Using Social (CRM) for Sales? Two experts weigh in

As you know, my view is that social can be leveraged as strategy, and the tools and processes for execution, for customer service, for marketing, for internal efficiencies.  I have never bought into the concept of using it for sales.  However, I am always interested in challenging my own thoughts and reached out to Chris Butler, COO of WeCanDoBiz (pro social sales), and Mike Muhney, Co-Founder of ACT! (who is stil not pro social sales). What follows are some insights they shared with me on their views and experiences.  I hope you learn as much from this as I have.

Q. What is your sales experience?

Chris: I have worked in Sales and Marketing on and off for about 20 years.  I started in the software industry working in the UK for US software vendors initially as a Pre-Sales Consultant and, as such have a pretty technical background.  I worked for CA as the UK and Ireland Global Sales Support Manager before joining Telenor as Head of Business consultancy with a large team of pre-sales guys working for me.  Following that, I worked as Sales Director for a large UK consultancy and then headed out into the big wide world of entrpreneurialism.  A couple of start-ups later, here I am.  I am a Member of the Institute of Sales and Marketing Management and have run many sales training courses for guys at all levels.In business you are always selling and if you are not you are not ‘in business’.

Mike:  Nothing short of absolute. I began my career with IBM back in the mainframe era as a sales guy. Back then, before you were given your territory, you had to attend a full-time 6-month sales training program in which you were nationally ranked. The bottom 10% of the class was fired. I graduated in the top 10% (6 out of 66). The training was nothing short of intense, professional, and renowned. I don’t believe any MBA student would find any 6-month period of their studies to be more intense than IBM Sales School.  I spent 5 years with IBM and won multiple “Hundred Percent Club” awards. 

I also held sales positions with Digital Systems (DEC’s largest VAR selling turnkey systems to CPA’s) where I was ranked #1 out of 42 salespeople after my first year, and #2 out of 42 my second year. I left there and joined Computer Associates, where I was ranked #1 again for their new national group selling their newly-released relational database product CA-Universe. I left Computer Associates to Co-Found Contact Software International, and Co-Created ACT!, the product that forever changed the way people manage their business relationships and which created the category known as Contact Managers. ACT! is also attributed with having started what became the CRM industry as well. ACT! is still on the market today, 22 years after its’ creation, and has never relinquished its 75%+ market share leadership role.

I afterword’s was recruited by Deloitte Consulting to become a Senior Manager in their CRM Division. This was a global position, of which I was one of only three global spokesmen and Business Development Manager for the CRM practice. Asked to focus on Europe exclusively, I developed a three-way strategic partnership European-wide between Deloitte, Hewlett-Packard, and Baan, capitalizing on the combined sales and marketing resources from each of us but primarily from HP to promote a Deloitte implementation solution. This strategic partnership within 6 months produced previously untapped multi-millions in added revenue to Deloitte by leveraging others efforts at no cost to Deloitte. I was recruited from Deloitte to become the EVP and GM of International Operations for Saleslogix, the SMB CRM company, which was later bought by Sage out of the UK in 2002. Since then I have been involved in a number of ventures as an investor, board member, speaker, and international business builder. Presently, I have just started a new software development company.

Reflectively, I can say that no matter what, every ounce of energy, at every point along the way of my career, I have been selling. It doesn’t matter what you do, be that law, medicine, politics, whatever, one is always selling. Before I came up with the name ACT! for instance, I code-named it YES!, which was an acronym for “Yes, Everybody Sells!” In fact John, right now right here on this blog article of yours I am “selling” my credentials to your readership. Selling never, ever, stops.

What is your experience with CRM?

Chris: I have been exposed to CRM systems of one variety or another since the day I entered sales and in fact before that, early in my career I wrote various client management systems in my days as a developer (yes, I did that too!)  In the intervening years I have used everything from proprietary in-house systems to Salesforce.com and Act! and everything in between.  In recent times, as I hope you will know, we implemented WeCanDoCRM within WeCanDo.BIZ bringing the power of CRM tools to the ‘social market’

Mike:  Multifaceted and intimate. Again, I Co-Invented ACT! and globally developed its’ market on the merits, benefits, and value of developing more effective business relationships through an extreme customer-focused lens. If ACT! is my child, and ACT! produced the CRM industry, then you can say I am the grandparent of CRM, there at the birth of both my progeny. Add to that the stints at Saleslogix and Deloitte, along with public speaking on issues surrounding CRM, I guess you could say it is certainly wider and deeper than most. I can also say that I’ve seen the worst side of it as well, unlike the Contact Management realm, where enormous failures have occurred and been ultimately either rejected or sabotaged by the very people CRM is primarily intended to serve – the salesforce – due to a host of factors outside of the control of these salespeople.

What is your experience with social media?

Chris:  I am currently COO of WeCanDo.BIZ.  We are a growing business network, operating globally despite our UK roots and predominantly in the SME/SMB space.  So from a business perspective, I have there from concept, through planning, development, implementation, growth and change of a highly dynamic social media business.  From a historic perspective, I first started to take notice of social media in the early 90s when the only real stuff out there was usenet bulletin boards and they certainly weren’t called social media then.  I have, as a techie, participated in building systems within corporates where communication was driven across heterogenous networks and messaging systems and in the world of the web I have been a keen user and adopter of social media technologies since the late 90s when I discovered Ecademy (although I did little with it at the time).  As well as being a Social Media business owner, I am also a singer and I use the web to carry my songs.  There is a huge convergence in technologies happening right now with things such as OAuth, OpenID and Facebook Connect making it so much easier to ensure that the message is consistent.

Mike:  Like many, fairly new. I have had a LinkedIN account for years, a Facebook account for 2-3 years now, and most recently earlier this year I have been using Twitter. 

I find LinkedIN nominally useful, primarily for forums. I nearly detest Facebook and find it virtually useless with an incredibly horrible user-interface outside of a family-and-friends perspective. (How’s that for taking a position?). Regarding Twitter, I do see, and have experienced, some pluses with it – but more down the road as it and its’ ecosystem produce better and more useful versions of it. I find it overwhelmed with “fluff” yet with some rare jewels that I have already benefitted from. I can say that I now cannot imagine any company, of whatever size, not having a Twitter account for a connection with its’ customers – as long as it is meaningful and balanced regarding frequency and content of messages.

The challenge will be to properly find balance with other competing activities to obtain maximum benefit with the least amount of effort to strike a “Useful Use” value to the user community.

How can social media benefit business, government, individuals today?

Chris: My answer to that is ‘with care’.  It is absolutely clear that social media can be used for huge benefit.  But as I have said in my blog, what you put out there is persistent.  Make sure the message is right.
 
For business, there are a couple of aspects worth exploring.  One is to find the things you need, be that sales leads, products, services and so forth.  The other is to tell the world what you do and that is where I would espouse caution.  People really don’t like being overtly sold things through social media.  That is becoming increasingly clear.  The messages are often annoying, often too regular and more than occasionally impossible to verify.  There is though, seemingly little wrong with announcing, say, a new product or service through a mechanism which invokes Twitter (as an example) BUT do it once and let the power of the initial message be carried by those who Retweet.  If the message is strong enough and people buy into it the job is done.  A highly effective method of using the power of the referral.  Trust sells.  Conversely, I would suggest you take a look at some of the #tags on Twitter like #fail (#btfail is a good example).  Bad news and public complaints are not good for business and corporates are starting to react.  There are already businesses in the UK who invest time and energy into monitoring any complaints they see on Twitter and responding (again – #btfail is one).
 
For Government it is an interesting concept.  A great example of government using social media is http://www.direct.gov.uk  This site is available on the web, via TV set-top boxes, via Satellite TV, Cable and mobile browsers.  You can pretty much do anything there from finding out about schools to taxing your vehicle to filing your tax return. Very powerful and very widely used.  Equally there is the Twitter President, Obama.  Case proven.  Social media can fund US election campaigns.  There are systems being developed within Law Enforcement within the UK to enable messaging to be used via various media (including SMS) to alert locally and in real-time should something untoward (like, say a wanted person be seen in your neighbourhood) occur.  So, examples aside, social media can certainly be used by government to drive awareness and to facilitate the citizens’ abilities to interact with it.  The biggest thing to avoid in my mind however is the cataclysmic problem of old grey guys trying to appear to cool.  Keep it businesslike
 
On an individual level, the benefits one can derive from social media are as myriad as stars, well, almost.  The great thing with social media is that it is what you want it to be.  Niche networks are growing for pretty much everything and the ability to cross-authenticate so much more means that the barriers to entry are lowering.  This part of the question for me is really a whole seminar series in itself so suffice to say,  Social Media for the individual is whatever you want it to be and the benefits are whatever you decide you need.

Mike:  The answer to this question is too long to provide for purposes of this blog. It is infinite, it is pervasive, it is powerful, it is ubiquitous, it is intoxicating, it is liberating, it is empowering and it is like so many other essentially wonderful things in life, inherently destructive and harmful as well through an endless list of abuse, misuse, “propagandishness”, and manipulative for ill-gotten intent about others. Like the internet with it vast benefits to us all, part of the cost of having it are elements surrounding porn (especially child porn), trafficking in drugs and people, addictive gambling, scams, etc, and social media tools, especially Twitter in my opinion, will have its’ own share of these “dark side” elements.

Can social media be use as an effective sales tool?

Chris: Social media as a sales tool?  Well as I have hinted above, my answer to that is be careful.  Try not to do too much selling.  The business is out there.  Go look for it rather than shouting about what you do too much.  By all means, use your website, traditional methods and everything else you do but get smart;  when we at WeCanDo.BIZ introduced our Twitter Sales Leads Tool we did it for a reason. There are about 27m Tweets per day currently and growing – and there are a lot of people out there asking for stuff.  We have just provided a way to go find it, simply and easily.  It won’t be the last leads tool we have included but nor is it the first.  Our Biz Needs have been generating business for suppliers since day one.  So maybe we took a slightly different approach but it all goes back to the old tenet: no need, no lead.  So, social media as a sales tool? Absolutely.  It is there now and will only grow.  We will not be the only organisation that works this out but we are the first to do what we have.  Again, focus on what people want and use smart stuff to find it.  I know I love it when potential members ask me what the benefits of what we do are and I show them lists of people who want the stuff they sell actually asking for it via social media.  And social media for referrals?  One Tweet saying how good someone’s service is powerful.  If that gets Retweeted a couple of dozen times, think what that will do for your reputation and potential sales? Now that is cool!

Mike:  If we define “sales” to mean those individuals whose strict focus is to target, develop, and produce more revenue in a true “relationship oriented” capacity resulting in a larger, along with more loyal customer base, disallowing the marketing and customer-service side of departmental efforts to provide customer connectedness, I would have to say “No – not yet”. I am not talking about a retail-oriented entity such as a hardware store attempting to “sell” to its community for instance, but rather the more professional element of selling that is one-on-one in relationship development. One-to-many is both inherent in the marketing and customer service side of the house, but not this type of sales and salesforce. Although the world has become more virtual in many aspects and even preferred by the consumer base (i.e. Amazon), some things will still remain personal and private in the selling capacity. As a salesperson within this definition, social media ranks way below the merits of digital-relationships via direct email between you and me as prospect/customer and seller. There is a point of impersonableness with tools such as Twitter that these types of salespeople will not want to wander beyond.

What is the most important thing for sales people to focus on today?

Chris: As always, knowing their market and working out the best ways to sell to it.  Using all of the traditional tools but also grasping that there is a truly new way of working which will not be going away (although it will certainly evolve).  Now is no time for sales people to bury their heads in the sand.  I won’t say evolve or die but I will say evolve or struggle and watch those who do change simply sell do more faster.

Mike: Summarily, the answer is, has always been, and will always be, the customer, and with the tools that we have been addressing here via social media, now more than ever to develop and retain a competitive edge and further differentiation from competition. The prospect/customer community is now more informed, more aware, and more powerful due to digital enhancements providing greater knowledge, and salespeople, and their companies, will have to themselves find the means with which to better find, keep, and satisfy the customer – with or without social media.

What are you or your company focused on today?

Chris: As a business we are focussing on expanding the capabilities for our members, existing and future, to do more business faster.  It really is that simple.  We provide the tools that make finding business on the web simpler and allowing you to manage an opportunity once you find it from cradle to grave.  We are looking to integrate more functionality and to increase the numbers of areas we enable to find real leads.  WeCanDo.BIZ is all about doing business; now!

Personally, I am spending a lot of time researching different areas for expansion and enhancement and keeping a watching brief on the big wide world of CRM, watching a lot of announcements and seeing some interesting stuff.  But I keep asking myself, specifically with regard to Social CRM, why is so much so-called SCRM just a rebadge with a snazzy internal ‘facebook’ type function?  Beats me.  I think I’d rather stick with our business network with its fully integrates Social CRM.  And I am also writing and recording more songs – look me up here if you like, I’d love you to sign up as a fan http://www.reverbnation.com/chrisbutler (see, I am human).

Mike:  I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you. I have just started a new company as a software developer targeting a market that makes the total population of CRM and Contact Management users look tiny in comparison. I am “underground” now for the foreseeable future, but watch for me later, cause I’ll be out there again.

Will government 2.0 be more successful than enterprise 2.0?

While taking a break today I saw two comments on twitter that I wanted to address:

• “#gov20 will fall flat on its face. An organization with no profit/loss motive is destined to fail. That’s both good and bad news.”
• “ IMHO #gov20 will be MORE successful – more need for collaboration, more info to share, fewer proprietary issues”

While not surprising, both comments feel wrong in my opinion. 

• The use of social, collaborative strategies, processes, and tools will play a central role for both.
• The right information will need to be delivered to the right people at the right time. 
• Security of data is key for both.
• Tools like CRM, Business Intelligence, and Social networks are cornerstones.
• Both must overcome the challenges of silos for both people and data.
• Both will count on this new way of doing business to deliver VALUE through more open communications, more transparency, and timely delivery of information.  For the Enterprise the ultimate value delivered is profit.  For the government the ultimate value delivered is a higher quality of service to the citizenship.

The first comment above assumes failure because the motivation of openness is not profit.  If that is the case then government would be a complete failure in all cases, not just for government 2.0.  Yes, I know government has plenty of problems but so does business.

The second statement, while correct in many ways, assumes that the deeper need for the success of 2.0 will lead to larger success.  The complexity, combined with the fact that not all government bodies need to embrace the 2.0 world, leads me to disagree.

What do you think?

John

Some random thoughts on operational responsiveness

Progress Software recently asked me to chat about operational responsiveness, an important focus area for them, an important phrase for all of us to think about. Note, I am not pitching Progress Software and received no payment for chatting with them about operational responsiveness. 

If you are interested, make up some popcorn, turn up your volume, and listen to my thoughts on Social media, CRM, and general business responsiveness.  Let me know what you think.

John

Personal Social CRM from Gist, Time to Get Excited

I had the pleasure of spending a few minutes chatting with Greg Meyer who is the Customer Experience Manager at Gist.  If you follow my blog you probably know I truly love this product, which is still in beta, for the way it helps me keep on top of recent news that impacts those people in my social community.

What is Gist?

Think of Gist as an individual Social CRM system.  You begin using Gist by configuring your social channels, the data, you want to pull into the system.  I, for example, pull in my LinkedIn contacts, my twitter community, my Facebook friends, and e-mails from various sources.  This data is then analyzed and, through the magic of some very clever engineers, you are presented with a view of all of the people and companies that you “know”.  I love the fact that it:

• Provides you with a complete picture of a contact.  Based upon your private information (your e-mails, for example) and public data (blogs, Twitter feeds), you can see all that is going on for that contact.
• Based upon perceived relationship strength an importance is assigned to each contact.  The importance can be overridden, however, enabling you to focus on the most important people in your community.  This importance controls what information you see first.
• All of the data from their tweets to their blog posts to emails that you have exchanged are at your fingertips.  While in Beta,  the data is there forever, once they come out of beta pricing will dictate how long data is available for searching.
• A view of contacts we share is available.
• Notes, as of the newest release, can be added per contact.  I love this new feature, it was my biggest complaint for Greg prior to the meeting.  Of course, the team at Gist coded it before I could say a word.
• Searching is very fast.  Finding contacts using a combination of simple search and filtering on tags makes it very easy to find who, and possibly what, you are looking for.

Is Gist Serious?

Yes, they are working hard, moving fast, and are using an agile development methodology enabling them to deliver new functionality every couple of weeks.  In the last update they added:

• Support for adding notes to contacts.
• Expanded Public Profiles.  I like where they are going here although I need to give this area more thought in terms of how it impacts (competes, compliments) LinkedIn and Google Profiles.
• Export Contacts & Companies to vCard files.

While I am a Microsoft technologist I am excited to see this team, under CTO Steve Newman, developing Gist on open source technologies.  It should benefit them in terms of short-term and long-term costs.  One thing to be aware of, if you are sensitive to where your data resides, it is in the cloud, not locked down in some data center controlled by Gist.  This should not prevent you from using Gist for personal use but should give pause to Enterprises with sensitive data requiring regulatory oversight.

How does Gist fit into your day?

Gist has become a part of how I do business very day.  For me, I use it:

• First thing in the morning, over my morning cup (s) of coffee.  I like to review all the new information for key contacts so that I can reach out to the right people at the right time. 
• Prior to meeting someone in person or on the phone I will check on the latest information about that person and their company.

It is truly a personal Social CRM system in it’s very early stages.   Stay tuned as there are a number of interesting changes that are coming down the road as they come out of beta and look to monetize (APIs, better collaboration abilities, more actionable information).  I’ll try to keep you up to date as it goes forward.

Is there anything else I can tell you about Gist?

John

Can Social Media Lead To More Open Government

As you know, I have been thinking a lot about the role that social media, social conversations, will play in the overall transformation of business.  We have all discussed engagement, relationship building, transparency, brand awareness, and other positive benefits to those that choose to participate in the conversation.  We have seen social and, while there is risk, it is good…

The use of social media in business has real potential in the following areas:

• Internal efficiencies by helping break down the internal silos that naturally form between disparate teams.
• Customer Service.  Social Support Communities are providing real value to companies today.
• Marketing.  Brand awareness, public relations, lead generation can all benefit from the use of social media.

The benefits of social media carry over to individuals, especially in terms of marketing/branding, and to government across the same areas as I listed for businesses above.  With that said, I was surprised when I read this post on govfresh.com discussing Reinventing Government.  When asked “What impact will social media have on getting government to make real changes around openness and performance?”, the answer surprised, disturbed, me when the answer was:

“I don’t see that they’ll have much impact at all. First, most people who use social media don’t relate to government at all. They aren’t activists; they don’t think about government; they can’t imagine really doing what is necessary to change things. Look at the health care reform debate. Organizations like MoveOn email us every day, trying to get us to email our congressmen. Meanwhile, insurance and biotech companies are donating millions of dollars to those same congressmen. To counteract the influence of that money it’s going to take people getting into the streets, marching, organizing, registering voters, and voting. That’s so far beyond what it takes to use Twitter that I have my doubts that social media will change government at all. We need a movement, not a better Facebook.”

What?  It might be just me but I really feel that someone missed a meeting.  This is the wrong answer, an example of someone failing to truly understand social media/conversations.  While I know several people who work in local and state government, let me be clear that I have never been a government employee.  However, and with that in mind, social media has to be able to benefit government in becoming more open, more transparent, better performing:

• The opportunity for internal efficiencies abound.  Government at every level, from my relatively small home town through the Federal Government, is segmented into isolated silos where communication is difficult.  The use of social tools such as wikis, chat, blogs, and Twitter/Facebook like applications will continue to break down those silos.  I know that many of these technologies are being used effectively today.
• The ability to streamline the delivery of services is being leverage in many communities (reporting potholes via websites, traffic reports and breakdowns via twitter, etc..).  Getting the information in real-time enables responding in real-time, reducing costs and leading to happier citizens.
• Improving brand images.  We have seen social media work well in political campaigns but it can also work well for improving brand/images at all levels.  If anyone needs to work on branding it’s government.

What do you think?  Am I missing the boat?

John

Can you identify the influencers in your market?

Is it possible to identify the true influencers in your market?  Can you identify the true influencers within your own company?  Can you identify those people who influence your own decisions?

If we can identify these influencers they would play a major role in the success of your business.  Working proactively with these influencers would allow you to maximize your customer service activities as you deploy your Social Support Communities.  These influencers would act as lead generators for your business and might be ideal, if they are companies, as partners to help close business.

How hard could it be to obtain this magical nugget of information?  I tried Twitalyzer as I know they suggest your influencers.  Unfortunately, they only listed one person who I even knew, none of them directly influence me in any way.

I don’t have the answers and would love to hear your thoughts..  Do you identify influencers?  How do you do it?

John

Your 2010 Social Media Plan: Who needs guidelines? We all do…

Before you read this post I would encourage reviewing the starting point of this series.  The need for social conversation guidelines exists for all companies but the guidelines need not be complicated.  Best Buy has done a great job of publicly posting their Twelpforce Twitter guidelines and they are a good starting point for you to review.  I love these guidelines for a couple of reasons:

• They are publicly available providing a level of transparency, something you should consider for your guidelines.
• Since the Twelpforce initiative is still an experiment in progress, they are evolving these guidelines as Best Buy learns more.  These documents need to be living documents, do not expect to write it once and have it hold up forever.
• Twelpforce members self-police and participate in the evolution of these guidelines.  Employee buy-in, true buy-in, cannot be mandated, involve employees in the process.

Read these, leverage these, they do a great job of hitting the key items you need to consider.  Also, remember that I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV.  You should chat with your legal team about the guidelines you put in place.  I won’t replicate the great work Best Buy has already done, but I do want to note some other key points you should consider as part of pulling together your guidelines.

Where do you start?

If you already have internal guidelines for code of conduct you should dust those off.  Those, combined with the Best Buy guidelines I noted in the beginning of this post, will make building your guidelines straight-forward.

Clarify who “owns” the accounts being used for your social media efforts.  This includes:

• Who owns the content created and distributed by the social accounts.
• Who owns the social accounts themselves?  Does the person who uses the account own it if they move onto another job or does the company?  Be clear as it will benefit everyone as not all accounts are created equal.  My recommendation is that:
  • Corporate accounts, those that include the company name in the account name (not description) need to remain in the hands of the business when employees move on. 
  • Accounts that are named to match individuals, like my JohnFMoore Twitter account, are owned by the individuals themselves.

Should you monitor compliance?

Yes, yes, yes.  If you have the right people on board they will self-police themselves, ensuring great service for everyone involved in your social conversations.  However, you still need to monitor that these conversations.  You can use free tools like Tweetdeck and Google Reader, or paid tools like Radian6, each have their pluses and minuses. However, if you are just getting started, download Tweetdeck and:

• Follow all of your company’s accounts, group them to more easily monitor the conversations taking place.
• Add Twitter search columns for your company name and/or your products.

Monitor and correct behaviors as needed.  Mistakes made on social channels are extremely visible.  Monitoring of conversations combined with a regular review process will ensure any small issues are corrected before they become large issues.

Do you have a social media policy in place today?  Am I leaving out anything that’s important to your business, government agency, personal brand?

John

Why do we insist on complicating CRM?

A couple of recent conversations have prompted me to ask this simple question… Why do we insist on complicating CRM?  While CRM means many things to many people (part of the problem, I guess) , we use our CRM systems to:

• Model relationships with customers, prospects, and others that matter to the success of our business.
• Store data that we collect from multiple channels to guide our actions and decision-making about how to work with those people, those relationships.

That is, at a very high-level, the purpose of our CRM, CEM, CIM, CMR, Social CRM, (“acronym do jour here”) systems.  CRM is also a strategy, another reason for the confusion when you discuss CRM with anyone other than those of us in the know.  Paul Greenberg, over this past summer, noted this excellent definition of Social CRM:

“CRM is a philosophy & a business strategy, supported by a technology platform, business rules, workflow, processes & social characteristics, designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted & transparent business environment. It’s the company’s response to the customer’s ownership of the conversation.”

Keeping it simple, the CRM strategy involves defining the right channels (phone, email, Twitter, Facebook, conferences, etc..), making the channels bi-directional (yes, customers need value in return), measuring results, refining, and doing it all over again.

While Paul says Social CRM is an extension of CRM I say it is simply taking those bi-directional channels and incorporating that information into your strategy, your tools….  Seems simple, seems right….

How these simple requirements are met, of course, require deep thought and requires new ways of interacting, new processes, and yes, new tools.  As I was discussing with someone on the Enterprise 2.0 site recently, you need to begin to recognize that your company resides in a very large ecosystem and that you must consider: 

• Conversations, social engagements, relationships, must be dynamically segmented based upon security needs, roles being played at the moment, sentiment, etc.. to ensure that the right participants are brought to conversations at the time they are needed, no earlier, no later. 
• As individuals are connected in real-time, historical data relevant to that conversion must be made available too.
• On all channels, social or other, companies must determine who the person is, the persona they are playing, and the right manner in which to respond to the user.  This might mean handing the conversation off to customer service, marketing, support, a combination of all parties.
• All conversations need to be mapped back to a central system, I’ll say CRM, and tagged according to the persona, the sentiment/tone of the end user, etc..
• As the end-user persona changes, even within a given engagement/conversation, the correct people on the company side must be brought in, again, with the necessary information to be immdiately useful.  In other words, you are not transferring them to yet another service agent where the customer must repeat everything they have already said.  Data is available immediately and people are brought in with that data at their fingertips.

My CRM friend, Wim Rampen, points out that I may have taken a wrong turn on my way to CRM enlightenment.  What do you think?

John

How Dell Outlet utilizes Social Conversations to generate revenue

Yes, you’ve caught on by now that I’m using the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday’s as an opportunity to take a short break from being completely insightful and witty.  Hey, I still am, but I figured I’d give you a little longer break while I share some more interviews from the leaders in the social world.  I had the great pleasure of chatting with Stefanie Nelson who manages marketing communications for the US Dell Outlet.

Stefanie, thanks again for taking your time to share this information, it’s helpful and I know it will benefit everyone to learn more about how Dell is achieving results through social channels.

What is your role with Dell?
I manage the marketing communications for the U.S. Dell Outlet, serving both business and consumer audiences.

How does social media fit in with your job?
For Dell Outlet, we are always looking for cost-effective vehicles with short lead times to help us communicate special offers. Social Media is a natural fit, as sites like Twitter and Facebook allow us to quickly post coupons and help sell excess inventory.

How do your customers react to you being social?
When we first started posting on Twitter as @DellOutlet in 2007, we intended to only post offers. We didn’t really understand the potential until customers started replying and asking questions. When we responded, the Twitter audience seemed very surprised and got really excited. It was clear that they really wanted to engage with us, and we were encouraged by the reaction, so we expanded our Dell Outlet social media objectives to include “improving customer experience”. We’ve been using Twitter to answer questions ever since. 

Do you use software, beyond Twitter, to monitor and engage on social channels?
I’m currently using CoTweet to manage @DellOutlet conversations on Twitter, and Dell also partners with Radian 6 for more qualitative monitoring and analysis across the blogisphere. In addition, Dell tracks sales, when applicable, via proprietary tracking URLs.

What return on investment have you seen for Dell Outlet by investing in social channels?
In addition to revenue (we announced in June that we surpassed $3 million from @DellOutlet Twitter links alone), we have also benefitted greatly from the increase in awareness. The press we’ve received has helped us put Dell Outlet on the radar of many potential customers that would not have otherwise know about us. While it’s not something we can replicate, I think it illustrates the importance of always looking for innovative ways to approach new media and new technologies. There are many opportunities to be “first” or “best” if you keep your eyes peeled. Combine that with a great Corporate Communications team, and enjoy the ride!

How many people are involved in social channels within Dell Outlet?
Currently, I’m a one-woman show for the U.S. Dell Outlet social media, which I manage in addition to  other demand generation  activities including email marketing, search engine marketing, online advertising, and affiliate advertising. It’s manageable, but not sustainable, so we are implementing processes that incorporate help from other Dell teams to handle questions related to customer care and tech support. Finding the right people and the right tools is critical to the success of such processes. 

How do customers react as transition them from social channels to the in-person experience?
In social media, it’s all about personal attention. The use of our “AtDell” Twitter handle naming convention (StefanieAtDell, LionelAtDell, RichardAtDell, etc.) helps to communicate that we are not a cold, impersonal corporate logo, but real people ready to answer questions and point you in the right direction. As a result, we are not necessarily transitioning customers from social channels, but are merely and extension of the entire in-person experience.

Any great stories from the real world to share?
I knew I really had to behave when I logged on one day to read “God is now following you on Twitter”. 

Stefanie, you had better be good with that kind of audience.

John

Your 2010 Social Media Plan, Start Your Blogging Engines…

Before you read this post I would encourage reviewing the starting point of this series. If you have already read it you still may want to review again as I added a little more background and the comments for the first post are great.

While Twitter is the doorway for social conversations, your blog is your house, a place where you can engage in deeper conversations with all that come over to visit.  As with all channels you employ for social conversations, your blog should continue to reflect who you are in a transparent fashion, should focus on engagement by avoiding one-way blogging, and should seek to add value to the entire marketplace.  In short, it’s not about a rabid focus on selling and shameless self-promotion.  If you want that, just buy some air time and run TV or radio commercials.

How do you get started?

There are some great post throughout the web that cover this subject at length.  The key points I want you to keep in mind, however, are:

• Work with your IT team to identify a blogging platform that you can bring in-house and maintain yourself.  If you do not have the technical team in place, find a blogging platform that allows you to fully customize the look and feel of your content and that provides you with plenty of storage space for images, videos, and podcasts.  You may need it.
• If you have branding and user interface guidelines start to use those to determine the look and feel of your blog.  Before you go live with any blog make sure it represents the business, don’t do it half way.
• Get a domain name for your blog and work with your IT team, or the hosting provider, to ensure that people coming to your blog will see something like yourcompanyname.com, it’s your name, show it.
• Ensure your blog enables sharing of content, place tools for bookmarking, retweeting, digging, of your content.  Make sure your messages are shared with minimal effort on your readers part.

Boring, I want to start blogging

While personal bloggers can “wing it”, your business should not “wing it”.     Your social conversationalist, the employee we hired earlier in the series, should pull together marketing and customer support/services to come up with a plan for your blog, a strategy, a series of measurable metrics.  Remember, the social conversation is led by marketing and customer service, do not leave them out of this conversation.

Your blog, as we have noted, should focus on adding value to your market place and as such should include this type of content:

• Guest posts by experts in your market.  These guest posts should not focus exclusively on how great your solutions are.  If your solutions fit the topic, highlight that fact, of course, but make the focus of these posts be on education.
• Include posts from your employees about their jobs.  Remember, people connect with other people, not nameless businesses.  Put faces to your business so that customers, and potential customers, can make these connections.
• Get your executives into the mix.  The executive team should occasionally weigh in, people want to hear from them too.
• Provide reactions to what is happening in the market as it happens.  As news about your key personnel, your company, your market,  is developing, react to it by providing your insights.

We have set the bar very low by stating you need to be delivering a blog post a week.  You should be able to deliver compelling content once a week, if not, why are you in business?

What should you be measuring?  For year one of this plan, let’s keep it simple as we will learn more, throughout the year, about what metrics are critical to your business success.  However, some simple metrics that should always be paid attention to include:

• Number of posts.  Hit those targets I gave you.
• Number of comments.  Comments and postbacks provide some insights into your influence.
• Standard web metrics like traffic, time spent viewing pages, etc, should also be measured.  You want your blog to be “sticky”, a destination people that people regularly visit.
• Subscribers to your blog via e-mail, through google reader, through any other source you can measure.  These are your “fans”, keep them coming back.
• Visitor source.  How successful are your other channels, like Twitter as an example, at bringing traffic to your blog.
• Visitor destination. Is your blog leading people into your corporate web site where they can learn more about you, becoming leads.  After all, this does come back to helping you generate leads, reducing support traffic, not just about making you a social media rock star.

While there is much more that could be said about your 2010 blogging approach, this will get you started. 

John