Social-Power Your Business * 48 practical tips for propelling your enterprise to social success

A Salesforce.com overview for growing businesses Share this

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Social media is a rocket. Put it under your business.

In a very short time, social media has gone from a nice to do activity to an essential competitive tool. If youre not out there, youre missing the conversations that are shaping your market and your brands.

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But many companies are still just paying lip-service to social media. They might start a blog or open a company Twitter account then just coast along. Its no surprise that the leaders in almost every market are also the best social media players. And they got there by weaving social media into the very fabric of their brands, touching almost every business process. This guide is a collection of practical things you can do right away to turn your company into a social-powered enterprise. You may be doing many of them but, chances are, youre not yet doing them all (who is?). So get going and dont forget to share your own tips with us*.

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*We want your social business tips! Share your tips for social success in the comments page or include a tip in a tweet with the hashtag #SocialSuccess and well use our favourite ones on the Social Success website. Share this

ways to social-power your business

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Start by listening

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Get your salespeople LinkedIn Premium accounts

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Use your employees social networks to help recruit talent

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If youre new to social, the rst step and most important tip is to listen. Get on to the social channels where your customers and prospects hang out then just listen to the conversations. See what they like, what they hate, what they care about and how they discuss their issues. Theres no better guide for your social media strategy.

After CRM itself, LinkedIn is probably the most powerful sales tool ever invented. If your sales teams arent experts in it yet, they should be. One of the Premium accounts will help.

Once you get a sense of the conversations, a social media monitoring and engagement tool like Radian6 makes it easy to listen to all channels (and engage in them) from one place.

Check out the 17 tips in Anna Brattons post LinkedIn for Sales: an action plan for salespeople. Or her excellent Ten Tips for using LinkedIn for sales prospecting.

Let your people know what jobs you need to ll and ask people to get the word out in social media. You may nd the very best people at a fraction of the cost of using recruiters or running ads.

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Decide who handles different kinds of social engagement

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Take customer service to social channels

If everyones out there on social channels, a single customer tweet could be pounced on by ve different people. You dont want that. Run a short workshop with people from sales, marketing and customer service to carve up the responsibilities so the right people are responding every time.

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Create a senior exec social team

Customers are talking about you on Facebook, Twitter and other channels. Your service agents need to be there to respond positively.

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Creating a social culture cant be done by one person. Get together senior people from key business units to act as social change agents.

Your Social Task Force should include people from across your organization that are savvy about social media and knowledgeable about your business goals. From The Little Blue Book of Social Enterprise Transformation

The Service Cloud puts social into the call centre and vice versa. For smaller companies, Desk.com streamlines and socialises the entire customer service operation and puts it in the cloud.

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Have a plan for dealing with negative social media comments

You dont want to be blind-sided by negative feedback or let things spiral out of control. Get your plan in place now.
Xabier Ormazabals post Six Ways to Deal with Negative Social Media Comments is essential reading on this issue.

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Enlist the crowd to guide product development

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Write a social media policy for everyone on your staff

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Focus your social efforts on a few channels

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Use social media monitoring to spot unmet needs. Bounce new ideas around social channels for feedback. Identify the product features that delight (or annoy) users the most. The key is to capture the conversations so you can harvest the insight.

As more and more people get out there representing your brand, youll need some guidelines. Our own social media policy is posted here as an example.

Organizing and recording the responses received to your relevant questions are a must. Through organization and analysis of the data, insights and trends will begin to arise and can give shape to your future product and service innovation and development. Stephanie Gehman, Social Media Examiner, October 31, 2011

Kieran Flanagans post, How to write a social media usage policy for your business will help.

Success in social is about doing fewer things better. Its good to explore lots of different social channels but focus your efforts on the few that really matter to your brands the ones where your audiences are hanging out.

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Get an active blog going

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Dont just sell, help

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Extend social collaboration to partners and customers

If no single person can sustain the posting schedule, get a team to do a multi-author blog. Your blog is the core of your social program, generating fresh, SEO-friendly content that captures your expertise and gives you something to share in social channels.

I noticed that some of the biggest blogs in the world had multiple authors... So Social Media Examiner started out with a team of five or ten contributing writers, and eventually grew to over 100. From an interview with Mike Stelzner of Social Media Examiner

Yes, social media can be an effective sales and marketing channel, but its most effective when you turn the tables and make it all about the other person, not all about you. The best thing your company can do in social media is to be helpful to your customers, prospects, stakeholders and influencers. From The Social-Powered Enterprise eBook

An internal social network is an essential for effective collaboration. But dont just limit it to internal people connect to customer communities and partners too.

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Add interesting milestones to your companys Facebook timeline

Some companies are actively seeking ways to co-create new products together with their customers or improve existing ones. The idea is to tie customers closer to the company and turn them into brand ambassadors. Christoph Schmaltz on Social Business Collaboration

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Never ignore people talking about you in social channels

You wouldnt turn your back on a friend complimenting you at a party. Dont do it in social channels either.

If your company has a bit of history, drop in some milestones to add depth and back-story to your brand. Your Facebook presence doesnt have to start on the day you opened your page. Go back and add the top milestones.

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Integrate a social program into every marketing campaign

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Its important to acknowledge and say thank you when someone mentions you or your brand, retweets, comments or contributes to the conversation. Christine B. Whittemore in Social Media Business Etiquette Tips

Be sure to spread out the posting of your milestones as those posts will go out to all of your fans. Dont post ten in a row or you may irritate your community with over-posting. Andrea Vahl, Social Media Examiner, April 7, 2012

It can be as simple as sharing updates on your campaign content or inviting people to participate in an offer. But make sure social engagement is written into every single marketing initiative.

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Pick a handful of social media metrics and track them closely

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Get the CEO involved in at least one social channel

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Harness the power of the Big Three tools for social selling

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You dont have to measure absolutely everything. But you do have to decide on the social media metrics most relevant to your strategy and track them using social media monitoring tools like Radian6.

A social media culture starts at the top. Few CEOs have the time to participate every day in many channels. But choose the most important and get the CEO going.

Success in social media isnt all about technology but the right tools can make a huge difference. If you dont have these pieces, start researching them now:  Social CRM such as our own Sales Cloud brings social proles to your customer view  Social Monitoring to keep an eye on, analyse, (and respond to) key mentions of your brand, products, company through social channels (See Radian6)  Social collaboration tools - tools like Chatter make it easy for the right colleagues to contribute to a big sale or customer service case

For thoughts on what to track, read Social media analytics: the guide to metrics and tools.

The most deliberate activity I participate in directly for Distilled is on LinkedIn where I deliberately reach out to people Id like to hire and connect to influential people in the industry. From an interview with Will Critchlow, Co-Founder of Distilled

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From the Mini-Guide to Social Selling

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Put social channels into your emergency communications or crisis management plans

Social channels like Twitter and Facebook can be a great way to get a message out to a wide audience when things go wrong. But to be ready, you need to build them into your crisis plans now.
During the summer riots, BTs 999 network became overloaded and wait times started to grow. BT used Twitter to send out some messages to persuade people not to call 999 except in emergencies. The tweets were picked up by a number of followers and re-tweeted on. Luckily three of the followers were very influential (including BBCs Jeremy Vine) and the messages were relayed on to their followers. This helped to bring down the waiting time from 40 seconds to zero. Interview with Jonty Pearce, Editor, Call Centre Helper

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Build relationships with your markets top inuencers

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Make team task tracking social and collaborative

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Use social media to monitor competitive activity

The people who shape your marketplace are out there in social channels. Make sure youre there, engaging with them regularly and constructively. Dont overtly ask them to help you until youve helped them by sharing their content, commenting on their blogs and sharing their posts. In social, you get out what you put in.

Give your project teams a fast, mobile and social way to assign tasks and track completion. Check out Do.com, the cool social productivity app that makes it easy to create and share tasks.

Set up Google Alerts; join key customer forums; monitor Slideshare; follow competitors on Twitter; and use AppExchange apps to integrate it all into your Salesforce social proles.

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From the Mini-Guide to Social Selling

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Social-power your CRM

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Be quick to own up to your mistakes

Help every salesperson set up a daily social media routine

A few minutes a day dedicated to social media channels can make a huge difference to your revenue pipeline. Create a quick and simple process that helps salespeople nd customers, help prospects and engage with inuencers.

The social media activities of your customers and prospects are an important source of insight. Dont isolate it from the single view of the customer that lives inside your CRM system. Make sure your CRM can generate social proles (or switch to one that can!).

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The Dreamforce session Social Sales Revolution: 7 steps to get ahead can help. Its a great panel of experts speaking frankly about social selling.

Social CRM is about gaining a better understanding of the context of the customer what are their interests, how committed are they to your brand, are their friends also your customers, what type of assistance or information are they looking for and so forth. An interview with Mark Tamis, social CRM strategist

Social channels can be brutal to companies that try to hide their errors, make excuses or blame others. If you screw up, be the rst to get out there and admit it, with a sincere apology attached (ideally from the most senior person relevant to the situation). Social channels can also be amazingly forgiving to brands that are honest about their mistakes.

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If you have an ecommerce site, add ratings & reviews

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Social commerce content like reviews add a vital ingredient to your ecommerce site: trust.

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81% of shoppers use consumer reviews in their purchasing process. Reevoo

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Earn senior management sponsorship of your social initiatives

That means building a rock-solid business case. Show how social can help ll the top of your sales funnel; and build your search rankings and web trafc; set targets for driving down the cost of customer service by using social channels. Whatever the key drivers are in your business, show how social media can contribute then set numerical targets.
The article Three Experts Discuss How to Measure Social Media can help you pick the KPIs that make sense.

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Follow the social media leaders

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Research every prospects social activity before calling

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Theres a huge amount of best-practice advice and information for any company eager to harness the power of social media. Our own site, SocialSuccess, posts expert interviews, articles and guides. Some great sites include Social Media Examiner, Social Media Today and Econsultancy.

Social media is a massive source of prospect intelligence but only if you use it. Make social sales intelligence a baked-in part of your sales process. No sales call needs ever be truly cold again.

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Sales intelligence increases win rates by 17%. CSO Insights; from The Social-Powered Enterprise eBook

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Get your app developers thinking social, too

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Get your social media presence in your advertising

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Create a customer self-service community

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Lots of businesses develop their own apps. But not many of them build social thinking into their custom apps. Theyre missing a big opportunity. You can help by putting social on to the developers agenda and by turning them on to Heroku, the agile cloud application platform.

Sounds obvious but a lot of brands still arent putting their Facebook page or Twitter name in their advertising. Thats missing a big opportunity to attract follows and likes from people who like your brand.

Get really, really good at content

Content is the currency of social media marketing. If youre not already producing lots of great thought leadership content that harnesses your companys expertise, you need to start.

In a survey of US television viewers, Accenture found that nearly two-thirds recalled seeing a Facebook Like image on television, and one-third actually interacted with a social media service online after seeing a social media symbol on their TV screen. Patricio Robles, Econsultancy blog, April 17, 2012

Letting your customers search your knowledge base and help other customers increases loyalty while driving down customer service costs. Let your customers post, comment and validate the best solutions (Yes, the Service Cloud can help).

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Use social media to crowdsource new content

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The Content Marketing Institute is a great place to learn more about it.

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The crowd is smarter than any single expert. Ask people across a range of social channels to contribute to a piece of content that youll produce and share.

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Hire for empathy

The best social media practitioners are naturally empathetic. When hiring for roles that involve social media participation, make sure empathy is on your list of criteria.

We did this on the Social Success website with the crowdsourced Social Media Business Etiquette Tips. We asked a single question in LinkedIn groups, Quora, Focus and Twitter and got over 120 excellent tips to share.

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Our friends at SoundCloud have built their team around empathy. And it shows.

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Write social channels into your Customer Access Strategy

Well let Brad Cleveland explain why:

A customer access strategy is a framework a set of standards, guidelines and processes defining how customers are enabled to access the information and services they need.

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Mobilise your social team

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To put effective services in place, you need an up-to-date customer access strategy that answers questions such as: Who are your customers and prospects? How will they want to interact with you? What access channels make sense? What will your service level objectives be? What technologies and skill sets are required?

Post content on social sharing sites

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If you can only engage on social channels from your desk, youll do it a lot less often. Give your social team and anyone who wants to participate the mobile apps to make it easy to squeeze social interactions into out and about downtime.

Dont just lock your valuable content like videos and presentation slides on to your website. Post them on content sharing sites like YouTube and Slideshare and youll reach a wider audience.

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Debbie Hemley identified 44 Useful Mobile Apps for Social Media Marketers on Social Media Examiner.

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Use social collaboration tools to support major sales pitches

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Winning big pieces of business often means orchestrating contributions from experts in different departments and disciplines. A social collaboration tool acts like a private social network, making it much easier to marshal resources and focus them on the opportunity. (Have we mentioned Chatter?)

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Participate in LinkedIn Groups

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Make performance reviews social and collaborative

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Use social media to talk about your community social responsibility programs

LinkedIn members have created over 1.2 million groups about every topic under the sun. Their Groups Search feature makes it easy to nd the groups that are most relevant to you. So get your social team to join the right groups and make constructive contributions answering questions, participating in discussions and helping people nd the right resources.

Social media tools can dramatically improve the way you manage your workforce, increasing transparency and accountability. The right tools can make goals explicit, progress clear and recognition public.

CSR and social t like a hand in a glove. There are few better places to discuss your responsibility programs with like-minded people interested in the same topics. Activists use social every day. CSR people should, too.

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Wed be remiss if we didnt mention Rypple here its our web-based social performance management platform (and its pretty amazing).

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Use real names in your customer service tweets

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Make all of your marketing content easy to share

Social media has to represent one of the biggest (relatively) untapped opportunities in the history of CSR. Natalie Cowan, Econsultancy blog, February 27, 2012

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Ending a helpful tweet with an actual rst name makes it much more personal and, makes it much more likely that your customers will connect with you.

Make every effort to replicate a face-to-face interaction. Leon Widrich, Social Media Examiner, April 12, 2012

People will share your content if its good and if you make it easy to do. So include all the right sharing widgets including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest and any other appropriate channel on your blog posts, landing pages and marketing content.

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Get a Twitter management console

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Twitters own client may not be the best option for managing your companys Twitter presence. Tools like TweetDeck and HootSuite let you manage several accounts in one place and separate your Tweet stream into columns for lists, hashtags and searches.

And Radian6 lets you engage on Twitter (and other social channels) in the same place that youre monitoring them.

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Be a guest blogger
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Blogging on your own website is important but you should also look for opportunities to guest blog on relevant sites in your market. It puts you in front of new audiences, boosts search rankings and builds bridges with inuencers.

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Stay on top of new social channels

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Even if theyre not perfect for your brand right away, keep an eye on new social developments by trying out the latest big social thing. Pinterest came from nowhere to become a major player in some markets. You may not ever join in but if you know what its all about you can apply the ideas to other programs. Every month, ask a different team member to join a new social channel and report back on how it works and whats interesting.

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Bonus Tip: Connect with Salesforce.com!

And dont forget to drop in on the Salesforce.com Social Success site.

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Got another social-power tip?

Tell us about it and well include you in the follow-up to this book.

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Social-Power Your Business The Tips Index Click to view

01 Start by listening 02 Create a senior exec social team 03 Get your salespeople LinkedIn premium accounts 04 Take customer service to social channels 05 Use your employees social networks to help recruit talent 06  Decide who handles different kinds of social engagement 07  Have a plan for dealing with negative social media comments 08 Enlist the crowd to guide product development 09  Write a social media policy for everyone on your staff 10 Focus your social efforts on a few channels 11  Get an active blog going 12 Never ignore people talking about you in social channels 13  Dont just sell, help 14 Add interesting milestones to your companys Facebook timeline 15  Extend social collaboration to partners and customers 16 Integrate a social program into every marketing campaign 17  Pick a handful of social media metrics and track them closely 18 Get the CEO involved in at least one social channel 19  Harness the power of the Big Three tools for social selling 20 Put social channels into your emergency communications or crisis management plans 21 Build relationships with your markets top inuencers 22 Help every salesperson set up a daily social media routine 23 Make team task tracking social and collaborative 24 Social-power your CRM 25  Use social media to monitor competitive activity 27 If you have an ecommerce site, add ratings & reviews 37  Write social channels into your Customer Access Strategy 39  Use social collaboration tools to support major sales pitches 26  Be quick to own up to your mistakes 38 Mobilise your social team

28 Earn senior management 40  Post content on social sharing sites sponsorship of your social initiatives 41  Participate in LinkedIn Groups 29 Follow the social media leaders 42 Use real names in your customer 30 Research every prospects social activity before calling 31  Get your app developers thinking social, too 32 Get really, really good at content 33  Get your social media presence in your advertising 34  Hire for empathy 35  Create a customer self-service community 36  Use social media to crowdsource new content service tweets 43  Make performance reviews social and collaborative 44  Make all of your marketing content easy to share 45 Use social media to talk about your community social responsibility programs 46  Get a Twitter management console 47 Be a guest blogger 48 Stay on top of new social channels  Bonus Tip: Connect with Salesforce.com

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About Salesforce.com
Salesforce.com is the enterprise cloud computing company thats leading the shift to the Social Enterprise helping over 100,000 companies connect to customers and employees like never before. Our social tools include: Super-charge your sales  Sales Cloud, for social-powered sales force automation and contact management  Data.com, B2B sales and marketing account and contact data Deliver amazing service  Service Cloud, for social customer service and support solutions  Desk.com, the social help desk for small businesses Join the conversation  Chatter, a secure, private social network for your business  Radian6, social media monitoring and engagement Build killer apps  Force.com, the cloud platform for custom app development  Database.com, the trusted cloud database  Heroku, the platform to build social and mobile apps in Ruby and Java Extend your business  AppExchange, the leading marketplace for enterprise cloud computing applications Improve your performance  Rypple, the web-based social performance management platform

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