If you’re following the rise of social networking and social media in business and in particular the business of politics, then be sure to read this article from NYTimes this morning.   The essence of the article is summed up in this quote:

” … as  it [the new White House staff]  tries to accomplish what aides say is one of their most important goals: transforming the YouTubing-Facebooking-texting-Twittering grass-roots organization that put Mr. Obama in the White House into an instrument of government.”

Regardless of how deep your interests in party politics run, what’s going to be fascinating to observe is how the traditional broadcasting networks will manage a head-to-head meeting with the Obama ‘network’.  No president has leveraged the power of the Internet and all the social networking tools before.  This is going to be a fascinating year of change for every business, organization and political activity.

Tom

Here’s an illustration of the way things are changing so you/your company can help Marketing and Sales use the Internet to build engagement and trust that lead to greater numbers of qualified prospects.

I’m going to take some liberties here and poke a bit of fun at traditional marketing, for the sake of making a point. Traditional marketing efforts in B2B have been largely focused on driving traffic to a landing page with enough enticements to move people through the long sign-up form in hopes of a payoff, such as a white paper, at the end. I once heard a presenter says that it’s analogous to what we do in Texas with cattle at branding time: We try our best to get ‘em to move through a chute with various enticements and prods in order to count ‘em and brand ‘em so we know our total worth in beef.

What’s on offer now is a perspective that lets the most interested or qualified prospects through the filter, but does it in a different manner. Think about all the traffic interested in visiting your site (a product site or social networking component of your site, or your media content, now spread all over the Internet). This traffic falls into one of three types: Yahoos, Bluebirds or Shy Yesses.

The Yahoos are a small percentage of people on the left side of the bell curve that are lost or kicking tires or whatever, but you’re not marketing to them.

The Bluebirds are the visitors who come to your site on purpose and engage directly. You focus on moving them into the sales process directly. You’ve been a Bluebird, haven’t you?  When you just call up and order something directly from a company–no salesman contacts you–that’s a bluebird sale. It’s the small percent of the bell curve on the right-hand side and, regardless of their numbers, you’re really not marketing to them either.

In the middle of the bell curve of behavior is the Shy Yes traffic. These are all the people coming to the website or bumping into the hundreds of podcasts and blog articles your company has distributed all over the Internet for the last few years. These people have some particular interest. Likely they have a need brewing on the horizon but the last thing they want is a sales guy calling, and they sure don’t want to tip their hand by filling out a long form just to get a white paper and then have someone start hounding them.

Long before a salesman comes into the picture, your company gets involved in a scoping or planning session to do something and wants to figure out how to proceed before getting vendors all hot and bothered.  This is the makeup of a Shy Yes. I’m sure you can think of other behaviors of people finding your content and hovering over product pages, checking things out.

What’s needed are ways to entice or engage the Shy Yes with small pieces of interaction … what you get is more and more of his/her attention by satisfying their need to learn more, to ask questions without worrying about a sales guy calling, to be better informed about making budgeting decisions on projects.

I think of the social media (audio podcasts, video podcasts, blogs, comments, and so forth) and social networking (being a member of a community to exchange useful perspectives and information on pertinent topics) as a kind of birdseed.

Remember when you were a kid and you went to the park? You’d put a few pennies into a seed dispenser so you could feed the birds. At first you would just run and throw the seed at the birds, thinking you were giving them what they wanted, but the birds would fly away. Over time, however, you noticed people who were sitting patiently on benches and had birds eating out of their hands. You noticed that the people got up slowly and put food down in small, separate portions, giving the Shy birds the seeds and space they needed to build trust. Over time the birds developed enough trust in that relationship to come right up to the person on the bench.

Social media and the container for engagement/social networking are the birdseed. They are what will draw the attention of the bulk of the web traffic poring over your site each month. This is the Shy Yes traffic, picking up information piece by piece, engaging more and more with your company. They spend more time on your site, which is garnering more of their attention during the day, and maybe in the evenings on their iPhones and iTouches. You’re there, and when they are ready they start to communicate with you because you’ve made it easy.

There are so many more ’seeds’ of engagement now with social media and social networking, compared to the old days of only one landing page per 45-day sales campaign. And now every touch point can be counted and used for gentle encouragement to offer help or for the Shy Yes to contact you when they want to know more.

As I’ve said many times before, none of this replaces traditional marketing efforts. Those will always be with us and always have value. I’m simply introducing a new perspective on other ways to find qualified prospects from the web using the various social tools now at hand.

Tom