By Joe Mechlinski

It’s a brutal fight. 365 days a year, 7 days a week, and 24 hours a day. Your competition is thinking about how to steal your current clients and, more importantly, your future clients, too. As the economy has slowed down, the logic is simple. People are still spending money – just not at the rate they used to. In the highly competitive world of solution selling for Microsoft ® Partners, if you show up when the customer is finally ready to buy, you will already be too late.

However, when you initiate the sales cycle far ahead of time, long before the customer is even thinking of making a purchase, you have a much better chance to ultimately win the business. You can beat the early bird to the worm. Or, to use the phrase of Chris Brogan, a 10-year veteran of using social media and technology to build digital relationships for businesses, organizations, and individuals, you can “Be there before the sale.”

In his book “Trust Agents”, Brogan advises, “Be human. Be helpful. Talk about things other than your clients and their products. Don’t just talk to people when you need something from them.” In other words, the key to successfully using social media is to treat your online relationships as you would any other relationships.

Relationships Still Matter

As recently as 10 years ago, the old rules of “being there” still applied. Unless you had a local presence, it was very difficult to be Joe Mechlinski there and stay connected to your prospects and customers. Being there physically allowed you to place extra emphasis on building the relationship.

Now, thanks to social media and the Internet, you can be there without being there. You can stay connected authentically – and profitably, as most businesses have discovered – by using the social web and the tools of Web 2.0 such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. The adoption of social media has been pretty amazing. Here are some statements that should grab the attention of any Microsoft Partner considering whether to invest in social media strategies:

• Tech decision makers give user-generated sites equal importance to traditional media sources when considering tech purchases.
• Decision makers consider their personal experiences first (58%) when shortlisting tech vendors, followed by word-of-mouth and industry analyst reports, tied at 51%.
• Advertising (17%) and direct marketing (21%) were listed as the least important information sources when short-listing possible vendors. (Study: “Tech Decision Maker,” Hill & Knowlton, January 2009)

But it’s not anonymous “decision makers” who rely on social media. It’s real people.
Consider:

• Friends still play an important role in influencing buyers. 83% of online buyers said they are interested in sharing information about their decisions with people they know, while 74% are influenced by the opinions of others in their decision to buy the product/service in the first place. (“Manage Smarter”, September 2009)

People are not likely to go back to their previous buying habits. In fact:

• 85% of social media users believe that a company should go further than just having a presence on social sites and should also interact with its customers. (Cone Business in Social Media Study²)
• 81% of marketers surveyed say that their social media spending will meet or exceed their traditional advertising spending within the next five years. (TWI Surveys/Society for New Communications Research, November 2007)
• By 2020, 84% of marketers agree that building customer trust will become marketing’s primary objective, and 82% agree that collaboration with customers will prevail over marketing. (1to1 Media survey of the 1to1 Xchange panel, April 2008)

Despite all this change, it is important to keep this in mind: the only thing that has really changed is proximity. Proximity has expanded exponentially. You no longer need to live in the same zip code as your prospects, Partners, and clients in order to operate in the same community.

This article shows you how to take advantage of the opportunity with six quick tips for using social media to “be there” most effectively.

Quick Tip #1: Say It, Don't Spray It

A good friend and master social networker, Greg Cangiolsi, founder and CEO of Baltimore-based Blue Sky Factory, recently shared some interesting information. In his effort to deliver a better customer experience via social media, Greg recently spoke to and heard from leaders of several brands including Ford, Dunkin’ Donuts, Southwest Air, Comcast, and others about the greatest challenges they were having with building their presence online.

What Greg learned from the community managers of these Fortune 500 companies was that the biggest mistake companies make is lacking authenticity, or using these tools solely for a marketing/distribution platform and not an engagement platform.

What does this say to Microsoft Partners? Same goes for you. If you just flood the social web with information about your company, without bothering to engage your customer, you will turn people off.

Quick Tip #2: Think Before You Speak

Second, Greg found that there was an  enormous challenge in not being consistent while building and nurturing a community. For example, there have come stories of individual employees sending inappropriate and untimely tweets. Last summer, a Ketchum staffer that was visiting agency client FedEx in its hometown of Memphis, Tennessee tweeted an unfavorable comment about the city. (Ketchum is a public relations and marketing agency).  This prompted an angry memo from FedEx that reached the executives of both companies and beyond. Though the employee was not fired, Ketchum had to do a lot of damage control.

The lesson here for Microsoft Partners is simply to think before you speak. Most companies are promoting someone within the organization to spearhead these efforts and to act as the one steady voice for all things social. This brings up the challenge of scale in larger organizations, and there we see teams being built to handle the organization’s participation within the social web. But smaller companies can participate as well by designating a community manager to maintain the company’s clear, consistent message while staying on-point. This will help avoid big, embarrassing blunders.

Conversely, Greg told us what large companies were doing right.

Quick Tip #3: Go Where Your Audience Goes

Each of the industry giants stated that they were committing to the new channels, dedicating resources, changing the face of their customer service, being transparent, and building trust to a larger community. Probably the biggest motivator for all companies, large and small, is the realization that the customer is already engaged in social media. As such, the customer is in a position to voice opinions that impact the brand. They can say what they like and what they don’t like – and because they are speaking to their communities of trusted friends, their message carries far greater weight than any impersonal ad campaign can muster.

Quick Tip #4: Be Real

Whether your company is large or small, whether your audiences are far-flung or local, being earliest to the sale depends upon your investment in your communities.

Social media can aptly be described as many communities of many humans. And like any group of humans, certain attitudes and behaviors will gain you acceptance, and some will get you ostracized. Being smart, socially, will differentiate the effective communicators from the rest on social media.

Studies suggest there are three basic requirements when communicating online or otherwise:

1. Authenticity
2. Transparency
3. Emotional Intelligence

Authenticity is just being who you say you are and staying consistent. It’s all about strengthening your brand by the lasting memory you create and the promise you deliver.

Transparency is full disclosure. There is no reason to fool your audiences online. It won’t work; they’ll smell trickery a mile away.

Emotional Intelligence (or EQ) has always been the secret ingredient in “how to win friends and influence people.” It’s just as important in social media, where your brand personality is open to the scrutiny of hundreds or thousands or millions of viewers. EQ is your self-awareness plus social awareness.

In his book, “A Whole New Mind”, Daniel H. Pink discusses the correlation between “right-brained thinking” and EQ and postulates that having a high EQ is the primary differentiator for companies facing off-shore competition. “We must think and master aptitudes that are high concept and high touch,” he writes, “that overseas knowledge workers can’t do cheaper …” Not only does our emotional intelligence determine our acceptance into communities, but it may be the difference between survival and extinction of our companies.

To understand the concept of self-aware versus socially aware, imagine your company as one of the characters from “The Wizard of Oz”. Which one should it be?

• Scarecrow – is socially aware but not self-aware. He’s a strawman, a fringe character. He’s close to the action but not paying much attention to what his use of social media might reveal about him. As a result, he is an extreme “life streamer” – posting too often about too little. “Crows are evil!” for example, or “Bored with my field.” If he only had a brain!
• Cowardly Lion – he’s very self-aware and very much interested in his own self-interest but is not socially aware. He doesn’t understand the value of the “social” in social media. Afraid of his own shadow, he stays away.
• Tinman – let’s say the Tinman is not self-aware or socially aware. (Sorry, Tinman, you’re the bad guy in this analogy.) He just doesn’t get what makes himself, or other people, tick. So he gets a little oiled up and starts chopping randomly in social settings – potentially inflicting great harm to the company’s image.
• Wizard of Oz – the great and powerful Oz gets it! He knows you can’t get on social
  media without a strategy. He knows how to listen, participate, and engage in a way that fully respects the laws of human behavior. The Wizard, front and center of all the action, makes an excellent community manager - and proves that the company is transparent by coming out from behind the curtain in the end.

Quick Tip #5: It's Never Too Early to Build Trust

People do business with people they trust. This time-honored adage applies to the Web as well. After all, we are all human. We love to be in groups, cliques, tribes. Social media is our way of staying connected. And when it comes to making purchasing decisions, social media is one way to gather information. Who do our friends recommend? I see it on Facebook almost every day: “Does someone have a roofer they can recommend?” “I need a plumber – willing to pay for quality.” “I need a CRM Partner that actually cares! Please ReTweet!”

In the current economy – and especially these days – what is more important than trust? In the last two years, people have seen their home values and 401(k)s cut drastically. While financial portfolios are starting to improve again, there is not one person working today who has not been affected by greed and mistrust. Trust is any company’s most valuable asset. Social media provides an excellent platform for companies to establish themselves as trustworthy.

Quick Tip #6: Let Social Media Lead You to Leads

What everyone ultimately wants to know is, will social media add to my bottom line? can tell you from experience: absolutely. Lead generation and new business are byproducts
of participation in social media. You can’t forecast it. It’s an organic outcome; it “just happens.”

This doesn’t mean you have to sit idly by and wait. Microsoft Partners can – and should – put their companies in position for it to happen. Once you’ve established trust, utilize social media to be there before the sale, as we’ve discussed. As you build your community, develop genuine relationships, and engage people, good things start to happen. Trust develops. As a result, when they or someone they know need your services, you’re already there.

Ultimately, though, smart Partner companies use social media tools not to sell or obtain the lead, but to participate in various communities, to add value to those communities, to be active, to make connections, and to stay in that constant feedback loop.

The Value of Being Early

Where your business goes as a result of its investment in social media is really up to you, the leader. I recently had an opportunity to hear Gary Vaynerchuk, the author of “Crush It!” speak. He said, “Saying you don’t have time for social media is like saying you don’t have time to listen to what your prospective customers are thinking, saying, and hearing.”

The biggest challenge for Microsoft Partners and other business people is to understand that, despite the technology and the feeling of being removed from human contact, social media is a conversation. It’s intimate and immediate, and there is a wealth of opportunities to give as well as to get value. But you have to be there. And you’d better be early.

Joe and his team at EntreQuest help Partners define and reach sales goals. For more information, contact Joe Mechlinski at jmechlinski@entrequest.com or visit the team online at www.entrequest.com.

1 “Debunking Six Social Media Myths,” B.L. Ochman, BusinessWeek, February 19, 2009 — www.businessweek.com/technology/content /feb2009/tc20090218_335887.htm

2 The 2008 Cone Business in Social Media Study presented the findings of an online survey conducted September 11-12, 2008 by Opinion Research Corporation among 1,092 adults comprising 525 men and 567 women 18 years of age and older. The margin of error associated with a sample of this size is ± 3%. http://tinyurl.com/ydnbbls