Fishing Where the Fish Are - Mapping Social Media to the Buying Cycle

Fishing Where The Fish Are: Mapping Social Media to the Buying Cycle Chris Brogan / chrisbrogan.com Chris Brogan: Fish Where the Fish Are - http://chrisbrogan.com/ﬁshebook -1

We know that buying cycles are basically some variation on this theme: Awareness Disillusion Interest Retention Research Purchase People become (or are made) aware of something. They take interest. They research their buying decisions. If youʼre lucky, they purchase the product or service. Afterwards, itʼs a matter of keeping them a customer as long as you can. Chris Brogan: Fish Where the Fish Are - http://chrisbrogan.com/ﬁshebook -2

Introduction Social media offers tools like blogging, podcasts, and social networks as ways to reach into this buying cycle. It doesn’t operate as an island. It ties into your traditional marketing plans. There are many differences in the execution, but the strategies tie in nicely to your traditional goals. What follows is a brief summary of six approaches to using social media to inﬂuence these transactions. Chris Brogan: Fish Where the Fish Are - http://chrisbrogan.com/ﬁshebook -3

Fish Where The Fish Are- Six Social Media Approaches 1.) Find the Customer 2.) Be There Before the Sale 3.) Be (or Empower) the Inﬂuencer 4.) Shift Behavior 5.) Warm Up the Funnel 6.) Measure You’ll note that these approaches don’t seem too different than typical marketing and sales methods, in name. It’s in the execution and the tools where things move differently. Chris Brogan: Fish Where the Fish Are - http://chrisbrogan.com/ﬁshebook -4

1.) Find the Customer Frank Eliason from Comcast didn’t wait for his customers to approach him. He used Twitter to seek out people having service issues, and then he helped solve their problems. What if you blogged about the area your potential customers might come from, like DigitalNomads.com from Dell did? Social media lets you find your customers first. Chris Brogan: Fish Where the Fish Are - http://chrisbrogan.com/fishebook -5

2.) Be There Before the Sale Long before you need a loan for your kid’s education, you should know about the Financial Aid Podast and Christopher S. Penn. Chris works hard to deliver trusted information to people without asking for your money. In fact, Chris does the opposite: he shows you have to save your money, day in and day out. By giving it all away, Chris ensures that you’ll think of him ﬁrst when buying. Chris Brogan: Fish Where the Fish Are - http://chrisbrogan.com/ﬁshebook -6

3.) Be (or empower) the Influencer Luis Suarez is a voice inside of IBM’s effort to power social computing. He shares his views, encourages others, and builds relationships that don’t immediately impact IBM, except that they do. We know Luis, and we form an opinion on IBM. Chris Brogan: Fish Where the Fish Are - http://chrisbrogan.com/ﬁshebook -7

4.) Shift Behavior Scott Monty has his job cut out for him. His role is to head social media for Ford. What does blogging and Twitter have to do with selling cars? Scott’s going to ﬁnd out. One way Scott moved to shift behavior was to start offering bloggers rides in the Ford Flex. Will it work? Will we blog about the car? This is perhaps the hardest step. Chris Brogan: Fish Where the Fish Are - http://chrisbrogan.com/ﬁshebook -8

5.) Warm Up the Funnel Mike Dunn has lots of experience in making relationships. He is one of the top cool hunters at Hearst Interactive. He wouldn’t put it this way, but he probably has to kiss a lot of frogs to ﬁnd a prince in that realm. Social media offers lots of ways to create “multi-touch” contact with prospects and buyers. Chris Brogan: Fish Where the Fish Are - http://chrisbrogan.com/ﬁshebook -9

6.) Measure If there were a patron saint of measurement, it would be K.D. Paine. There’s a reason she speaks at all the hot conferences. K.D. is one of the few who can easily talk about how social media is measured. But there are ways to add gauges to what we propose when we talk about social media. They just take a bit more thinking than traditional methods. Chris Brogan: Fish Where the Fish Are - http://chrisbrogan.com/ﬁshebook -10

Tools for the Approach For each of these six approaches to the buying process, let’s look at some examples of tools. Then, we’ll talk about their use. 1.) Find the Customer - listening tools, search. 2.) Be There Before the Sale - profiles, presence. 3.) Be (or Empower) the Influencer - blogs, platforms. 4.) Shift Behavior - (this isn’t tool specific. More below.) 5.) Warm Up the Funnel - Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn 6.) Measure - Hubspot, Radian6, BuzzLogic, More. Chris Brogan: Fish Where the Fish Are - http://chrisbrogan.com/fishebook -11

Find the Customer- Tools / Application Here are some listening and search tools: * http://blogsearch.google.com * http://www.technorati.com * http://search.twitter.com Use these tools to build searches on your company’s name, your products’ names, your competitors, but MOST importantly, think of what someone would type into Google at the moment they needed you most. Search for that. Chris Brogan: Fish Where the Fish Are - http://chrisbrogan.com/ﬁshebook -12

Be There Before the Sale- Tools / Application Build profiles on social networks and websites, and update them. Have an account on: * http://www.twitter.com * http://www.facebook.com * http://www.linkedin.com * http://www.flickr.com * http://www.upcoming.org (You might have some other recommendations here.) Put up YOUR picture, not a corporate logo. Represent by being you, and by being a good employee. Chris Brogan: Fish Where the Fish Are - http://chrisbrogan.com/fishebook -13

Be (or empower) the Influencer - Tools / Application Have a blog, a lively blog, a place where you talk not just about your company and product, but instead, you talk about the space your customers inhabit. Luis Suarez talks about social computing - not just IBM products, but the ways in which companies use social computing. Make sure your blog is nicely designed, is professional, and that you’ve pointed your online points of presence to it so you can encourage conversation. Make it easy for people to share your material off-site, too. Chris Brogan: Fish Where the Fish Are - http://chrisbrogan.com/ﬁshebook -14

Shift Behavior - Applications This is more of a “how” you should do it section. To shift behavior, be helpful. Starbucks became our “third place” because it was inviting, because transactions were easy, because the place was conﬁgured for our business. Be helpful. If you’re trying to sell more product, how can you reduce friction to the purchase? What else can you do that isn’t directly tied to a sale but that still helps? Can you point to other people’s services when it makes a difference? Shift behaviors by being online and by being helpful. Chris Brogan: Fish Where the Fish Are - http://chrisbrogan.com/ﬁshebook -15

Warm Up the Funnel - Tools /Application Use LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and commenting on people’s blogs as a way to keep relationships “warm.” Never underestimate the value of comments and general, non-sales-minded conversations. Some tools to help you stay on top of this: * http://www.backtype.com - commenting tracking. * http://www.friendfeed.com - lifestream hub. * http://search.twitter.com - search for your name, company’s name, product’s name, etc, and subscribe to it via RSS. Chris Brogan: Fish Where the Fish Are - http://chrisbrogan.com/ﬁshebook -16

Measure - Tools /Application There are many ways to measure social media’s impact. You probably already think of pageviews, unique visitors, comments. Here are some more: * http://www.radian6.com , http://www.buzzlogic.com , http://www.crimsonhexagon , http:// www.vibemetrix.com - sentiment and comments. * http://www.hubspot.com - site search quality, value of links, more. Simple point: there’s more than numbers to consider. Chris Brogan: Fish Where the Fish Are - http://chrisbrogan.com/ﬁshebook -17

A Starting Strategy for Social Media Using the six approaches above, here’s a quick rundown of your potential starting points to building out a social media project for your organization. 1.) Find the Customer - Assign two people in the organization to build listening queries, populate an RSS reader as a command center, and conduct regular reporting cycles on the fruits of listening. 2.) Be There Before the Sale - Create a quick, one page document to outline company guidelines for building employee profiles on social platforms like Facebook. Work with IT on firewall concerns. Work with management to lay out fair use policies during work hours (again, no more than a page). Work with sales/marketing/engineering on ideas for using the platforms. Chris Brogan: Fish Where the Fish Are - http://chrisbrogan.com/fishebook -18

3.) Be (or Empower) the Influencer - Have a one page blogging policy in place (usually no more strict than the email policy). Have policies on comments (including how to handle negative comments). Build strategy on types of posts, ideas for outreach, promotion, and finding similar blogs and people in the space. 4.) Shift Behavior - Demonstrate through case studies and pilot efforts how to empower employees to be helpful. Share examples and ideas on how these efforts can positively impact marketing/sales efforts. 5.) Warm Up the Funnel - Determine a method for internally annotating the social aspects of CRM, or build a way to report the multi-touch approach of using social tools to reach out and maintain relationships with prospects and customers. 6.) Measurement - Improve current reporting to include the social elements such as comments, inbound links, search term value, etc. Chris Brogan: Fish Where the Fish Are - http://chrisbrogan.com/fishebook -19

Wrapping Up The playing field changes daily, and the tools mentioned above are just a fraction of the hundreds of different choices that exist. The strategies are general and the approach just starting points. The difficult work is in customizing advice like this for your specific needs. That said, hopefully, this is a starting point for how you might approach integrating social media into your existing marketing and sales efforts. Not unlike Approach 4, my goal is to be helpful. If you have further questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me. Thank you for your attention. -- Chris Brogan | chris@chrisbrogan.com |617.759.3639 | http://www.chrisbrogan.com Chris Brogan: Fish Where the Fish Are - http://chrisbrogan.com/fishebook -20

Everything in this document was intended for sharing. Please forward liberally. If you use any material in presentations of your own, simply give credit to http://www.chrisbrogan.com . If you have any questions, check this page ﬁrst, and if you still have questions, contact me: chris@chrisbrogan.com Cover photo credit: Manatari. About the Author Chris Brogan is a ten year veteran of using social media and technology to build digital relationships for businesses, organizations, and individuals. Chris speaks, blogs, writes articles, and makes media of all kinds at [chrisbrogan.com], a blog in the top 20 of the Advertising Age Power150, and in the top 100 on Technorati. Connect with Chris on LinkedIn. Subscribe to his Free Newsletter. Contact Chris about Speaking. Chris Brogan: Fish Where the Fish Are - http://chrisbrogan.com/ﬁshebook -21

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Fishing Where the Fish Are - Mapping Social Media to the Buying Cycle

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