FreshNetworks Blog

Tim continues his series on Selling Social Media.

So we now get to the final phase in the Sales Cycle when selling a social media solution – the ‘Close’. Certainly this is the most enjoyable piece, when all the hard work finally delivers the outcome. If all the previous phases have been followed, then I find that this phase is also the easiest, because you have a proposition that meets the priority business needs and that has been successfully tested for a positive reaction from the client during the Propose The Solution phase.

From the clients perspective then this point is critical. It commits your funds and resources, it also ensures that, at the decision-making level, there will be no misunderstanding, and that all stakeholders (including the suppliers and vendors) will be ‘on board’ with the social media project that has been considered and will now be given the go-ahead.

When delivering the Closing question, the single most important lesson is that, at this point (and only this point!), it is important that your question is a closed question, not an open question. So, you are asking for agreement to proceed with the project that has been discussed, within the timescales and subject to certain preconditions (such as contract terms or technology dependencies). How you phrase the question is completely up to you, but when you have asked it, keep quiet and wait for the answer.  There is no need to elaborate, or to buy extra time, you are simply awaiting a Yes or No.

It is quite timely that this series of ‘how-to-sell-social-media’ blogs ends the year with the final phase, ‘Closing’. Thank you for all your comments and feedback, and I will be adding further thoughts and ideas next year. Happy Christmas!

Read all our posts on Selling social media here.

I have a client who once said to me: “We want to use social media to attract more complaints”. This may seem an odd thing to say, all too often attracting complaints is a reason people cite for being anxious about using social media. But this client knew that one part of there service didn’t always perform as well as they might hope. They also knew that nobody ever really complained to them. They must be complaining somewhere, they thought, and we’d like them to be complaining to us.

People use social media for lots of things, but they often use it to express their opinion about a brand or organisation, to tell you where things are good and to tell you where things are bad. To complain. We’ve written before about how to react if somebody complains about your brand online. The brand should reply when a factual inaccuracy is being discussed, or when a customer has had a bad experience and is reporting it online. And when they reply they should:

1. make sure that they know the facts so that they can correct inaccuracies and keep people up to date with what is happening
2. represent the brand in a way that respects its history and is consistent with the brand’s image
3. respond in good time and continue to engage in a discussion whilst it remains relevant
4. know how to prioritise who to respond to (this may not be as simple as the person with most followers on Twitter)

In a crisis management situation there is little different to this, it is just on a bigger scale.

The typical crisis management sees a lot of people discussing, debating, and complaining about your brand online. Many of these discussions will be factually inaccurate, and many will be from customers who have had bad experiences. These are the types of discussions that should be responded to, and should be responded to in the right manner.

Whilst every crisis is different, and there is no simple set of rules about how to use social media in these situations, a number of observations arise from looking at how people have successfully (or conversely have badly) managed crises in the past:

1. Use social media to keep people up-to-date: The worst thing in a crisis is not knowing. This is where social media can be useful as a tool to keep people informed. Update regularly as things unfold and make sure you are updating with actual developments. The benefit of having a well established blog or online community is that you can then use it for this purpose. Make it the place people can go to for information, keep it current and keep it honest.
2. Make sure the people representing your brand know what they are talking about: When you are unhappy there is nothing worse than feeling that the person talking to you doesn’t really know or understand what is happening. You need the people that are engaging on behalf of your brand in social media to be up-to-date on what is happening and able to speak openly and truthfully for the brand. They need to be immersed in the brand and internal process and be able to update people quickly and escalate any issues effectively within your organisation. This doesn’t mean they need to work for you directly, but it does mean they need to be fully immersed in your brand and they should be effective and experienced brand communicators.
3. Engage people talking about you – be they compliments or complaints: When crisis happens people are going to complain, and these complaints need responding to. The best thing is to do so in a direct and informative manner. Correct inaccuracies and give people who are complaining information to stop them talking about you in social media and start them helping to resolve their own problems and disappointments. This might be directing them to your blog where you are keeping people up-to-date or it might be telling them where to go to get refunds (for example).
4. Work effectively with a the hub and the spokes of your social media presence: You can’t be expected to engage everybody in detail on Twitter, in Facebook or on blogs, forums and online communities. You will end up repeating the same information multiple times and this information will often become out of date quickly. This is where having an established hub-and-spoke model of social media engagement comes into its own. If you have a developed hub, and online community, for example, where you can send people to get up-to-date and real-time updates on what is happening then you can engage them where they are (Twitter, Facebook, forums etc) by directing them here.
5. Don’t wait for crisis to hit to build engagement: When crisis hits, it is easiest if you have a clear process in place already for dealing with complaints and discussions about your brand online. You need a blog or online community that people recognise as the place to go to to talk to your brand. And you need a well established presence in social media. Without this, you will find it much more difficult to go in when things go wrong and take part in discussions. You will be the newbie and the outsider, when really you should be the centre of the conversation. To get this you need to have a history of really engaging your customers; not just running social media marketing campaigns.

Overall, when crisis hits, social media can be an effective and powerful tool. But only if you have been using it to engage people long-term. Only if you have a history of dealing with criticisms online, and you know where people are likely to complain. Only if you make it easy for people to contact you and to find information from you. You don’t want to be dealing with hundreds, or thousands, of individual complaints scattered around the social media web. You want people to know where to go to complain and to get information. And you want this to be a place you manage and facilitate. You want people to come to you, so you can deal with their problems and update them with what’s happening. You want a place to send people to if they are talking about you online.

Social media is a powerful crisis management tool, but only if you have been using it when you are not in crisis mode too. It’s real engagement not campaign-based marketing. And in a crisis it will be easy to see which is which.

Rage Against the Machine on Facebook

Rage Against the Machine (RATM) have just had their first UK Number 1. They got it thanks to an extraordinary underground Facebook campaign, beating X-Factor winner Joe McElderry.

The successful single, Killing in the Name, was released over 15 years ago. RATM spent nothing on marketing and yet they made it to Christmas No.1. Whatever your opinions of Rage Against the Machine, Simon Cowell, Facebook or Joe Mcelderry, this has been a great show of social media might.

A week ago X-Factor Winner Joe McElderry appeared to be a shoo-in for Christmas No.1. Every year, for four years, the Winner of X-Factor has been number one at Christmas. But this year Jon Morter (@Jon_Magic), a HiFi Technician from Essex,  decided to set up a protest campaign on Facebook and promote Rage Against the Machine as a possible contender.

Why does this classify as an impressive victory for social media? Here’s a brief summary of what each single had going for it:

Joe Mcelderry and the X-Factor machine
- 13 weeks of prime time TV appearances
- 4 years of X-Factor Christmas No.1′s (i.e. a great process for getting the result)
- Professional promotion – Simon Cowell’s company has been pulling out every stop.
- A pleasant song for Christmas – ideal stocking filler for mum’s across the UK
- 3 months of press articles, morning TV chat show appearances & radio interviews
- Online and offline advertising spend
- Store sales – Joe’s got a physical single that’s on sale in all good record stores – 500,000 in HMV alone (their largest ever singles order). The RATM single has not been re-released so it is not in store.
- Playlists – Joe gets lots of radio airplay thanks to being on key playlists
- Massive discounting – Tesco are selling Joe McElderry’s single The Climb for 29p. That’s less than half the 67p you’d pay for Killing in the Name by Rage Against the Machine.
- Point of purchase marketing – both in store, and also on the homepages of iTunes, Amazon, Play.com and Tesco.com (the four major MP3 retailers in the UK).

Rage Against the Machine had:
- £0 marketing budget
- an offensive song that caused 138 complaints last time it was played on Radio1 (Killing in the name)
- an unofficial facebook group set up by a fan
- a “charity angle” – I don’t think the donations to Shelter have been a large driver of success, but they helped prevent the campaign being seen as bullying of Joe and raised over £65k.

This seems like an appropriate way to end 2009 – a big year for Social Media.

We’re often asked how to build corporate support for social media projects. There are many social media advocates that find it hard to sell internally.  What’s the best approach if you’re a Marketing Director selling a social media proposition to the Board? Or a Department Head keen to include social media in your 2010 budget?

I have recently coached a client in selling his social media business plan internally. As previously explained (see my selling social media series), a key component in the sales process is to associate the business needs to the social media proposition. I see this often overlooked as people present their long lists of features and functions, many of which are superfluous, in the hope that quantity will overcome quality.  No!

So, to do this exercise properly with my client, we booked a meeting room for half a day, and we spent a couple of hours considering his business strategy and the corporate needs of the company. With the key business priorities apparent, we then started linking these to the components of the social media solution. We found that 7 of the company’s top 8 business needs could directly benefit from some social media features and associated community engagement.

We then created a simple powerpoint slide, with 3 columns, Need, Feature, and Advantage. Each business ‘Need’ with the relevant social media ‘Feature’ (or Features in some cases), that delivered a noted ‘Advantage’ to the business (ideally quantified and objective). And, finally at the presentation, as he talked through the slide, I coached him to ensure that he gauged the ‘Reaction’ (from the audience) to each item as he went down the list. ‘NFAR’ – Need, Feature, Advantage, and Reaction.

This turned out to be a great starting point, but there was still more work to do. Building support for any new proposition often requires a mix of 1to1 meetings as well as larger group sessions. Ahead of the team discussion you should meet with some of the key influencers on an individual basis to get buy-in. Just as you would have with any new initiative.
The final point to make is that an important part of selling is management of expectations. And when it comes to social media this is especially important. Social media is frequently over-hyped. As a social media agency, we’re always very keen to manage our own enthusiasm and focus on promising only the things we know we can deliver. Projects are always harder and take longer than people expect. Don’t damage your personal credibility by over-selling social media.

Sounds like a stupid question, no? But actually it’s a valid one, especially in this time of flux. If you ask some people what an online community manager does, they’ll describe a moderator.

If you ask others, they’ll detail a curator. Others liken it to being a gardener, keeping the weeds at bay and encouraging conversation to flourish.

In our recent community predictions for 2010 post, many of our contributors thought that 2010 would see a tightly-defined, standardised ‘community manager’ role, with various spin-off roles taking on the work that’s currently supplementary to many of us running communities.

So what are the skills that should make up this core community management role? Well, looking at the communities I am currently responsible for and have run in the past, I would suggest the following ‘job spec’.

Managing moderation and moderators
That’s right, as communities mature – and some of the first communities are veritable grandparents now – it’s simply not sustainable or sensible to have community managers spending all their time moderating.

With a sensitive or particularly ‘lairy’ community, post-moderation (or even pre-moderation) of every piece of content can be a full-time role, possibly several full-time roles.

If this is the case, community managers should be managing the work of moderators, possibly even moderation software, not doing all the grunt work themselves.

Welcoming new members
Whether you personally greet every new member, make it your business to encourage particularly shy members when their first post goes unanswered, or put together an amazing ‘new members’ pack’ to be emailed out when anyone joins, welcoming members is very important.

Engaging stakeholders
Building a flourishing community is fantastic, but if you’ve built it as part of an organisation, and that organisation isn’t committed to it, isn’t prepared to listen to it, the people that make up the community could well fall out of love with it.

Promoting good behaviour
This starts with the community management team, continues through fair and transparent guidelines and is enforced by consistent moderation and through taking tough decisions for the good of the community.

Monitoring and reporting
A good community manager understands how healthy his or her community is, they know it instinctively, they can sense it, but they also have the figures to back it up.

Reporting and statistics aren’t unpleasant monthly (or weekly) pains in the bum, even if they’re often treated as such. If you really want to know your community, and if you really want to prove that there is a point to all the work you’re doing – and the organisation is funding – then you need to know how your community is behaving, feeling, and moving around.

Be an advocate
For your community, for the members that make it up, for your organisation, for community management in general. If you don’t feel you can, this is not the job for you.

This list is not exhaustive, what shall we add?