Fortunately, social media offers an amazing source of business opportunities. If you approach it the right way, you can build many relationships that could be crucial to your business growth and success.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=CttFgE913PE

This article is about successfully “selling” with social media. I’ll explore how to achieve success with the “two people getting to know each other and starting up a conversation that might go somewhere” kind of selling.

Here are 8 ways to strike up social media conversations with people you want to meet:

#1: Boil the Frog

There’s an old wives’ tale (some truth to it), that if you put a frog in boiling water, it will sense the heat and jump out. But put a frog in cool water and turn up the heat slowly and the frog will hardly notice.

When reaching out online to people you’d like to meet, don’t come on like gangbusters. Nothing screams “jump out of the hot pot” more than a blatant “let’s talk so I can sell you something” message.

Start cool and warm up slowly. Comment on their blog post. Retweet them thoughtfully. Compliment something they wrote. Become familiar to someone—even if they don’t engage you right away—and it’s more likely that they’ll engage you in the future.

For example, this person wrote to me personally, said something pleasant and left it there. Nice start!

Dr. Rachna Jain, who studies the psychology of social media, says, “When people see you more, they like you more. The shorthand is that familiarity breeds likeability. Especially if you’re seen as giving them value or good content or information.”

#2: Givers Gain

The world of social media changes faster than the Clippers change coaches. But some things never change—like the golden rule of networking (social or otherwise).

The golden rule? Givers gain. (Bet you figured that out from the section header.)

As Dr. Jain said, “…especially if you’re seen as giving them value or good content or information.” How? Share a white paper. Share a relevant piece of research. Invite them to a private local business event.

Remember, starting relationships can take many touches. Do this right, and people will perceive you as valuable even before you interact with them personally (which we’re getting to), and you boil the frog at the same time.

#3: Make Henry Kissinger Proud

There’s an old story that’s been told and retold about how Henry Kissinger approached getting the best out of his staff. Before reviewing anything from his people, he’d ask, “Before I look at this… is it your best work?“, and the staff would go back and keep working until they could say yes.

When reaching out through social media, give it your Henry Kissinger effort.

As president of a company and publisher of a reader publication (RainToday), we have about 150,000 subscribers and followers.  And they reach out to me fairly regularly and want to connect.

Many of them remain strangers because they made no effort to relate to me. A standard, “my products would be of value” overture does not catch anyone’s attention. No personalization… no genuine connection. Even something better than bad would be good.

But every once in a while, someone reaches out with real effort, energy and thoughtfulness—the kind that would make Henry Kissinger proud. Here’s an example of how one gentleman started a conversation:

This example goes on with several more paragraphs explaining our connections and reasons for why we might both be interested in connecting. This contact effort was obviously customized and it resonated well with me.

#4: Be Brave

Call reluctance is common on the phone. It happens online, too. People don’t reach out online because of some kind of fear. “They won’t respond.” “They’ll say no.” “They’ll be angry with me.”

The fact of the matter is most customers believe salespeople don’t reach out enough. In the online world, there’s a heavy emphasis on the concept of inbound marketing. I think inbound marketing is a great approach. But that doesn’t mean proactive outreach—the online equivalent of cold-calling is either dead or bad. (By the way, cold-calling isn’t dead. See the research in Bloomberg Business Week from 2007. The 2010 study revealed the same thing.)

When you find a particular person you want to connect with, reach out.

As long as you keep points 1, 2 and 3 in mind, you’ll be fine. As business guru Wayne Gretzky said, “you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”

Be brave. Take shots.

#5: Be Positive and Pleasant

When some people gear up their bravery for outreach, they think, “I’m about to reach out to a big-time person. I need to seem big time too!” So they puff out their chest and brag about how awesome they are.

Who made the rule that “important” people should be temperamental and full of themselves? Not endearing. I’ve had the good fortune of interacting with lots of guru types and most of them are pleasant and humble.

Don’t try to come off as the BMOC. The fastest way to come off as inconsequential is to keep saying how influential you are.

Todd Schnick says it so well:

“Actions make you influential. Not your words or tweets. People who serve, people who help others, people who share the cool things that others are doing… those are the actions that make you influential.”

Right on, Todd.

#6: Prepare for Window Shopping

When you reach out to people, expect that they’ll check you out. When someone writes to me and I’m curious, the first thing I do is Google and see what comes up.

Make sure when the people reaching out to you search for you online, you’re portrayed exactly how you want to be. Determine how your personal brand and online reputation come across, as they’ll greatly affect people’s impressions of you.

#7: Let Your Personality Shine Through

People build relationships with people they like. If you want to build relationships, be endearing. And the best way to do that? Let your personality shine through.

Boring is forgettable. Personality is memorable. And social media outlets are the perfect place for you to be yourself.

For example, in my research for this piece, I came across articles by Amy Porterfield. I visited her website, and saw her nifty little description of herself:

I BELIEVE in:

• Hard work, but that you have to be able to throw it all away for love and family.
• No drama. Really… not even a little!
• Acceptance. No judgment lives here.
• Wearing my heart on my sleeve.
• Embracing whatever’s next.
• But most of all, I believe that social media should be something you enjoy, not dread, every day.

No drama. Not even a little. I love it!

Now that’s letting your personality shine through.

#8: Take It Offline, When It’s Time

Social media outlets are great places for starting conversations, but they’re not the only place to have them. When the time is right, take the conversation offline.

You can start with a phone call or go right to face-to-face (assuming you’ve boiled your frog correctly). In any case, take the leap.

Selling is a contact sport. After you’ve begun your conversation and built rapport, find a good reason to take the conversation offline and see where it takes you.

And a little bonus…

There are so many social media tools available now it can be difficult to keep up. Here are a handful of tools that are helpful for lead generation and sales:

• Google Alerts and Twitter Alerts help you find reasons to create conversations by following trigger events.
• SocialToo can help you keep track of new and lost followers.
• GeoChirp is good if you need to focus on a specific geography.
• TubeMogul can help you spread the word with video.

TubeMogul is a video advertising and analytics platform that connects advertisers with highly targeted audiences.

• Twellow finds people you’re looking for with a sort of Yellow Pages for Twitter.

Twellow is a directory of public Twitter accounts to help you find people who matter to you.

• SproutSocial helps if you’re getting serious about this whole thing. And, of course, the three biggies: Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

One last thought—selling is a big topic. There are so many approaches to succeeding with selling. I think about sales a lot, but I don’t have a corner on the best ideas by a long shot.

If there was a ninth way to succeed in building relationships and selling with social media, and you were to add it to this article, what would it be? Leave your comments in the box below.

*No frogs were in any way harmed in the process of writing this article.

However, there are still many who are struggling to ‘sell’ social media to their executives.  And as Doug Frisbie, Toyota National Marketing Manager says, “The price of inactivity is greater than the risks of anything we’d be doing in social media.”

Let’s explore 9 ways you can make a good case for social media programs.

But first…

Why Do Some Execs Avoid Social Media?

It’s important to understand the reason that executives resist jumping into social media. Most of the time it’s fear of the unknown. Brands are not used to being open; they’re used to being in control. Old-style marketing was easy – you push out a message to millions of people (through TV or radio) and you’re done.

Marketing the new way actually means letting go of the reins and putting customer voices up front and center, which can be a scary thing. Because a lot of executives often are not personally active on social networking sites and microblogs, they lack full knowledge of the inner workings.

Couple that with all of the negative press some companies are getting for having the wrong approach to social media and you start seeing the lack of trust in the effectiveness of social media.

But what can you do to convince your executives that Doug Frisbie and all those social media practitioners out there are right? How do you show them that social media should be a critical part of your business strategy?

Here are a few suggestions:

#1: Display Current Conversations

One of the fastest ways to convince your management that it really isn’t a matter of ‘why’ rather than ‘when’ is to do some quick detective work yourself.

Using free tools like Google Alerts, TweetDeck and others, research the ongoing conversations about your company and provide a quick summary in a very visual way. Include screenshots of people’s tweets; calculate the percentage of positive, negative and neutral posts and comments over a specific period of time (1-2 months). If you don’t have expensive listening tools in place, the calculation will be manual, and it will take you a little bit of time.

If the customers are already reaching out to you and getting no answer, this will definitely get management’s attention. Further into your presentation, don’t forget to tell management what you’re planning on doing to turn the ‘neutrals’ and ‘haters’ into loyalists.

#2: Don’t Leave Out Competitor’s Information

Make sure to include the information on not only what your competitors are doing in this space, but also what is being said about them. If your competitors are not yet looking into social media immersion, this is your chance to show leadership in the industry. If they’re already getting into this space, this might convince your boss to at least look at doing the same to avoid being left behind.

#3: Show Your Industry Peers’ Successes and Failures

Take a look at what other companies in the industry are doing and make sure to mention two or three social media campaigns that got a lot of press coverage. Providing examples of companies that failed to listen to social chatter and to address customers’ concerns can at times be very convincing as well.

#4: Use Data

Do your homework. Organizations like eMarketer, MarketingProfs , Nielsen, comScore and lots of others publish a ton of data on social media usage, social network demographics and other statistics. Morgan Stanley and Forrester publish research on digital trends and consumer expectations. Use this data to make your case when it makes sense.

#5: Start Small

Start with pilots. Try it out with a small budget (or sometimes with no budget to begin with) and a small dedicated team. Enlist the help of grassroots folk from all over the company if needed (you don’t have to have full-time dedicated personnel at this point; you can succeed with just the help of a few passionate people). Make sure that your goals are measurable. This is absolutely critical to your mission.

#6: Do Risk Analysis and Contingency Planning

You need to ensure management is comfortable with the idea of pilots. Having a crisis plan helps. Map out every scenario you can think of. Identify any potential risks. Ask yourself, “What if conversation turns to this topic?” or “What if we get this type of reaction?” and have a solid plan to address every one of them.

#7: Seek Outside Help

As much as it pains me to say this, the sad reality is that often external consultants seem to have more convincing power and more credibility than a company’s internal experts. If that’s the case, then enlist the services of an external source to help management understand that the conversations are happening with or without them and that they don’t have a choice but to join in.

#8: Create Guidelines and Enable Your Employees

Let your management know that you’re not going into this blindly. Start by creating guidelines for engagement on a platform of your choice for your pilot. Include topics that will and will not be discussed, your moderation house rules (what posts will be deleted and why) and any additional information you want to convey.

Be transparent up front and be sure about setting expectations for the dialog to come. You can then go even further and create a simple set of social media guidelines to ensure that your employees are operating with a clear understanding of what’s appropriate and what is not. Partner with legal, PR, HR, security and privacy teams on this; it will ensure your key stakeholders are all on the same page and feel comfortable with the direction. Their support will be critical in your pitch to executives.

As an example, take a look at “Intel’s Social Media Guidelines (and feel free to steal with pride).

#9: Stay on Course

Most importantly, remember that change isn’t easy. But one person can make a difference and help a brand think and behave differently. We’ve seen it time and again. Don’t get frustrated; stay on course. Having a meaningful dialog with your customers is critical to the success of your business and absolutely is the right way to go.

We would like to hear your experiences. What has worked for you? Let us know your thoughts in the box below.

This article reveals three important tips you need to know to help build and manage communities.

What Is Community Management?

Previously I wrote examined the different roles for those who work with social media in business.   Among the many roles, the community manager is by far the most important because he or she is on the front lines of communication. Here’s how I define community manager:

A community manager usually manages an editorial calendar for a blog/community, a Twitter account and various third-party social media channels like a Facebook fan page or a YouTube account.

A community manager may also be responsible for managing a social listening platform like Radian6 and filtering/assigning conversations to others in the business unit for a proper response.  He or she may even organize in-person events (or town halls) to get feedback from the community. The community manager is the face of the brand.  Conversations are at the core of the job responsibility.

Over the years, I have worked for several big brands and have learned some valuable lessons about community.  When I refer to community, it’s not just a “social networking” site where users are required to login and create profiles. Communities can be built on Twitter, YouTube and even on a blog where the conversations are happening within the comments.

Here are three lessons to consider when managing a community:

#1: Embed within your community.

During the War in Iraq, there were several journalists from various news organizations who would embed themselves within infantry units in order to get access to “front line” reporting.  The result was that viewers were able to keep up to speed with what was going on several thousand miles away.

Community managers must also embed themselves within the community they serve and become integrated with the community.

The result is the collecting valuable data and insights from the community members and reporting back to management. The reporting is usually feedback on how to improve the company’s products, services or business processes.

Community managers will be successful if they are authentic and leave egos at the door.  Community members are smart and can see right through egos and many times they will call you on it. The best tip I can give to a community manager is just to be yourself.

During my time at Yahoo!, one of my core responsibilities was community management. In order to do this effectively, I had to earn the trust of the community. I accomplished this by taking off the mask of corporate America and doing what comes naturally: being myself.  I invested hours a day just getting to know others in the community and engaging in really simple and personal conversations. It didn’t take long for others to consider me a friend and begin to trust me.

#2: Don’t just focus on monetizing.

The biggest mistake a community manager can make is to start screaming “one-way” marketing messages at the rest of the community. The members will do one of two things: they will either leave the community or call you out on it publicly. Both are bad for business and should be avoided at all costs.

Unfortunately, situations like this still happen today. Brands and small businesses create groups, fan pages or Ning communities for the sole reason of monetization.  There may be some sales as a result, but there is little to no long-term benefit, much less repeat sales. Remember the old saying, “It takes more to acquire a new customer than to sell to an existing one.”

The most effective strategy to drive revenue for a business is to build the community, earn members’ trust and delicately ask for their permission to market your services, a wise proverb from Seth Godin.

#3: Don’t just listen, get the community involved.

Yes, the hot topic today is “listening” and the tools are just about commoditized with new applications launching every month. Building strong customer loyalty is not just listening but also acting—embedding yourself within the community and becoming a trusted voice there.  However, the challenge for every business in social media is to eventually “become believable.” And that means winning consumer trust.

Here is an example during my tenure at Intel how we succeeded through social media after a big consumer marketing campaign:

In May 2009, Intel launched a “Sponsors of Tomorrow” commercial featuring Ajay Bhatt—the co-inventor of the USB. Check out the video here:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqLPHrCQr2I

The catch phrase, “Our rock stars aren’t like your rock stars,” aimed to put a human face to the Intel brand.  For a split second, one of the Ajay Bhatt fans in the video rips open his shirt to reveal a T-shirt emblazoned with Bhatt’s image.  We were bombarded with requests for the T-shirt on Twitter, YouTube comments and on our blogs.  We then ran a T-shirt contest through Twitter and gave away 100 Ajay Bhatt T-shirts.

Intel now runs an Ajay Bhatt fan page on Facebook where I see the number of fans still growing today.

Do you manage a community?  What other tips would you suggest? I would love to hear your point of view, please comment below.