Being liked versus trusted

The customer might like you as a salesman or sales rep. but that doesn’t mean they trust you.
People might buy from you because they like you, but that will be limited to smaller amounts of money as they need to trust the salesman for larger purchases.

Getting sympathy or being liked might be a first step in the right direction which might lead to being trusted.
On the other hand being trusted doesn’t mean you are being liked. The customer can trust someone without liking him.
Being trusted will help getting larger sales deals closed.

A trust relationship will last longer and is much stronger than being liked. Just being nice to people doesn’t mean these people will trust you for their decisions and money.

Trusted adviser

The goal of anyone in B2B sales should be to become a trusted adviser as this opens the number of opportunities with this customer. The main role of the salesman is to take away or to minimize the risks, the apparent risks or the perceived risks that are involved and result from with any purchase decision. The trusted adviser is one of the best persons placed to remove these buyers’ risks.
Being liked doesn’t bring value to the customer in his purchase decision. A trusted adviser will bring value for the customer during his buying just because of removing these risks.
The marketing efforts of the company can help building trust for the salesman with the customer.

As relationships in sales matter, both being liked and being trusted will help salesmen to get more deals closed.

Are you being liked or being trusted or both by your customers ?

Social media marketing is not advertising

Social media marketing is all about communication and not advertising. However many companies fail as they try to use it as push channels towards their clients or potential clients.
Pushing marketing or sales messages on to social media are unlikely to become real conversations. Moreover this might turn out negatively as only those who are against or upset will reply. Not exactly what you want.

Search statements and discussions

Instead social media marketing should start with investigating what lives on the Internet amongst customers, potential customers and competitors.

This can be done by using searches on:
- Google on specific sites
- Forums
- Twitter (using the search box).

Or using purpose developed tools:
- Social mention
- Whos Talkin
- Hootsuite

Listen

The next step is to listen in real-time to the existing conversations.
Any conversation or statement about:
- Your brand ?
- Your industry ?
- About specific services or products related to your business ?
- About your competitors ?
These can be good or bad.

Who are you talking to ?

Before jumping in, replying, answering to any discussion you should find out who you are talking to.
You have to become aware of their:
- Background: who is this person
- Location: local, country or far away
- Influence: in both social media as in real-life and business
- Relevance: not related, occasional or core

Search on LinkedIn (Google “Name LinkedIn’ works too) or on Klout to give you the required insight for influence and reach, expertise and network size.

Some marketing guru’s advice to mainly focus on influencers.
However:
- Every statement or discussion can be picked up and become important overnight.
- Behind every person there can be a client or potential customer.

Respond and discuss

Your answer should be to the point, authentic and compelling in order to have a positive discussion going on.

In any case don’t offend people and avoid starting a sales pitch.
Not:
- The corporate voice: exactly to avoid in social media
- Broadcast: responses should be personal as conversations are one to one
- High volume: immersing social media with your messages will not help
- Stale content: always the same stuff isn’t effective in social media (works in advertising)
- Egocentric: it is not about your brand solely
- Self-serving content: as this will only drive fans away

The importance is not your to show, expose or build your authority but to influence for your benefit.

Track

Then track the speed and type of replies with the aim of finding potential customers or business partners.

Are you dedicated enough for social media marketing ?

Social Media

If your social media is managed apart from the entire marketing mix, then why take the effort of investing time in social media ?
Often the social media is operated and managed separately from the rest of the marketing channels as if it is of a different kind just because it is new (was new). This can lead to a different strategy or approach of customers not fitting into the complete company or brand picture.

However in the end all marketing channels are a communication from the company towards the potential or existing customer. For them whatever channel they listen, read or view doesn’t matter as it is a communication from the vendor.

Marketing Mix

Your marketing mix should include social media as it has become an essential part of your marketing. The marketing budget should be managed over all the channels and all efforts together.

Managing and treating your social media marketing separately your efforts and investments are likely to be wasted.
All of your Tweets, Facebook messages, bog posts and blog or forum comments should be a part of the total marketing mix.

Your marketing should:
- Form one unit
- Having one message
- Consist of one strategy
and include your social marketing too.
Else you will waste time, effort and money and might end up with different strategies.

Is your social media marketing included in the marketing mix?

The Conference decline

As Sales or Business Development we used to go to conferences in order to encounter people that could become leads and prospects.

Until the majority in the venue had sales purposes: from the speakers to the attendees: most are into sales.

The Social Media decline

Although the Social Media (like Linkedin, Ecademy, Viadeo or Xing) started out with discussion platforms with good intentions, it soon became apparent more and more discussion were turned into a sales pitch or the discussions were stared as a sales pitch.
- The speakers of conferences have turned into discussion starters.
- The salesmen in the audience have turned into discussion comment posters.

Exactly the Social Media face exactly the same decline as the conferences due to the majority being into Sales.
And if the discussion started is not a sales pitch it is likely to be a job posting.

Hence slowly the interest in discussions on Social Media will die too.

Do you participate or start discussions on Social Media in order to promote your business ?

Money versus time, effort and creativity

According to the laws of thermodynamics no energy is wasted as one type of energy is converted into another one. The same effect is present in marketing: money versus effort and creativity.

In marketing you can spend a lot of money on a campaign with little effort and creativity
OR
You can invest time, creativity and effort for realizing a marketing campaign without spending much money.

In traditional marketing it was and is mainly the amount of money spend on a marketing campaign that influences the result.

In social marketing money is of lesser importance as mainly the effort and creativity count for getting more or better results.

The more money spent the less effort or creativity required.
The lesser money spent the more effort and creativity is required.

Yin Yang

Yang is fast, focused, hot, aggressive, hard and solid: money
A marketer can spend a lot of money fast on an aggressive marketing campaign, that will only last as long as the money lasts.

Yin is characterized as slow, passive, soft, yielding and diffuse: effort, time and creativity.
A marketer can invest a lot of time and creativity in a marketing campaign without getting any results fast. However the effect of the campaign will last long.

What is your style: spending money or investing time, effort and creativity ?

MySpace

First all companies flocked into MySpace and then it died for various reasons. Probably advertising, spam and Facebook.

Facebook

Facebook started out for a limited target group, soon expanding to a massive population. As such marketing guru’s advised that all companies should have a page on Facebook as it was the (next) place to be and to get leads.

Twitter

Then Twitter shot from the nerd underground to fame after Oprah presented Tweeting on her show. So marketing guru’s hurried to praise the commercial impact of Twitter which made CEO’s or CTO’s to put messages on Twitter. Additionally customer service was almost handled through Twitter and using Twitter for customer feedback was considered as normal.

Google+

While Twitter is being overwhelmed by automatic posts and spam bots, and the user interface or certain features of Facebook are getting cumbersome or confusing, Google has started out with Google +. Although it was by invitation only, Google+ had a considerable level of sign-ups over a a few weeks: 20 million in 21 days.

After only 21 days there were already consultants portraying themselves as Google+ specialists although business profiles (company pages) are not available yet.

Although the first uptake was impressive,it remains yet to be seen if the growth trend will continue as Google+ is still a small player in the social media and the forerunner Google Buzz failed.

Business and social media

Should companies all aim for getting a company page on Google + (once it will be allowed) or have we learned from the past ?

All the time and money by companies spend on MySpace (and consultants) has more or less evaporated, indicating investing in social media website might not be a good investment having a risky Return On Investment. This impacts businesses having put their hopes on social media marketing for lead generation.

After having invested time and money in MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and probably some other social websites that have disappeared now, will you aim for having a business profile page on Google+ ?
Or don’t you see any advantage anymore as you have seen it all before ?

Questioning Social Media Marketing for small businesses

All marketing guru’s will tell businesses to use Social Media Marketing for driving leads and customer to their website/shop or engage potential customers.

However in case of a small business the use of Social Media for marketing purposes is less evident as for midsized and larger companies as:
- Their target market is localized geographically – no global or continent wide
- Their messages won’t be headline news
- Their frequency of posting messages will be rather low

Chances are small that small businesses will get followers – if any followers – on social media.

Social media presence

On the other hand these small businesses should have Social Media presence for:
- SEO reasons – it will help search findability and SERP
- Presence: an occasional message from a customer
Not having presence on Social Media is a fail as every message missed to get posted is a lost free opportunity to expose the company brand.

Social Media Marketing: investment of time and money

Small businesses should have social media presence, but should limit the amount of money and time spend on it. As all the social media services are free (except MySpace), getting an account or setting up a page (Facebook) is already a major step in the right direction. Additionally these accounts and pages should be referenced on the company website.

Starting a blog becomes quickly a burden as it requires posting on a regular basis (at least once a week) consuming time and effort. Thus a blog becomes an investment in time and requires creativity.

Also when having Social Media presence make sure you verify and question each content you publish as certain content could be interpreted differently. E.g. your expensive employee event pictures might give the wrong impression with customers.

The ROI of social Media Marketing is questionable and difficult (if not impossible) to measure.

Free marketing

Not participating in social media is turning down free marketing:
- Your messages brings exposure
- Every time someone tries to reach out to you on social media platforms
- Increase of findability in searches as social media shows up high in search

Social Media content ?

What to post on Social Media easily without spending much time or money:
- Your new products
- Your promotions
- Your season discounts or special deals
- The press releases of the products you represent
- The links to articles related to your industry
- The link to analyst industry reports – even if it is only an introduction/teaser to the report
- Your new content: every piece of new content should get linked in a message on Social Media
- Youtube, Vimeo or Dailymotion video – creating a video can be on the cheap

Just don’t put anyone (interns, junior staffers)  in charge of the Social Media is it exposes the company with a wider reach than any of your previous marketing.

Hope for traffic, engagement and forwarding: exposure

Just hope for people:
- Visiting your website thanks to social media
- Engaging into a conversation
- Forwarding your messages
For exposure on the Internet to the world

Not having Social Media presence will lead to missing opportunities.
Thus in the long run those small companies without Social Media presence will fall behind for various reasons.

Is your company present on Social Media ?

Many Social Media death claims

By just searching on the Internet you will be able to find a string of articles claiming Social Media is dead containing a series of statements and facts why social media is in decline.

Many reasons are given – many indications of decline.
- Less interest
- Me-too: early interesting adopter leave
- SOCIAL Media has become Social MEDIA
- Other forms of entertainment
- SEO of Social media kills it
- Spam
- Brands aren’t social
- Followers and friends are fake
- …

The Social Media hype cycle

As with all trends there is the hype cycle of:
- Technology Trigger with early adapters
- The Peak of Inflated Expectations: analysts, bloggers write about it
- The valley of disillusionment: after the first real uses with to high expectations
- The slope of enlightenment: the new hope or way to use it
- The plateau of productivity: generic use guided by consultants and specialists

Is Social Media in:
- The Valley of disillusionment right after the peak of inflated expectations ?
- Or has the plateau of productivity been reached a while ago and now it is going to decay for good ?
Probably the latter as the adoption rate and penetration within the world population has been massive already. MySpace, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter have (or have had) all hundreds of millions of users, thus the point of mass adoption has been passed.

Multinational corporations use Social Media: not so social

Social media has been tried, experimented and used by major corporations for their marketing with very different levels of success. Not just for one event or campaign but multiple campaigns.

Several well known brand names have swapped their budgets for conventional and even Internet marketing in favor of their Social Media Marketing.

Multinational companies have used all the platforms in the hope to have a viral campaign – only a few succeeded (Dove)

Moreover new functions in Social media Marketing in companies were created in order to lead the new marketing.

These are all clear signs that The Plateau of Productivity for Social Media Marketing has been reached some time ago.

Of course multinational corporations are not so social.

- MySpace is ever declining is popularity
- Facebook still has many users but the use per person is declining
- Twitter has been overrun by bots and people spamming and at the same time Twitter having trouble to make money
- LinkedIn has their users have a demand: getting a job or better job
- Google+ might have gotten lots of sing-ups but how few are migrating from Facebook ?

Noise instead of original content on Social Media

Currently original content on Social Media is hard to find. There is too much noise in the content on these social media by people who are marketing or selling stuff.
Additionally the content is getting buried by clever re-targeting advertising on these platforms. The real original content without marketing or sales intentions has become suppressed and almost extincted.

If Social media is no longer the place to be or to spend time for people (this happened to MySpace and will happen to the other platforms too), then Social Media Marketing will decline rapidly too. Moreover as the Return On Investment (Social Media Marketing ROI is hard/impossible to calculate) will decrease too.
Social Media marketing has just become another channel besides printed advertising, online advertising, TV ads, paid editorials, product placement, … and it could decline rapidly and significantly if people aren’t interested anymore to follow someone or to be a virtual friend.

The hype of Social Media Marketing is over.
RIP of Social Media Marketing is near.

Do you still follow people and companies on social media ?
What about your friends on Social Media are they any real ?

Fast and slow fires

In a traditional marketing campaign like advertising, email campaign or direct mailing you measure the ROI (Return On Investment) from the beginning to the end of the campaign. As soon as the campaign is over the effect is gone or almost gone as there is little or no influence afterwards.

A social media marketing campaign however is long lasting: you know when you start it, but you never know how long it will last. For example we still have a few blog posts driving high traffic from 3 years ago. So measuring the ROI becomes more complicated as the result and return can build up slowly over a long time span. Some social media efforts didn’t have much effect in the beginning but were long lasting. Others were an instant hit but their influence evaporated rather soon.
So having fast and slow fires in social media marketing.

So in order to measure the ROI of a social media marketing campaign or effort you need time and patience.

Initial investment

Measuring a traditional marketing campaign has the advantage that the initial investment can be measured easily – for example:
- The press release writing and distribution
- The creation of the ad and the ad space bought

In social media however the social is a part of the investment that has likely has happened before the start of the new campaign. The company or product has already:
- Followers
- Links into other social media
- Subscribers to the blog
- Generic Internet presence
Hence calculating the initial investment already becomes difficult as you build upon an existing network or support structure, which is hard to calculate in.
The actual effort of the campaigning can be rather small: just a blog post or even a few Tweets that get the necessary attention can be enough.
The part of the initial investment that is easy to measure can be much smaller than the total investment made previously which needs to be spread over all other social marketing campaigns.

Impossible Social Media Marketing ROI

As defining the initial investment is hard to figure out exactly and the return of your campaign can bring in results during many years, how can you ever define the exact ROI ?

Still even if you can’t measure your Social Media Marketing you should listen, monitor and analyze each of your Social Media Marketing campaigns in order to score and classify each of them. You will make distinctions between successful, not so successful and failures.

The social media dream

We have been sold the dream that social media is:
- Free
- Available for all
- The users are the contributors adding the content (user generated content)
- The users promote the content – may the best win
A real democratic environment!

The social media business

However the social media sites own the content you create it after you hit share. They will control it and manipulate it for their own benefit.

This is due to the business for social media websites they need:
- Ever more page views
- Getting more users
- Getting more visitors
- Matching content with the adverting proposed to them
- More advertising
- Happy advertisers
They will use your content in order to reach their goals – not yours.

At the beginning of a social media website their goal is to attire crowds massively. Thus they will make sure the popular or eyeballs grabbing content is promoted. Them ore visitors and page views the better.
In a later stage once they have achieved a certain level of audience, they will aim for more advertising revenue.

If the content you are providing by posts, comments is not supporting their crowd attracting or advertising goals, then it will be manipulated in order to be less findable or just omitted. You are not in control.

Hence think twice if you are going to use your social media for your marketing as much of your efforts could be wasted.

Social media marketing in a censored world seems a gamble

Portals, Google, Napster, MySpace, Bookmarking, Youtube

In the early days of the Internet, portals promised to deliver all possible links to information and entertainment you needed.
Soon Google Search took over which brought the decline of the portals. However the clean interface of Google was not entertaining at all.

In order to fill the missing entertainment gap Napster, MySpace and Bittorrent were all the hype.
MySpace was quickly conquered by music groups bringing entertainment to the Internet.

Shortly during the iPod era, Podcasting came and went away again.

As search on Google is cumbersome for most people (what should you look for in order to get entertained ?) bookmarking (Reddit, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Digg, Mixx, …) became popular as people got direct links to infotainment and the bookmarkers got their ego boosted when scoring high.
The big disruption came from YouTube which brought short entertaining video on demand.
Abruptly MySpace died thanks to Facebook and Youtube.

When Twitter emerged as the massive platform for promoting links in real-time (and without constraints or cheating) the bookmarking era came to an end. However Twitter is not entertainment.

Google+ should aim for entertainment

Now we have Google+ which should challenge Twitter and Facebook – but still it won’t bring entertainment as User Generated Content as well as bookmarking links are not entertainment.
The Hangouts on Google+ could become entertainment places but that can only happen if professional entertainers see their benefit and can make money by creating these Hangouts. making money can only when they get a piece of the (soon expected) advertising revenue on Google+.

The quest for entertainment

Still the real quest is that people need entertainment on the Internet as they want to be entertained.
Currently Facebook, Twitter or Google+ doesn’t solve the quest for entertainment on the Internet.

- YouTube (and Vimeo, Dailymotion)
- Adult websites
- Gossip and Celeb magazines
are still the most entertaining places on the Internet but they bring not the entertainment of a TV show (Oprah, Soap operas).

What shall arise as the first real entertainment platform on the Internet ?
As the Internet is a big place a start-up with a proposition might already be lurking around.
As all marketers will have to become entertainers (even in B2B) the quest for entertainment on the Internet also concerns them.

Social media is no longer social

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and many others all started out as communications and online relationship building platforms without ads.
Now all social media have become advertising channels for highly targeted ads based on the user intelligence as they need to make money for their investors.
Just like soap opera’s they have become carriers of advertising under pressure of the investors.
In both cases the content draws in the crowd and the ads are carefully targeted.

However the more focus on advertising the less evident it becomes for users to communicate and build relationships as the platforms have become:
- Increasingly more complex in functions and features.
- Cluttered by ads
- Slower in loading the pages due to all of the above
The advertisements are becoming distractions from the real purpose of the people using it and the simple and clean layout is gone.

Social media is no longer social as it is just has become another advertising channel like soap operas.

Google Plus has started out without advertising while still under invitation only but it won’t take long before ads will appear once the gates are open for everybody.

Social media will go like portals

The question now becomes if it is still interesting for a company to:
- Advertise on social media
- Invest time and effort in social media

At the end of the nineties portals were all the hype. They were competing with each other by adding more and more functions and features in order to capture more market share. Their user interface became cluttered and load times increased.

At the same time the Google search engine became popular as it presented a clean user interface without any clutter. Then the decay of portals was evident.

Now the decay of social media is near as they:
- Are competing heavily on functions and features: Facebook vs Google plus / Twitter vs Tumblr
- Are more and more populated by bots
- Have become advertising channels just like soap operas

Moreover the content in social media is not getting any better as more and more companies post their editorials on social media and try to promote their products and services: companies take over from people on platforms intended for people.

Next after social media

If a new communications easy and convenient channel for the public emerges then social media will decrease in importance just like it happened portals.
The new communications or relationship building platform needs to be:
- Accessible easily and convenient in use for all without complex user interface like Facebook
- Bot free – unlike Twitter that has more bots than humans tweeting and re-tweeting
- Capturing the attention and be interest generating

Maybe the new communications channel it is already available – like ChatRoulette ?

Do you still use social media for business or product promotion?

Business goals

The business of Google is selling advertising on their search engine (Adwords) and aside content which they analyze (Adsense).
In most cases your business is related to getting found on Google. The more people find your website, the more likely to get leads.

These two goals don’t exactly match up.

Online marketing techniques

In order to get found and appear high in the SERP (Search Engine Result Pages) you will use SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques, Content marketing, Link building and Social Media Marketing. The better you score:
- The more your business will get found on the Internet
- The lesser you will buy advertising from Google

The power of Google

In order to counter all possible marketing techniques, Google can and will change the parameters of their search engine with the aim of selling more advertising.
Apparently they change it all too frequently in order to change the rules of the game.

Of course Google can change all possible parameters but still the search results need to propose valid and valuable content on websites which limits somewhat their possibilities.

Staying on top of Google

The best online marketing for your business is to excel in all possible aspects of online marketing, which requires;
- Abundant of content in relation to your products, solutions, market, industry segments or verticals
- SEO for each page of content
- Link building for as many pages possible
- Distributing your content beyond your website
- Engaging customers on Social Media in order to get even more content and links

The online marketing battle is not so much against your competitors but obtaining more presence on the Internet than any of your competitors in order to oblige Google to show your content high is as many search engine results.

How well does your company score on Google ?

During the DotCom era most companies got a website and believed they would be cool, become credible and successful instantly. Of course having a website wasn’t enough to be successful on the Internet.

The same is happening over again as companies have been going into Social Media by starting a blog, getting a page on Facebook and tweeting Tweets on Twitter. Social Media marketing has been portrayed as being cool for companies.
However Social media Marketing is more complex and requires more effort than just having some corporate or new product content on a blog, a Facebook page about the company and Tweets about the company, the CxO’s or the products.
Hence most companies made the same error again: they went with the flow (or trend) to be cool but didn’t questioned what was required to be successful in Social Media, just like they forgot to investigate how to be successful on the WorldWideWeb as it was call before the turn of the century.

1. Target customer audience
For a start you need to know your target customer audience. Who are your customers and your potential customers. Moreover you should know who amongst them would ever read or see any content on Social Media.
If you mainly sell to CxO’s of large traditional corporations, it is unlikely your Social media Marketing will ever have any effect or success.

2. Content
You need to have interesting content that will be interesting for your target audience. Not content that gets interest from people that are not from your potential customers group.
make sure your Content Marketing addresses your customers or potential customers.

3. Realism
Getting a lot of interest or comments from people who will never buy from you is only blurring the reality as you think you a scoring with your Social Media marketing, but in reality you are just wasting your time and effort.

4. Editing
Your content has to be written or presented in an appealing or pleasant way. Even the best and interesting content badly written or presented without imagination will score much lesser or even get hardly any interest.

5. Entertaining
People on Social Media will find information and select what they want to read or see and will decide nearly every second if they will continue to consume the information or not.
if your information is not utterly important or life threatening – which is in most cases – your content needs to be entertaining in order to keep the attention of your audience.

6. Measure
Whenever a company invests, thus also in marketing, it needs to calculate the Return On Investment.
Probably this is hard to achieve with precise numbers and amounts of sale, but at least you should try to measure if you reach your target audience or not.

Once having a website was cool, now posting content through Social media is cool, but in the end only lead generation, sales, generating revenue and making a profit are the real cool things in business.

How cool is your company in Social Media ?

Convincing the CxO for social media marketing

Marketing analysts, marketing guru’s and marketing bloggers have all long praised the use of social media for company marketing. This will have convinced most of the Marketing managers but what about the ever hesitant CxO level business executives?
How can you as Marketing manager convince your CxO?
Well NOT!

Awareness social media

If you have to convince the CxO level, you will never get real support.
All the CxO’s in the world have heard about Social media: at least they are aware of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn thanks to TV news and the press. They probably even have experienced it themselves or their relatives.
Awareness doesn’t mean they are interested or see the benefit.

Social Media Battle Field

Hence even if you manage to convince them to approve to use social media for company marketing, then they will be ready to shoot you on the Social Media Battle Field at the first glitch of problems or issues. They will never ever be on board with you for social media marketing. Forget it. Else the Social Media Battle Field becomes your war.

It is better not to try to change the mind of your CxO about social media marketing.

Be prepared for social media marketing

However be prepared for the case your CxO asks why you aren’t using social media marketing as then someone else has influenced and convinced them of the use of social media.
In that case it is not you. It is not your war.

Is your CxO in favor of social media marketing ?