Take a Long Hard look at your Social

The foundations to marketing started in the 1920s and developed to a point in the 1950s and from looking at many companies social media (Twitter, LinkedIn etc), things have not changed much.

"Broadcast" marketing is a simple concept, you throw lots of "mud" at the wall, some of it will stick. In the "Mad Man" days, the people with the biggest advertising budget sold the most product. Bigger the budget, the more mud you had to throw. Simples.

Have we changed since 1950s?

When I first started out in sales some 27 years ago, we sent out mail shot letters, the more we sent, the theory was, the better of the outcome of the campaign.

Then email was invented and we could scale up the number of mail shots sent out and better still we didn't need to buy stamps, emails are free. When I first started using email, the word "spam" hadn't been invented, thankfully.

As somebody at a Marketing Agency recently said to me,

"we keep firing out those emails, it's a pity the open rate keeps going down."

Moving onto the modern day, Social Media was invented, but have we really changed what we do? Look at the average B2B (Business to Business) Twitter feed, it's 1950s broadcast in a modern Social Media wrapper!

Let's be Honest here

Dear reader, please take a few seconds to review your social media feeds. And let's be honest here .....

• People don't read ads anymore
• We fast forward through ads on the TV
• Call me, (I don't recognise your number in my phone) I won't take the call
• Send me an email and I don't know you (it will end in my email junk file) and it will get deleted
• None of us care about your company or products
• The most important person in the world is me

"Broadcast" on Social is a Waste of Time

Come on, we are friends right? Let's be honest and look at our social media feeds (and these can be company and your employees) are you posting stuff all about you, your company, how great you are?

I'm sorry, but none of us cares!

Was checking out a "Digital Practice" on Twitter the other day, Table Tennis table the whole lot. Their Twitter was all about them. Even the photos of them picking up litter in the branded T-Shirts, was all about them. I asked a question, on Twitter. Nothing happened.

Control, Control, Control

Some of you will have already switched off from this blog, as no broadcast means loss of control. Was talking to a senior marketer recently and they said

"We cannot trust the employees to post the right things on Social Media, so we tightly control everything".

How can you control the message? I'm sorry, the genie is out the bottle. This is what we mean when we talk about Digital Marketing (I prefer to drop the Digital and call it just Marketing) and Social Selling (I prefer to drop the Social and call it selling).

Maybe some training might help?

Times have changed, the buyer is in control and your competition are just one click away, we have to move with the times.

The "A ha" Moment!

The list above of places where I ignore brands is pretty damning. That said as a customer, it is probably easier to contact me than at anytime ever in history.

My Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat are open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

We all love brands both B2C and B2B and we all have customers and advocates that would love to interact with us and be part of our community.

Social now reaches across the whole organisation, not just sales and marketing but human resources, finance, purchasing, research and development, returns, after market, supply chain, etc.

Which means it's a corporate wide (dare I say C-Suite) issue. Social is both internal and external and in an age of cloud and standardisation (all the IT systems will be the same regardless of company or industry) it will provide you with your competitive advantage.

Was talking to a company recently that helps customers return goods. Wouldn't be great for your brand if customers tweeted how great you are, by making the process to return goods easy, rather than tweeting how bad the process is? Great competitive advantage, you also might sell more?

Social Strategy, got one?

Your organisation needs a "top down and bottom up" social strategy, that reaches across all departments. Where everybody know what the strategy is, how to interact with customers, tone of voice and brand message. Oh, by the way, you could also kill the competition, but don't tell them I told you.

The Cool Thing is This.

While people buy people. People are more likely to buy from friends, people are more likely to buy from people they have a relationship with, people they feel have something in common with, and people they have been recommended. Build relationships on Social and those people are more likely to buy from you.

And Finally .....

To finish with I'm going to quote my buddy, Ted Rubin as he can conclude this better than me:-

Social mirrors real life. It’s not as if we suddenly lose our concept of human interaction when we sit down to a keyboard or turn on a tablet! Too often, though, all of the worrying and red tape built into social strategies leads to a message that’s been dehumanized. If people want a sterilized vision of your products, services, or brand, there are plenty of places they can find that information online. When it comes to social, though, people want to interact with real people, not bots.

And when they interact with your brand, they expect the left hand to know what the right hand is doing. That’s why open communication across departments is crucial, from planning your overall social strategy to actually handing a customer from one person to the next along their particular journey with your brand.

Want to know how to sell to the modern, connected buyer?

If you're interested in a blueprint to help you in your move to digital and social then I recommend my book. “Social Selling - Techniques to Influence Buyers and Changemakers”. Written in a workbook style, it's designed to help you implement a Social Selling strategy across Sales and Marketing. 

To order follow this link to Amazon there is also a Kindle, eBook version.

About the Author

Tim Hughes is co-founder of Digital Leadership Associates a company that provides support and guidance in all areas of Social as well as Social Selling. He has been called "an innovator and pioneer" of Social Selling and in the recent Onalytica list of the most influential Social Sellers globally, Tim was named as number 1.

Tim can be contacted on Twitter @timothy_hughes where he has some 159,000 followers or [email protected] - You can find him at his blog The Social Selling Network

Digital Leadership Associates 

Digital Leadership Associates is a consultancy to help companies move to digital and social. Set up by Social Media guru and bestselling social media author, Adam Gray @agsocialmedia and myself. 

We are NOT a LinkedIn training company, we help companies undertake the change required to meet today's changed world. A recent customer got a 4,000% (Four Thousand percent) increase to their Social Media presence. While we cannot guarantee such a response for you, why not give us a go and see if we can but try.

DLA provides advice and guidance to companies, given by actual Social practitioners, that is people with actual experience in social media, social and digital transformations.  Check out our website or contact me at [email protected]