We have recently decided to put to use a social networking campaign. This means a little blogging — both the micro-blog Twitter-style as well as long winded article-style — a little advertising, a whole lot of messaging and emailing and a lot of communication no matter how you look at it.
Social networking by individuals is predictably done for fun but in our case it is driven by our goal of improving business sales; in other words, for profit.
Our first discussion is going to be on referral campaigns. After all, referral campaigns are intended to get the tenuously associated individual working for the company, so banging the idea of a referral campaign off the social network only makes sense. We thought we'd would ask the group of friends and see what they all thought about it.
After all, one big aspect of selling a company's services is awareness. Awareness of a company, or its brand, or even that its service exists. By now pretty much everyone agrees that web sites are as much a part of the business zeitgeist as brochures were ten years ago.
With the economy in its current state there has been a lot of belt tightening by both companies and individuals. This means most everyone is looking for ways to either improve their income or at the least try and keep things status quo. For businesses this can mean a huge shift in perspective in how they use the web. What many deem to be an online brochure can actually be altered or enhanced to both actively drive sales and manage company work flow. But I digress...
For individuals improving income is often based in smaller increments. Cutting an expense here or making a few extra dollars there. All this leads back to the concept of offering a reward for referrals. For example I recently saw an ad that offered $500 for referring a web site project that comes to fruition. So we're asking the social network, as real people and not supposed ad respondents, would anyone reading the discussion participate in such an program?
Social networking offers a real insight into the everyday collective of individuals that ultimately make up the sales funnel of an organization. A lot of those individuals live outside the funnel, but a few would definitely be in — or have access to — the group any given business could cater to. In this way social networking offers business an opportunity that didn't exist even just a few years ago, which is a collective of potential customers that you don't have to pay to have a two way and meaningful conversation with.
What better way is there to expand your brand and general awareness of your product or service than by conversing with the community? Whether or not you can measure a direct improvement from social networking, the reality is only through awareness will a business succeed. A concerted effort towards using the social network paradigm as a tool for advertising, promotion and brand awareness will only end up benefiting the business over the long term.
How could we