STEP FOUR
Tie Social Networking to Key Business Drivers
Previous steps in this book discussed how to leverage social networking for business and offered some recommendations on selecting the most appropriate social networking technology. Now that you have chosen to fully participate in social networking either by building a custom system or leveraging off-the-shelf technology, you can start to realize the business efficiencies of social networking.
How Social Networking Aids in Key Business Activities
Full engagement in social networking only enhances the practice of key business activities in which most companies engage:
recruiting and hiring top-notch sales, marketing, and product or service development professionals
investing in training for all sales staff
marketing products and services through multiple channels to educate and connect with current and prospective customers
fostering knowledge sharing
reinforcing brand loyalty through every customer contact.
Recruiting and Hiring
Social networking is not a new way to screen and interact with potential job candidates, but it has added major efficiencies to the process. Examples of recruitment tools that function through social networks include blog searches, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Ryze, and Twitter. In addition, there are niche and international sites that can be useful for finding, screening, and recruiting job candidates.
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Blog Searches
While searching blogs may seem like a novel way to find qualified job candidates, it does work. In fact, the success of the technique has spawned the creation of a number of services that offer organizations help mining this rich source of potential job candidates. These services include Technorati, Blog Catalog, and Google Blog Search. Essentially, these and similar services enable users to search the “blogosphere” for keywords and phrases or to search by topic or category.
For example, if a recruiter is seeking candidates in sales management, the recruiter enters a job classification into one of the blog search engines and is directed to relevant blogs that match the search criteria. The recruiter then queries these bloggers for candidates that fit the job requirements. The process does require some additional research by the recruiter, but often some of the best candidates for specific organizational roles are not currently looking for a job or perhaps have not even considered the role or job responsibility being offered. The blog recruiting technique expands the universe of qualified candidates and offers referral networking beyond the well-worn channels of personal and colleague contacts.
Facebook and MySpace
As noted in Step 1, Facebook and MySpace are the dominant consumer social networking tools used by more than 400 million members. In general, recruiters use these services to review biographical information.
Of course, recruiters can also establish initial relationships with clients. Recruiting is like selling. Recruiters sell open job positions to candidates who might fill the job opening. Good recruiters establish relationships with their candidates to help guide them through the opportunity and the selection process. They ultimately negotiate and close the sale by hiring the person.
LinkedIn, Plaxo, and Ryze
LinkedIn and Plaxo are the two main social networking sites for the business community. As pointed out in Step 1, LinkedIn is the dominant service with more than 55 million members in more than 200 countries, but both are extremely valuable recruiting tools. Plaxo has about 40 million members. Corporate headhunters and organizations post jobs within specific interest groups, and members of the groups share job openings and make job and skills recommendations for other members. LinkedIn has thousands of special interest groups organized by company, profession, job role, and common interests. Recruiters can post, and candidates can review and actively respond to openings. Because of the nature of LinkedIn and Plaxo and the relationships established, users of both systems get exposed to opportunities and people in their networks as well, which increases the relative size of the net cast by the recruiters. Ryze is similar to LinkedIn and focuses on professional networking but has a much smaller footprint. It currently has about 500,000 members.
Because of its open nature and search capabilities, recruiters can use Twitter to search for potential candidates that map to the competencies for the open job. Simply enter a job title or key competencies and a list of job postings will be served up. In fact, entire niche sets of recruiters (small and large) use Twitter as a way to search for potential candidates.
Niche Social Networking
In addition to the general consumer and business social networking tools, a number of other tools are useful for recruiting. The examples include ethnicity-focused networks, college and professional networks, and internationally focused networks.
MiGente—Social networking site focused on the Latino-American community. The site has an area called MiGente Professional, which is targeted to members to network for professional reasons, post resumes, and view job openings.
Doostang—Social networking site for candidates from top schools and recently graduated candidates. Job seekers and recruiters can use the site to identify career-minded, typically recently graduated candidates. Members are informed when alumni members are in a company with a job opening as a way to get additional information about potential opportunities. Recruiters use it for ready access to a candidate base of more than 500,000 members.
Naymz—A professional networking tool individuals can use for free that enables members to establish robust online profiles; get feedback from peers and colleagues; post resumes; and connect online blogs, websites, and such the member is using. It also helps the member get exposure to potential job opportunities. Recruiters can use the tool to post jobs and search for potential candidates.
Affinity Circles—A member-based social networking system aimed at associations, typically those for college and university groups, such as alumni associations.
Recruiting is not limited to domestic sites. International recruiting sites such as Xing, Viadeo, and Tianji are available. In addition, international users have access to these sites:
Hi5—Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Africa
Bebo—United States, United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Poland, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, India, and the Netherlands
Orkut—Brazil and India
Wasabi—European-centered social network with sites for the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain
Mixi—10 million users and 90 percent of market share in Japan
Kiaxin—China
CyWorld—Korea, China, Japan, and Taiwan.
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Sales Training
Sales training, whether taught in the classroom or online, ensures that those working directly to increase your company's top-line income are operating at the top of their game. Social networking is a powerful tool to support and augment traditional learning methods.
Dozens of specific sales-focused options are available from blogs and online publications (e-zines) to member forums that are part of business social networking tools such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Plaxo.
Following are some examples of networking options for sales professionals and how your organization can use them.
Blogs
SalesPractice.com is a forum-based, member-driven best practices site. Sales practices are broken down into sales-related categories. Members then post questions and answers. The knowledge of the community is shared with the larger community.
Miller Heiman Blog is a CEO's blog, full of articles on sales training (http://millerheiman.com/sam-reese). It is cross-linked with Twitter and RSS feeds. The CEO is well versed in the art of sales, and his regular blog posts provide information on sales training for end users and people who might procure sales training.
Sales Management 2.0 originally was conceived as a blog to help sales professionals continually improve their sales skills (www.salesmanagement20.com). It has evolved into almost its own sales-related blogosphere with a forum community, video posts, chat, and so on.
Karl Goldfield's Sales Training Blog focuses on helping sales professionals, both new and seasoned, gain additional professional
selling skills via sales training (http://salesblog.karlgoldfield.com).
Sales Training Advice is a communication platform blog for sales trainers and experts to share advice, tips, and techniques on how to become sales champions (www.salestrainingadvice.com). Multiple authors submit articles on a variety of sales-related topics.
SalesTrainingDrivers.com is ASTD's blog on sales training. You will find excellent articles on the blog, polls, reader comments, and resources, plus information on upcoming training and conferences for Sales Training Driver content.
Gitomer.com is an e-zine from Jeffrey Gitomer, a well-known sales professional who has written multiple bestselling books on sales and sales-related best practices. He offers the e-zine, which includes articles on sales topics and inspirational notes on a weekly basis, a Facebook group, RSS feeds, and so on. He also offers sales training called TrainONE.
Facebook and Other Tools
Sales professionals also use Facebook (see Figure 4.1 ASTD Press on Facebook) and internal network tools such as Yammer to establish interest groups, share best practices, and provide just-in-time mentoring to those in the group. Following are some suggestions on how your business might use these and other tools to support sales.
Some companies that offer sales training establish groups on Facebook as a way to market their offerings and share information about upcoming events, plus enable like-minded members to connect. In the search field on Facebook, enter “sales training” and you will get multiple groups. For example, Richardson and MTD both have groups established on Facebook.
Yammer is an internal social networking system that is used as a collaborative framework to share knowledge across an organization. For example, members inside an organization can share information about a client, an
opportunity, or the competition using Yammer (a Twitter-like tool).
FIGURE 4.1
ASTD Press on Facebook
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In addition, custom applications that operate in concert with existing systems, such as SharePoint or Awareness Networks (www.awarenessnetworks.com/home), allow your sales staff to use custom-built communities to collaborate and share best practices.
Marketing Products Through Multiple Channels
Social networking is a boon for marketing and building new prospects for your sales force. Not only is the immediate feedback important, but the viral nature of social networking can spread your message fast and with little effort. Using the networking features of social networking systems, these systems can recommend groups that are established by companies to friends who are not fans of the company group yet. For example, maybe your cousin, who is a friend of yours on Facebook, is a member of the Harley-Davidson motorcycle group. Because of this, you might get a recommendation, via your cousin's membership in the group, to join. In many cases, you might not care to join the group, but sometimes you will be invited to groups you do want to join. Just knowing that companies have groups can help establish word-of-mouth marketing of the groups to others and drive ancillary marketing of the company.
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Sharing Knowledge
Information sharing is crucial for competitive and market savvy organizations. Sales professionals need to share information about the competition or to leverage best practices for all aspects of the sales process.
Wikis
One of the most useful social networking tools for this type of knowledge sharing is a wiki. Wikis are used to share information such as sales collateral, pricing, product and service information, and other key intelligence. A wiki can also be used for collaborative proposal development for sales teams no matter where the members are located.
A good example of this kind of tool is Sales Wiki (www.deakon.com.au/mysalesresources/sales-wiki.aspx). As a user you can search for core topics and as a member you can actually contribute to the articles and words posted there. Think of it as an encyclopedia focused on sales terminology.
Custom Knowledge-Sharing Applications
Many companies (especially larger ones) encourage the sharing of information through the use of custom-developed information tools. For example, one large organization built a knowledge-sharing system that enables internal chat and threaded discussions, allowing its employees to share ideas, best practices, and need-to-know information.
Reinforcing Brand
Social networking is now also a key tool for reinforcing product brand, and, depending on the product or service, networking can even decrease sales cycle time. For example, movie studios create custom groups or Twitter feeds to pre-market new movies, thus helping to establish and maintain the buzz and excitement around them. Starbucks and other companies announce new products or services through their social networking channels to help drive marketing to the social networking audience. For example, Yukon coffee, one of Starbucks' coffees, had been removed from the Starbucks product line for some time. The company decided to return the coffee as an organic coffee and pre-announced this through its social networking sites to help drive demand ahead of the actual product release.
Clearly customers who are “pre-sold” have higher product adoption, use more features, and are more likely to evangelize the product or service to peers. In some ways, building brand also decreases bottom-line costs as well.
Build an Internal Sales Team
When all employees have a sound baseline of information regarding a company's products and services and are coached to talk with their connections, they can often help expand the sales pipeline. Too often, professional sales people sell only inside companies, which creates a finite number of connections and scale in potential pursuits. One good way to provide product information and sales coaching across the organization is to establish an internal wiki or social networking system, enabling all employees to share ideas and learn about the company's products, services, and initiatives. Some companies use systems like Yammer to do this, while others invest in custom social networking systems.
Decreasing Bottom-Line Costs
Social networking systems can be used to reduce costs and inefficiencies. By using these systems to educate customers (and internal staff) about your organization's products and services, you can
decrease the sales cycle, which lowers cost of sales
reduce customer care and tech support costs because clients are more knowledgeable of the products and services
minimize the number of product returns because of more customer awareness of your company's products or services
increase efficiencies in a technical and customer support function because of increased product or service knowledge.
Companies continue to identify creative ways they can use social networking systems to reduce costs and decrease sales cycles. Best Buy has started an innovative Twitter-based continuous feedback system called Twelpforce. Twitter members can post queries to Twelpforce, which is a group of professionals from Best Buy who help answer technical or product questions to support sales. Thousands of people currently follow Twelpforce online. If you would like to see this in action, go to Twitter and type in Twelpforce in the search field (see Figure 4.2).
In addition to these cost reductions, the low cost of entry for leveraging social media networking systems can help reduce costs of some other traditional approaches to marketing, knowledge sharing, and so on. Many of these systems can be implemented at no technology cost to a company. For example, a company can establish a group on Facebook at no cost. Additionally, these systems can be implemented on a smaller scale to smaller groups inside organizations prior to launching a more robust enterprise-wide system. In an interview with Murry Christensen, the director of Learning Technology at JetBlue, he stated they “purposefully implemented their social networking collaboration system just to the 200 faculty members there to test it out.” In other words, rather than piloting the social networking system to all JetBlue employees, Murry's team piloted their initial social networking project with the 200 people in the learning organization as a proof of concept to determine if it was to be implemented on a larger scale in the same fashion. Use Worksheet 4.1 to help you make critical decisions about implementing social networking in your organization.
FIGURE 4.2
Twelpforce on Twitter
Summary
There are two primary drivers that are important to most businesses: increasing top-line revenue and decreasing costs, which create profitability and sustainability for a company. Social networking systems are already used to help with both of these key drivers in many organizations.
In Step 5, strategies for getting your organization to participate in the benefits of social networking will be discussed.
WORKSHEET 4.1
Checklist For Validating Alignment of a Social Networking System to a Business Driver
Instructions: Use this worksheet to determine if the social networking system you are seeking to implement is actually going to align with a business driver for your company. If you can answer “Yes” to at least one of the items below, then you should be able to show alignment with a critical business initiative.
