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In 1998 a company web site was considered slightly cutting edge and cool.  But, not important enough to hire a professional, especially when Uncle Billy's high school son Dexter could build one for you.  Almost imperceptibly, web sites went from "nice to have" to compulsory over the next few years.

You may have heard much talk about social marketing: Linked In, Twitter, Facebook, Blogs etc, and decided it's nice to have.  Today I read an interesting article that makes the case that we're back to the future again.

In the Four Cs of Social Media , Sean Nelson of Sonar Media develops the case for paying attention to the development of this new type of communication.  I have followed Sean's growth from Insurance Broker to national Social Media guru, and now pay close attention to his blog.  The Four Cs are:

Communities
Traditional advertising and marketing is about interrupting. Social media is about sharing and interacting. You have to have someone listening in order for interactions to happen.

The interesting thing is that people want to interact. The following statistics make that clear.

• 78% of social media users interact with companies or brands via new media sites and tools, an increase of 32% from 2008.
• 95% of new media users also believe companies or brands should have a social media presence
• 89% believe that they should interact with their consumers using social media

Its important that you build communities on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter that are made up of your prospects and clients.

Content
Content is King. Its been that way since cavemen began writing on walls. Since then only the means of delivery has changed.

One of the mistakes I see is companies jump into using social media and immediately begin communicating sales messages. A sales message here and there is likely fine but when its all you do…Houston we have a problem.

Regardless of what you sell someone out there is looking for information about it. They want to be informed, educated, and even entertained. If they like your content they will like you. If you share good content consistently over time they will likely begin to trust you.

Social media provides great vehicles to share video, photo’s, written, and audio content.

Conversations
The difference between traditional advertising and marketing and social media is the difference between talking at someone and talking with them. If you’ve built the right communities and are sharing the right content conversations should naturally happen.

There are different levels of conversations. A comment on a blog post, a retweet, a comment on your LinkedIn or Facebook status are all forms of conversations. Tou just need to be sure you are tracking these responses and reply back.

Even something that seems as trivial as a “Thumbs Up” on a Facebook wall post is a positive. The important thing is you put out a message or content and someone chose to respond.

These conversations and those among others will have an impact. These two statistics support this.

• 51% of respondents saying that social media has influenced their online transactions.
• 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations

Conversion
The final piece of the puzzle is for the preceding steps to lead to conversion. If you’ve taken the time to develop a strategy than all of the pieces should work together to lead to this point.

One of the mistakes that I see is that companies indiscriminately send people to their home page. While that may help you build site traffic it may not necessarily help you with conversion.

If you’re communicating about a product or service why not funnel any responses into a Landing page. Seth Godin has been talking about landing pages since 1991 and lists five actions that the page can generate:

• Get a visitor to click (to go to another page, on your site or someone else’s)
• Get a visitor to buy
• Get a visitor to give permission for you to follow up (by email, phone, etc.). This includes registration of course.
• Get a visitor to tell a friend
• (and the more subtle) Get a visitor to learn something, which could even include posting a comment or giving you some sort of feedback

Your home page can generate these five same actions but its not designed to focus on one of these five actions specifically. Sending them here is like sending them to a neighborhood rather than a specific location.

Wrap Up
The 4 C’s are important if you want social media to work for you. There are different ways to build communities on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. There are different ways to communicate messages on each. The conversations are even different.

Focus on applying the first three to each of the networks and begin to see the Fourth C happening a little (maybe a lot more) frequently.

David Kirkup

404 348 0326

dkirkup@b2bcfo.com