A Sales Force of People Passionate About You.
Imagine a world where those people most passionate about you sell for you every day. The concept is certainly not new – we all know that referrals from our friends, family, and our professional colleagues are key to our decision-making processes. Whether we are considering a restaurant, a movie, or multi-million dollar software product, we value and trust the opinions of others who have specific knowledge of those brands. Truth is, we trust the opinions of others more than the more simplistic claims of advertising and marketing.
While offline referrals typically happen from one person to another person, social media is “word-of-mouth” in hyperspeed. The average Facebook user has over 300 people following them. Same with Twitter. And LinkedIn. Now, imagine your brand has a few thousand — a few million? — of these interconnected people following you on the social networks, sharing your stories, your virtues, and their own experiences with you back to their friends and business acquaintances. You do the math. If you have something your network wants to share, you’ve just hit that harbinger of marketing — scalable engagement.
Sound attractive?
Well, it’s not as easy as it may seem. The key to being a successful steward of social media is to be a great member of these online communities. Becoming a great participant in social media begins with becoming a great listener. (Let’s be honest: “listening” has typically come second in line to “talking” in the marketing world.) Fortunately, there is an entire software industry evolving around building tools to help brands listen to their consumers. Second, brands need to learn how to participate in these discussions. Yelling “Buy from us!” won’t work. That’s marketing. This is different. Social media is about giving a broader base of people within your organization the ability to communicate naturally with the outside world of consumers. The growing body of social media success stories indicates that departments like customer service, tech support, and product developers are often the first to see measurable gains from a well-planned social strategy. What if your marketing and sales goals from social media actually emerge from being a more holistic brand online?
None of this is new to us at Ciceron.
In fact, social media is not a new phenomenon at all. Large numbers of people interacting with their personal and professional networks of like-minded communities goes back as long as the Internet itself. (In fact, Ciceron’s humble beginnings started with the founding of an online community in 1993!) We have a proven methodology for analyzing both the long-term and short-term opportunities social media offers for your organization. We also help leaders understand where social media intersects with the entire organization, and then we build organizational plans, training programs, and measurements to show where social activities transcend from “people doing social media” to fully engaged strategies that create very real, very scalable, and very profitable business outcomes.
Let us help you transform social media from buzzword to buzzworthy.
Get started today – Contact us
