Tag Archives: media

Oct 11

Social Media – Recommend something

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Uploaded on March 17, 2009 by gilderic

Uploaded on March 17, 2009 by gilderic

Recommend: to present as worthy of confidence, acceptance, use, etc.; commend; mention favorably

This is possibly the hardest stage and the one that most often introduces cognitive dissonance. You spend the time establishing rapport, building your understanding, demonstrating your understanding and expertise, at some point you need to recommend a solution. Obviously you want to recommend your solution, your most expensive solution (to push your ROI), or your cheapest solution (to hook them in)?

No, you want to recommend the best solution for whoever you’re talking to.

Of course if all you do is recommend others you’ll quickly go out of business, unless that is your business paid for by someone else. And here we get to a really interesting business proposition that’s been around for some time but is potentially seeing a resurgence in the business of social media business.

Commission based sales and affiliate marketing (where the sales channel takes a cut of the final transaction value) are nothing new. However, this is still a traditional sales pitch, even Google ads will present you the ad that’s paid the most for the keyword you’ve typed in even if you would actually be better off with another (cheaper) solution.

‘Proper’ social media allows you to recommend other people and yet still maintain a link with the customer for the next time, and through the joy of networks to all their connections. So when they tweet what a great consultant/business/product you’ve got, all their connections find out.

There still isn’t a decent mechanism for measuring social value. Tara Hunt‘s Wuffie Factor is an attempt but I’m not aware of it being used much in practice. LinkedIn recommendations are a bit too back-slappy and mutually appreciative which sort of devalues them.

The hardest reports I filled out were the ones where I’d been talking to a company and suggested they get in touch with another University for their £’00k research project. Of course it goes down better if that solution is from the company employing you, but its remarkable how many successful introductions to new clients came from people I’d recommended go elsewhere.

Uploaded on July 9, 2009 by Reinante El Pintor de Fuego

Uploaded on July 9, 2009 by Reinante El Pintor de Fuego

Close: to arrange the final details of; to complete or settle

If the recommendation is accepted, and it usually was, then closing is just the fine tuning of the agreement, sorting out purchase / invoice details, price, delivery, etc.

A word of warning though, just because you’ve build up this great rapport with a client, don’t begin work without a signed contract. If there is to be an exchange of money then you need at least something that sets out in writing the proposed transaction.

Having invested all this time and effort in securing a sale, keep it going, but don’t assume anything. Don’t assume that now they’ve finally made a purchase they’ll go away and leave you in peace, making monthly subscription installments; or that now they’ve bought your stuff you can pester them about every upgrade and option on the list.

I would recommend consistency above all. If you’ve provided a very light touch information stream and simple options leading up to the sale, don’t suddenly start sending bi-weekly email newsletters. Likewise, if you’ve been chatting on twitter, sending notifiers through your Facebook fan page, and so forth, don’t suddenly ignore them to chase the next client/customer.

So five posts ago I asked what was social media good for? It can be good for business, it can be good for your business, but like any tool of business, you need to spend a bit of time thinking through your strategy and implementing it to find new customers and establish rapport, lurk-a-lot (and talk with them a lot) to understand them and their needs, demonstrate you’ve been listening and really understanding, and then make some recommendations on their best course of action, eventually closing a deal with a new customer.

And if I’ve managed to build up some rapport with you, you think I might understand your needs, and have demonstrated that I understand social media, I’d recommend you drop me an email and we’ll take it from there! :)

Oct 06

Social Media – establishing Rapport

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Uploaded on January 11, 2009 by daviza

Rapport: relation; connection, esp. harmonious or sympathetic relation

This is ostensibly the easy bit of social media; the ‘friending’ act is usually straight forward and simple and isn’t the whole point of “social media” to be, well social?

As is often the case the answer is “Yes, but…

I think that the difference is between permission and interruption. Seth Godin is probably the leading writer/thinker about this.

In the good old days you’d interrupt what people were doing to tell them about your great product or services. Because you’d interrupted them you had to move fast before they found something else to look at, hence the high-speed / high-pressure approach made (in)famous by car salesmen on US television.

If you were networking you’d open with your elevator pitch and close by handing a business card over and demanding one in return. When you got home you’d immediately send out a follow-up letter and offer to quote for business, you might even include a ‘special offer’ because you’d met them in person.

All of which has very little to do with rapport and everything to do with words like ‘conversion’, ‘pipeline’, and ‘sales order process’. Too many people are still using the social media tools as old-school interruption opportunities. Folks on twitter who constantly tweet their blog posts, special offers, etc, Facebook apps that aggressively try to go viral by demanding that you interrupt your friends with requests to join this club, or take this test.

The plethora of tools and sites now available mean that we can genuinely begin to build harmonious or sympathetic relations with customers/clients without getting all new-agey and transcendental.

The first task, as always, is to be clear why you’re using social media tools. Where they fit in your business plan (you do have a plan right?) and what you’re hoping to achieve. From here you can think about where to begin social networking, who you’re hoping to network with, what you would like out of it and what you’re offering. Remember that to be really successful you need others to give you permission to be social with them. Your content / offer / insight / etc has to be compelling enough for people to click “Accept new Friend” or whatever the equivalent is on the platform you’re using, and you should almost certainly be on several.

Then there’s the design of your social presence, which should be sympathetic to the audience. If you’re audience is corporate business then slightly serious blues, rounded boxes, and a ‘business like’ approach is probably better than wacky layout, pastel colours, cartoon fonts, etc. This harks back to a joint post I did with Chris in March about presenting your product (or yourself) to a customer.

Think also about your avatars, are they logos, photos cartoonified versions of your photo? Think about where you are (Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Xing, LinkedIn, Ecademy, etc) is this where your customers, partners, or audience are? More importantly, is it where they expect to see you?

Most of the companies that do business with Universities are medium sized or large companies, they’re typically not start-ups. So while start-up and new media parties are great fun (and they are), they weren’t that relevant for my role back in 2002-2005. What was relevant was industry networking events, and regional networking events where the middle and senior engineers and Directors would go to find out about research, funding, and opportunities for their company. Being sympathetic meant asking about their business processes, technical challenges and opportunities they weren’t able to capitalise on just yet.

These days I’d be checking out the LinkedIn groups from Aerospace & and major primes, I’d also be signed up to the forums from the West of England Aerospace Forum (our regional membership organisation for this sector). I’d also explore Ning and some of the other less well known social media platforms to find the niche networks.

That’s how I established a rapport with the MD of Messier-Dowty Services, at an event where the interesting companies were. Messier-Dowty Services had a huge opportunity in the coming need for through life capturing of service data on every component in an aircraft’s landing gear, and a huge challenge because a single landing gear can have thousands of components and hundreds of sub-systems; all of which are being moved between individual landing gear, different aircraft, and many operators throughout their serviceable life. With even my limited database architecture experience it wasn’t hard to sympathise with that opportunity/headache.

Having established some rapport I was able to arrange some follow up meetings to understand their needs, demonstrate that understanding by developing an outline project idea and then recommend a great academic and funding source, and closing a circa £100k project between them and the University.

Once you established some element of Rapport, you can begin to build your Understanding of the person’s needs.

Oct 04

Social Media; what is it good for?

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Specifically, how can we build business value using social media in all its forms.

Lots of smart folk have been discussing the business models (esp Alan Patrick, Seth Godin, Fred Wilson, and Sean Park) and the use of social media (esp danah boyd, Chris Brogan, Tara Hunt, and our own Nigel Legg), you could even check out my GReader shared stream or Friendfeed to see who I’ve been reading in particular.

This particular post was triggered by two events here in Bristol. The first was the launch of the Brrism Social Media Cafe, the second was a local Federation of Small Business event. Both were good in that they were fundamentally starting from outside the echo-chamber.

As a lapsed academic with a research background in systems theory, business processes and change management I think I have a useful perspective to consider these new tools. I’m also not promoting my own business solution so perhaps offer a degree of ‘independence’. I’m lucky in that I have the freedom to experiment and to try and span organisational & industry boundaries to figure out how these tools can be used.

And they are just tools. This may be heretical, but despite all the Gen-Y / Digital Native stuff, I don’t think social media is re-wiring our brains. That probably last took place around 60,000 years ago and even if it is taking place now, its a process that’ll take several biological generations (rather than internet generations which can take place over a weekend).

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Arthur C Clarke, Profiles of the Future, 1973, Ref. Wikipedia

Yes, the technology is remarkable, even amazing and close enough to Arthur C Clarke’s description of ‘magic’ as to be the best description in most circumstances. Even the humble SMS, when you actually try to break it down to fundmental processes, software and hardware, is magic.

So what can we do with this ‘magic’?

There was definitely more understanding of the community building potential for social media tools at the Brrism event (even the ‘money’ group spent most time talking about community & method rather than purpose) while the FSB folks were still making the leap from social media as a ‘free’ version of traditional marketing. However, all the talk about community, social, conversation, and similar terms took me back to a Young IoD event I went to a couple of years ago.

The speaker was Nick Drake-Knight and he has a very clear sales process. Nick advocated Rapport – Understand – Demonstrate – Recommend – Close. I think this provides an excellent strategy for social media usage in business, actually its a great strategy for being social in business. Over the next few days post my thoughts on how to do this and relating to real experiences that I’ve had.

Mar 31

Shifting sands of conversation

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Normally I’d be sat here writing up tonight’s event in the Watershed featuring the Pervasive Media Sandbox mid-term report / presentation thing.

But I’ve already done that on Twitter.

In fact there were at least 2 others twittering (@iamdanw & @sammachin) and I suspect a few others as well. The inimitable Scoble has noted that he’s pretty much on Twitter now and a quick perusal of his blog shows much reduced posting activity. Whereas he’s allegedly tracking 16,000 Twitter feeds (which is quite likely given previous form).

So what does that mean for this blog?

Well I’m not really in the business of reporting on events and stuff. I’m not a geek-hound rooting out the latest technologies and dissecting / discussing them.

I am a business developer with an engineering background and research credentials, working in some pretty interesting areas (at least I think they’re interesting). So I’m going to try and write a few thought pieces relating to what I’m doing. These roughly fall into 3 categories music, education, entrepreneurship; with business development and digital technologies as a common thread.

Lets see how things turn out.