Social Media and business.

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Social Media and business.

October 6th, 2009

This week’s social media blog posts:
Monday: The Social Media Manifesto.
Tuesday: Social Media and business.
Wednesday: Your Social Media strategy: What are you hoping to achieve?
Thursday: Social Marketing turns the Media Funnel upside down.
Friday: Action steps for getting your business started in Social Media—today.

(This is the fourth in our series of Social Media posts for the month of October. We look forward to your feedback on this series.)

In our last few posts, we talked about the fact that Social Media is simply anything you do in the online space that allows others to converse, contribute, add to, distribute or give feedback to.

That’s all fine, you say, but how does that relate to my business? To answer this, one must first accept the notion that people are coming to the Internet to find solutions.

The key to developing a successful Social Media campaign is in setting yourself up as a solution for your customers. Not to sell so much as to solve.

People come to the Internet to find solutions to an almost limitless number of problems: I’m looking for the lowest price on the latest James Patterson novel; I’m looking for a gluton-free recipe; I’m looking to find out which gas grill I should buy; I’m looking to return a broken music player; I’m looking to see how the Giants did last night; I’m looking to be entertained; I’m looking for trusted insight on which growth stocks to buy. You get the idea.

For some of the problems people come to the Internet looking to solve, your company or products may offer an obvious solution. Many times your company has the expertise and resources to help customers in quite a few ways. And the most helpful usually don’t have to do with selling them stuff.

The obvious question most businesses would have at this point is: “Why can’t the people with problems we can solve just come to our website?”

The thing is, most Internet users aren’t looking for a sales pitch, and that’s exactly what most corporate web sites are, or at least what visitors expect when they go there. There’s nothing wrong with this…there’s a time and a place to get your product and sales information in front of a prospective client. But when they are in the early phases of looking for a solution very often isn’t the right time.

Increasingly, Internet users see the value of the ‘Net as being able to connect with peers, other customers, thought leaders and neutral resources when researching a purchase. Upwards of 70% of consumers are “web first,” meaning they either purchase on the web or do research on the web before ever setting foot in a retail environment.

So how do you go about finding which problems to solve? What’s the one thing your customers would say you do better than anyone else (your Brand Vision)? What problem(s) does that solve for customers in the real world? Now ask, are there web users that are having that same problem?

Once you are clear on what problems you can solve, then you can move on to consider which Social Media platforms will work most efficiently at helping you do it. We’ll talk more in depth about these platforms in future posts.

As always, we look forward to your feedback on this series. If you’re not currently receiving the Quisenblog, you can subscribe here.

Posted by Mickey

The Quisenblog