Koka Sexton dot Com

This Week in Social Media

Koka Sexton — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 19:10:19 +0000

Let me start off by saying that I get a lot of email. I was just introduced to a service called Sanebox that has helped a ton. I wanted to give this new format a shot. There are many things I come across on social networks that are worth sharing and I’ll be finding some of the best of those and creating a blog post about them each week.

Building a Social Business

Koka Sexton — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 12:27:12 +0000

Last week InsideView held it’s first user conference called the Insider Summit. It was a lot of work and a bit stressful to pull it together. It all worked out and it was great to see so many customers in one place all wanting to hear the plans for InsideView and the were using Twitter to spred the news. During the conference there were about a dozen breakout sessions that fell into one of three tracks; Sales, Marketing and Social Selling.

I held a lunch time panel with some amazing leaders in the sales world, Anneke Seley, Jill Konrath and Craig Rosenburg. They answered questions about everything from what sales managers do wrong, to how social media has changed the sales landscape forever.

I ran the social selling track and held panels with customers and companies like Sprout Social, Extole, Yammer Cornerstone OnDemand and others. Besides the interest in best practices of companies leveraging InsideView for sales intelligence, I was asked questions about how InsideView is leveraging social media for lead generation, branding and support. As I mention in the post the ROI of social media, building up to the different skill levels should be the goal of any company that wants to become a social business.

I find that most companies especially InsideView customers want to become social businesses in one way or another. What I mean by that is companies understand the need to open up social channels in places like Twitter and Facebook. They understand that their prospects and customers are increasingly leveraging social networks to share information and communicate with eachother. It will eventually be fatal for a company to disregard these channels of communication.

To gain the most of these social channels companies need to realize a few things that seem like common sense to me but I’m biased.

Social media as a broadcast channel

This is what many companies still use social media for. Setup a profile on Twitter and push out feeds, leadgen content and press releases. I dont believe there is anything wrong with a company using it’s social profiles for broadcasting news and content, as long as this is NOT the only way you use it. If this is the case then you are defeating the purpose of being on social media. Since many marketing professionals don’t understand social media, this is the only way they can view it and by making social channels “Just another channel to push messaging, like email marketing”, they will lose in the long run. If your social strategy is not focused on engagement, your message will fall flat.

The broadcasting of information is the part of social media that companies should look into automating. Of course there will be human process but having an employee sitting at a desk typing in multiple updates directing followers to papers and other company links is ineffective. How many ways can you describe your latest whitepaper in 140 characters? Let technology help you with that and put your people on more important, strategic tasks.

Social media as a support channel

Some companies leverage social media as primarily a support channel. Airlines, restaurants and even car manufacturers have been the leaders in this space. Zappos for example has built an entire culture around leveraging social media for support. Regardless if your in a B2C or B2B space, social media can be leveraged for support. It scales well and gives your customers easy access to you.

Depending on your business, you have to gauge how much of an impact social media will have with your existing customers. If your customers aren’t on social media, there is little need to be using it for support. If you find that your customers are online and active in social media, even if they are doing it on more passive modes and mainly talking to friends, its an opportunity to be more connected with them.

Social media as a sales channel

This is an area that most companies in the B2B space struggle with more than the above. If I had a dollar for every online discussion that had some sales manager saying “Sales people should be selling and not wasting their time on social networks”, I could probably afford that new entertainment system I’ve been drooling over at BestBuy.

The most surprising things about people making that ridiculous statement is that they are saying it IN A SOCIAL NETWORK. Of course there is a value, there are sales opportunities to identify, new prospects to engage. They need training on social media for sales people. People are in social networks all day long asking questions that sales people should be listening for. The absolute worst deal you can lose is the one that you didn’t know of. Waiting for your phone to ring or for a person to come knocking on your company website with a “have sales contact me” flag will guarantee that you are missing out on deals. If you’re part of the 1% that doesn’t have to worry about closing more business then this doesn’t apply.

If your sales people are not actively listening to their territory for questions and conversations about their industry they are missing opportunities. The hardest part is on how to build the foundation and culture around this.

Building a social business

The social business is larger than setting up social collaboration tools into your CRM so you can post updates to a group of employees. Internal activity feeds are good but the social business should be focusing efforts on external activities. Setting up public channels where you can push messages is skill level one and really where the work begins. Understanding how your community is consuming and more importantly sharing that content is skill level two. Assigning resources to engage with these people and have conversations is skill level three. Skill level four is achieved by building a social graph of people inside your CRM and proactively engaging with them. The real fun happens when you can build a strategy around using nothing but social channels to connect with people that may have never heard of you before. This is no longer just a role for marketing people, any customer facing employee should assume some responsibility for this. That is what drives growth.

The idea of a social business has been evolving. I think that a few great companies are leading the charge and others will be following suit shortly. I believe that customers want to have interactions with brands regarding support and content. Why else would they be providing feedback [good or bad] and sharing your news across their networks? It’s the responsibility of businesses to stay transparent and available wherever their customers are. When companies embrace this new paradigm of a social business, customers are not the only ones that win.

Social Media: The ROI of Marketing Engagement

Koka Sexton — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 13:30:48 +0000

There are many articles on the ROI of social media. Many of them talk about the ROI of social media not being revenue but more about extending marketing reach and connecting with prospects and customers. One I read recently was called Tackling the Question of Social Media ROI: Change Your Goals. It was probably one of the better explanations of social media ROI I have read but I wanted to add some of my own thought about it.

Fans Followers and Subscribers

The most basic and easiest metrics to put in place are counting the number of fans, followers and subscribers you have accumulated over time, or “skill level 1″ as I call it. In the early days of social media for businesses, this was the only thing they cared about. Truth is that there are still many companies that still ONLY care about these numbers because they really have no intent on actually building their social media channels to be ‘social’.

Without being a social business and actually putting resources in place to be a company that wants to communicate in open channels with your prospects and customers, all social networks just become another platform to broadcast marketing messages. The more fans and followers you have the wider that exposure will be but the chances of you actually gaining anything from it worth measuring is slim to none.

The sad thing is I come across many companies that do this and it shows. The company executives just dont ‘get it’ or worse, they get it but still don’t see it as a priority to other marketing efforts.

Social Media Engagement

This is what I call “skill level 2″ of social media ROI. It’s still fairly easy to measure if you use some great social media tools like these. In my post Social Media Engagement Drives More Followers I highlighted the hyper-growth of the InsideView Twitter profile when we started really focusing on engagement.

Some metrics for social media engagement

Clicks: How many times are your updates getting clicked through.
Updates made: How many updates are you sharing.
Retweets/shares on Facebook: How many times has your content been shared online.
Unique mentions: How many NEW people have mentioned you online.
Influential mentions: How many people of influence have shared your content to their networks.

Though measuring engagement is fairly straight forward, it takes more work to actually engage with their prospects and customers and this is why many companies just dont do it. In order to do it right, it takes alot of planning and you will need some dedicated people resources to make it effective. Even with the above metrics being tracked, strategy needs to be designed and tactics executed on in order to build a sustainable and almost predictable level of engagement from month to month.

New Leads and Revenue

Leveraging social media to drive lead generation and revenue (Skill level 3) is a goal many companies strive for but ultimately fail to do. There are many reasons for this and the obvious one is that they have zero commitment to skill level 2. Even if they do have the commitment, they have not put anything in place to actually measure these channels and therefor have no way to track the effectiveness of anything they are doing online.

I’ve been in my current position for a year and it took some time to build the structure to actually track a new lead from social media. Without understanding the fundamentals of Skill level 1 and Skill level 2 there is no chance of getting here. There is a sense of accomplishment when you can run a report and see in any given period of time how many new leads have been generated from Twitter, when a fan on Facebook has started a trial of your product or when your company blog can be tracked to a deal with a big customer. How awesome would it be to see that social media is in the top 5 sources for new leads in your company?

Most marketing departments are trying to figure this out, few have. I believe this is because social media challenges the existing paradigms of most marketing professionals. Measuring the ROI of social media is like asking a sales person what the ROI is of a phone call. The only way to know is by tracking a volume of calls and seeing what the conversion rate is, understand why those converted and replicating the effort. Dialing in the actions that focus on the right messages at the right time to the right people.

Would a company put effort into marketing and then tell their sales teams not to answer the phone? On the same token, would you engage with your customers and then cut off lines of support? Of course not!

It takes work, experiments and commitment. Now, imagine a business that empowered all of their employees to be involved in social media. Sales people would be social selling and support would be providing social customer service. From the company blog to Twitter to Facebook and any other channel, they become a large community all focused on your product that can be leveraged and supported in real time.

Inbound marketing works and companies that are doing this now are going to be the ones reaping the largest rewards in the long run. Again, most companies are not ready for this yet.

The Real ROI of Social Media

I could have left the post off with the rainbow of generating revenue from social media but I dont believe that should be the end game or even the true focus of what your company should be doing with social media. Revenue is a byproduct of content marketing, expanding your reach and excellent engagement.

The real ROI of social media is the moment you realize that you can’t stop the spreading of your content even if you tried. It would be like trying to unpull a trigger. There was a moment when we had a paper that was being used for lead generation and distributing it primarily through social media and we accidentally broke the link. The link to the paper was getting shared for hours before someone alerted us to the error. It was an easy fix and all was right in the world again but it was surprising that during the time the link was bad, our fans and followers continued to blindly share the link with their network because we had become a trusted resource and our influential advocates passed along our updates without giving it a second thought.

ROI is most importantly the cultivation of relationships and capturing the positive word of mouth recommendations from your community. It’s the gift that keeps on giving. Engage with your community, capturing positive feedback, acknowledging the source and leveraging that feedback on a continuous basis.

1. Determine your influencers
2. Understand who influences your influencers
3. Determine how to help and support your influencers’ and their network

Social media ROI should be measured across all skill levels. Social engagement is NOT just a function of a marketing department. A social business is one that can leverage social networks for marketing, sales and support. Many companies focus one of these but lose sight of how the trifecta plays together and drives real interaction that builds awareness, creates new business and retains customers. Each company is different and in the B2B space that I’m in revenue is always the goal. Hitting that goal is made possible by spending 80% of the time engaging with the community, focusing efforts on sub-groups of that community to get more targeted reach and deliver focused content. Starting with marketing and training sales and support to ride the momentum of social engagement.

Businesses that want to win with social media need to break down the walls, create a social media policy and dissolve their fears around social media use and understand the impact it can have. Build a team of people focused on social engagement and community management. Start building communities around your customers and engage with them online. Identify who your top influencers and advocates are and build relationships with them. Stop using social media as a bull horn and start using it like a hyperactive telephone.

3 Social Media Apps Every Marketer Should Use

Koka Sexton — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 13:09:57 +0000

If you are responsible for monitoring and engaging with your Twitter community, here are a few applications that you should be using. These applications and some elbow grease from you and your team will provide results like what I posted earlier on how social media engagement drives new followers. I wish there was one app that could do all of the great things these can do collectively but I have not found one yet. These are the top social media applications I use on a regular basis and what I find most valuable about them.

Sprout Social

Hands down one of the best applications for a team of social marketers to use. I mentioned them in my post on 40 free social monitoring tools. It has some very interesting functionality that can be used as a simple SocialCRM app but I get the most milage out of how they’ve been able to track a team’s efforts online. If you manage a team responsible for communicating with people on Twitter, this application makes measuring engagement and impact easy.

Crowdbooster

I’ve written about them before and liked them so much I wrote a follow up post. This application opened my marketing eyes to a new world of content distribution by first showing my my best times to tweet. I still find myself coming back to this application often to get better insights to my Twitter community.

SocialBro

This application does not get the attention it deserves. I don’t even remember how I found it. Most recently they have launched a web client for the Chrome browser that works better than the download version. SocialBro gives a detailed view of your entire Twitter community and comes with a bunch of bells and whistles. After synchronizing your profile, the application gives you details on just about every segment of your community based on followers, following, and their influence. One of the best things I like about this app is the ability to search through your Twitter community for key people.

Social Media Engagement Drives More Followers

Koka Sexton — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 20:00:23 +0000

A few weeks ago I tasked the team to pay closer attention to the community we have developed on Twitter. The goal was to see if being more engaged with our community would drive more fans and followers. It seems like common sense but I wanted to test it out just to make sure the extra time spent would result in an increase.

I’ll be the first to say that the number of followers you have is not the most important metric. In fact companies that think that numbers are the most important metric, miss the point of what social media is all about. The metric should be based around the amount of engagement you have, times you are mentioned and the influence you gain through that engagement. Of course, its a chicken vs. egg conversation in some aspects. You need to increase the number of people following you, just like a business needs to build their customer base but there is no point to either if you can’t stay engaged with them and get to know them as people and not contacts. Thankfully we have a fairly engaged community on Twitter that shares our content and also sings our praises. Tweets like this give me a warm feeling that we are doing something great in the Social CRM and sales productivity world.

We appreciate all of our fans and do our best to stay engaged with them but we made a decision that no fan or mention of InsideView gets overlooked and instead of engaging with 80% of the people who follow us, we wanted to get 100% engagement across the board.

It’s a bit easier to do when you have the help of a great team that believes that the goal and results will pay off. I wanted to share with you what we found. The company Twitter profile for InsideView was growing steady with about 5-10 new followers a day. Not bad since the people who were following InsideView were within our space and not a bunch of random people or bots.

Engagement has a massive effect on growing a Twitter Following

Then something wonderful happened within a few days of execution. Instead of gaining the 5-10 followers that we had typically seen, we had a spike of over 50 in just one day. I had to check the reports a couple times because I just didn’t believe it. Nothing had changed. There was no new content outside of the regular blog posts and other updates shared. The only difference was the fact that we spent the time to engage with EVERYONE that followed or mentioned us.

Sure it could have been a one time occurrence and then nothing to be overly impressed with. As we continued to spend the time to make sure no follower, person who mentioned us or shared our content we saw the numbers stay strong. After just a couple of weeks we have a stronger position of our social media strategy, one that shifts the focus of our presence on Twitter from sharing content as the goal, to one that focus on more engagement with our growing community.

My iPad is the Hottest

Koka Sexton — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 18:21:17 +0000

This is a first for me. I guess my iPad gets just as worked up over Twitter and Facebook as I do.

Too busy to blog?

Koka Sexton — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 06:11:30 +0000

Interrupting our regularly scheduled program of sorting through work emails and other social marketing tasks to actually right a blog post here on my blog that I have been neglecting.

I haven’t been slacking. It’s been an exciting ride at InsideView this year. I just read my post from my first week at InsideView for the first time since I wrote it. Damn, we’ve accomplished alot since then. Complete social marketing / engagement plans, new websites, 153 blog posts, the launch of Social Selling University, roadshows, and learning more than I can express.

But I’ve realized that I shouldn’t neglect my blog. Yes, I’ve said this before. How can blogging be one of my responsibilities and yet I’m too busy to blog?

In the past year there have been a dozen blog posts I’ve wanted to write about social media and social marketing. The InsideView blog isn’t the right place for those thoughts so I filed most of them away. I started getting contributed posts on sites like Business 2 Community and even one in Mashable. But those are still sales focused and I want to talk marketing trends, social engagement and company transparency through social media.

So I’m going to start using this blog for those posts. One a week is my target schedule. I’ve already got one in the queue for this week and next.

Heading to Social Media Plus

Koka Sexton — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 19:23:09 +0000

This week I’m going to be in Philadelphia speaking at the Social Media Plus business summit. I was accepted as a speaker and will talking about Leveraging Social Media for B2B Sales Teams.

SocialMediaPlus will consist of 21 seminars on real-world topics that will help you walk away with an understanding of how to effectively implement Social Media strategies inside your company. You will hear from marketing directors, technology professionals, and social media experts, telling you how they have used social media to build brand, interact with customers and generate revenue.

I’m excited to get a chance to speak to this audience but even more excited to listen to some other experts talk like Dan Waldschmidt, Gavin Heaton from SAP, Jeff Cohen at Radian6 and Michael Bird from NetProspex. You can see a complete list of speakers and their topics here.

I will be live tweeting from the event and should get a blog post of the highlights up later this week. If you’re at Social Media Plus let me know.

How to Activate Your Facebook Timeline [video]

Koka Sexton — Sat, 24 Sep 2011 03:33:55 +0000

This is gold for those of us that heard all the hype around Facebook Timeline and can’t wait to see the changes to Facebook.

Here’s how it works: Facebook Timeline looks like a Tumblr blog, letting you scroll vertically through all the biggest moments in your life–maps of where you’ve been, pictures, comments, apps, and more.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-timeline-2011-9#ixzz1YpyDOoBk

Get a Vanity URL for Google+

Koka Sexton — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 16:51:03 +0000

Until Google decides to allow for vanity URLs for Google+, there is a way that you can have a short version of your Google+ profile without having to send out something that looks like this.

https://plus.google.com/u/0/106504626814765096955/posts

Gplus.to is a creation by Şirzat Aytaç that lets you create a short URL of your choosing for your Google+ ID. Now you can have a nice looking vanity URL like this.