On December 2, the Hollywood Post Alliance (HPA) hosted another valuable luncheon event through the Sales Career Resource Group (SCRG). On the menu was a panel discussion about gaining visibility for your company by fine-tuning social media skills. Moderated by mobilizedtv.com’s Debra Kaufman, the panel featured industry veterans who are well versed in social media tools, such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter:
- Ben Benedetti, Modern VideoFilm
- Mark Kaplan, Technicolor Sound Services
- John Myers, Ring of Fire
- Bill Sewell, Wiredrive
The right tool for the right job
There are a couple of ways for businesses to take advantage of social media. Mark Kaplan scans his online friend’s contacts for job leads. “By having a friend in common on LinkedIn or Facebook, my cold call just became a warm call,” he said.
Listening to online conversations is also a big part of using social media. Mark monitors his Facebook updates feed to figure out what projects are becoming available and who’s working on them. Bill Sewell uses Twitter, one of his favorite tools, to see who’s talking about Wiredrive. He said that he spends about two hours a day listening.
Streamlining communication is another benefit that social media provides. Bill views Twitter as a one-to-many text messaging service, which provides significant value over one-to-one communication. For Mark, those kinds of advantages are putting an end to traditional communication avenues, i.e. email addresses and phone numbers. In his experience, more people are sending Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter messages as a means of personal communication.
One caveat, though. To avoid potentially making a private conversation public, Mark recommends being aware of the difference between direct messaging and writing on someone’s wall or public space. Ben Benedetti agrees that learning to communicate through social media properly is a more complex than it may seem. And Ben should know. The LinkedIn group Ben founded, the Film and TV Professionals group, is 23,000 members strong and continues to grow. Ben recommends learning how to use Facebooks’s lists and groups, which are ways to organize your contacts so that you can send more targeted messages.
Measuring ROI
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Social media offers a number soft benefits, but measuring their overall impact is tricky at best. As Ben said, there are any number of reasons that a business fails to secure a job, and incorrectly leveraging Facebook or Twitter isn’t a valid excuse.
Bill acknowledged the difficulty of gauging the effectiveness of Wiredrive’s social media efforts. But he’s taking steps to implement metrics. “We take a very analytical approach to everything we do. We are currently evaluating a tool for measuring the ROI,” he said.
When John Myers was involved in facilitating the Ring of Fire Myspace fan page, he often turned to his 12 year old niece to gauge its effectiveness. This was a point well-taken by moderator Debra Kaufman who acknowledged that younger people with a native sense of technology often turn out to be our greatest teachers.
But these days, Ring of Fire is taking a different approach. John isn’t trying to measure how much business social media is bringing in because Ring of Fire isn’t using it to drive sales and promotion. The Ring of Blog, Ring of Fire’s current foray into social media, is a window into their culture. For John, social media is about supplementing their work, sharing ideas and building identity.
Building your social media strategy
Leveraging social media is still a new sales and marketing strategy. And like all strategies, it requires planning. Sometimes strategies take the form of an official social media policy, but they can be as loose as an informal agreement with employees.
Mark’s social media plan is built around Plaxo and Facebook. He uses Plaxo as his address book; he doesn’t accept competitors as friends on Plaxo because that would be giving them direct access to his rolodex. Facebook, on the other hand, is for perusing the industry landscape and trolling for potential jobs.
Bill said that PR and marketing toolsets are baked into the daily routine at Wiredrive. People are logged onto Facebook, Twitter, Tweetdeck and other tools and interact with people throughout the day. The company has a social media policy, which helps guide its message. Learning to communicate better and with authenticity is also part of Wiredrive’s overall social media strategy.
John’s solution for guiding the message was to bring PR in house. “We’ve had PR in house for the last eight years. It gives us more control over our message,” he said. But social media isn’t the primary vehicle for delivering the message. In fact, Ring of Fire isn’t jumping on the social-media-as-marketing-panacea bandwagon. John is opting to let the work and the people behind Ring of Fire speak for themselves through the blog and website over trying to fit Facebook into a PR strategy.
Mitigating negative comments
It may go without saying, but there will be times when someone broadcasts a negative comment about your business. Bill said that Wiredrive counters unfavorable feedback by providing top-notch customer service. The idea is that you will generate positive buzz that can more effectively mitigate negative comments.
Ben agrees with this line of thinking, adding that transparency and a willingness to improve will get you through the rough patches. “The main thing is to deal with your problems with integrity. Negative comments will blow over,” he said.
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Mark recommends taking proactive measures, such as posting positive comments and never posting negative feedback. He is more concerned with people hijacking conversations, which refers to when a conversation develops off of something you post that moves the focus away from your main idea.
The point is that there are no right or wrong ways to use social media tools. There are a range of approaches and opinions. But one requirement, however, that the panelists agreed on is a willingness to experiment with new media tools in order to find out what is right for your business.
Business becomes personal
Although the brave new social media world has its drawbacks, the sales advantages are considerable. Friendships give you the edge and bring advocates. But still, the old questions about the line between business and personal are still there; they are just more pronounced in the social media world.
When it comes to the online convergence of personal and professional life, Bill avoids the issue altogether and only writes about issues that he’s interested in and passionate about. But as such, it turns out that his Facebook activity is about 70% business.
For Ben and Mark, life is business. Both admit that they share their life online, which results in a mix of personal and business. As a result, Ben acknowledges that a false sense of intimacy emerges as social networks grow. It’s nice to be able to reply to a contact via a Twitter feed or Facebook wall at your convenience, but the lines between friend, contact and spammer begin to blur.
Going against the emerging social media grain, John sees more value in demarcating personal and professional space. He reminds his employees that, while it certainly isn’t prohibited, they are not expected to use their social media accounts to evangelize for the company.
Regardless of the extent to which you use social networking tools, it’s important to keep in mind that they are not an instead of; they are an in addition to. Good marketing, sales and PR are still about people interacting with people. Mark agrees with this idea. “You will always have marketing and PR because it’s all about relationships,” he said. The luncheon, after all, was a room of people having a discussion. And that’s something you can’t fit into 140 characters.