Social media may be full of sales opportunities, but tapping them takes more than a branded Facebook page. You need a team of town criers, each trained and ready to talk you up.

Where Social Sellers Go Wrong

Too many companies sic their salespeople or influencers on social media without setting them up for success. The following mistakes are sure ways to fail with social selling:

1. Not establishing brand standards
Whether you tap your own team members or rely on external influencers, you can’t expect them to know exactly how you should be mentioned online. Although social platforms do differ in terms of content format and audience, standards should apply no matter where a conversation occurs.

Structure your standards in terms of actions, particularly if your sellers aren’t part of your core team. Nu Skin’s social media guidelines provide its independent consultants with specific dos and don’ts around its product and earnings claims. For visual learners, the beauty and wellness brand includes screenshots to show what brand-appropriate and (-inappropriate) posts look like online.

2. Leaving multimedia out of the mix
Low-effort content doesn’t catch eyeballs on social media. Although text posts have their place, consumers want to see proof: How does the product work? Where does it fit into their life? Are their friends using it? Data-driven video tactics help social sellers answer those questions quickly and in audience-specific ways.

Visual content doesn’t need to be an enormous production, either. If you don’t have the budget to hire a video marketing agency, think about alternatives. Beauty brand VerveGirl gained 1,400 user-submitted videos in two weeks simply by holding a makeup tutorial competition. For infographics, consider contest sites like 99designs, which lets you choose a winner among hundreds of entries. 

3. Putting quantity over quality
Social selling might sound like a matter of breadth, but there’s a reason brands should choose micro-influencers over their mega-influencing peers: Nearly two-thirds of consumers prefer small-scale interactions online.

Although you might have enough marketers and salespeople on your team to cover your core social media platforms, ask yourself whether they’re too close to your company. For some campaigns, such as selling B2B services on LinkedIn, you might need the internal knowledge and credibility. In consumer spaces like fashion, that distance is desirable because it creates a sense of authenticity. 

4. Taking an all-platform approach

Instagram and YouTube may be the top two platforms in terms of influencer marketing investment, but that doesn’t mean they’re the right choice for every brand. Both platforms attract young audiences, for one, making them poor places to reach middle-aged adults or seniors.

Before sending out your social army, consider who uses each social media platform. Pick a primary and, if the budget allows, a secondary site. If you can only afford one and have a general audience, Facebook has the broadest appeal in terms of age, race, and gender. 

5. Neglecting nurturingWhat happens after a user spots your content on social media? If you’re lucky and you’ve established a clear click path, you might score a sale. More likely, you’ll have generated awareness. What you do with it dictates whether that initial interest becomes something more.

Include a link to your site in each social post. At that link’s destination, use a lead capture tool. Although whitepaper content works best in the B2B space, B2C companies can also pair social posts with on-site assets. REI’s #ForceOfNature campaign maps nicely to its blog and infographic content. To comment or sign up for REI’s newsletter, visitors have to share their email address, giving the outdoor brand a chance to close a sale.

Turning attention online into actual revenue is easier said than done. You might make a few new friends with those artful Facebook posts, but there’s more to the story if you want to sell. In both yesterday’s town squares and on today’s social platforms, the secret is the setup. Reaching the right people on the right platforms with the right messaging is how social selling works.

The post 5 Mistakes Brands Make Trying to Sell on Social appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Sifting through thousands of company mentions, hundreds of emails, and dozens of texts and DMs, all waiting for me to respond. All coming at me in real-time.

Last month I talked about the need for a digital detox and the one small step I took to balance family time with my digital consumption and communications. The goal being to better manage the flood of information that a staggering 90% of young people keep within arms distance 24/7.

The call to respond in real-time

Last year, I was attending a social media committee meeting for IAB, and our co-chair convincingly made the case for us to focus on real-time marketing. Connecting in real-time was the next frontier for social marketers and engaging with your customers and prospects directly leads to great result she argued.

My intuition at the time was that she was pushing this agenda on behalf of her employer as it conveniently played to their strength, their platform.

But her prediction was right on.

Flash forward to two months later and the darling of the Super Bowl was not a 30 second spot, but one little Tweet from the team at Oreos. But their real-time marketing success did not happen overnight. They had just finished honing their real-time “culture jacking” skills through a 100-day program called “Daily Twist.”  The program was 100 days of real-time postings of Oreo’s responses to what was happening in the news.

This raised the bar for all social marketers and challenged us to be more responsive. More “in the moment.”

Mistakes will be made

Recently, AT&T and the Los Angeles Lakers were called out for gaffes they made when they tried to tie their brands to 9/11.

The road to brand hell is paved with good intentions, and Real Time Marketing Sucks is here to keep us honest.

The idea is simple. When a story or event becomes so massive that it’s dominating search trends and essentially  “owning” the interwebz (think Miley Cyrus), you come up with a way to tie your brand into that story.

But it’s not that simple.

For example, Shark week takes the web by storm and social marketers can’t resist attempting the tie-ins even though should probably let it go.

Having a team with the confidence to respond in real-time is not as easy as it looks. Trust, autonomy and a deep understanding of your brand identity and voice is critical to your success. Trolls, critics and your competition are watching. But at the same time, your fans and advocates are also watching, and can be great allies under this kind of pressure.

We often refer to our social media-marketing manager, Brandon Swanson, as our resident Meme-ologist. Being on the pulse of the web helps us connect with our fans in real-time.

At the end of the day, marketing is tied to brand and your brand should always have definitive boundaries around what you should and shouldn’t be mentioning on social.

This means, regardless of what’s trending, if a topic is not suitable for your brand (as in the 9/11 examples above) it shouldn’t be covered. Period. Not in real-time, or any time for that matter.

Conversely, if a topic is suitable, jumping on it in real-time may not always be the best approach for your brand. You may want to wait for all the opinions to be offered and then publish a longer, thought provoking piece and be the final word.

Points of passion

My first experiences with real-time marketing in my current role was by chance. We were testing blogs that chased trending topics, similar to the tactics sites like Buzzfeed and The Huffington Post use. We quickly learned that breaking celebrity real estate news that was tied into the news cycle offered tremendous rewards.

Large spikes in traffic, press coverage, growing our fan base and generating excitement around our brand became commonplace. We realized that we were connecting with people’s points of passion while getting a better understanding of what they wanted.

Today, my team has the confidence and freedom to experiment. So when the NFL season was about to start, we were ready and had relevant content to delight editors and ride that wave.

Here’s a recent example of one of our stories making the main carousel on a major portal:

My team is doing what we’ve always done: responding directly to friends, family, fans and having fun doing it! And yes, it’s all in real-time.

We’re connecting with our fans and adding value to our community.

What experiments in real-time marketing are you doing? Is it working? Is real-time marketing and targeting going to be a priority for you in 2014? I want to hear about it in the comments below, and naturally on Twitter.

The post How Not To Suck At Real-Time Social Marketing appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Today, our inboxes are stuffed to overload, and they follow us everywhere on our smartphones. We have the ability to be connected wherever we go, but research suggests that we are less happy and becoming addicted to it. We used to desire being connected to the Internet at all times.  Internet cafes and clustered Wi-Fi hotspots make us feel that being plugged in is essential to being part of the flow of the world. But that flow has become a tidal wave, overwhelming many of us with too much information, too many emails, too many status updates and texts to respond to.

Time for a digital intervention

A few years ago, I was having lunch with my buddy Jeff Turner at one of our favorite local restaurants.  For years we’ve found time in our busy schedules to talk family, social media and technology.  That day, I was sharing my struggles with information overload and he told me about a breakthrough he’d just experienced by completely unplugging from the technologies that dominate our personal and professional lives. He also recommended a book called “You Are Here: Discovering the Magic of the Present Moment” by Thich Nhat Hanh. I read it shortly after, during my first trip to meet with the Marketing and Communications team for the National Associations of REALTORS® in Chicago – my real estate equivalent to a pilgrimage to Jerusalem or Mecca.

The book had a profound effect on me. I realized how much of my life I’d been wasting staring at my phone. When I got home I made a simple, but deeply worthwhile change. I vowed that when I leave work each night I don’t get back online until after my daughter goes to sleep. Spending that time with her every day is important for her, and it’s important for me too. I’ve realized that the online world can wait.

Being present in the moment

When I was at SXSW Interactive last March, I immediately noticed that most of the attendees were spending an unusual amount of their time staring at their phones. Great new potential real-life connections walked right by them as they instead satisfied their need for interaction by tweeting and checking-in on Instagram and Foursquare. It’s the same thing I’ve seen at concerts, where people end up watching much of the show through their view screens, recording what they see in fuzzy photos and videos rather than just putting away the phone and enjoying the experience of sharing great music with hundreds or thousands of like-minded people. It happens at restaurants and parties, too. People are too busy posting pictures of what they’re eating to savor the food or enjoy the company right in front of them. The video below, “I Forgot My Phone” does a great job capturing the shift happening in our culture today:

The emerging trend is analog

Fitbit, Pebble and other wearable tech are driving the “Quantified Self” movement, which reinforces the idea that being connected at all times is the bleeding edge of cool. However, I’d argue that the opposite is true. The real trend is in the virtues of stepping away from tech and understanding the importance of being present in the moment.  Being disconnected encourages you to leverage the power of analog to build relationships and help you reconnect with your creativity.

Online fatigue is common and Pew research released in February showed that 61% of Facebook users have recently taken a break from the service for several weeks or more. Some hotels now offer a service where they’ll store your phone in their safe for a day to help you fully relax more. There are also cutting-edge programs like Digital Detox, which helps people truly get away from the online world and rediscover themselves. Apps such as Freedom help you block out endless online distractions so you can get your work done with more focus and attention.

Social media and email aren’t going away anytime soon, nor should they. They’re a vital part of how we live in the world today. I’m not going to be giving away my iPhone anytime soon and you’ll find me on Instagram and Twitter pretty often. But I’ve learned to strive toward greater balance. I communicate in the digital world, but live in the real one.

Does the volume of information you’re processing these days overwhelm you?  Are you taking planned time during the week, or the year to go completely offline or “off the grid?” Have you attended a Digital Detox? What’s working for you to achieve balance? I want to hear about it in the comments.

The post Is It Time For A Digital Detox? appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

We come up with complex charts, give them fancy names and create jargon like ‘dark social’ and ‘quantified self’ in part because it sounds cool, but also because it perplexes decision makers, which creates a need and gets our phones to ring! However, there are many who see hype and jargon as what it really is: hype and jargon. Without oversimplifying our industry, a social media marketing expert should be able to break it down and easily explain how to build your program, no matter how new or mature it is.

But it’s really simple

Recently I had the good fortune to present to two very distinct and talented audiences. The first was a room full of very accomplished journalists at the 47^th Annual National Association of Real Estate Editors Journalism Conference. The second was online real state global leaders at the Property Portal Watch Conference. In both presentations, I stressed that people in the business of social tend to make things complex when at the end of the day, it really comes down to two things that matter (h/t Robert Scoble):

1. Are people talking about you? (“you” can be a person, a brand, a product, etc.)

2. Are those conversations leading to your desired outcome? (sales, traffic, page views or whatever your desired outcome is)

Many of the journalists I spoke to were focused on page views, shares and other similar metrics that their newsrooms expect from them. With the executives overseeing various portals, it was overall traffic and connecting people in the right part of the decision loop with their customers.

These days, many in my social stream are sharing their enthusiasm around the idea of “social business” or “social” enterprise software. I read hundreds of articles presenting various theories of how to dominate the online space and get pitches from dozens of services promising to amplify, quantify, or augment my company’s social messaging. However, I believe this is premature for many and is a convenient re-direct from the original question we’ve constantly being asked and the discussion we continue to have: delivering a real return on investment (ROI). If you haven’t delivered real ROI to yourself, or your company with your social efforts, how will enterprise software deliver ROI?

It’s not all smoke and mirrors

I’ve heard compelling presentations that show how internal social systems have brought down costs at organizations, but if you haven’t figured out the two things that matter above, getting your employees on Yammer or an internal white labeled version of Facebook is not going to do much for your bottom line.

Jason Falls, Liz Strauss and McKinsey & Company have inspired me over the past year to get back to the basics.  One of the things I admire about Jason is that his book “No Bullshit Social Media” encourages people to cut through the nonsense and focus on what social media works for in business. One slogan that my team and I have lived by since we heard Liz Strauss say it at Social Media Club LA last year is to “build your network before you need it.” A fan base isn’t just about the numbers; it’s about a real network of advocates who can often promote your brand better than you can.  McKinsey & Company did an excellent job in explaining social media to executives with Demystifying social media and I often refer to in presentations.

As social media marketers and consultants we must strive to give the best advice but that advice has to be tailored to the business and their business objectives. What do you want social media to do for you? If it doesn’t answer the two questions above, scare tactics, buzzword jargon and complex diagrams of the landscape aren’t going to help you in the long run.

Businesses and websites change; fundamentals do not. When I started in the business of social influence, long before Facebook was even a vague concept, we hit message boards and engaged in conversations that were already going on. Once we had shown interest and gained trust, then we could reach them with our messages.  The buzzwords and platforms change, but those two core questions do not.

What hype and jargon is driving you nuts these days? Who inspires you? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

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