Behind every giant social media campaign, you can be certain there stands a team of dedicated professionals and an enormous budget. It is only when you have a big bag of advertising dollars that you can hire the most creative staff and bring together people with the range of skills needed to put those ideas into action. 

But social media success does not have to be measured against the heights of Old Spice ads or constant buzz of the Starbucks Facebook page. As long as it brings in customers and increases conversions, your firm’s social media presence will be doing fine — and that is easy to do. The most effective strategies are not just simple; they also cost nothing but time.

It starts with contacting key influencers. 

We hear about a lot about key influencers, and all sorts of companies have cropped up to help companies identify them, from Klout (which delivers some odd results) to the fee-charging and number-heavy Twitalyzer. None of those services though are completely reliable and none can really replace personal experience: when you are writing about your field, you will not need an algorithm to tell you who the most important players are. You will know who they are because you are reading their posts — and reading the posts that other people write to them. 

You should be writing to them too. You should be commenting on their posts, answering their questions and making arguments that they would have missed. If you can trigger a response from those leaders, some of the people following them will click through to see who you are. A number of those people will become customers right away. Others will become followers. All will give you their trust, the most important asset a business can give is a lead during the sales process.

Don’t Show Off  to Key Influencers; Show Them

But those key influencers — and your new followers — will not just want to know what you think. They will want to feel that you know what you are talking about. While contacting key influencers is one important and costless strategy, another related strategy is to make sure that you are posting links to and comments about good content.

Your tweets and your posts should not just show how smart you are, not even to key influencers. They should make the reader feel smarter for reading them. 

So do not just tell a key influencer that he was wrong; show him what he was missing by linking to evidence in a poll or a research paper. Expand the knowledge of the key influencer and your followers, and they will come to see you as a valuable source, as an expert who can help them to learn.

Show key influencers that you are their equal in expertise and you will soon become a key influencer yourself.

But that will not happen overnight, which is why the third simple strategy you will need to succeed at social media sales is patience. You have to wait for the community to grow, for relationships to build, and certainly for the respect you have built up to translate into revenues.

Unless, of course, you have a giant budget and a team of creative types ready to deliver success overnight.  Right?  Right.

The Economist’s Schumpeter columnist, who discusses business and management practices, took a look this week at reputation management. Reporting on an announcement by The Reputation Institute, a consultancy firm, of the results of its corporate reputation survey, Schumpeter raised three objections to the idea that we live in a “reputation economy.” 

The first, he argued, is that reputation actually covers a broad range of beliefs about a company, from the quality of its products to its relationship with NGOs. Apple, for example, has a reputation for producing high-quality, reliable and creative products but it has consistently taken knocks for labor conditions in its Chinese factories. The company is considered in two different ways, nuances that are missed when talking broadly about Apple’s “reputation.” 

The second objection is that a good reputation is not necessary to do good business. Schumpeter notes that tobacco companies still make giant profits, as do budget airline RyanAir and UK news outlet the Daily Mail even though all of them suffer from poor public relations and a low regard among the public. The same could be said for oil and defense companies, and it is not hard to think of plenty of other examples, from Microsoft to McDonalds, of firms with weak reputations but strong financial data. 

And Schumpeter’s third objection is that reputation is much less important than the more tangible quality of its products. Regardless of what people think about a company, if the products meet their needs and do it at the right price, they will buy. 

Social Media Builds Reputations 

Those arguments are worth considering for anyone selling through social media. The biggest strength of a stream of tweets and posts is their ability to affect the way people think about a business. They build a firm’s reputation. The most obvious example is Comcast which was able to reverse its reputation for poor customer services by launching a Twitter stream dedicated to handling online complaints. 

If Schumpeter is right and reputation counts for little, then social media marketers are wasting much of their time. All of those hours spent writing comments and making replies intended to make readers feel happy and welcome could have been better spent on deeper quality assurance or designing a better UI. 

But reputation does count for something. A company might have reputations in multiple areas but they affect the overall feeling that the market has for a firm. Apple has been quick to react to stories about employment conditions in its Chinese factories because it knows that a sinking reputation in one area could affect sales among some market sectors. 

Nor does Schumpeter consider the costs of a bad reputation even among successful firms. Tobacco companies do well because their product is addictive. RyanAir made half a billion dollars in profit last year, but it might have made even more if its customer service reps just knew how to say “thank you.” 

And while a good product is always going to be vital for a company’s success, prospects have to know about those products and trust them enough before they have even used them if they are going to make the purchase. 

That is what reputation does — and that is what you are doing as you are promoting your firm’s products on social media. 

Three summation comments about reputation:  

1. Warren Buffett has said that it takes 20 years to build a reputation, and five minutes to tear it down.  In other words, take care of your reputation.
2. Reputation builds trust, and trust is why customers deal with you. 
3. One huge tool in building business reputation is LinkedIn. (See Inc.com's article to understand why.  See This Course to get assistance.)

Profit from a Valuable New Habit

In the early 1900s, Claude C.  Hopkins found himself with a problem.  A leading figure in the new but booming advertising industry, a friend had asked him for help selling a new brand of toothpaste.  

Hopkins had beaten some major challenges before.  He had increased sales of Schlitz beer by telling people that the bottles were cleaned with "live steam" — which was, in fact, how all beer bottles were washed.  And he had successfully pushed Palmolive by persuading women that Cleopatra used the soap in her bath.  But advertising the new Pepsodent represented a whole new problem: at the time, barely 7 percent of Americans bought toothpaste.  Ten years later, that figure had risen to 65 percent.

Hopkins had done something that happens very rarely but which can have massive consequences: he had changed a habit.

America is Changing the Way It Watches TV

Something similar is happening now.  According to a new report from Forrester (http://goo.gl/Y7GLA) the habit of Americans to spend their evenings passively in front of a television screen is changing.  The report states that 85 percent of US tablet owners use their device while watching television, while data from Nielsen suggests that as much as 30 percent of time spent on a tablet coincides with time in front of the box.

Some companies have already noticed.  USA Networks and DC Comics worked together to create a graphic novel to complement the TV show “Burn Notice.”  But all marketers should understand that the estimated 50 million people who have bought an iPad (and the few others who opted for an Android device) are likely to be engaging with your brand with half-an-eye on the television and NO eye on commercials.

That means that at peak time, you know where they are likely to be and what they are likely to be doing.  

If you know that the demographic for your product is likely to be interested in a particular television show, it will pay not just to tweet about the show but to tweet during the show, using a related hashtag to capture your market's attention and pull them towards your website.

You can also make sure that you are present on Facebook during the show so that when someone makes a comment related to the program, you are right there with them, demonstrating that you share their interest, and deepening your connection.

Of course, not all your potential customers are going to own a tablet computer — but many will, and knowing where they will be at a set time gives you a major advantage.

And you will even be able to check your progress.  As you tweet and comment on social media during a television show, you should find that your connections increase and sales figures show an increase in the number of sales made between eight and ten in the evening.  

If the sales do increase, you will have given yourself a valuable new habit.  If it does not happen, you will have a good excuse for watching TV when normally you too busy.  Right?

The big advantage of social media as a marketing tool is that it is free. Whether you are building a Facebook timeline, a Twitter stream, or a LinkedIn account, you will not be asked for any cash. When it comes to buying leads ready to convert into customers, you cannot beat social media for value.

But you can beat it for time.

Social media success does not happen overnight. It takes time to identify the key influencers in your field, to build a community of followers and to be seen as an important agent in your industry. That happens gradually as your tweets are re-tweeted, your links are shared, and your posts receive comments. As that happens, your name spreads, more people follow you and your brand grows on social media sites.

That sort of growth, however, takes place over months and even years. It does not happen from one week to the next.

That is why social media companies are able to rely on advertising as their main revenue source. They can mine their data to shorten the time it takes to alert certain demographics to the presence of a brand. Facebook has ads that appear on the side of the page (and now next to images, too) that can be targeted as finely as marital status and interests, as well as geographic location.

Twitter has a smaller range of promoted tweets in search results and timelines, promoted trends and even promoted accounts that push messages from businesses into the view of potential customers. While they sound disruptive as an attempt by a business to intrude into a private conversation, the ads have been well received by users. No less than 14 percent of respondents in one survey said that they had re-tweeted a promoted tweet. (As the ads are paid for by actions that include clicks and re-tweeting, that is both a sign of their effectiveness and their cost.)

1. Rule to know: Social Media does not deliver sales; Social Media amplifies sales.
   

But while the ads on social media sites can be well targeted, their effectiveness is debatable. One survey of Facebook ads has suggested that they are more likely to be remembered than television ads; another survey, though, found that their click-through rates are significantly lower than those of other online ads. While Twitter’s promoted tweets have delivered high levels of engagement, they seem to boost brand awareness rather than increase sales immediately.

You Cannot Buy Trust on Social Media

Even if Facebook’s ads had high click-through rates, and even if promoted tweets did generate regular sales, the ads still would not be an effective substitute for slow natural growth on social media.

1. Rule to remember: Time buys trust
   

That is because success on social media is not about building up large numbers of followers, contacts, and fans. (We have begun to see the harassers, as I call them, who think that sending out a tweet an hour or a day has some sort of positive effect.) It happens when you build trust. The more you engage with your community, answer their questions, provide them with valuable information and bring them into your business, the more they will want to do business with you. That sort of relationship is built over time. It does not always generate immediate sales, but it does lead to the kind of long-term commitment that leads to firm brand loyalty. That is not something that ads can buy — but it is something that time buys on social media.

1. Rule to use: Begin with the social medium LinkedIn.  USE IT RIGHT!
   

You can tell a lot about a company from the conversations that take place about it on social media.  Apparently, that also includes future share price movements.  According to a new data mining study, the more separate conversations that take place on Twitter about a company in the S&P 500, the better that company is likely to perform on the stock market.  When conversations focus on just a single topic, the company is likely to perform poorly.

The reason is not entirely clear although researcher Vagelis Hristidis speculated that the cause might have something to with people focusing on bad news and growing bored quickly with good news. 

When Apple produces a phone whose antenna does not work, for example, social media chat will focus on the problem.  That is a preoccupation that is very difficult to shift especially when it takes hold among millions of people, even with the help of expensive public relations firms.  Apple might have tried to dismiss the antennagate problems of the iPhone 4 and move the conversation on, but it ended up handing out free bumpers and dismissing the engineer instead.  As long as the company does not repeat antennagate though, conversations about that company will continue to range from the iPad to what it is going to do with its giant pile of cash.

That is interesting news as far is it goes, but only 500 companies are on the S&P 500 and most small firms would be happy just to be the subject of conversation.  The problem though is that when spontaneous conversations about small companies do occur, they often focus on criticism.  Jorno Keyboard, a manufacturer of a foldable Bluetooth keyboard, seems to spend its entire time on social media dealing with complaints about the product’s delayed launch rather than discussing its unique folding structure and small size.

Small firms though have an advantage: when conversations about them are not happening by themselves, their social media staff get to decide the conversation starters.  When they tweet a link to a blog post that touches on their industry, they start to push the conversation in the direction of that post.  When they ask followers what they think of the product’s new color or shape, they keep chat focused on appearance, spreading word about the brand without opening it to any substantive criticism.  Even some large firms can do this.  Coca Cola is rarely in the news (although it is always on billboards) so its Facebook page constantly asks simple questions that prompt the drink’s fans to mention the product’s name without engaging in any real discussion about it.

When your followers and fans have one reason to talk about your business that reason is likely to be a problem.  That is a time to listen, respond and make sure you fix the issue.  But when the conversation is not happening, you get to start it.  That conversation might not put you on the S&P 500, it might just keep the business rising.

[I should mention that there are some fine products to control any possible criticism.  I should also mention that you need it sorely.  Contact me and I will suggest a few.]

How to Build Trust in Your Social Media Marketing

If you have been trying to show that you “get” texting and tweeting by cutting out the vowels and posting abbreviations like a teenager with fast thumbs, there is a good chance that you are ruining your credibility. According to a new survey from Microsoft Research and Carnegie Mellon University, while some communities may see non-standard grammar as a badge of credibility, for most users, all those appearances of “ur” instead of “your” and “2” instead of “to” might help to save characters but they also make the content of your tweet appear less trustworthy. 

“[I]f credibility is a goal, users are encouraged to use standard grammar and spelling despite the space challenges of the short microblog format,” say the survey’s researchers.

Also reducing the credibility of content posted on Twitter are avatars made up of cartoons, a logo or, worst of all, Twitter’s default user image. Following many users also reduces trust, perhaps because the twitterer appears to be trying too hard to win popularity through follows instead of relying on posting good content.

Readers are more likely to trust a tweet when they believe the author is an expert on the subject, is someone they follow or at least have heard of, or if the tweet contains a link to a URL they have previously clicked. The most powerful trust builder though is when a tweet has been re-tweeted by someone the reader trusts.

You Need Credibility

You online credibility is vital for businesses on social media. Companies use social media to build the kinds of relationships with markets that just cannot be achieved through advertising or publicity. The personal engagement and conversations that take place on social media platforms creates the trust that leads to sales.

• So you should put your picture on your Twitter stream, and not the logo of your company or a photo of the product. 
• You should write in full sentences so that you are easily understood and appear articulate and informed. 
• You should choose a username that is either related to the subject of your timeline or reflects your real name. (Internet-style combinations of words and numbers were also found to appear untrustworthy.)
• And you should be focused, says the survey.

Your timeline should try to write largely about a single topic so that readers can see that you are an expert in the field and that the opinions you display and the news you link to are worth reading.

But there is a danger there. While you should focus on business, if you are going to build a relationship, you also need to look human and approachable — the reason those default avatars and logos reduce credibility and cause readers to overlook posts.

To boil the survey results down to its essentials then, the best approach has more to do with attitude than strategy. If you can create a social media presence that portrays you as an individual with valuable expertise in a particular topic — the topic of your business and the workings of your industry — you will be able to both build relationships and create trust. And that will lead to sales.

Incredibly good.

nytimes.com

With Video, Obama Looks to Expand Campaign’s Reach Through Social Media

“The Road We've Traveled” documentary, bound for YouTube, is seen as a fund-raising tool.

When presidential candidates have a message they want voters to hear far and wide, they have typically turned to that old campaign standby: the television ad.

But as President Obama and his advisers prepare to begin their general election push, they are turning first not to a 30-second commercial but a 17-minute online documentary that they hope will be shared and spread online through social networks and e-mail.

When the Tom Hanks-narrated, Hollywood-style documentary, called “The Road We’ve Traveled,” is set to go online Thursday night, it will appear on a new YouTube platform that enables the Obama campaign to turn the passive experience of watching a video into an organizing and fund-raising tool. The technology will allow viewers to post campaign content to their Facebook pages, volunteer and donate all without having to leave Mr. Obama’s dedicated YouTube page.

Eventually campaign strategists hope to use the new software to focus on people in highly specific ways. For example, if someone watches a video about a certain geographic location, like Florida, a list of that person’s Facebook friends in Florida would appear alongside the video with a message from the campaign that suggests recommending the video to them.

The Obama campaign’s efforts underscore the importance that political campaigns now attach to Web video and the role the medium will probably play in the coming election. Once best known in politics as the venue for viral parodies and hastily produced response efforts, online video is vital in the way campaigns communicate with and persuade voters.

“The importance of video is so new for campaigns, even relative to ’08,” said Teddy Goff, the Obama campaign’s digital director. “Now it’s in some ways the primary way our digital operation communicates with supporters. And increasingly it will be the primary way we communicate with undecided voters.”

Television is likely to remain the dominant way campaigns reach voters for the foreseeable future. Experts predict that about 10 percent of the campaigns’ advertising budgets this year will be spent on the Web. But online video offers campaigns a way to connect with people they know are engaged and not fast-forwarding through messages on their DVR players or flipping channels during commercials.

And, perhaps more important, it offers them a way to disseminate their messages into online communities where friends and family members share, discuss and debate. Campaigns believe that helps elevate their messages beyond propaganda.

“This year it’s all about getting your message into those trusted networks because everyone is suspicious about politicians,” said Darrell West, of the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution. “It’s hard to be persuasive through a direct advertisement. But if you can get people to share videos, it adds a degree of credibility because a friend is endorsing it. People will take it more seriously.”

“The Road We’ve Traveled” was conceived and produced by the campaign to stand out from standard political video fare. For starters, it was directed by Davis Guggenheim, the Oscar-winning director whose film credits include “Waiting for Superman” and “An Inconvenient Truth.” It features interviews with Obama administration officials past and present, including Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Rahm Emanuel, the former White House chief of staff. Former President Bill Clinton makes an appearance as well, hailing Mr. Obama’s decision to kill Osama bin Laden as one he hoped he would have had the courage to make as president.

The new YouTube platform that the Obama campaign will use to release the documentary gives anyone visiting the president’s YouTube page a number of options to share the content or pledge support, the kind of one-click approach that campaigns now see as an integral part of their digital strategies.

Mitt Romney’s campaign is using similar technology with its Web videos. Visitors can donate, volunteer and share content, all within Mr. Romney’s YouTube page. The campaign has worked to keep its video offerings dynamic, producing roughly two a week over the course of the campaign.

The Obama campaign has taken a similar one-stop-shopping approach to streamline online donations. Borrowing a technique from online merchants like Amazon and Fresh Direct, repeat donors do not need to resubmit their credit card information to make a pledge. The campaign saves it on file, and all the donor has to do is click.

Where online video offers some of the most potential, strategists say, is in modernizing the traditional aspects of campaigning, like get-out-the-vote efforts and responses to attacks from opponents.

“It’s the ability to get your message out quickly that makes all the difference,” said Zac Moffatt, the Romney campaign’s digital director. “And that’s really where I think YouTube has found a niche in politics.”

Some strategists said what has changed in this election is the ability to turn Web video into something people act on. “One of the biggest challenges with YouTube is giving people a clear action to take after viewing,” said Stephen Muller, the Obama campaign’s video director. “The goal is to bring our engagement tools to our supporters.”

The Role of Images in Your Social Media Marketing 

It is easy to forget, when you are cutting down a tweet to make it fit 140 characters, that Twitter actually lets you communicate with a thousand words. You will not be able to fit all of those words into the timeline, of course, but that is the value of a picture — and Twitter does allow pictures.

It is a relatively new thing. Twitter launched without any imaging ability at all. Like hash tags, pictures attached to tweets were an innovation that came from the community, in this case from TwitPic. Now images are built-in and every profile comes with a camera roll that contains the user’s images, and which anyone can browse.

And it is likely that people do. 

Check out the profile of someone interesting on Twitter or a business you are considering following on the site and it is almost inevitable that you will find yourself looking through their images. It is a much faster way than reading their tweets to discover who they are. 

For individuals, that picture roll is likely to contain shots of themselves and their family — and, too often, of their lunch and their desserts. Businesses should be focused on offering behind-the-scenes shots, images from sales events and any appearances of their product in the media. 

And Here is the President with Our Product

One company that does this very well is tablet case-maker Dodocase. The company’s image stream on Twitter contains more than 40 photographs. Some of the images show the cases in production. Others depict the company’s stall and the product at craft fairs. A few show the case when it pops up on television shows. 

The effect is to pull the reader in, to give them bonus glimpses of a product they admire and a company they love. The pictures help to deepen the relationship with the customer.

On Facebook, the images do even more; the company has 99 photos on its Wall alone, including a shot of a Dodocase sitting on the President’s desk in the Oval Office. Other images though have been tagged. This shot, for example, shows a couple of people wearing the company logo during a bike race. By tagging those people, though, the picture does not just become available for them to see; it is also pushed onto their profiles where their contacts see them. 

That is a strategy that is been used to great effect by wedding photographers in particular. After the shoot, photographers have been known to upload a selection of images then tag the people in those images. The photographer will not know the names of everyone in the photo but he can invite others to add their own tags. The tagging pushes the image onto a guest’s page and puts a sample of his product in front of more people who match his market demographic.

So a business using social media can post product photos and behind-the-scene photos. It can upload images of their product being used in all sorts of interesting ways (although few can manage to land a shot of their item on the President’s desk). And it can post images of customers — and expect those customers to bring in more customers.

Did somebody say a picture is worth a thousand words? 

Social media is not a sales person’s most important tool.

The most important tool a sales person has available is a question.

Asking a question about needs and planned use allows sales people to gather the information they must collect in order to deliver a targeted pitch. It tells them who they’re talking to and what they want to hear. It is how every meeting with every lead should begin.

And a question is also how every sales pitch for every product almost always ends: by asking the lead whether he’s going to buy.

Of course, every good sales person knows that a yes_or_no question is not a question they should ever ask. A simple yes/no question has a 50/50 chance of producing the wrong response. Instead, we ask questions that assume a particular answer. “You’d prefer this in blue, wouldn’t you?” Or even better can be an alternative close.  “Would you like it in blue or red?”

But that final question, the one that turns a pitch into push and tests whether your salesmanship has done its job, is a delicate thing. If the lead feels that you’re assuming too much, he’ll step back. He’ll assert control over his decision-making by stating his refusal. The bigger the margin by which you’ve missed the moment, the more the lead digs in and refuses to buy — and the harder you’ll have to work to win him back with more questions.

How does this sale process relate to social media marketing?

Questions Inform, Close, and Engage

Questions aren’t just another form of content on social media. They’re one of the most valuable forms of content and one of the easiest to produce. Take a look at Coca Cola’s Facebook page, for example, and you’ll see plenty of questions asking followers how close they are to a Coke right now, what goes best with a Coke and whether they love Coca Cola.

Those questions are placed to encourage engagement, to provoke followers to write comments and stay active on the Page. But they also yield information. The number of replies a question receives tells the social media manager about the concerns of his followers. The answers themselves tell him their preferences.

But most importantly, the questions act as precursors to the close. Each question reminds the reader of the drink. It makes them thirsty, recalls the flavor and increases the chance that they’ll head to the fridge and pour themselves a glass.

And of course, the replies are also seen on their own profiles, putting Coca Cola on thousands of other Facebook pages. (The question about Coca Cola fans’ favorite accompaniment generated more than 7,000 replies.)

In traditional sales, questions yield information and close deals. Social media amplifies the power of that tool by also driving engagement and spreading the brand.  The more questions you put to your prospects and customers, the more you will discover what works and what does not.

    Did you get my point?

    Or did I miss it?

Check off the box.  Get the right answer and I will buy you a Coke.  Oh, I forgot.  Remember to ask the right question.