Gen T…The Twitter Generation

Posted on October 12, 2009 by marc meyer

Is that possible to have? Seriously… A generation that revolves around and relies on Twitter; and wouldn’t know what to do without it? A group of people that start and end their day with a good morning and a good night to their Twitter network. Is that you? Gen T?

When Twitter was down or went down what did you do? When Twitter doesn’t do what it is supposed to do, what do you do? Do you rely on Twitter for your information about the days events? Is it your search engine for content, and content ideas? Is it your own informal little polling tool?

Twitter is an icebreaker for you.

Do you reach out to your network for restaurant ideas and places to go when you’re traveling? Do you share the mundane? As well as the exciting and earth shattering things that may happen in your life? How important is it that you Retweet something? How pissed do you get when you are auto-DM’ed? How much do you Tweet after the work day ends?

How does your work day begin? Does it revolve around starting up your favorite Twitter client? Do you share your wins and losses- your frustrations?

I bet you have a story about Twitter and how it affected your business for the positive. I also bet you could tell us about something bad or unpleasant that you were witness to on Twitter as well. I imagine you have a fairly healthy list of suggestions that Twitter could enact that would make it better for all of us.

How strong are some of your personal relationships versus some of your relationships forged because of Twitter? When you meet someone for the first time, though you have been tweeting for months or years on Twitter, what’s it like? Good, bad, better, or indifferent?

You are part of the Twitter generation.

This Tuesday’s #SocialMedia Tweetchat topic with @aaronstrout

Posted on October 11, 2009 by marc meyer

Social CRM – Lipstick on CRM or Transformational Business Model?

October 11th, 2009

We spend a lot of time on this chat discussing social media and marketing with details like implementing, measuring, strategizing, executing, engaging, etc. Let’s say we dial it in and our community efforts are going great and growing quickly. I say, SO WHAT! If you’re not converting these prospects and customers to do something then who cares. All this social stuff doesn’t matter if you don’t sell more stuff or keep existing customers on board longer by providing better service. Another way to look at it is turning regular customers into advocates and detractors into believers. This happens when you engage the customer quickly, meet expectations, deliver quality and consistency over time in an open and transparent way. Companies manage these interactions today using internal tracking systems like Customer Relationship Management (CRM). But wait, customers are not using old ways to communicate, they are using new ways to engage and interact with social tools. this leaves companies scrambling to figure out how to engage and interact from their internal legacy systems. Along comes Social CRM.

Everyone is trying to define Social CRM (great resource from Bob Thompson) in their own way and yet no one definition quite fits all needs yet. One definition by Paul Greenberg makes a lot more sense than many others I’ve seen. He says:

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.

But we are not here to define it, our intent is to educate a new legion of corporate soldiers – hell bent on infusing their companies with social goodness both externally and internally. So what does Social CRM look like? Here’s a possibility:

Traditional CRM: (sales) prospects become leads, leads become accounts and from accounts come opportunities. Sales people are managed with activity levels (# of calls, emails), funnels are staged and it becomes more operationally focused (read: process focused not customer focused)

Social CRM: in an online home improvement Q&A, a homeowner asks “what goes better on a kitchen floor, wood, carpet or tile?” A professional from a home improvement big box store responds with “Tile, because wood might warp with water spills and carpet will hide food that drops. I am going to forward you a direct line to our local store and a 15% coupon on flooring tile. Come in this weekend and I’ll make sure Joe is available to walk you through the options in person.” CRM is updated, Joe at store is notified and homeowner is sent an email with a “Tweet This” link on your experience. The new measurement might be interactions started, prospects referred and conversational intent.

A couple of things are happening here. 1) Sales forces must change the “50 calls/day = 10 meetings /week =1 sale/month” sales by the numbers approach to an approach that engages with prospects and their needs and over-delivers with solutions that are relevant at the time. 2) Systems must be able to support this distributed engagement and broaden the ownership roles across many levels of a customer taking what is traditionally an inside-out approach and integrating more of an outside-in model.

To help us make sense of this all, we’ve invited Aaron Strout to help us moderate the topic this week. Aaron is a proven professional in this space working from both the vendor and customer side, and is a social heavyweight for sure. We’ll need a heavywieght as we explore this relatively new topic of Social CRM and begin to identify places to consider implementing within our collective companies. The chat will consist of 3 questions as usual coming 20 minutes apart and starting at 12 noon EST. Join in by following #socialmedia through Twitter or to make it easier follow our LIVE page during the event. The topic:

Social CRM – Lipstick on CRM or Transformational Business Model?

Q1: How does adding social make CRM better?

Q2: If social is front end & CRM is back end, what information is important to capture into CRM?

Q3: How can Social CRM help improve conversion (cover sales, service, support)?

via hashtagsocialmedia.com

Posted via web from marcmeyer’s posterous

Social Media Smarts: Estee Lauder Promotion extends the brand beyond the life of make-up

Posted on October 10, 2009 by marc meyer

Estee Lauder Gets Women Ready for Their Social-Media Close-ups. Cosmetics Giant Offers Makeovers and Professional Photos to Use for Profile Pictures

By Jack Neff

BATAVIA, Ohio (AdAge.com) — The venerable Estee Lauder cosmetics brand has found a seemingly natural way to connect with social media: offering free makeovers and photo shoots at its department-store cosmetics counters coast-to-coast to produce shots women can use for their online profiles.

via adage.com

Excellent Idea, though one has to wonder whether the demographic at the cosmetics is an active user of Facebook or understands the how. We’ll see.

Posted via web from marcmeyer’s posterous

The Top 45 Objections To Using Social Media

Posted on October 8, 2009 by marc meyer

If you’ve been in the business of social media for any length of time, whether you have been selling it, marketing it, or implementing it, you will have heard one of the 45 objections below. What really makes this list though, is that the majority of it came from you and your clients and your experiences. It was crowdsourced from Twitter!

However, There’s a larger and more important issue here though, and it’s one in which you can and should, use this list as your cheat sheet. YOU need to be able to answer all of these objections. Or at least anticipate that your clients and prospects will be voicing these concerns and more.

Feel free to add to this list.

1) Why should I? I don’t need to. Just because everyone else is doing it, doesn’t mean I have to.

2) It’s a fad, I’m going to stick to what works for our business

3) It costs too much

4) I’m in no hurry

5) I have no desire

6) It will require too many resources within our company

7) I’m worried about the legal ramifications

8) We’re better off by doing nothing

9) To risky

10) You can’t measure it

11) We give up too much to the customer

12) We won’t make any money

13) We can’t control the message

14) We don’t know the first thing about social media

15) It will take too long to pay off

16) It will take too long to implement

17) It’s just a blog, twitter and Facebook- What’s that going to do?

18) I can do it/we can do it ourselves

19) It’s not worth it

20) Our customers are not on social networks

21) It’s too complicated

22) We can’t control our employees using it

23) I can’t it’s a legal issue

24) We want to control the message

25) We can’t support with our current management/management doesn’t support

26) We’re B2B so there is no reason for us to engage consumers

27) It’s a regulatory issue. So no guidelines in place.

28) No trust

29) Don’t want to acknowledge negatives

30) Not our customers

31) Don’t have time to adapt to the technology

32) Social Media results are not easily visible to non-users

33) Fear of change and the unknown

34) Not our target market

35) Our customers don’t use social media

36) Our deadlines are more important than your Tweet goofs.

37) Privacy issues

38) No ROI potential

39) Lack of expertise

40) Lack of a market

41) We already do social networking, we have a facebook fan page.

42) Too complicated & therefore, we’ll look for alternative options

43) We’ve been fine without it

44) We’re waiting for it to mature

45) We tried it, it didn’t work.

46) ?

What are we missing?

Share this Post

On Twitter do you reap what you sow?

Posted on October 5, 2009 by marc meyer

It’s as simple as this.

Your deeds or actions on Twitter, good or bad, will repay you in kind.

The words “What you do comes back to you” are an excellent paraphrase of what generally occurs or can occur on Twitter. “You reap what you sow.” You plant spam, then later you gather the resulting harvest of backlash, useless followers, and nothing to show for your worthless attempt at gaming the system.

The harvest that you reap depends on the kind of seeds you sow. If you sow nothing but broadcast, push style Tweets, you cannot expect to reap anything of consequential value from that.

If you retweet value, if you engage in some type of dialogue and help others, promote and encourage others efforts, then what can you expect? Value begets value.

I think you know the answer.

Can you go left?

Posted on September 30, 2009 by marc meyer

In basketball, there is a term that really separates the wheat from the chaffe so to speak, and it’s all based on a person’s ability to dribble the ball and to a certain degree, shoot the ball.

Fundamentally, those are 2 very important aspects of basketball. Shooting and dribbling right? So what enhances those 2 skills? Well if you’re right handed, chances are you will dribble with your right hand and you will shoot with your right hand and you will favor the right side of the court.

From a marketing, and social media marketing standpoint. You will play to your strengths. You will go or you always go with your right hand. With what you already know.

Now back to the hoop court. The most dangerous players are those with enhances skills and abilities. These are players who have a “handle” and…can go left. In other words, as they are going down the court, they can dribble with their left hand or right with ease, and shoot with either hand as well.

They can change hands on the fly and not skip a beat. They can adapt to any situation because they have the skills to do so. Were they born with those skills? Chances are they were not. They trained and they practiced. But you don’t see that part. You just see the finished product.

One of the first things a coach looks for in an up and coming player is whether the player has a “handle” with his left hand. Can that player go left? It takes about a minute to assess and if you have 100 kids for example, trying out for 12 spots, it quickly becomes one of the main determinants.

Why is this important? Without the ability to dribble with your left hand, you essentially cut the court in half. It becomes useless, You can never go over to that half of the court because you cannot dribble with your left hand. So you favor the right side-all the time. I repeat all the time.

The same applies to social media and marketing, you will lose unless you can bring more to the table than the next person. Oh, and you better be able to back it up.

Just as it is on the court, shit talkin’ can only take you so far and at some point, you have to start walkin’ it.

So how bad do you want it? What skill sets are you bringing to the table? Can you enhance what you already know? Do you always go to your right?