The change follows the movement from management to engagement.  I read this first in the thinking and writings of Thomas W. Malone, whose book, “The Future of Work: How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style and Your Life” wrote about “the shift from ‘command-and-control’ management to ‘coordinate-and-cultivate,’ and the new skills that will be required to succeed”.

Peter Kim talks about these same changes in CRM-

*How does CRM become social? *
Item: Former > Future

1. Roles: Customer service representatives > All employees engage
2. Function: Process-centric > Conversation-centric
3. Approach: Contact management > Community management
4. Channels: Well-defined > Dynamic and evolving
5. Value: Periodic customer connections > Sustained engagement
6. Model: Simple transactions > Complex relationships

So start preparing for the future – as William Gibson wrote, “The future is already here – it is just unevenly distributed.”  While the future interactions with our customers and clients may be complex, sustained, and dynamic,  it may be more rewarding.  Ongoing, engaging, and authentic conversations are worth the extra effort and focus.

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Benefits of Facebook Pages

Remember, Facebook Pages are public. This allows search engines to search and index these sites. So people can use search engines to discover your Facebook Page, and it becomes another opportunity besides your main site for customer to discover your business. Pages can also include links back to your main site, and this helps you with building off-site in-bound links to your main site.

Another benefit of Facebook Pages is the ability to send updates to people who follow or becomes “Fans” of your page. This ability to communicate with your Facebook Fans is an important engagement method. Regular updating and new content is a requirement for successfully building the number of your Facebook Fans.

One viral marketing advantage for Facebook pages is that that when someone joins, it is published in their News feed and shared with their friends (unless turned off). This allows your updates to be seen by the friends of Fans on Facebook, which leads to more discovery by others.

Two way Interactions

In programming your Facebook Page, remember social media is about people interacting with each other. Make sure your strategy includes giving something to your participating consumers (offering instead of asking). This is a great way to have people become fans and remain involved. Think about offering coupons, weekly deals, limited offers (free shipping) and other product items that are unique or first offered to your Facebook Page audience. People like to feel special, and you are part of their social circle.  Friendship is a two way street.

While starting a page is free and easy, Facebook Pages also let you add Facebook Applications to your Page. Some of the best companies pages (CocaCola) utilize Facebook Apps to help create a rich and sticky environment. Keeping away from the standard Facebook Page layout can make a big difference to encourage people to become a Fan of your Page. The best Pages use rich graphics, strong creative and engaging content, encourage fan communication, and make strong use of videos and images. This is not your official website, so you may want to play with the Page editorial voice and tone to match the medium.

The ongoing care and feeding of a Facebook Page can build a rich and rewarding engagement platform with your customers, but this also requires you to address the concerns and challenges that people post about your company on your Facebook Page. It is important to have established a practice strategy about who and how at your company will address any problems or concerns.

Analytics – Measuring your Success

Besides two-way interactions, measurements are the core of interactive marketing. The Facebook Pages insights tool includes your Fans’ engagement with posts from your Page. You can see how many comments Fans make on your posts, and also track the Fans’s viewing your posts in News Feeds. By watching your posts and Facebook Page analytics, you can see what type of content and interactions your Fans like the most on your Page. This can then be used to change and improve your ongoing content strategy.

Don’t stop at a Facebook Page

While a Facebook Page is a great way to interact with your customers who are on Facebook, don’t ignore the other social networks. Connecting multiple social platforms through your main website as a hub can help connect and direct your customers across the web.
Make sure you focus on the demographics of each site. Quantcast.com can give you demographic information about the various social networks. Facebook has a much different user compared to Linkedin. Depending on your business, you will want to develop a unique social network presence at multiple networks to help grow and expand your customers across the different social media networks.

Get Started

Before you get started, you should be clear about your campaign needs and goals. How will you define success with your Facebook and other social media presence? What is your ongoing content programming strategy? Who from your company will be responsible for the two way relationship building?

Contact us and we can help you with these items.

“Inbound Marketing” is a term that I have seen to describe the untraditional ways to market and find leads and customers for your products and services. It is the practice of having qualified leads find you and your company through the use of creating content, search engine optimization (SEO), and social networks, rather than utilizing traditional “outbound marketing” such as advertisements, cold calls and tradeshows. The old form of marketing was played as a numbers game. If your company could get in front of a large enough number of people, an acceptable minority amount of those people could be warmed up (via your marketing message) to the point where they would sample, grow interested, and eventually purchase.

Even pre-recession this was an inefficient and expensive proposition, and many people would be interrupted by the message who may have no interest in your offering. This was a large waste of marketing dollars and team members’ efforts. These external campaigns also had an incredibly short time in the market to create impact.

Benefits of Inbound Marketing
In these tight times, marketers looking for greater efficiency (not difficult to achieve) and affordable ways to acquire customers have turned to Inbound Marketing utilizing blogs, search engine optimization, and social media. David Meerman Scott recommends that marketers “publish their way in” in contrast to outbound marketing where they used to have to “buy their way in”.

The key benefit of inbound marketing techniques is that these methods pre-qualify potential customers before they arrive at your digital site, so there is a likelihood that your brand message will be delivered to welcoming vs. annoyed people.

Using low cost tools to pre-screen only those interested in continuing an interaction with you greatly saves time and money compared to the old outbound marketing strategies.

Content to drive interest
In addition to blogging, there are many other forms of great content to create that will bring interested visitors. White papers or other materials for download, manifestos, creating or posting video how-to’s or roundtable discussions, webinars, and developing micro-sites will all attract leads that are interested in your offerings and are eager to engage in a conversation with you about your organization.

SEO and Social Media to drive discovery and authority
Search engine marketing includes applying the tactics of search engine optimization and link development. When your site is optimized for search engines, it is rich in keyword text and its URL structure and site navigation schemes are user-friendly to automated search programs. Your optimized site also has many links to third-party sites that are relevant and authoritative to search engines, creating a strong “findability” ranking.

The last element for successful inbound marketing uses social media to help find experts, influencers and fans of your product, industry or topic, and building an ongoing (and cross-linked) relationship by participating in the discussions about your company, your industry or current trends or topics. You can build a strong offsite community around your company and products by commenting on relevant blogs, authoring guest posts, and by using social media for product development insights, for seeding your products in advance of launch, and for listening to and responding to customer feedback and product complaints.

All of these inbound methods pre-qualify the customer who discovers your company’s message, and brings these “want to be found” customers to your site, starting the ongoing relationship on the right foot.

The long-term build strategy
By sticking with these Inbound Marketing strategies, you’ll continually bring in new customers and grow in your search ranking. However, it won’t happen overnight. While Inbound Marketing is less expensive than traditional marketing, it does take an ample commitment and patience. It takes constant work. You may not be on page one on the search engines or have oversubscribed webinars, but by making a commitment to inbound marketing long term, you will begin to see results.

NPS is based on the fundamental perspective that every company’s customers can be divided into three categories: Promoters, Passives, and Detractors. By asking one simple question — How likely is it that you would you recommend [Company X] to a friend or colleague? — you can track these groups and get a clear measure of your company’s performance through its customers’ eyes. Customers respond on a 0-to-10 point rating scale and are categorized as follows:

Promoters (score 9-10) are loyal enthusiasts who will keep buying and refer others, fueling growth.
Passives (score 7-8) are satisfied but unenthusiastic customers who are vulnerable to competitive offerings.
Detractors (score 0-6) are unhappy customers who can damage your brand and impede growth through negative word-of-mouth.
To calculate your company’s Net Promoter Score (NPS), take the percentage of customers who are Promoters and subtract the percentage who are Detractors.

We recommend this program to our clients – to find out more you should visit Net Promoter and learn more.   If this is interesting, there is a book about how to implement this practice:

In their book, Answering the Ultimate Question (Affiliate Link), Richard Owen and Dr. Laura Brooks of Satmetrix describe the Net Promoter Operating Model that captures the elements necessary for a successful program. The operating model provides a best practice framework for how companies collect and act on customer feedback to optimize financial benefits.

Please comment below and let us know if you have heard about the Ultimate Question and if you have had any experience implementing a customer satisfaction program at your business

But are you too old to become a trust agent and influence online? To understand the demographics around trust agents, look at this Forester interactive tool:

Interesting for people like myself (the over 44 male crowd) to see how few of us are creators or critics. To stop this emerging generation gap, we need to understand and train ourselves on these new communication strategies and tools, and to join the conversations.

Robert Gonsalves (www.robertgonsalves.com ) is a highly respected consultant to CEOs in all industries seeking to grow and profit from their online presence. His work creates lifelong online customers for his clients. His strategies and tactics define, design, develop, deploy and defends brands, increase online audiences, and ensure the loyalty of those followers.

His pioneering work at Warner Bros. Online (founding member 1995-1999) and seven years at Disney Online is supported by his work in operations, technology, customer management, production, budgeting and analysis, spanning a total of 23 years at Paramount, Disney and Warner Bros.

His work developing award-winning websites also tripled online revenues and increased traffic over 600% while delivering double digit cost reduction.

His clients and colleagues say he is “a razor sharp strategist creates actionable solutions is brilliant at operations”… “with a keen sense of how things work” and “new media savvy.” They go on to say Robert is “an incredible technical visionary who has that rare gift of balancing the technical with the business requirements, harness technology to turn a vision into reality” “amazing breadth of knowledge about a very changing industry.”

His core expertise is leading and growing new and existing brands online and creating/enhancing customer communities, to build new revenue streams and bottom line growth on all interactive platforms.

He can be reached at robert”@”robertgonsalves.com or (323) 395-5151.

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