I’m talking social business today at Nevada’s Center for Entrepreneurship (NCET). It’s a variation of some of my most recent presentations on social business with one exception. In this one, I am going to recommend the book No Bullshit Social Media by Jason Falls and Erik Deckers. A few of my slides toward the end of the presentation reflect content from the book. I’ve not officially recommended it yet with a blog, that I’ll do that soon. Here is a quote I love:

Social media marketing is about building relationships, not receipts. The receipts will come, but only if you invest the time and attention it takes to build relationships with your customers. Think lifetime value, not sale value. (p. 180).

I strongly concur. The good news is that most of your competitors are sleeping through this time of tremendous opportunity to create community and word-of-mouth marketing around their brands. It’s still early, but the clock is ticking. It’s time for you to stop making excuses and get started – no bullshit.

I had the honor of speaking to ProNet Reno today about Personal Branding. I was impressed with the quality of support this group provided its members that are searching for employment. It was a serious business meeting with a serious group of folks.

I hope some of them will take my advice and change their minds about what it means to assume responsibility for marketing yourself with these new tools of content generation and engagement. Never before have we had so much opportunity to be able to document and target our value – what we can do uniquely well to help others address opportunities and solve problems that matter to them. It’s our value, not our personality, that makes us remarkable. But creating content and marketing that content is a paradigm shift in the way to establish and maintain a career. I hope some of them will give themselves permission to be excellent by choosing to do things others are not willing to do (e.g. blog).

Now is the time to establish your digital citizenship. Companies that fully grasp the potential of social business will be looking for people have a demonstrated track record of being professionally personal in their increasingly connected social networks. Focus on increasingly associating your name and face with searchable and shareable content that is valued by others and you will never again have to fear being either invisible or irrelevant.

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My son and I had a bad experience at our local McDonald’s franchise last week, and I blogged about it here. That blog was posted on my Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook accounts.

The local franchise owner is smart enough to maintain an active presence on Twitter where someone listens and responds on behalf of his brand. Within an hour of my post, someone contacted me via direct message on Twitter. The next day I got a call from someone in the franchise office, and yesterday I got a letter signed by the franchise owner.

That’s a great example of how social media is transforming customer service. Today when people pick up the phone to complain to a business, it’s not to make a call but to send a tweet.

No one in the franchise ever complained to me about my blog post, but some of my readers felt that naming the business was not cool. The sentiment was that it’s OK to say something positive about a business online, but negative comments should still be handled in private with a phone call or letter.

I respectfully disagree. In my experience, phone calls and personal letters are a waste of time when it comes to communicating a product or service failure. It does not work all the time, but I’ve gotten consistently better service from a variety of companies the last few years via Twitter and Facebook than any time in my life. Even if I had wanted to call or send a letter, I can’t find via Google search a website for McDonald’s of Northern Nevada where contact information and an invitation to share comments is posted. If you prefer that people call you when they have a complaint about your business, you better make it easy for them to find your name and phone number.

As I’ve said here many times before, whatever customers say about you to their friends off and online, you earned it. If you don’t like what they are saying, then you better fix what they are complaining about. It’s arrogant and unrealistic to think that your business is entitled to only positive public comments.

A public “were sorry, let us fix it for you,” on the blog where I documented the service failure is the only suggestion for improvement I have for my local McDonald’s franchise. They handled the service failure very well, but if I had not written this blog post no one else would know that. When a customer complains on a social media platform, make sure to respond on the same platform.

Well done, McDonald’s of Northern Nevada. My son and I will be back because you earned our business.

What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

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Is it better for your business to pursue a competitive strategy where you copy your competitors, or where you force your competitors to copy you? Your customers and employees are embracing the ability to participate in many-to-many conversations via easily accessible tools like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Yelp!, blogs, and now Google +. This is a paradigm shift in the way people communicate, and that means it’s a strategic opportunity for businesses willing to fundamentally rethink how they treat and communicate with their customers and employees.

Three years ago, if you gave someone terrible service, they might pick-up the phone and call a friend or two to vent. The damage would probably be limited to a few people and might even be soon forgotten. Today, they go online and vent on Yelp! or Facebook. Those comments you earned are now archived and shareable. When the things your customers and employees say about you online move through trusted networks, they have the power to impact the growth of your business.

Never forget that being good will always be more important for your business than getting found. If your products and services are impressive, or if they suck, the word about your business can spread faster and farther today than three years ago. Many of the customers, employees, and suppliers that touch your business today are increasingly connected and active in social networks. Make it a strategic priority to give every one of them something good to say about you. Hint: if employee and customer satisfaction are not part of your formal business metrics, then it’s not a priority.

Leverage the social connections of your customers and employees and you will create a strategic opportunity for your business that will force your competitors to pursue competitive parity. Ignore or even worse disgust your social customers and employees and you might just be sowing the seeds of demise for your business.

Please take the time to watch this brief video from my recent presentation on social business to the Reno-Tahoe American Marketing Association. In it, I discuss a few more recommendations I have for businesses that see the opportunity provided by running a social business. After you watch the video, please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

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I was recently in the market for a photographer to take my daughter’s senior pictures. She wants her pictures taken by someone her friends have not used so that she can get a unique look for herself. She did a Google search for photographers in Reno and picked five she thought had potential. I picked up the phone and called three of the five photographers we found via Google.

Not a single one of them returned my call.

The basic fundamentals of good business are more critical today than ever.  The sale for most businesses is still always closed in real time, either in person or over the phone. Social media is simply a tool that can expose you to more people to show how impressive you and your employees are.  But if you are not impressive, it will expose you to more people that will talk about it in their increasingly connected social networks. Whatever they say about you – good or bad – you earned it.

The Google search did not help me find a good photographer, so I went to Facebook and asked my friends to recommend one. I got 14 recommendations by the end of the day, many with links to social objects for me to examine. Johnstone Studios responded promptly to my e-mails and set up a face-to-face meeting where they spent an hour describing to my daughter and I how we could make the photo shoot special for her. I was sold.

This process of asking trusted friends in social networks for recommendations is something I call social business sourcing. I’m finding that sourcing is almost as fast and much more effective than searching.

Is your business spending as much time and effort on mastering social business sourcing as you are on getting found via search? You need to be good at both, but the real prize – word-of-mouth marketing in increasingly connected social networks – is earned when you beat your competition at the social sourcing game.

Please watch this short video clip where I describe my experience social sourcing a photographer. It was part of my presentation on social business to the Reno-Tahoe American Marketing Association. After you watch the video, please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

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Social objects are most trusted when they are shared by friends. If you write a blog post with relevant content, I can pick up that blog post and share it in my social networks. When my friends see that I have put my brand on your brand, they are much more likely to trust your content than if they had found it via one of your outbound marketing techniques.

Conversation around your social object can occur either on your site where the object was created, or on my site where the social object was shared. My friends and I can talk with you and with each other about it’s content. When you and your employees listen and respond to the conversation, your engagement influences the way we think about and are motivated to behave toward you, your employees, and your business.

You can’t recommend yourself to my friends, only I can do that. Unless you create the social object, you don’t create the opportunity for me to do for you what you cannot do for yourself. You are not entitled to my recommendation, you have to earn it with remarkable content that consistently demonstrates that you understand issues that matter to us and you care more about helping and engaging than selling.

When a friend shares your social object with me, it’s a signal; when you blast out a sales message, it’s often just noise. My purchasing decisions are increasingly based on signals that I’ve sourced from friends in my online networks, and I’m getting better at filtering out your outbound marketing noise.

Please take the time to watch this very brief clip from my recent presentation on social business to the Reno-Tahoe American Marketing Association. After you’ve viewed it, please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

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Whenever I speak to groups about social business, the most common question I am asked is “how much time does it take?” The related question is “how do we measure ROI?” but what folks really think they want to know is “is this worth my time?”

From a tactical perspective, these are all legitimate questions. From a strategic perspective, they are the wrong questions.

If you and your business have not yet fully embraced the emerging relational internet and mobile technologies as a way to transform every aspect of your business and continually improve your ability to impress your employees and customers, the question that should be keeping you awake at night is this:

Am I too late?

If your competitors are embracing social business and you are not, then they are defining the competitive landscape. When your competitor reinvents the rules of the game, the best you can ever hope to achieve, if you even survive, is competitive parity. While you scramble to try to imitate what you think they are doing, they will be busy creating the future again.

There is no free lunch in social business. It takes time for you and your employees to learn how to blog, tweet, make videos, and interact with people in professionally personal ways on LinkedIn, Facebook, and now Google +. But if you never invest the time, you will never develop the skills and never build a formidable river of relevant content that flows through the social networks of your customers, employees and suppliers, working for your brand around the clock, every day of the week.

If you don’t create the content, it will be almost impossible for you to convene conversations with customers at sites you own. If you never convene conversations with customers around things that matter to them, you’ll never build a strong community of people that care about you and your business because you first cared about them. You can’t buy communities of people that trust you so much they are willing to publicly associate their names with yours, you have to build them, and that takes time.

Our economy has been rocked harder the last few years than it has at any time in my life. Businesses have cut their workforces, and many businesses have closed. But at the very same time in history, sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter have created the unprecedented ability for people to participate in many-to-many conversations where they quickly and easily share information about things that matter to them. These conversations are archived and shareable. It’s nothing short of a paradigm shift in the way we communicate with each other.

Business as usual has been a recipe for disaster for so many companies in this dismal economy. The paradox is this has been a time of tremendous opportunity to practice business unusual for those that had the foresight to embrace the paradigm shift being driven by relational technologies.

It’s still very early. Make social business a strategic imperative and you still have the opportunity to seize the initiative on your competition, to force them into battle for competitive parity.

The clock is ticking. It’s time for you to give serious thought to how you and your business will respond to the new reality of social business.

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If I owned my own business, or managed one for someone else, I would work very hard to only hire conscientious employees with an internal locus of control. I would also check their online profiles to see if they were good digital citizens. I’d be looking for employees with a specific personality profile and a track record of operating professionally personal accounts on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. If they also had a current blog with good content and conversation around that content, it would be a home run.

I would then work very hard on a daily basis to impress the socks off of my conscientious and connected employees. After I had trained them to be good at their current jobs, I’d make sure they understood that I expected them to make decisions and take actions in an attempt to impress every one of our customers, every single time. I would expect them to partner with me and their peers to develop solutions on how to fix any broken systems and continually improve our ability to deliver products and service so good that our competitors will struggle to keep their current customers from becoming our loyal customers.

I’d provide my employees with social media guidelines that would help them make better decisions about how to represent our business in their online social networks. I would hold myself accountable for earning their good faith and positive word-of-mouth marketing away from work by the way I had treated them while they spent time with me at work. I’d ask them to keep their eyes and ears open for content and conversations online that might be opportunities (e.g. personal recommendation for our products and services) or threats (e.g. customer complaints) to our business. I’d recognize and reward good social business behavior, and quickly address with training and clarified expectations poor social business behavior.  I LOVE this excerpt from the TNT Social Media Guidelines:

I think it’s safe to assume that the majority of my competitors will continue to sleep through these times of tremendous change in the way we communicate. They will continue with their systems of haphazard hiring, inadequate training, and ridiculous expectations for their disengaged employees to impress their customers. They will be oblivious to the effects their turnover mill of disgusted yet hyper connected employees has on their ability to grow their business.

My competitors will probably continue to compare themselves to each other, thereby ensuring that they are all very comfortable in their mediocrity.  The bar is very low for social business awareness and savvy. No one cares more about your business than you and your employees. Why would you outsource the passion and experience of those voices to an agency? I would not.

This a time of tremendous strategic opportunity for any business with the leadership foresight to see the radical new potential of the empowered, enabled, and responsible social employee. Good social business is more than a marketing issue – it is a leadership imperative.

What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

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