Social Media Marketing

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THREE T
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With the combination of listening and influencer identification programs in place,
you can take a big step toward designing your business based on what your customers
want. It’s important to understand that this goes beyond “designing the products they
ask for.” Sometimes customers don’t know what they want, or they don’t know what is
possible, or they want the wrong thing. Don’t confuse listening and influencer identifica-
tion with the wholesale turning over of your business design to your customers. At least
as regards your brand, product, or service, it’s still your ship: Your customers are the
crew, and so can make or break the voyage.
Bring Social Learning (and Technology) In-House
Using your listening program to discover and track important memes (thoughts and
trends) and to spot influencers and create valuable relationships is Step 1. Connecting
these to your business by identifying who within your organization needs to know
about this, and who has the ability to do something constructive with it, is Step 2.
Social business is highly focused on the combination of getting marketplace infor-
mation where it needs to go and ensuring that internally you have the kind of organiza-
tion that can benefit from it. To do this, look at internal (enterprise) software applications
such as Socialtext, Lotus Connections, SharePoint, or internal communities built using
Jive Software, Lithium Technologies, and Salesforce.com. Dell’s Employee Storm and
Philips’ use of Socialcast are examples of social technology applied internally to create
powerful connections to customers. These connections were built to implement effective
responses to conversations using the same types of applications inside the organization as
were used by the customers to create those conversations outside the organization.
Very often, implementing a social business program means that before you get
started with more engaging social technology programs that are outside your organi-
zation, you’ll want to get to work within your organization, building cross-functional
support and the capability to act on what you’ll learn in the external marketplace.
Going back to the purchase funnel and to touchpoint analysis, the challenge of manag-
ing conversations hinges on your ability to guide the conversations so that they help
you. Because you cannot control the conversation directly, you instead manage and
influence them through your own actions, through the products, services, and mes-
sages you deliver into the marketplace. Your overall response strategy—listening, and
then bringing relevant information inside your organization, respectively—depends on
your organization’s ability to effectively connect external conversation with internal
care and capability. Think of the actual response as step 3 following steps 1 and 2.
Having an internal, workflow-based process that receives, analyzes, and routes the
conversations that matter to you is essential. Often overlooked, these processes and the
people across your organization that are parts of them should be in place sooner rather
than later. Setting them up can be a challenge—most people don’t arrive at the office
looking for more to do—but this is again where “listening” is such a great starting point.