I’ve been pondering Scots post for a while as I was tickled by the thought that social media helped dinosaurs to dance. I often have conversations with clients that bemoan the fact that their staff are using social media and they feel that they need to implement firewall blocks or filters to prevent their staff using social media in their working environment.
But draconian policies or guidelines aren’t going to work. You will drive your staff to use social media on their mobile phones, or pop down to Starbucks for the free Wi-Fi. You have to accept that this is here to stay.
Your future leaders will not stay in your company to rise up the ladder if you don’t let them socialise in the way that Gen Y socialise. Marketing teams are investing in social media marketing as there’s a higher growth rate of success. There seems to be little executive interest in social media according to eMarketer.
There needs to be interest from the executives. This is not going to go away…
So how do you position your social media implementation plans in order to convince the detractors in your organisation that the person to person network is the way forward?
You need a policy and it needs to be good. it needs to be followed and it needs to be monitored. For this, you need to ask the key questions of your organisation. What the business wants, what the employees are permitted to do, and what the interaction with the community will be. Amanda has done a great post here on B2B social media policies
You need to decide how to get sales from your efforts. Budget holders want to see a positive ROI or they will not commit. As Adam says, it gives you a much better level of interaction if you can add your customers social media profiles to your customer database. You’ll be able to engage with them at a whole new level. Think about which sites to focus on. Neal has some good tips on his post.
You need staff to execute on your social media plan. You need to position this carefully as this is a cost to the business. 60% of businesses don’t have staff dedicated to social media according to Helens blog post. Without staff to engage, or without time to engage you will not have success.
You need to measure your success in your activities. 34% of B2B firms don’t currently do this. You need to have a baseline and measures to make sure that you can grow your figures and improve upon the metrics that you have set.
You need to measure your success in your activities. Does repeating this twice emphasise this enough. it’s really important!
Your customers want you to be credible. Get a blog. Talk on your blog. Demonstrate your credibility. The company will want to see column inches, positive PR, visibility. A blog or blogs from your employees will add to these column inches as your presence increases.
You need case studies. Find recent ones that are relevant to your organisation. Position them to the budget holders who want to see the bottom line, not the amount of fans, page views or ‘Likes’ They want to see revenue. That’s why case studies like the Old Spice campaign works. It led to an uptick in sales. Sales matter. numbers matter.
And if they’re still not convinced. I’ll come and talk to them about the business value of social media and why so many companies can get business success by following some simple guidelines. 🙂
Eileen's Digital Technology 