Will you be my facebook friend, Facebook friend, Facebook friend? You know the type, the digital equivalent of someone that whistles around networking events collecting cards with a ruthless intensity, discarding people like sweet wrappers as they surge towards their KPI of how many they can collect in an evening.  I know they exist, I’ve met enough of them.  That’s why I don’t connect with everyone on Linkedin, I prefer to connect with people that I’ve met in person to keep touch of someone where I have a common interest or business opportunity.

What is nice however is when you do get to meet people as a result of social media.  When something comes off.  When an on-line interaction goes off-line, then gains further traction.  Social media then turbo boosts that relationship, making it more relevant and allowing you to develop your relationship further.  It isn’t the silver bullet as everyone would have you believe, it’s just another tool in the box, albeit a bit like a Swiss Army knife, multi-purpose in its action.

I’ve lost count of the people that I’ve now met on social media that have turned into really solid contacts and friendships.  Without social media we would have never met.  It brings together communities and common interests, like a laser beam on the world, picking people out that might have a propensity to collaborate with you, help you or do business with you.  This is the bit that many businesses still don’t get. They still think it’s about Facebook friends, endless hours of wasted time posting irrelevant status updates and non-profit generating activity.  Deployed badly, it can be.   Deployed correctly, it’s quite the opposite.  If your business thinks that a physical networking event is a good idea, then you need to also look on-line too.  Networking events can be hard work sometimes, you don’t always get quality, you might get quantity.  Take it online and you might increase your propensity to speak to your target audience.

When did you last survey your key customers? Do a bit of research about how you’re doing?  Couple of times a year?  Annually  Never?

A survey is different from – let’s say – a peer to peer relationship.  We can maintain those, nurture them and pay attention to them.  However, in larger businesses which often rely on a spiders web of contacts between two businesses, it’s amazing how opinion can differ.  Leaders aren’t always connected with the detail.  That’s where a survey can come in and give you a healthcheck, beyond the parameters of “do we like each other as people”.

The trick with surveys is to keep them short.  Don’t expect too much of people, they are busy with their own stuff.  If you keep it concise, targetted, simple and easy to complete you will get greater response.  I regularly use Survey Monkey, a free cloud based application, which allows you to create a basic on-line survey for free.  All you have to do is decide your questions, decide what format you want the answers in – multiple choice etc – and then publish the URL to your customers.  Easy as that.

Well, it’s easy is you really focus your questions down and make them relevant.  Surveys have to give the recipient a right of reply.  Not everyone is comfortable with being “totally honest”.  I like Survey Monkey as it is done anonymously, so you tend to get to the real truth.

Sometimes it can be difficult to read difficult things, sometimes people fill them in when “in the grip” of a difficult situation, so the timing triggers a negative response.  Regardless, they should always be seen as an indicator for you to take action and investigate further if things aren’t going your way.  It’s surprising what you can learn and in our world of “user generated content” the most important voice we should be listening to – is our customers.

I told a social media agency off the other day. They made an approach via e-mail to me enquiring whether I integrated Social Media into my PR deployment. The e-mail was personalised, written by someone, not an e-shot. I wont embarass them or the agency by naming names. As an agency pedalling Social Media, the very minimum that I would have expected is that, prior to any approach, they should have already checked my social media landscape. Pretty basic. Had they done so, they would have seen that I already use Twitter, Blogging, Youtube and Linkedin as part of my personal and business communications. Now, if they’d of said, “we’ve done a scan of your landscape” (because were a social media agency) and we think you could improve your digital footprint like this…., then fair enough. Approaches like this, are inexcusable to me nowadays. I’ve blogged many times about Time, Attention and Trust (T.A.T) and how it’s never been easier to investigate your potential prospects (see this post for further info). It goes to show, that the smart businesses, individuals and agencies are using Social Media in the right way. To research their prospects and tailor make their approach. The less savvy agencies out there aren’t practicing what their preaching, not the smartest advertisement for their business or for social media as a serious platform for business generation.

Business talks a lot about creativity and often gets creativity mixed up with innovation.  Attending the Drum Roses awards in Manchester last night, I was really impressed to see some of the amazing work being generated by advertising agencies from the North West of England.  Advertising agencies rely on talent to generate the next big idea.  One particular piece of work which picked up a raft of awards last night was this.  Following the harrowing death of teenager Sophie Lancaster, her mother – Sylvia – set up a foundation in her name to educate people to be tolerant and understanding of sub-cultures.

It is a tragic story.   If there is one small sembelance of good to come from this, it is that, this wonderful piece of work was created.  The agency concerned, deserved their awards (which ran into four of five gongs, for this one piece of animation on its own).  It inspires me to really further believe in the power of creative thinking and to also continue to challenge yourself to do new things and think differently.  We can’t all be talented creative directors in an advertising agency, however we can push the limits of our own individual creativity to stay fresh and leave a mark.

“Social media is not a unicorn, it’s a horse!”  That’s how I opened up my bit of the panel session at the SAScon conference in Manchester today, when asked about the role social media plays within my business at Brother, highlighting that is should form part of an overall marketing plan.  The panel was exploring the challenges of actually getting social media going in business.  Rather than write a massive long blog about it, I’m going to bullet point the key points I made (in no particular order): -

1. T.A.T is what matters nowadays.  Time. Attention & Trust.  See earlier blogpost about it here.
2. Choose your channels carefully and only do whats relevant to the outcome you want.
3. B2ME is the new B2B.  Blogpost here.
4. Keeping relevant in peoples lives is what matters.
5. Engagement should lead to marriage.  If you are going to get going with engagement, ultimately you want that person to be a customer or stay a customer, that’s the end game or don’t get engaged.
6. Social media promotes authenticity and transparency and can create emotional connections with customers.
7. Getting it all going can be hard work.  I personally drove it in my own organisation.  If you don’t have the buy in from the leaders, it can all end in tears if the going gets tough.
8. Create a framework.  Develop a policy that is relevant to your business, don’t borrow someone elses.
9. I.T. have to be on board.  I’m fortunate in having a supportive European IT Director.  In many business they can get in the way or be a barrier.
10. 61% of businesses say sales and profit are their key drivers yet 64% of people practicing social media say it is hard to measure (source – econsultancy survey).  Social media should form part of your overall campaign integration, not be mutually exclusive of it.

Social media is a trend not a fad.  It’s here to stay.  Customers are no longer king, they are KING KONG (didn’t manage to get that soundbite in).   We all have intolerance of bad service and we have the tools to tell others.  If you want to win more customers, win their hearts and their minds and then let the six degrees of separation do the rest!

Speaking to a roomful of executives at Old Trafford today (second time in a week), I focussed on Time, Attention and Trust as they key things that they need to pay attention to.  As the people responsible for deploying shared services in their organisations, I argued the case against the “dark forces” of too much process control and reporting.

Too often, initatives are deployed in businesses which fail.  I know this as I’ve been there.  I’ve made the mistakes, got the battles scars and the T-shirt.  Making or breaking a new initiative is as much about the time and investment you make in people as it is the brain power you put into process re-engineering.

In life, we are battling with lack of time, low levels of attention and low levels of trust.  It’s a conseqence of life, we’re working longer hours than ever before, life is not about work/life balance anymore, it’s about work/life blend.  Breaking through into peoples thinking, is all important.

To win the hearts and minds of our customers, we have to stay relevant.  To re-invent processes, bin others, test, refine and improve.  Large scale, enterprise-wide initiatives can be years in deployment from original design.  You have to wonder, whether they are still relevant, years later.  Change takes time.  Time is in short supply.  What do we do?

Stay relevant.  Build pictures of our customers.  Add value.  Intervene at optimum moments.  Move up the value chain.  Make ourselves indispensable.  Listen on social media.  Be clear about our benefits.  Stay passionate.  Connect people.  Break conventions.  Look outside our industries for inspiration.

Later this week, I’ll be presenting a short talk to a group of salespeople about social media and how it can help you “cut through” when prospecting for new business.  My thesis is that in a world where time, attention and trust are scarce within customers, interruptive methods of marketing have an unintended consequence.  That is, your intentions are good, you’re trying to inform a customer of a new product or service which you feel will really benefit them, however, due to their workload/pressure, they see it as an interference in their working day.

Let me give you a concrete example from today.  In amongst my post, I got two cold prospecting letters.  One – from a large advertising agency – was a chest beating letter of how good they were, how they had done a brilliant job for someone else, how many awards they had one and they included a free box of cereal from the client they did the work for.  So, no relevance, totally unpersonalised, they hadn’t taken the time to research our business, just expected that the brownie badges on their arm means that I should give them some time.  All I had was a crushed box of breakfast cereal.  Ahem.  I don’t think so.

Contrast that with letter two. A highly personalised piece.  My company logo featuring prominently.  Letter signed by the MD of the business, with full contact information to the decision maker.  Referencing things that they had seen about us in the press, things that you can pick up off of my social media feeds, offering solutions to those forthcoming projects.  Which did you think had the cut through?

I call this “B2ME” marketing, I’m always banging on about it.  Social media channels such as Twitter, Linkedin or Blogs allow you to quickly establish the movements, challenges, projects, problems and successes of your potential customers and create personalised communications to them.  Clearly, you can’t do this if you are – say – a credit card company, handling millions of customers.  However, if you are a B2B brand, targetting specific decision makers within key target accounts, frankly, you’ve no excuse to be sending plain vanilla letters.  They are a waste of time.  A waste of resources.  And have the opposite effect that you are intending.

So, to all salespeople out there, selling to large and major accounts.  To hit your OTE (On Target Earnings or Commission), you can powerfully use social media channels to incresae your “Opportunities To Engage.”  By doing this, you can learn more about your target customers and offer meaningful solutions to them.  Simple as that.

Shopping. We all do it.  Some on-line, some off-line, some new, some second-hand.  The High St. continues to change in front of our eyes as traditional retailers struggle to pay the rents, when up against the internet business model.  So, shouldn’t all shops be dead now?

Of course the answer is no, because the internet doesn’t satisfy the emotion of immediacy.  Retailers have us clearly segmented into our demographic groups, they know what we buy, how we buy, when we buy.  Heaven only knows what the Tesco Clubcard database could tell us about human behaviour, that probably explains the constant store re-layouts, which confuse the hell out of all of us, but continue to contribute to their results.  They use the immediacy concept to entice us into impulse buying, trading up, cross-selling and filling our baskets up.

I used the acronym “I-WIN” above relating it more to higher ticket goods.  What that stands for is “I Want It Now”.  That is, I’m in the market, I’m active, I’ve got the money and I am a hot buyer.  Men particularly – when in this mode – can be  hugely impatient.  There are generally three stages that buyers are at when they’re shopping: -

1. Absorbing (Not in the market, but their minds are absorbing, taking in stuff).  Seeing ads on TV, general branding.
2. Researching (Thinking about the purchase, reading reviews, comparing).  Browsing in shops, reading reviews, comparison sites, sourcing suppliers.
3. Active (In the market, price checking, ready to buy).  Using price comparison engines, searching for vouchers, visiting specific shops.

Your sales and marketing strategy needs to cater for people in all three stages of the buying cycle.  Generally, it’s a pyramid shape with stage 1 at the bottom, stage 2 in the middle and stage 3 at the top.  The bottom being the large bulk of your market at any one time, the top representing the tip of the pyramid, smaller, more focussed buyers.

When you have a customer in “I-WIN” mode, they are either in “distressed purchase mode”, that is, an event has forced them to look for a product (due to technical breakdown) or they have researched, selected and are now choosing a product.  At this point, you must have it in stock or you will lose the “I-WIN” buyer. I come across so many businesses that spend money on demand generation activity such as Google adwords only to get people to their sites, without offering a call to action to buy or conversion to buy.  Businesses that spend money on newspaper adverts, to then not stock the items they are advertising.

With time becoming a rarity, buyers will reject any retailer that doesn’t serve up what they want, when they want it.  It’s a lesson to us all to get the basic hygiene factors right.  Product. Price. Promotion. Place. People.

I was sent a message on Twitter yesterday by someone I’ve known for a few years, it said “Your Tweeting, Blogging, Flogging, etc.. is just super powered. Immense effort…” (thanks to Mediacloud for the generous comment).

I’d had breakfast with her “super powered” husband earlier that morning.  He’s an immensly clever psychologist called Steven Sylvester, you can find out more about him here, I’ve worked with him a number of times on organisational challenges and also in my own development.  Steven is looking to further expand the number of clients he works with and we naturally touched on social media platforms as a way of reaching out to them, he was curious to know what steps he should take, where the quick wins were.  He is self-employed, time is money.

The conversation and subsequent Tweet inspired me to write this blog, just as a pointer on some basics if you are small business and want to know where to focus your effort.  Social Media is easy if you fully understand the impact it can have, how to successfully deploy it and how much time to spend on it (relevant to all the other demands of your business).

My basic advice to Steven was: -

Twitter

1. Tweet more regularly, aim for four to six per day.  Make them interesting.
2. Start/participate in more conversations.
3. Use Twitter to drive traffic to your blog/website.

Blogging

1. Post regularly, at least every couple of days.  Doesn’t have to be a long blogpost, just interesting.
2. Blog around relevant things in the news and give your perspective (it will assist in Google search).
3. Invite comments on your blog (you will see who want’s to engage, which may lead to business).

Linkedin

1. Use status updates differently to Twitter.  Say something different, consider it more of a weekly update.
2. Join relevant groups and participate in relevant discussions to your business area.
3. Actively encourage clients to write recommendations for you on Linkedin.

By doing these three things in each of these three platforms, I can guarantee that you will make more contacts.  If you break the golden rule, that is, by just going into sales broadcasting mode, you will quickly find it won’t work for you and your efforts will not yield much in terms of results.

The point is, that social media is all about management of reputation and building reputation, in the end, it should lead to sales, just in a different way than convention.  If you already network to get business, then just consider this an extension of the activity that you already put in.

I attended a conference in Manchester today called Brand vs. Demand, which aimed to address this issue. It’s not easy topic to tackle as there are many different factors which should dictate where you spend your marketing dollars.  Are you a B2C or B2B brand?  In an established or new market?  What your route to market is? And so on infinitum…

It’s the traditional tussle which exists between the Marketing Director and the Sales Director in many big businesses (except if you’re both in my case and you find the right balance).  Activity which tells a brand story, reaching out to the emotional decision making criteria of your customer vs. activity which generates instant leads and ROMI (Return on Marketing Investment).  In a recession, all the spotlights get turned to ROMI, for obvious reasons, sales matter, the bottom line matters.

Branding is easily overlooked, seen as a luxury, not a necessity.  Capital is impatient.  Most pieces of commissioned research tell you that for every year you underinvest in branding, it takes you triple the time to catch back up again.   Notwithstanding the above (what you’re selling, to whom and in what phase of the market you are), you need to keep your credentials out there.

When people decide to buy things, if you meet all the basic hygiene factors, price, performance, place, then other factors come into play.  Generally, people narrow their choice down to three brands, you need to be in that top 3 box of consideration.  If not, you’re not in the game.  So, getting the balance right is all about shifting your weight on the see saw, appropriate to market conditions, your budget and your objectives.  If you launch a killer product in a recession, get behind it, spend and take advantage of all the cheap deals out there.  Now might be a great time to get on and do some branding work to take advantage of your key competitor not spending, for example.

There was a promising line up of speakers today, some delivered, some didn’t.  The Rt. Hon Lord Heseltine was interesting, still bright as a button, despite his accelerating years.  He’s been the brains behind the Haymarket Publishing empire for many years and it was interesting to hear his views around printed media.  His prediction is that the specialist marketlaces continue to remain to be profitable as customers “don’t know what they’re looking for.”  As someone that regularly buys road cycling magazines, I concur with that, page by page consumption is typical behaviour for me and my bedtime browsing, however, things will change in time, of that I’m sure.

So in conclusion, you have to do both.  Big or small.  Recession or not recession.  Big budget or little budget.  What it’s for you to decide is how where you put the weight (your budget) on the see saw of spend (brand vs. demand)  Over time, it should be balanced.  In recessions, it can shift much more to demand generation (making the numbers) or branding (taking advantage of great deals), it’s for you to decide the “how, why and when.”

How are you spending your money at the minute?