It’s all about Fusion...

The starting point for any successful social media marketing or collaboration campaign is strategy development. Many questions need to be asked and answered by brainstorming. Some of the key questions include:

• What are the attributes of your best customers?
• Define your brand in terms of the target’s view
• What is it that your brand is / does?
• What is it that you do?
• What is in it for me? (Prospect view)
• SWOT Analysis
• What triggers Customers decisions to buy?
• Define Your Partners
• Who are my competitors?
• How do I measure return on investment?
• What is my sales process?
• Where are my customers?
• Where are my prospective business partners?
• How can we collaborate?

After answering these questions, setting objectives and developing a plan it is time for action. There are many social media marketing tools available and it is important to utilise the most effective and efficient ones. I would suggest the following for starters:

• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• You Tube
• Blogging
• Niche sites

It is important to understand the nature of each tool and its strengths and weaknesses.

Twitter is a microblogging site limiting tweets to 2 or 3 sentences. It has over 20 million users and growing quickly. It is easy to find customers and business partners, as well as joining in conversations. The functionality is limited and the noise and spamming restricts it severely.

LinkedIn is a business professional networking site with about 50 million users. Customers and business partners can be found in groups. Spammers are kept out and the functionality is improving. Building a network is somewhat slow and communications restricted between users.

Facebook has over 350 million users and is growing at half a million per day. It is a ‘business casual’ site and allows users to personalise their business using fan pages. Users can also join groups to help their search for customers and business partners. All profiles are searchable and spreading messages is easy and effective. Facebook has strict terms of service which they enforce seriously. Although it has text chat boxes it is extremely slow at times.

You Tube is the last of the ‘Big 4’. It is a very powerful site for personalising your business with 75 million views per month. Users can have their own channel, load their own and favourite videos, and because You Tube is owned by Google there is a very positive move up the search engine rankings quickly. It’s free and users can even load MS Powerpoint presentations. There is no communication or collaboration tool.

Blogging is a very powerful way to personalise your business. It also enables you to establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry. Blogs should be posted on a regular basis and not too long. They appear quickly in search engine rankings. They are ideal bridges between connecting and directing prospects to your website. Although blogging sites allow comments from readers, blogging tends to be one way communication.

There are over 600 niche social media sites. The easiest way to find one to suit a use is a Google search for ‘keyword’ and ‘social networking’. It is advisable to join only 2 or 3 of these niche sites due to time constraints. These sites are a bit more focused but again communication is slow and this limits collaboration possibilities.

To be successful in exploiting social media tools to attract customers and business partners; and to improve communications and collaboration internally in organisations a systematic approach works best. Begin with developing a strategy followed by establishing a presence on each social media site. Then expand your reach by increasing your following and friends on all sites. A target of 100 new connections per week is easily achievable. Large numbers of connections are of little value in themselves. It is vital to then nurture relationships with speedy and effective communication and collaboration. Finally, once the system is working, it is important to maintain it with good time management and good tools to achieve efficiency.

The weakest link currently is in nurturing relationships. The social networking sites communication tools are often slow, cumbersome and in the case of Twitter full of noise and spammers. Online communities need real time communication tools for users and effective collaboration tools to allow file sharing, long posts, embedded videos, longer posts, built in searching, safety and security, reporting and statistics and highly scalable and much more.....

Both real and virtual online communities can then nurture relationships improving communications, collaboration, lead generation, sales, product development, team working, project success, and customer service.

I’ve just found that tool I’m delighted to announce ....more soon on ‘Drive Fusion’.

Continues soon...

http://www.DriveERP.com
http://twitter.com/John_McGrann