When looking at the connections you currently have and the connections you want to build, ask yourself who are the people that can help create value for your brand. This brand value is driven by referrals, relationships and recommendations; also known as the three Rs. Consider these to be the people whose opinion you most trust.

Here’s an analogy that demonstrates the “who.”  These are the people with whom you will engage through social networks to make decisions using the three Rs. Remember the last time you made a big purchase like buying a car? You probably went through the same situation as most of us. You went online to research different brands of cars. You saw advertisements online, on TV and in your area that encouraged you to purchase the car. But all of that was not enough for you to consider buying yet.

[Referrals] When you start reading blogs and articles from known experts, the experts will say that this car is great, reliable, reasonably priced and so on as compared to others just like it. Because of the value of their referral, you will begin to feel that this car is the one for you. This referral (indirect or direct) pushes you to think more actively of your choices.

This is similar to seeing a social post from a friend or colleague. You are more likely to pay attention to it rather than a third party post. When you create content, make sure that it is something that your social network or target audience will value and want to share with others.

[Recommendations.] When some you trust tells you that this car is one that you should consider and one that they can vouch for. They tell you that they had a Toyota Camry in high school and college and after 200k miles; they went to buy another Camry with no hesitation because that is the car they trust. This again motivates you to consider the car without a doubt.

Just as in Google+ or LinkedIn, people will be able to see the +1s or recommendations for a product, service or company that really stands out and makes an impact on the buying decision.  Be sure to that you always share your content with your list of influencers so they can have the opportunity to have an opinion. As a best practice, consult your influencers before publically posting anything so you can be sure that they will recommend whatever you post.

[Relationship] When a close friend or family tells you that you should buy that car and that you will be making a great decision and a smart purchase. This final act is one that truly fulfills your buying decision and reinforces the referrals and recommendations that you received previously.

Similar to when you make a post on any of the social platforms, you are usually posting something with the hope that your network likes it or comments on it. This final reinforcement tends to help seal the deal and convince you that what you are doing is the popular choice.

Using your connections is the best way to driving engagement with your social media networks. For businesses, it’s important to identify and manage your connections and understand who are the ones referring you and recommending you and how can those relationships help to drive your social media engagement.

According to Answers.com:

“B2C is an abbreviated term for business to consumer marketing. Business to consumer marketing is when a business markets products to a consumer market. A consumer is a buyer of products that are not business related.”

“B2B is the practice of individuals, or organizations, including commercial businesses, governments and institutions, facilitating the sale of their products or services to other companies or organizations that in turn resell them…”

Now, let’s try to simplify those answers to say, B2C is businesses marketing to consumers and B2B is businesses marketing to other businesses who will turn around sell it to consumers.

Let’s break it down a little further. B2C marketing means that you are targeting a single individual to purchase something, maybe in the case of a product targeted at children, you are also targeting the parents, so then the parents become the decision maker and the child becomes the influencer in the purchase. But in the case of B2B marketing, you have multiple parties to influence; you have the decision maker, the influencer and the user. Check out my other post for more details, link to post.

If you ask most marketing professionals about how you are supposed to target B2B customers, they usually will go into some long theoretical presentation on targeting buyer personas and how you need to place yourself ONLY in media that speaks B2B. I agree that there is great importance in targeting B2B customers in specifically B2B media channels, but that’s not going to get you the full attention of your target prospect.

Even though your target prospect is a business professional, it does not mean that they aren’t also like average consumers that use traditional consumer outlets everyday to shop, read consumer product reviews and browse comments on Facebook. Remember also that this influence (even if place in consumer media) is part of the attribution process, it’s part of the demand generation funnel that gets them through the different stages in the sales cycle. The influence of awareness ad placed in consumer media could be just the thing that pushes the prospect from pre-purchase to awareness, or from awareness to consideration.

When thinking of B2B, the first question that comes to mind is how big is the business that I am selling to and who does what. Meaning what role does each stakeholder have in that company and who makes decisions? So, let’s break it down further and look at the specific questions to ask when targeting B2B prospects.

Question Set 1 – What do I know about the company that I am targeting?

It is always a good idea to do research on a company before you approach them. If don’t know where to go, there are some great resources out there in Manta, Hoover’s, Facebook.

• What is their annual revenue?
• How many employees do they have?
• How many offices do they have and where are they?
• How long have they been in business?
• What are their different product lines?
• How much are they selling their products for?

Question Set 2 – Who does what?

When talking to a prospect (company), you need to understand who does what and who makes the decisions. Typically in a B2B company you are targeting 3 different roles. Depending on the size, the same person may be doing all three or two of the three roles.

Decision Maker – this is the person that typically is the final word because they sign the check, they are in a executive role, or could run the business unit.

Typical Title: C-level Executive, President or Vice President

Conversation: These are more formal conversations. You are typically talking about the company wide benefits and total cost of ownership or even total cost of operation.

Interaction Time: Limited, more interaction near the end of the deal

Influencer – this person is usually in a middle management role and either runs the department or team that will be purchasing your product. This person is also the biggest voice in the conversation.

Typical Title: Director or Manager

Conversation: These are less formal conversations. When talking to this person, you need to talk about your product as a solution, show them the product highlights and key selling points.

Interaction Time: Frequent, you will spend more time with this person than any other person and you should spend most of your time selling to this person.

User – this person will actually be hands on with the product and will need to understand the ins and outs of it along with usability and functionality.

Typical Title: Manager, Supervisor, Associate, Analyst

Conversation: These are informal conversations. It is best to keep these conversations specifically about the product best practices and operational efficiencies.

Interaction Time: Occasional, more interaction near the end of the deal

As mentioned in my previous post Social Marketing Best Practices, you need to identify what is important to you and you need to tie in the overall effort to your goals. If your goal is to build engagement around prospects and customers using LinkedIn, you might as well follow the majority and do the things that are important to everyone. And remember that there are some things that are not up for debate, like a profile picture. Just do it, put up a picture because if you don’t then you are part of the 1% that don’t find it important.

[Tip] Before you start changing your profile and go back and forth to add some punctuation error or modify, you need to turn off your broadcast activity. You would hate to broadcast to everyone every time you decide to change one little detail.

Here is how to do it

1. Go to LinkedIn and click on “settings” on the dropdown underneath your name. This is on the top right hand side of the screen.
2. You may be prompted to enter your password again, but you will be directed to the settings page.
3. On the bottom, you will see 4 tabs starting with “Profile”, look for “Turn on/off your activity broadcast”, click on it.
4. A window will pop up asking you to check/uncheck the box.
5. If you are looking to turn off a broadcast about each simple change to your profile, be sure to uncheck the box.

Best practices for your LinkedIn profile

1. Complete your profile 100%. 
You can see your score on the right side when editing your profile. Here are the areas that will help you get to 100%.

• List your current job
• Include two previous positions
• Add your education
• Add a profile summary
• Upload a personal photo (no kids, no pets, no logo)
• Include your specialties
• Earn at least three recommendations

2. Edit your public profile URL. 
I suggest you choose your name if it’s available. Add this URL to your business cards, your signature file and include it in other profiles.

3. Write a detailed summary. 
Your summary is one of the most important parts of the profile because the search engines index it. It should be written in first person and should include your keywords, your skills, your experience and what differentiates you from others. You can use up to 2000 words. Suzanne Vara outlines How to  Pack A Powerful Punch With Your LinkedIn Summary.

4. Include links to your company websites on your profile. 
Tip: Select the “other” option so you can add the name of your website. You can then add additional links to your blog, Facebook page and any other websites you have.

5. Add sections to profile. 
It’s important to add dimensions to your profile. This is way to give you more depth than someone who went to school here and worked there. Here are some that I like:

• Skills. To add a skill you must first search for a skill you have. When the results appear you can add the skill to your profile. Hubspot has more info on how to add skills to your LinkedIn profile.
• Volunteer Experience & Causes. This detail can possibly be a deciding factor when employers are looking at your profile. They are thinking that you are more than just a work-a-holic, you are selfless and a team player.
• Organizations. Whether it’s an industry org, an internal committee within your company, or a church/youth group, highlight what is important to you and what you want people to maybe ask you about in conversation.
• Reading List by Amazon. I really like this one because it shows you as a thought leader but also gives you something to talk about when engaging in conversation for business. 

6. Earn recommendations.
Recommendations add credibility to your profile. LinkedIn has made it simple to give and receive recommendations. Good sources of recommendations come from your clients and people who have worked with you. Tip: In order for your profile to be 100% complete you need 3 recommendations. I typically recommend at least one each from co-worker, manager and customer/partner.

7. Update your status several times a week with links to your blog posts, news about projects you’re working on or links to your industry news. 
You can schedule LinkedIn updates using a desk client like Hootsuite, Seesmic or Tweetdeck. You can also tag a tweet to post on LinkedIn by adding “#in” to the tweet. I do not recommend sending all of your Twitter updates to LinkedIn, but selectively choosing which tweets go to LinkedIn with the #in tag. Your updates show up on the feed and are searchable using LinkedIn Signals, the new search feature on your home page below the status window.

The most important part of that definition is that “a ‘best’ practice can evolve to become better as improvements are discovered”. You have to remember that your company’s best practices should and will vary and most certainly will change depending on your industry, buyer persona, customer buying cycle, product set and many other reasons. More specifically, it will vary depending on what is your current marketing mix and strategy. There is no such list that is a one size fits all, it’s best to take the advice of others and integrate that into your own strategy and tweak it over time to best accommodate your goals. Once you have aligned your marketing mix to your goals and have instituted best practices, you will have a solid strategy that will be hard to refute .

So with that out of the way, here is my list of best practices. Although this advice is specific to LinkedIn and Facebook, the advice holds true to most platforms. Remember also that Social Marketing [Social Marketing Defined] plays a specific role in your marketing strategy, so each of these best practices will present itself when applicable.

• You need to have a house rules section or disclaimer page on your company’s social media pages. Reserve the right to remove bad content, remove any offensive, discriminatory, racist, political, religious, etc. (Here is the one I wrote for Rackspace as an example, look at the bottom of the page http://www.linkedin.com/company/rackspace-hosting/products)
• Build an engagement system within the social media platform. This includes a listening mechanism and a response mechanism. Remember that this requires consistent feedback with a specified SLA that you hold yourself to
• Foster conversation by building engagement systems through chat, video, and sharing features that enable conversations among individuals and groups
• Use a multitude of media channels to increase engagement
• Build out a content calendar, post multiple times a week, preferably every day, vary your posts, have a clear CTA
• Focus on engagement, so ask questions, post helpful tips, link to articles/videos/content
• Have a CTA that drives them to your company website or to parts of your marketing funnel
• 78% of consumers like fewer than 10 brands – HubSpot
• If you blog at least 20 times per month, you get over 5 times more traffic than those who only blogged less than 4 times per month, so the more you blog, the more likely you are to have consistent unique traffic
• Use social media to generate new product ideas and innovation, crowd source your next product idea
• Build a social product experience by using API tools and Social Plugins
• Enable people to like individual products and content across the web
• Use social plugins, like activity feed, recommendations, comments and live stream to make experiences social
• Run sponsored stories to promote people’s actions from the news feed
• Execute integrated strategies across the entire adoption cycle.
• Remember to always have fun

There are many definitions out on the web, so let’s look and see what they say. And obviously, my definition is geared towards my experience and expertise (FYI). Let’s start with what BusinessDictionary.com says: Use of commercial marketing in promotion of goods and services in a way that helps in promoting the consumers‘ and, by extension, the society’s well being. Now let’s look at what Wikipedia says: Social marketing is the systematic application of marketing, along with other concepts and techniques, to achieve specific behavioral goals for a social good.

With varying definitions out there, let’s try to try to define it from the perspective of demand generation marketing person. My definition: Through the use of social media channels, create awareness for your company and elevate the voice of Promoters in order to build meaningful relationships that enable the lead-to-sales process. If that too seams a bit wordy, lets try this condensed definition: demand generation through social media channels.

To give you some insight to my perspective, let me explain my thoughts on the topic. Before Social Marketing we (marketing departments/demand generation teams) would push content out at various points in the sales cycle hoping that prospects would engage with the content and that would then push prospects down the funnel. Driving a prospect down the funnel was slow and unpredictable. There was no catalyst. Today, Social Marketing acts as a catalyst to help accelerate the prospect through the buying cycle. It does this with the help of social/community engagement and the actions of Promoters/Advocates, what I call positive reinforcement. Each act of reinforcement pushes the prospect to the next stage in the sales cycle and with each interaction with a piece of demand gen content being more meaningful. Let me show you a diagram to explain it a bit better. (See below)