage people where they are already comfortable and in language that fits the network instead of creating your own network and trying to fit them into your box.
Raise awareness
Can you answer a question, give directions or raise awareness of an issue by directing users to a particular program? Add worthwhile input to the conversations you discover and become more visible. Stick to the 80/20 rule. 80% of what you post on any network should be in support of others. Is there a local charity, school or event you can talk about? The other 20% can be about you, but you don’t ask for the sale at this point. We’re building awareness in the public sector, and if you’re interesting you will see inquiries from prospects. Be a connector within your network and others will return the favor.
Get to know your prospects
There’s a lot of information out there. Some might say too much. Like any other kind of relationship building you need to get to know who you’re dealing with. If you do some searches on me for example you’ll see that I’m a Mac user, I ride horses, love the California coastline and travel quite a bit. Any salesperson worth her salt sees the value in this kind of information to develop a relationship, right?
Prospects to leads
So you’ve attended the tweetups, had conversations with people on your blog, Facebook page or whatever networks you’re using. Now what? Use those listening skills you’ve developed to look for an opening to convert a prospect into a lead. Just because you met them online doesn’t mean you have to go through the whole sales cycle on Twitter! Use your social media presence to encourage prospects to subscribe to a newsletter. Call them on the phone. Send them flowers on their birthday. I don’t need to tell you how to take it from here now do I?
Evangelists
Probably the most touted word used by social media consultants is “evangelist”. The truth is; when you create relationships online and show you’re an honest forthright person making a living, when the station shows it’s support for the community, the people in the community support you back. When you send out a call for help for a promotional campaign they are more likely to respond to the guy they’ve been chatting with online than a cold call. Wouldn’t you?
How long is it gonna take?
Building awareness and goodwill, communicating with your market, connecting people who need to know each other, all help to raise your visibility and increase public awareness of what you do. These kinds of deeper relationships are going to show a much faster return than if you broadcast your message out to a pile of networks but don’t connect with individual users. That said, it’s not a magic bullet. Expect to see some returns such as personal connections in a fairly short period of time. Deepen those relationships without asking for a sale until you know you’ve reached the tipping point. Expect to nurture these relationships for a minimum of 3-6 months before you start to see a significant volume of return. Then watch it snowball and pick up speed.
Measurement
I’ll be the first to say it’s hard to measure the ROI on social media. How do you “measure” a relationship online that turns casual acquaintances into evangelists? What value does the evangelist have? What value do the evangelists’ networks have? Their networks networks? If you really want to dig into social media measurement KD Paine is the diva of measurement. Visit her site for a deeper understanding of how this all works.
It’s never over
Social media evolves constantly. Your relationships need to be nurtured even after the sale (maybe especially after the sale) like any other valued sales lead. The cool thing is, with social media you can continually feed your network of prospects, clients and future clients with useful information that enriches their day and keeps you in top of mind.
And there’s more!
I spoke a bit about creating a corporate social media policy and efficiency as well. Here are some additional links I think you’ll find useful.
Last but not least, if you’ve got questions put them in the comments below or shoot me an email ( Janet at JanetFouts.com ) or find me on Twitter. I love questions!
