Speak to your community.
Speak in your community.

Always remember: You’re a leader, a member, and a follower of your community.

Here’s some tips for growing reputation in a community:

Next: The start of a new series “The Next Questions

“We want to build our social presence.”

“We engage thought leaders to improve brand resonance.”

“We’re keeping an eye on reach, true reach, and potential reach to improve amplification.”

I hear statements like this every day. Hell, up until a few months ago I said statements like this every day. These are common goals for social media, and there’s nothing innately wrong with them, but these goals are bad. Let me show you what I mean with a simple exercise you can use on your own goals:

“We want to build our social presence.”

Why?

“To be more visible to our audience.”

Why?

“To raise brand awareness.”

Why?

“So that, when a customer is ready to buy, we’re top of mind.”

Why?

“To improve sales.”

“To improve sales.” That’s your real goal on social. That’s your business goal. Building a social presence, engaging thought leaders, improving reach – these are all tactics to achieve your goal. It might seem like I’m splitting hairs here, but in an industry where we’re inventing words just to find new metrics (I’m looking at you, “retweetability”) it’s important to use proper business language to stay connected to business reality.

We need to start talking about social goals in terms of the number of leads generated, the number of support tickets created and closed, the number of email addresses collected. These aren’t the pretty, feel-good numbers, but they are real numbers. Once you start focusing on the real numbers you can start using the whatever metric as the flavor of the week to see if you can improve your real numbers.

This is how social will grow and evolve. When we can go into sales meetings and say, “I got you 20 leads this week and 5 look like they’ll close.” When we can go to support meetings and say, “We caught a disgruntled customer, fixed her problem, and sold her an upgrade.” When we can go to a marketing meeting and say, “We got 400 qualified email addresses for the next outbound campaign.”

Social will grow and evolve when we do. Are you ready for the change?

Talk to the first person who talks to you on social.

It doesn’t have to be anything serious. Just drop a stone in the well to hear the echo. Think about who that person is, how she found you, why she talked to you, what you did and if you can do it again. Start talking to (or towards) her. To the people she associates with, hangs out with, is friends with.

Then have a little faith that someone else there will listen, too.
Don’t fall back on that faith, though. Sometimes big fish live in empty ponds. Sometimes you’ll have to cut your losses and move on. But not every time, and all you need is once.

Always remember: Being social online is like being social in life, be pleasant and everything will be fine.

As you start collecting information from your social networks, you’ll also be collecting insights into who you’re talking to. Here’s how to mine those insights for all they’re worth.

You’ll usually start out with a name and a company. Google it. You’ll get a good idea of who they are and their position in the company. Use this information to inform which people and positions to go after in other companies.

Check their social networks. LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook — these are the resumes of the 21st century. Use these networks to figure out who these people are, what they like and how they act online.

Find the connection. Your goal is to have a successful first conversation. That’s why you’re collecting data. See if you have mutual friends, interests, ideals. Once you find that in, go out and have that conversation.

Don’t learn too much. You don’t want to come off as a creeper.

Next: Growing Reputation

You want people to do something. You want them to go out of their way to perform some action so that you, sitting in that chair, will benefit.

This is what you want. This is your goal. Make it easy. Design your site around your goal. Don’t be garish about it, but make what you want known and make it easy to accomplish.

Provide content in exchange for leads, and create content that helps people better understand your product, your industry or your ideas. Ask people to do it, and you’ll be shocked at the number who do. Don’t trick your way to your goal. That’s not why you set it.

Always remember: You set a goal for a reason. Create content for that reason, too.

These are the three rules of valuable content:

1. Make it readable. It’s been said that Joyce’s Ulysses’ is one of the most poignant pieces of literature in modern culture. And no one has read it. You know why? It is the least readable, densest string of words pounded out in the last 100 years. Joyce wasn’t trying to talk to the masses. You are. Focus on creating readable content by using tricks newspaper journalists have been using for years. Create an inverted pyramid of information, putting the most valuable information in the first sentence and expanding on it though the content. Use well defined chunks to break up walls of text. And take a page from the internet handbook by making lists.
2. Make it actionable. You’re creating content for a reason — to get people to act on a goal. Make sure your content reminds people to take that action. Ask people to register if they like what they read. Know what you want and don’t be afraid to ask people to do it.
3. Make is sharable. The content you create needs to be made with the internet in mind. When monks wrote books, they would put huge effort into making the pages of their tomes so beautiful that people would preserve, admire and flaunt them. The monks knew their medium and used it. Today’s medium is social. Know it and use it. Give your articles compelling headlines, create content addressing the hot topic of the week, give people more of what they are already sharing.

Next: Finding your Community.

Don’t set a goal for social media. Set a goal for your business.

That’s why you’re on social media — online at all, for that matter — to make the needle of change jump one more notch into the positive. What does your company need that you can provide? Can you generate leads? Take care of support? Get the word out? Choose something you can do and set it as a goal to do it.

Set a benchmark for yourself. What steps are you going to take to reach your goal? Are you going to bring in ten more leads a month? How are you going to get contact information and qualify prospects? Want your site turn up higher in searches? What will you do to get more keywords in your articles? Want to be the next Steve Jobs? What’s the revolutionary new product you’ll be bringing to market? Call out what you’re going to change, define the steps you’ll take, and set a hard deadline to have it done by.

Always remember: Goals mean nothing if no one holds you to them.

Here’s a list of common, high-value, social goals.

Purchases. The best thing you can do for your company as a marketer is bring in additional revenue. Setting a goal that results in customers making additional purchases, and being able to measure it, is huge.

Leads. If your company is a high end B2c or a B2B, you’ll need leads. Trade your readers content for contact information and take a little time to qualify your leads before sending them to sales.

Downloads. It could be a whitepaper, an infographic or any other piece of marketing material your company creates. Don’t just let people download it though, that’s all give and no take. Ask for an email address, a Twitter handle or a name — something you can use as a starting point for leads.

Registration. Like downloads, this goal is all about getting contact information. If you host classes, conferences or webinars, ask for permission and an avenue to contact potential purchasers.

Once you know your goal, follow these steps to shape it:

1. Note the business outcome. Write down why you’re striving for this goal. What will the result be for your company? Make sure these goals aren’t too obscure or too far removed from real business outcomes. Stay practical.
2. Set a timeframe. Know when you’ve reached your goal. If you’re trying to get 10 leads each week, you haven’t reached your goal until you get 10 leads every week. Hold yourself to your timeframe, and if you don’t make it, evaluate what went wrong
3. Create tiers of achievement. If your goal is to raise the number of leads by 15%, then set the minimum goal at 10%, the real goal at 15% and the stretch goal at 20%. If you don’t reach the minimum, reevaluate. If you reach your stretch, celebrate.

Take 20 minutes to set a good goal now, you’ll be amazed at how much time it will save you later.

Next: Creating Valuable Content

Chances are, you’re not starting from scratch. Chances are, your company has at least one client, one follower, or one fan.

Chances are, that person is an advocate. That person took a risk and chose to support you and your company, not because you’re the biggest or the best but because of you.

That’s great! That person is your ideal client. A client who wants you to succeed because they believe in who you are and what you do. Take some time to think about who that person is (or who those people are, if you have more than one). Ask who they are demographically: age, gender, location, income. Ask who they are psychologically: hobbies, interests, motivation.

Once you have a good idea of who that person is, start creating content for them. If they have a problem, write a whitepaper with a solution. If they have a question, write a blog post with the answer. If they want a joke, make a video with the punchline.

Create content for your ideal customer, and your ideal customer will come to you.

Always remember: Picturing who you’re talking to can have a huge impact on how you talk.

Here’s a simple three step process for picturing who you’re talking to.

1. Who are your current customers? What are they like and why do you like them? Who are your favorite customers? Who are your least favorite?
2. Who are your ideal customers? If you could have any customer, who would it be? Would they never complain? Give perfect feedback? Savvy business folks? Chill consumers?
3. What are 10 of their pain points? Think about the 10 biggest annoyances for those people listed above. What drives them absolutely crazy? Keep this list around and use it as inspiration for future content.

If you’re just getting started in social media there’s one thing you should know: no one is listening to you and — brace yourself — nobody wants to.

Harsh truths are done so let’s be productive. Start creating content for the few people who you know are listening. Who are your current customers? Your current friends? Your fans? Your followers? Those are the folks you’re going to talk to. Ask what issues they’re having and where they’re stumbling, create content to address those points, then publish.

Always remember: The most important thing you can do is publish, no matter what.

Here’s 6 tips to keep producing content, even when you don’t want to.

1. Envision who you’re talking to. It’s easy to chat with the people face-to-face because you can see how they react, be it an upturned nose at a political comment or a slight grin after an amusing story. That’s why you create a character to speak to. Think about who they are, their personality, what they like, what they believe and how they will react to and benefit from your content.
2. Create a list of ideas for content. Once you know who you’re talking to draft out 50 headlines for potential articles. Don’t write the articles now, instead use these headlines as a source of inspiration if you ever hit a writing block.
3. Don’t get discouraged. It’s difficult to justify your efforts when you’re talking to empty chairs. But that’s where we all start, spouting off ideas into the dark, talking to anyone who will listen.
4. Keep experimenting. “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.” If the articles you’re creating aren’t getting the click numbers you’d like, don’t be afraid to try something new, something out there, something different.
5. Keep publishing. Do the writing work up front and keep publishing for at least three months. Aggressively promote your content and change your tactics if they aren’t working, but give your strategy time to get rolling.
6. Slow your roll. Social media is new, fast and shiny. It’s easy to get caught up in the stories you read on Mashable of people becoming overnight sensations through social media. First, that happens to such a small fraction of the population that it’s not even a factor. Second, once that initial wave of attention wears off, those viral companies are back to square one, working their way up from where they started. No matter how you approach it, social is as slow a process as every other form of marketing.

…until today.

We built Argyle Contacts to help Community Managers and social professionals build stronger customer relationships that drive revenue and retention.  We’re excited to ship the core feature today and look forward to building on this foundation in the coming months.

Much more info below. Let us know what you think!

Argyle Contacts Feature Demo

Manage Your Social Contacts

Argyle automatically populates the new Contacts tab with with people you’ve recently interacted with on Twitter. Every social action in Argyle enriches your contact database – new followers and mentions automatically create new contact records.  All of your social interactions thread together to provide a full conversation history with each contact.

Know Your Audience

The individual contact card provides a comprehensive overview of your relationship and social interactions.  You can augment social history and data with additional information. Write notes to provide additional context to your contacts. Add email address, phone, and other personal information to round out a profile. Look out for exciting integrations in the near future that will augment your social contact with data from your core CRM!

Use Tags To Build Context & Workflow

Context matters in social. Did that last tweet come from a high value customer? A valuable prospect that is in the final stages of the sales process? A customer that has an outstanding high priority ticket? Not knowing could be the difference between a win or a loss, a happy customer or a lost customer.

We integrated tags into Contacts to solve this problem. Use tags to organize your contacts into strategic groups. Tag your largest customers to make sure that you’re keeping tabs on them. Tag strategic influencers and target them with personalized content on a regular basis. Work with your sales team to tag key prospects to ensure that you’re engaging them as they advance through the sales process.

Pingdom’s 2012 Social network demographics wanted to know the answers to these questions and more, so they examined age and gender data from 24 of the top social media sites.

Talking to B2B social media marketers every day about how to craft their social media marketing strategy and content, most of what they know about their social audiences is anecdotal. So, whether or not you’ve begun to close the loop with your social media marketing by tying your marketing efforts to real ROI, these demographics are a great place to start with creating your marketing strategy that makes the best use of your time and energy to truly engage your audience!

Before we get to the data, the sites included in this survey are: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, Reddit, Hacker News, Slashdot, Github, Stack Overflow, Orkut, Quora, WordPress.com, Blogger, Flickr, Myspace, Tagged, Hi5, LiveJournal, Yelp, deviantART, StumbleUpon, Goodreads and Last.fm.

You may note one glaring omission: Google+. Unfortunately for us there is no data on Google+ in DoubleClick Ad Planner, the Google-owned tool they used for the demographics data. Also note that the demographics data used in this survey is for the United States.

OK! Onto the social media analytics!

1. Average Age Distribution in Social Media:

More than half of these social media users are between 25 and 44 years old.

While only 2% of social media users are 65+ years old, obviously this age group will continue to grow as social media users and consumers continue to age.

I think it’s important if you’re B2B  trying to sell via social, to note who the users of social media are versus the people within companies with the purchasing power, and make sure to tailor your content to both crowds.

2. Age Distribution per Site:

This chart should make something very clear; social media is most definitely not just for the young. Some examples:

• 55% of Twitter users are 35 or older.
• 63% of Pinterest users are 35 or older.
• 65% of Facebook users are 35 or older.
• 79% of LinkedIn users are 35 or older.

However, as you can see on the flip side, 58% of Reddit users are under 35. So, if you’re posting to Reddit keep it young, fresh and witty!

3. Average User Age per Site:

Based on the sites in this survey, the estimated age of the average social media user is just under 37 years old. Here are some other observations:

• The oldest users. LinkedIn has the oldest user base, with the average user being 44.2 years old.
• The average Facebook user is 40.5 years old.
• The average Twitter user is 37.3 years old.
• The age trend for Facebook and Twitter. Compared to a previous survey we did 2.5 years ago, the age of the average Facebook user has gone up two years, while the age of the average Twitter user has gone down two years. In other words, Twitter’s user base is getting younger, while Facebook’s is getting older.

4. Gender Balance on Social Media Sites:

• 17 out of 24 sites (71%) have more female than male users, that’s 2/3 of the social networks!
• The average gender distribution is 48.75% male, 51.25% female.
• Most male-dominated site? Slashdot (87% males) is the standout, followed by Hacker News (77% males) and Stack Overflow (76% males). In general, the more tech-focused sites in this survey have more male users than female.
• Most female-dominated site? Pinterest (79% females) is in a league of its own, followed by Goodreads (70% females) and Blogger (66% females).
• Facebook and Twitter have the same gender distribution: 40% male, 60% female.

Thank you to the in depth content and analysis and images from Royal Pingdom.

Meaning, it’s all about cultivating not just an online community of a high quantity of leads, but of high quality leads.

@ArgyleSocial shared an interesting (and awesome) story of poor vs. fantastic customer service, proving further that these one to one individual relationships matter not only to the individual involved, but when these interactions occur publically on social media platforms, they are each important marketing and branding opportunities.

South African mobile communications and technologies commentator, Arthur Goldstück says, “This is the key difference between a social media complaint and a call centre complaint: when it is made through a call center, it is a solitary, personal expression of dissatisfaction to a single individual, who has the ability to placate the customer in private, or not, as the case may be.” A complaint that is not handled well via social media has potential for different (read: broader) consequences than traditional complaint-routes, which shouldn’t be acknowledged as the only way for gripes to come in anymore.

I think it’s important that B2B social media marketers to think of yourselves as wearing almost every single departmental hat. You’re one part marketer, one part sales, one part customer service, one part interesting dinner party guest, and the list could go on and on depending on what your business is.

The next step to fully embracing your new responsibilities to your company and brand, is making sure your strategies and processes in place for handling all incoming leads, complaints, etc on your social media properties are appropriate in regard to speed and quality of response.

Social media is quickly becoming (if not has already become) the hub for B2B companies to interact with their business partners, customers and potential customers. Doing it well can benefit the bottom line, and doing it poorly can be forgotten… slowly. Having a strategy is the first step… then all you have to do is, just one of our favorite mantras here at Argyle:

Images Via Readers Random Ramblings Blog, 500 Memes