Page 132 - Social Media Marketing

chapter 5: SOCIAL TECHNOLOGY AND BUSINESS DECISIONS ■Create a Social Business

Part I of this book started with the engagement processes and the ways in which inter-
action and participation with social content can connect your audience with your
brand (for better or for worse!). Built into the engagement process is a recognition of
the new role of the customer, now much more of a participant in the marketplace and
increasingly in the businesses and organizations that serve it. The final foundational
element of Part I—the social business ecosystem and its collaborative processes—
exposed the collective knowledge of the Social Web and showed you how to use it in
building, running, and evolving your business or organization. Collaboration between
the business as a whole and its customers is the hallmark of a social business.

Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day

If some of the core social media marketing concepts are unfamiliar to you as you head into Part II,
110 you may find my earlier book helpful. Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day (Sybex, 2008) covers

the basics of social media marketing and provides a nice introduction to the fundamental con-
nection between the purchase funnel and the Social Web.

Collaboration in the context of social business means several things. First, it
means working together, which is pretty obvious. Less obvious is who is working
together. Social business implies a collaborative process not only between the business
and its customers, which is tough enough, but also within the business itself—across
“silos”—and between individual customers. Using the combination of conversations
and active listening to guide your business planning process is a logical—but decep-
tively simple—approach to social business. More often, the processes of organizational
change, of breaking down silos, and of appropriately sharing and exposing information
quickly and widely present the real challenges. It is critically important not to repeat
the business mantra that goes “Our customers are at the center of everything we do”
while operating largely without their input and without formally integrating your cus-
tomer’s experiences, thoughts, and ideas into your internal business processes. Only
when this occurs—when customer ideas and inputs are brought into the business or
organization in a visible, meaningful way—is it a “social business.”

The key to combining listening data, obtained via support forums and similar
applications, and other information gathered through direct connection with your cus-
tomers is that this needs to be connected to your business strategy and the processes
that surround it. In other words, traditional marketing is largely focused on market
study (both pre and post) that informs a message. Listening—in the simple sense—
conveys back to you the degree to which that message was consistent with the actual