If you look at companies right now, the big thing that’s happening is the executives are looking at social media as possibly a branding so then they put it into marketing, but then sales uses it as a sales tool to reach their customers. You may have four or five departments that are very siloed doing different things, putting out different post and sometimes putting out different mixed messages. What we do is … I’m sorry?
Craig: That’s never good where one department is not talking to the other.
Les: Exactly. The what the goal is you get these departments talking to each other and then developing a strategy as a baseline so that now when these different departments are working on social media, they have a baseline to go back to and say, “Okay, we need to follow what the overarching strategy for our entire corperation is from that social business perspective.”
Craig: Do you find that there’s common mistakes that companies are making?
Les: Yes. Very much so. One of the big things that companies cross the border or I’ve had some clients that have made this mistake and we’ve actually had to separate ways because sometimes they just can’t get the message… is that they try to use social media as a selling their product or services like they would a radio, television or magazine campaign.
The big thing that it doesn’t really work in that type of environment because of the fact that it’s more about … People in social media have been saying these for years. It’s more about engaging them to talk about things that they want to talk about.
For example, if you take Cabela’s, they don’t really care that you have a brand new riffle that you’re trying to sell to them, what they want to know is does it do what it needs to do out in the field or is it good for home protection and those type of things.
Companies are making the mistake of they’re selling it like they would, it has these features and these benefits as oppose to here’s how it fits in with your daily lives. One of the things I hear CEOs say a lot and executives say a lot, “I don’t really care if you’re walking your dog.” I always laugh about that because you may not care that I’m walking my dog, but the people who do business with your company do care that you’re walking your dog because they want to see you as a person, not just a corporate entity.
I think that’s the big change that’s taken place in corporate America is that the understanding that you as an IBM or you as an AT&T, you’re no longer this big behemoth that the individual can’t get in touch with. They want to learn and know about the individuals that are running these organizations. Organizations run by people, they’re not just in existence and they want …
Social business strategy wants to help … It is one of those keys to allow your customers and future prospects to get to know the people that they’re working with as oppose to just this big behemoth company.
Craig: That’s kind of interesting too because it goes back to the idea that whether people want to also buy from a person or from a family and big corporations can have that family feel if they’re willing to put the face of their people out there and the story of the people that work for that company despite their size. It gives them a more personal connection.
Les: Exactly and that’s the key to any social business strategy. I always jokingly say if anyone calls himself a social media expert, please run, because that whole industry hasn’t even been in existence to a point that someone can know all there is to know from a perspective because it changes so often too.
I think that if an individual tries to take on this as a separate entity from a perspective of as well as running a business, they fall … They sometimes do some of those mistakes that we’ve talked about because it’s just too much and it changes on a regular basis.
I think that understand that they need help in showing those people, showing those faces of their employees, showing the faces of people who are running the company and how to show them is vital to any success of an organization.
Craig: Do you think that there’s things that you see companies do very well?
Les: I do. There’s a few. I always use the example of companies that do well and in contrast that companies that have done poorly. The companies that have done well are companies like Coca Cola and Virgin. If you look at those two organizations and you look at what they’ve done and go to their social media site, if you go to their Facebook pages, they’ve developed a community where people want to get involved.
