Social Business: Why Having a Plan Matters

Co-authored by: Laurie McCabe and Sanjeev Aggarwal, SMB Group, and Brent Leary, CRM Essentials

 

Good plans shape good decisions. That’s why good planning helps to make elusive dreams come true.
Lester R. Bittel, The Nine Master Keys of Management

This seems to be especially true when it comes to getting business value out of social media. We recently wrapped up fielding for our joint SMB Group-CRM Essentials “2011 Small and Medium Business Social Business Study,” in which we surveyed 750 SMB (small business is 1-99 employees; medium business is 100-999 employees) decision-makers regarding their use, plans and perceptions about social media.

Although SMB interest and adoption of social media to assist with a variety of business functions—from generating leads to product development—is sky-rocketing, the question remains of how and where SMBs are actually deriving business value remains. Our study took an in-depth look at the specific activities and functions that SMBs are using social media for.

While Sanjeev Aggarwal, partner Brent Leary of CRM Essentials and I are just beginning to immerse ourselves in this very rich gold mine of data, one thing is clear:  SMBs that use social media in a “strategic and structured way” to interact with customers and prospects are much more likely to be deriving benefit from their social media investments than those who are using social media in an “ad hoc, informal” way.

Today, SMBs are most likely to be actively using social media to help with marketing and sales functions–including generating more web site traffic, generating more leads, connecting with people who aren’t yet customers, improving market awareness for their brand, reputation enhancement and creating more/better interaction with customers.

As shown on Figure 1, survey results show that those that have a more formal and structured strategy are more likely to be satisfied or very satisfied with the outcomes than those that are using social media in an informal, ad hoc way. For instance, among small businesses:

• 39% of respondents using social media are very satisfied/satisfied with the results of using social media to “create more/better interaction with customers/prospects,” as opposed 24% of those using it an ad hoc manner.
  
• 37% of structured users are very satisfied/satisfied with using social media to generate more web site traffic, compared to just 14% of ad hoc users.
  
• 37% of structured users are very satisfied/satisfied with using social media to improve market awareness for the company, in contrast to 16% of ad hoc users.

Figure 1: Comparison of Small Business Satisfaction with Social Media for Business Activities: Structured vs. Ad Hoc Users

 

While we have about 30 other questions and a seemingly endless array of cross-tabs to mull over in terms of the study, one thing is already crystal clear: To get the most business value from your social media investment, you need to pause and plan—in addition to playing with—social media activities.

For more information about this study, click here.

Social Networking – The SMB challenge and how the SMBs can gain value from Salesforce.com Cloud Service solution

Social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, WordPress are all the range in the B2B and B2C world today. But does the SMB business owners/CEOs or a lone marketing person have the time to devote to track and follow these sites without spending an inordinate amount to time and effort – especially when there is no clearly identifiable direct linkage that this leads to increased sales. How can SMBs participate in and leverage these market trends effectively to address their business and marketing needs?

All these social networking sites present vast amount of unstructured information to the SMBs. In addition, SMBs are also beginning to see a large number of e-mails sent to our e-mail In-boxes from these social sites – leading to information overload, and in many cases turning away the SMB that could benefit from it. What is needed is a solution that aggregates information from all these social networking/community knowledge sites and presents it to the SMBs in a manner that make the information (which at times is very valuable) more easily consumable and easily searchable.

I was at the Salesforce.com CloudForce.com seminar some time ago, where they showcased their social networking integration and service cloud strategy. The Service Cloud shows an elegant and easy-to-use dashboard to present and search the popular social networking sites to the SMB and mid-market enterprises – this will help the SMBs take advantage of all the community knowledge without spending a lot of time and effort following individual solutions like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, WordPress, etc. CRM platform has the potential to pull together information/community knowledge from the various social networking sites and meaningfully relate it current customers, prospects, and partners to deliver more engaging conversations and communications – providing significantly better ROI compared to an ad-hoc social networking access.

Social networking & community services do have the potential to:

• Improve customer interactions and relationships
• Actively engage customers and partners
• Engage potential customers in technology education and learning
• Interacting with the channel/VARs for information exchange and support

SMBs are actively exploring how to participate and incorporate all of these social networking sites/feeds to develop a social networking strategy that drives a broader marketing and services strategy.