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The Social Network Mid-Life Crisis

Jan 2017/in , , , /by

Each social network has its own persona. We have the style icon, all looks, in Instagram and the hotheaded, no-filter urbanite that is Twitter. Then, there’s the socialite, Facebook, and the professional, LinkedIn – both who seem to be undergoing respective identity crises.

FaceInTraditionally a sharing point for family and friends, Facebook is crossing into professional realms. TechCrunch recently shared Facebook’s announcement that it is testing out job features. The idea is to give businesses the ability to promote job listings from their company Facebook pages. These recruitment features include job post creation, posting, and even the ability to receive applications. Similar to applying directly through LinkedIn, Facebook is considering a prepopulated format when applying through the network.

This isn’t the first time Facebook has tested LinkedIn-esque features. Last year, Facebook tested out “Profile Tags” that showcased a user’s interests, skills, and personality. Sound familiar? Take a peek at your LinkedIn endorsements.

LinkedBookLinkedIn users seem to be favoring the social aspect of the professional social network. My colleague finds about every third LinkedIn update on her feed to be more personal than professional. However, it’s difficult to pinpoint what’s driving this behavior.

A confusion of what is “work related” is possibly to blame for the increasing clutter on our LinkedIn feeds. For example, the included quote was pulled from a lengthy LinkedIn post.

linkedbook formula

The quote was accompanied by a big, smiling, “selfie.” Though work and career are essential themes to the post, the emotional description and personal image reflect Facebook’s intimate reputation more than that of the professional networking psyche originally associated with LinkedIn.

The pseudo-work related post formula has spread like wildfire across LinkedIn. Always, a personal photograph follows the assertion. Another “selfie” shot I came across this morning was captioned, “Ready for my first interview!” I can’t image any interviewer not checking the LinkedIn profile of candidates before meeting.

LinkterAlongside the emotional, personal posts popping up throughout your updates are the political statements. Statements an employee wouldn’t dare utter in the office are suddenly posted for every co-worker to see in dark gray Source Sans font.

Rather than these posts being overlooked, LinkedIn users can’t resist the bait. Each political post is accompanied by Tweet-worthy replies from every part of the political spectrum. Even posts without political themes are subject to these users.linkedbook politics

There’s no confusion of these being unrelated to work (unless one’s industry is, in fact, politics) so what’s driving users to share these on LinkedIn?

LinkedBlrLinkedIn may be, accidentally or not, encouraging unprofessional behavior. Just as Facebook has begun to mimic LinkedIn, LinkedIn is mimicking other social networks, especially those heavy on the social. Earlier this year, LinkedIn began developing its own version of Facebook’s “Instant Articles”.

Nowadays anyone can “publish an article” to LinkedIn’s “news” in the same style used by any unprofessional blogging platform including the micro-blogging network Tumblr, with its neo-new wave, post-punk persona. After publishing a blog an article, it will be conveniently placed into the view of their connections via LinkedIn’s “Recommended Reads” emails’ “Published by your network” section. If you play the game right, as outlined here by this highly-shared author, LinkedIn Editors will push your news to the featured #dailyrundowns. Though curated by the human hand, the Daily Rundown sometimes consolidates trends across all interests, creating one noisy summary. Take a look at the below headline on death.

LinkedIn Editors

In a world of information overload, the last thing we need is a noisy, one-stop shop. From retail to news to TV channels, our society is demanding filtered, specific access points to what we consume. If LinkedIn loses its sense of self, we lose a productive, professional networking tool and the relevant-information sharing possibilities it offers. On the flip side, if Facebook loses its carefree persona, I may have to limit the number of cat photos I post.

Still not sure the lines are being blurred? Check out this comment made on LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner’s recent update:linkedbook post

Social-Selling-Image1

5 Tips to Enable Your Social Selling

Feb 2015/in /by

A new post from Rachel Clapp Miller at Force Management posted on HubSpot titled ‘How to Get Your Sales Team to Show Value in Social Media‘ is a good quick read as you think about enabling your own sales teams with social selling skills.

According to the post, a survey from IDC shows 75% percent of B2B buyers use social media to make purchasing decisions. And that number jumps to 84% when you factor in C-level and/or VP Executives. It’s a no brainer, making your sales and customer facing teams social is important and Rachel’s 5 tips are spot on:

      1. Use what’s available
      2. Set Goals
      3. Add sharing into the current sales process
      4. Consider Technology
      5. Share success

I love this combination of technology, enablement and setting formal goals for your teams and have seen it work well for sales teams of all different sizes. Here is how we enable our own FirstRain team to become social sellers:

Using our own platform, FirstRain provides each one of our customer facing rep with prompts, covering their customers, target markets and industry trends. With one click access from all our apps, they can quick share externally to Twitter and LinkedIn and to internal social networks (we use Chatter, but enable our customers on Chatter, Yammer and IBM Connections). Social-Selling-Image1

In addition, our marketing team on a weekly basis picks out 10 pieces of content for our field team to quickly share on Twitter and LinkedIn. Our team creates these weekly emails, using targeted FirstRain views we have created and selecting content that we may see our own network sharing. Topics range from Sales Enablement trends, Platform engagement, Internet of Things and things like security concerns that our customers care about. Some are directly addressed by the products we provide, but some are top of mind topics that everyone should care about. The format is as easy as our product app sharing, one click to twitter or Linkedin- leading to many thanks and sharing from our teams!Social-Selling-Image3

Twitter-Egghead

Trying to be a Social Seller? Don’t be an Egghead

Aug 2014/in /by

“Just like having a website in the 1990s, buyers are now judging the legitimacy of an organization based on their presence (or lack thereof) on social media.”

Rachel Clapp Miller over on the Force Management blog recently wrote a great piece on how to incorporate social media into your sales process. According to the research she quotes, social is proven to helps sales organizations drive pipeline by

(1) engaging with buyers earlier in the sales cycle,

(2) maintaining relationships with current customers and

(3) demonstrating valuable market insight.

Whenever you start using a new social media site, it prompts you to change your avatar, the image associated with the content you create/post. Your avatar basically represents who you are and an increasing amount of sales people are starting to use their professional ‘headshots’ across all their social business networks. This allows them to create a recognizable brand for themselves as social sellers for when they finally meet face to face with the customer. [Have you ever experienced the delight of meeting someone that you have followed and engaged with on a social network? I have many times, and it is a great feeling!]

Many companies are also starting to dictate that their employees join and engage with their customers on social networks – primarily Twitter and LinkedIn. Recently I saw a huge influx of people joining Twitter from a specific company. I found them because they were all retweeting the same corporate tweets I was tracking. However, I also noticed that many of them were eggheads.  An egghead is a twitter user that doesn’t change their profile pic. As an ‘egghead’ you are surely going to be ignored–some might even think that you are a spam bot of some sort. So I asked someone that worked there about what was going on. It turns out that their CEO had announced at their annual meeting that everyone had to be on social. So the eggheads got on social, and many of them still haven’t hatched.

Remember the old mantra, people buy from people? Your buyers are not going to engage with your eggheads. However, hatching an egghead into a social seller who will provide value to their network doesn’t happen overnight. You have to put together a social media plan that will help your sellers be successful on social. This should include tools that will help them quickly share content that is not only promotional for your own company and products, but will also provide insights into subject matters that your customers care about.

With that being said, I think it is time for me to retire my very own avatar. A couple of years ago I wrote an ebook that was beautifully illustrated. It included a hand drawn cartoon of me. Since then, I have used that picture as my Twitter avatar. My network knows me as such and I am concerned that by switching I might be masking myself with … well … a real picture of myself! But that’s ok- the aim is to provide value and engagement to my old friends and my new ones as well, and a fresh look could help do the trick..So follow me to see the “new” @danielabarbosa

Social Selling

3 Steps to Better Social Selling

May 2014/in /by

The world is more social than ever—and selling is no exception. But as Salesforce.com points out, the conversation around social media has been focused on marketing instead of making the sale. However, salespeople can and should take advantage of social selling to drive more wins and increase revenue.

But where to begin? The insights are out there, but where do you look for the most actionable and strategic, and then draw them out? Personal business analytics enable salespeople to use social selling techniques to reach prospects and win sales by not only showing them exactly the information they need to understand their customer’s business and their own market, but by allowing them to share critical insights as well.

To excel at social selling, there are a few key steps.

  1. Get to know your customers. In order to most effectively position your solution to them, you need to know their specific business challenges and what, exactly, they care about. What are their key market drivers? What makes them successful, and what keeps them up at night? Having the answers to all of these questions will help you foster a productive and effective relationship with your customer, making it easier for you to help them, and making them more likely to buy from you.
  2. Listen to what the people are saying. Twitter has an estimated 500 million tweets per day—including the unrestrained thoughts of thought leaders and executives. It’s essential to have your ear to the ground and understand what people are saying about your solution, your market and/or their needs. With business twitter solutions like FirstTweets you’ll be able to sift through the noise to find the gold nuggets of information you need to identify more opportunities.
  3. Sharing with your own team. Not every sale is straightforward, and many times you’ll need the help of a lot of different people (why do you think it’s a sales team?). You can keep everyone on the same page and updated with the latest developments with the prospect by sharing breaking news and valuable insights right through your CRM or enterprise collaboration platform.

Salespeople are usually very social people by nature, and by equipping them with the right tools, you can harness and direct their sociability to improving sales.

new years

Make content your New Year’s marketing resolution

Dec 2013/in /by

Content marketing is the probably the biggest marketing trend of 2013. It seems likely that content will remain the biggest marketing industry buzzword going into 2014. Do you have a resolution for the New Year? Maybe it’s time for your marketing department to come up with a collective resolution: successfully implementing a content marketing strategy in 2014.

You may be thinking content marketing doesn’t work for B2B, and you’re not exactly wrong. A lot of companies haven’t figured out how to get content marketing to work efficiently for them. The truth is, B2B content marketing brings a unique set of challenges. However, provided you know what you’re in for, the return on investment can be just as high as it is for B2C.

The challenges of B2B content marketing:

  • Not all traffic is good - While a lot of B2C companies can benefit from easy content that simply drives traffic, B2B content needs to be engaging, thoughtful and demonstrate expertise. When done right, B2B content will be aimed at aimed at industry experts. Bad content can attract a whole lot of the wrong audience. You may be getting more traffic, but if it’s not improving your sales prospects, there’s really no point.
  • Getting your voice heard - In the past, things were much simpler. You knew exactly where your content would go, and who would get it. Basically, marketers would write articles for glossy industry magazines that would go out to a list of subscribers. These days, content sources are free and marketers often struggle to be heard over the din of voices.

How to implement a successful content strategy

Because of these challenges, it’s not surprising that about half of companies surveyed by Content Marketing Institute reported they had no content marketing strategy. Given the lag in adoption of this marketing channel, those firms that do find a way to implement a successful content marketing strategy will be ahead of the game.

Here are some tips to get started:

  1. Get to know your consumers - Use customer intelligence to learn as much as you can about your consumer base. You can’t generate great content without knowing who should be reading it and why your services matter to them.
  2. Generate awesome content – Be a resource for your consumers. Write informative content targeted directly to prospective buyers. As Leigh Hoops writes for Forbes, consumers are constantly bombarded with information, and they’re getting sick of it. She also says if a piece of information feels too valuable to be giving away, then you’re doing it right. On the other hand, make your content as readable as possible. Your prospective buyers are busy people too.
  3. Find your consumers - Having trouble finding your audience? You’re probably not looking in the right place. Social media may be great for B2C, but if your company is using Facebook and Twitter, you could be throwing hashtags into the void. Of the companies that do use content marketing, 91 percent are on LinkedIn, according to Content Marketing Institute.
  4. Don’t give up - Continuous content is a must. Don’t disappoint your newly enticed prospects by neglecting your blog. According to Holly Chessman for Social Media B2B, the biggest reason corporate blogs die is because people stop writing them. To make sure you aren’t putting your content strategy on the back burner, it’s a good idea to create an editorial calendar. Make writing part of your daily duties. If you have trouble figuring out what to write, it’s okay to delve back into old content and put together a “greatest hits” collection.

When done right, these strategies will help you generate better leads for your sales team. Don’t let your fears hold you back from the jumping on the content marketing bandwagon.

social media

Develop a Social Media Strategy Specific to Your Customers

Aug 2013/in , , /by

By Daniela Barbosa, Director of Business Development

Simply just being on networking sites isn’t enough anymore—to stay competitive you have to be creative with the content you are putting out there, showcasing your expertise and even creating a new social community. With all of its challenges, social media continues to be one of the most effective ways you can market your company and connect with clients. When your customers are able to interact with your company online, you’ll understand what is currently driving them to purchase a certain product or favor a specific brand. But think beyond just sharing content with your clients—develop an engagement strategy that’s specific to your target consumer and you will begin to see stronger sales.

Be Purpose-Driven
Forbes says that digital marketing campaigns are starting to move toward more purpose-driven content and branding, according to this infographic from We First, a B2B training company. The infographic highlighted that 54% of consumers don’t trust that brands are being genuine. Let that sink in for a minute. Your social media initiative is under customer scrutiny most of the time, and you need to figure out a way to bridge that disconnect and really interact with your customers. A main challenge to achieving this end is that the majority of employees, about 54%, said they didn’t clearly understand their company’s mission and so were unable to effectively communicate with customers online. After you make sure your employees really know what your company is trying to achieve, then you can turn to your customers. One of the key ways the infographic suggested for building customer loyalty online is by showcasing the humanizing aspects of your company, such as charity involvement, or highlighting a strong volunteer culture.

By developing a comprehensive social media strategy around your customers’ needs that all of your employees can follow, you will not only improve worker knowledge, but also ensure everyone is on the same page.

Learn From Entrepreneurs
But how do you make this a reality? Well, understanding your customers is key, but you should also gather some insider secrets from a few innovative professionals who have conducted successful social initiatives.

Entrepreneurs are often better able to think strategically about what they want to accomplish. According to a case study by Entrepreneur magazine, three startups gained strong sales early on by adopting a customer-centric—and, unsurprisingly, innovative—social media strategy.

One of these young professionals, Warby Parker, decided to increase awareness about his New York city-based online eyeglass company’s brand by encouraging clients to share their own stories and content on social media. Warby was able to promote his company by providing customers with the opportunity to try on the eyeglasses before buying, and then asking them to speak about their experience online, like whether they decided to purchase the frames. The strategy was focused on generating positive buzz about the company.

David Gilboa, co-founder and co-CEO of Warby’s company, told Entrepreneur that the marketing idea was a grassroots-type strategy for the brand.

“Don’t view social media as just another way to push your marketing messaging,” Gilboa said. “Think of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter as critical customer service gateways and take the time to respond to each and every customer who reaches out to you there. Each comment, photo and tweet gives you an opening to directly communicate with them on a meaningful, personalized basis that encourages brand loyalty.”

While you don’t have to implement a try-on initiative like Warby, especially if you are selling B2B enterprise solutions, you should make sure you develop a social media plan that focuses on the customer—not just on your company. Doing so can get the rest of your team involved and centered on what should be the primary reason for the campaign—connecting with your clients.
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