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5 Ways to Sell Social Media to Your Boss

October 10, 2008 on 2:00 pm |

4. Talking To Actual Customers

Some bosses - maybe yours - are so removed from their customers that they get a kick out of hearing from them. After all, if you spent 20 years getting your customer feedback from memos, you can imagine how disconcerting but exciting it would be to hear from, you know, a real human.

I recommend starting with positive feedback. Grab a sampling of social media feedback from your customers (just Google your company name or check Yelp.com, if nothing else). MarketingVox reports that reviews are usually positive - 87% of them, in fact. Print out a few and put them in front of your boss. Seeing glowing customer feedback will only get your boss more interested in hearing from customers.

In the up-coming book Secrets of Social Media Marketing, author Paul Gillan describes it this way: "Once they start taking direct feedback from customers, they tend to get addicted. Direct customer relations is like a drug."

5. Set The Boss' Sights Long-Term

When discussions of ROI come up, a time frame almost always comes up. "What will we get in the next quarter for this investment of time or resources?" "I want monthly reports on this expenditure."

This discussion is worthwhile and statistics should be kept to track progress. However, you will have more success in social media if you set your boss' expectations to cover a longer period of time. Engagement is a long-term project.

Valeria claims that engagement and impact on retention can take two years to measure. That's not to say you won't see results before then. Lewis Green talks over at MarketingProfs about the ROI his company received from their blog. But manage your boss' expectations and keep them looking at the long-term goal.

BL Ochman put it succinctly in this interview:

"You need to have realistic expectations, and know that conversational marketing produces results over time. It is not a quick fix or a magic bullet. Instead, social media must be integrated into the overall marketing plan for the long haul. And over time, you can build traffic, sales and your customer/donor base with these new tools."

So What?

In most instances, when marketers talk about measurement or ROI of social media, they are trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. You can't apply a Web 1.0 gestalt in a world where the audience cannot only respond, but can also generate more content than any single company.

Instead of measuring how well we are pushing our message onto potential customers, we should instead gauge our success on the number of conversations listened to, problems resolved, and useful suggestions received from the community of customers we already have.

Your challenge is bringing your boss around to this worldview. And it is a worldview, not just some notion. It changes the way you interact with the world, so it's no small task. Likewise, it's a big job, so you'd better get cracking right now.

Social Media Linked To Trust

Don't forget that the reason to sell social media to your boss is so that you can begin to build a cache of trust with your customers. In truth, that trust is the real return on investment. The more they trust you, the more they will buy from you and respect your opinions.

Ian Schafer, CEO of Deep Focus, said in AdWeek that "The other risk is that in the zeal to track, marketers and agencies will lose sight of the need to trust that getting closer to customers is a worthy goal in and of itself."

Marketers seem obsessed with assigning value to interactions on social media sites. But real success comes when you value the interaction itself.

Have you sold your boss on social media tools already? How did you accomplish that? Please leave suggestions in the comments section below. And if you haven't already, subscribe, where I regularly blog on these topics.

DJ Francis is the founder and author of OnlineMarketerBlog.com - a business blog at the intersection of marketing, copywriting, and social media.

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