Media Badger, Social Media Research & Consultants

Keep The Sales Manager Away From Social Media

Sales is, for the most part, is a “near-term results” effort. On a daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly basis a CEO is always looking at the sales numbers. Because the purpose of a business is to make a profit and sales helps drive profitability. Otherwise you’re a charitable organization. I’ve seen a lot of expectation that because Social Media seems to be so “instant” with services like Twitter or Plurk and Facebook, it should be able to bring instant sales results. But it isn’t.

Social Media is a managed investment – like marketing and communications. It’s been argued and I agree, that through Social Media there is a true model for Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC). Properly researched, planned and implemented, marketing has an ROI. Marketing essentially paves the path for the sales team to close the deals…to ensure they have deals to close in the future.

Social Media enables marketing (and sometimes sales) to foster deeper relationships in the marketplace in order to aid the organization across all aspects of the company. Product feedback for the product management team, company feedback from shareholders, indicators for increased market uptake and feedback to human resources for hiring issues.

Simply looking to engage in Social Media for immediate sales opportunities will only lead to disappointment. Engaging in Social Media means you must be prepared to make an investment with resources; your company’s most precious resources – people. A senior manager wouldn’t execute a marketing campaign without research and planning just as a sales manager wouldn’t let a sales team loose without a good plan – ideally sales and marketing work together.

So it is with Social Media; you need research, then a plan, then you execute. Over the longer term. Look for metrics to measure progress as you would in marketing. Expecting instant results is setting up for failure. We’re not saying don’t let the sales manager near your Social Media efforts, but they shouldn’t expect to instantly expand the sales funnel or salivate over huge sales gains in the next sales period. Social Media takes time to garner results – that means months.

And if you’re calling your agency to create a video that will go “viral” to get those instant results – hang up now. Certainly you can make a cool video – but it’s the public, not your marketing team, that decides if anything will go viral as Shai Agassi so truly stated among others.

Social Media Marketing Is A Managed Investment

If you’re looking to engage your company or organization in Social Media and you think Facebook is the place to start, you could be wrong. If you also think a some advertising on Facebook or MySpace and maybe a cool application in Facebook is the way to go, you may end up wondering why it didn’t work.

Engaging in Social Media often requires a holistic, multi-channel approach. This means you might well need to consider engaging through Social Network services like Facebook, microblogs like Twitter or Plurk and leveraging YouTube and a blog or two. Additionally, you’ll also need to look at how you actively participate across those channels.

In our experience, most failures with Social Media marketing come from the assumption that an organization can leverage Social Media in the same way as the Web or traditional marketing. You might have some small degree of success in this regard, but it will also be shortlived. We’ve seen a number of cases where an ad agency will execute a clever video style campaign in Facebook and some push on YouTube with great creative. The message takes off, gets good viral uptake and some click-throughs that result in sales. This is good for the short term. But what happens afterwards? The campaign has ended, but the creative lingers. You might think that’s good in terms of ongoing brand awareness, and it is, but it’s also damaging.

With no later follow-up, your brand is simply seen as marketing. This may very well make the next campaigns significantly weaker in uptake over time, since you aren’t engaging your stakeholders over the longer term and they will simply see you as “pushing” rather than “participating” and Social Media is all about participating.

As you plan to enter Social Media it’s important to think about your ongoing engagement and participation, so that the next time you launch a campaign, you have an engaged base audience to help you spread the message. Over time you build a good solid audience with which you gain permission to engage. Campaigns will be more successful and the results will mean better overall sales. That’s a managed investment in Social Media.