Posts Tagged ‘social networking’

It’s safe to say that there is no one formula for presenting social media to your company. The approaches will differ based on your position in the company, the company’s culture, formal presentation processes, probably on the size of your company, and the receptiveness of the industry to social media. But if you believe, as I do, that social media is here to stay and that your business can benefit from tapping into the social revolution, then you should find some helpful tips here for making your big pitch.

I’ll start by sharing my personal experience pitching social media to my previous boss then share responses from across different social networking channels. Just so you know, I think my presentation barely made it to first base. The tips I mention below include “corrections” for things I left out of my presentation. Those bits of extra wisdom plus crowdsourced responses should help your presentation go much further than mine and hopefully you’ll knock a homer.

I hope you’ll stick around and add your experiences and feedback in the Comments section below.

The Pitch
It was 2008 and I was pitching social media to the company’s CEO.

It was lonely standing up there in the conference room. It was just the CEO, me, and the glow of the projector displaying my Power Point presentation. But I knew that folding social media into the fiber of the company was the right path. I presented the benefits and massive opportunities of social media, examples of other companies doing amazing things with it, and showed him Tony Hsieh’s (Zappos CEO) Twitter stream to help him visualize what top-down involvement looked like.

Presentation Tips
My personal tips for pitching social media to a boss are:

1. Get help from other colleagues. Two or more people pitching a new project is much more convincing than one lone voice. I chose to present on my own after getting lukewarm feedback from potential allies.
2. Schedule a time for the pitch. This conveys the message that you have something serious and important to discuss and it avoids interruptions.
3. Create a formal presentation. I suggest a Power Point or a written proposal. This will give you a clear framework and keep you on track in case your nerves set in. I used Guy Kawasaki’s “10/20/30″ Power Point presentation guidelines to select the presentation structure.
4. Primarily, answer the question “What problems will social media solve?” This was the first question I was asked and my answer was a bit shaky. My presentation had focused on the benefits and opportunities, not as much on problem-solving. The CEO and I ended up coming up with potential problem-busting uses during the meeting.
5. Present the benefits of using social media from different company perspectives. If you are a marketing person, your inclination may be to only focus on the marketing opportunities. Don’t stop there. You can approach social media from an HR, customer service, IT, and sales perspectives as well. During the meeting, we discussed using social media as part of the Web site process improvement cycle.
6. Recommend a concrete plan of action. Ask for resources (time, people, and money) to accomplish an objective and get a commitment. Make sure you recommend a SMART objective – one that is specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based.

As a result of the pitch, I was given time to do some “experimenting” with social media. This was less of a commitment than I had hoped for, but was resolved to make the most out of the opportunity. This would require patience since I had already been very active on Twitter and knew what could be accomplished. A year and a half later I designed and help implement a blogging infrastructure and all product managers are now blogging and sharing great content with customers and the Blogosphere.

Other “Pitch” Stories and Approaches

As I closed up the blogging project, I wondered how other people fared making a similar social media pitch. I jumped on my social networks and asked them. I went to Twitter, Facebook, Aardvark, and LinkedIn and posted the question:

Note: This was the question posted to LinkedIn. The Twitter version was much shorter as was the Aardvark version. I blogged about using LinkedIn and Aardvark for doing in depth Internet research earlier this month (includes a video demonstration).


Crowdsourced Responses

There were many different approaches to pitching social media. Here are some of the responses:

Present a binder containing examples of all the things that are being said about the company, industry, products – even about your boss – on social media. Also include some LI Q&A, tweets, blogs etc. by employees, key customers, competitors.

This can be a real eye-opener that brings home the lesson that the train has left the station, and though you can’t control the chatter, you can be influencing the discussion – but only if you get in there and play.

Some great examples to include are situations where a customer was upset or misinformed about something, and got satisfaction through a social media response.

-Rob Duncan, www.robduncan.com, via LinkedIn

Developing a tracking system for social media is imperative for measuring the efforts put in by your social media manager and ROI. While it may not always be concrete numbers, there is something to be said for sentiment, reach, and passion for a company.

- JNR from San Diego

I have never had to pitch my boss on social media, but I have had to pitch social media to very stubborn and old fashioned people before.

I really like Rob’s suggestion of showing examples of where people have talked about your company. When ever I have done that for potential clients, they are very impressed. It helps them to see the vision of what social media is.

I posted a link below of a great video by Socialnomics that I’ve found to be pretty effective. It displays a bunch of impressive statistics on how social media is here to stay.

-Chad Mustard, Owner Blue Helm Communications, www.bluehelm.com, via LinkedIn

A couple [of] suggestions based on my 4+ years experience pitching blogs/SM to clients.

1. I’ve had much more success sitting with decision makers, one or two at a time, in front of a computer, actually showing them what can be done on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. I agree with others here that showing mentions of your company are powerful – even more powerful if you show them these mentions in real time on one of the monitoring sites. For people who aren’t engaged in SM on a regular basis, it all sounds strange and highly theoretical when discussed in a meeting. You have to make it real.
2. Be crystal clear about your SM objectives. If you’re not sure what purpose SM serves in your organization, discussing engagement tactics and even strategy are premature. SM can support many organizational goals – branding, thought leadership, SEO, customer loyalty, lead generation, etc. The top people may not understand SM, but they understand more leads, happier customers, more prominent brands. I think it’s much better to internally position SM as a tool to support initiatives rather than an initiative in itself.

-Brad Shorr, Director of Content Marketing, Straight North, www.straightnorth.com, via LinkedIn

…In order to “sell” my boss on social media it was pretty easy conceptually, just drive traffic from these social media activities to our website. Actually delivering on the results is the hardest part.

…

It’s just getting past that first hump that is the hardest part when you’re relatively unknown in the SM world. Getting the first visitors are always the hardest, but it is something that can provide exponential gains with growth.

…

So the best way to start out is to set some obtainable goals, go ahead with your plan, measure the results and control the expectations with your boss.

-Chris Rizzo, from a Michigan data center, Online Tech, via LinkedIn.

Present the rationale backwards. Start with the benefit of social networking (interaction with brand, profit generation, lead generation, etc.) and leave the execution to the end. Most people can get bogged down in explaining how social networking works which can be a heavy learning curve for some non-tech savvy people.

-Ed M., Hoboken, NJ, via Aardvark

I’ve presented twitter as a valuable primer for research by searching for tags, organizing the results into columns, and highlight key phrases in peoples’ posts. This enabled my boss to see it as both qualitative and quantitative, but also synthesized into something that seemed meaningful, just by providing simple headings like “many women feel guilty when taking time for themselves” with supporting tweets below. Make it look substantial, but highly organized. Avoid the overwhelming clutter appearance of social media. That’s what they’re afraid of.

-Michael Kiser Innovation/Interactive consultant in Chicago, via Aardvark

Review

We’ve seen my approach to pitching social media, some of my tips, and several other approaches. If you’re about to make a big pitch to your boss, department, or to a potential client, I hope these approaches and techniques help you in your endeavor.

I’d also like to send a big THANK YOU to everyone who responded to my question and shared and contributed to the research for this post.

Have you pitched social media to an executive? As always, I would be honored to hear your stories via the Comments.

Have an awesome presentation that you want to share with the world?

If you’ve already posted the presentation (could be a Power Point presentation) to Slideshare.net then you can embed that presentation into your WordPress.com blog. I’ll show you exactly how to do that in this video. This process also works for WordPress.org blogs.

I appreciate and value your Comments and feedback.

Twitter has been giving my @jesseluna account the cold shoulder, not displaying tweets from others for over 8 hours. It’s 9:09AM Pacific Time and the last tweet update was at 35 minutes after midnight.

Apparently I’m not the only as The Next Web reports that many accounts have been affected. TheTwitter blog has not posted any information on this freeze out yet.

I can see Replies and tweets that use hashtags that I follow but that’s it. The Next Web also points out that you can see updated tweets using the Twitter Lists feature.

Hopefully Twitter can patch things up soon. Until this gets resolved, I’ll focus on conversing (not just reading posts or retweeting) then probably head over to Facebook to see what’s going on in the world.

Did your account freeze up? Did you jump to another social networking site? If so, which one?

2009 was full of twists and turns. Big deals, big plays, and big hearts, on all fronts. These are my predictions for 2010.

1) Users learn to own their stuff
As we continue to see companies like Twitter and Facebook grow like crazy and start monetizing at every step, we’re going to realize that they are growing because of OUR content. Are you leveraging your own content, whether for business use, charity, or for you own personal purposes?

2) Twitter will become the number one news service
Users will organize to be the first to cover global news and be able to bubble that information up so that emergency, government, and traditional news outlets can jump on the news faster.

3) Augmented Reality marketing is going to be HUGE
Augmented Reality is a relatively new technology for displaying image content and tools in a live context. For example, Yelp, a restaurant/hotel rating site, allows you to use your smart phone to look through its camera and see an overlay of ratings information tied to your current location. The video below has an example of me using Yelp in my small town of Santa Paula, CA.

4) CEO’s from Fortune 500 companies will start to get fired for not having a strong social media strategy.
We saw this in 1997 when some slow executives decided to “wait out” this whole Internet thing.

5) Spiritual networks will become prominent and widespread
There are many folks who don’t prescribe to a particular religion but are extremely spiritual. These networks will do things like support the ill, be activist for social causes, and push for legislation (whether progressive or conservative). Take a look at spiritjump.org (@spiritjump on Twitter) as an example of it’s potential.

6) In the boxing world, Manny Pacquiao will beat Floyd Mayweather in a close split decision.

7) In politics, Immigration Reform takes center stage and the associated hoopla makes health care reform look like a cake walk. By the end of it, tens of thousands of awesome and deserving students will be on the road to conditional permanent residency.

8) The top 5 “TV” shows will be primarily seen via computer screens.

9) Video bloggers from different disciplines are going to crush it in 2010 and people will be talking about movie deals, instead of book deals.

10) One or more of my videos will hit one million views on YouTube and I’ll get a cameo role on someone’s rock video.

I recently had “the Twitter talk” with the CEO of a high tech B2B company. His one main question was, “Will Twitter help us make money?”

My response was that B2B companies should not look to Twitter as a way to sell widgets, but to view it as a trade show.

At a trade show:

1. Conversations and actions are focused on building relationships
2. Outcomes are evaluated on a long-term basis, not a quick hit
3. Strong partnerships are the greatest financial reward. In the CEO’s business, a new vendor can mean millions in sales per year
4. It’s a great place to share the company’s brand and personality
5. To get the most out of a show, you have to engage participants or you will get lost in the crowd

So there is a reward at the end of the Twitter rainbow for B2B companies. But it takes time, work, and a decent strategy.

Oh, and don’t forget the swag.

If you’re using Twitter, there’s a good chance that you’re a member of one of these four twiques. You may not completely identify with any one of these twiques, but it’s like the school cafeteria, eventually you have to choose your own space and there will be others doing the same thing.

ONE. Information Junkie – Many Twitter users log in to tweet about news, excellent blog posts, or re-post other tweets via retweets.

Who they follow
These users are more likely to follow news feeds like @BreakingNews or local news accounts, news personalities, print media figures, and Twitterati (Twitter insiders or “influentials”).

You may be an Information Junkie if:
a) You retweet every major news item in CAPS.
b) One of your tweets has shown up on a live CNN segment with @ricksanchezcnn
c) The only pictures on your blog are of books, fountain pens, or David Allen.

TWO. Fanboys/Fangirls – Yes, celebrities are making their way onto Twitter by the droves and many love to support them.

Who they follow
That’s an easy one, they follow every celebrity they can identify. From one-hit wonders to Internet phenoms, to solid gold actors.

You may be a Fanboy/Fangirl if:
a) You’ve commented on every single @mrskutcher Twitpic
b) You’ve watched at least a dozen TV shows because the star asked you to tune in via a tweet
c) You still think @ijustine will reply to you some day.

THREE. Funny Bunnies – Some tweet peeps use Twitter to hone their comedic writing. This “sub-culture” is chock full of characters (usually Rated R) and they keep score using the site Favrd which keeps track of tweets that have been Favorited.

Who they follow
Funny tweeters usually only follow other funny tweeters. The main reason for this is that in order to score points on Favrd, their peeps have to know about Favrd and be registered on the site. The other reason is that many of the funny tweets are R-rated so they tend to offend non-Funny Bunnies.

You may be a Funny Bunny if:
a) You regularly chronicle four or more bodily functions
b) Make three or more people spit their coffee out every morning
c) You hand out more gold stars than a kindergarten teacher.

FOUR. The Conversationalist – Many people are on Twitter to meet other people and engage in community building. Some, like The Conversationalist, live on Twitter. Tensions may arise if a Conversationalist expects one of the other personalities to do the same.

Who they follow:
They will follow everyone who is engaged in real conversations and will follow folks from all other Twitter types hoping they will chat back.

You may be a Conversationalist if:
a) Your last 200 tweets are all Replies
b) You converse with people via Blips at 1AM.
c) You’ve wished over 50 people a happy birthday in the last month.

So there you have it, four very different Twitter cliques or “twiques”.

Which twique are you in?