[...] How To: Effectively Talk to Execs and Clients about Social Media – This one is of great importance to me since many times, talking to folks that do not use social media is a real challenge. [...]

[...] at the bottom. Sadly, some bloggers and tweeters are still there. When you talk to executives, I recommend you focus on the end objectives and end results, never on the tools, which moves lower and lower on the [...]

[...] on value, not technology Next, don’t focus on tools, instead focus on the end result: value. How To: Effectively Talk to Execs and Clients about Social Media. This post teaches you how to talk about the end results of what’s expected, ever lead with [...]

I am a recent addition to http://www.OpinionLab.com who’s primary purpose is to provide a real-time solution through customer [+]Feedback to increase customers retention, communication, reduce marketing costs, understand different customer needs differently on every page, can be in 30 languages, and measure what they like or dislike, while monitoring the influence, brand and functionality of the website.

Over the past 4 weeks of my recent employment I have been trying to better understand why brick walls exist when doing B2B sales in a customer dependant environment? Is it better to provide a great product, or is it better to provide a great understanding for the need, and then determine if our product is their solution? Can you determine this as you bounce through hopeful key decision makers [kdm] who may or may not be the KDM?
From gate keepers to time limited executives…how! how! how?!

As corporations move forward, do they all take a simultaneous step to become trendy in certain categories, such as Social Networking. My understanding of corporate strategy was to: provide vision “internal” and “external” customers while providing problem resolution, leveraging global markets, develop productivity, moral responsibility and contribute to the betterment of the “blank” industry…and all of the sudden there is this rude awakening!

Hey, I wonder what our customers think?

What are your suggestions as to brick walls to reach KDM, before the opportunity to offer value?

[...] 1) A business champion makes it easier: Evangelizing a community program and launching it within an enterprise requires interface with many business units. Marketing, Product Development, Product Support, Communications, PR, and other client groups are often impacted. Having a business champion (that will convince each of these groups) that will address the business objectives, mitigate risks, and define how it’s aligning with t…. [...]

For other clients who are big on “reputation management”, we’ve used Google Alerts as a really simple sort of syndication to show them the practical application of new tech. It’s back to basics – knowing what concerns already are in play for a customer, and then finding the tech that will address them successfully.

Thank you for pulling all of this together – the what not to do is as useful as the what to do.

[...] How To: Effectively Talk to Execs and Clients about Social Media Good stuff, basically thinking results and wants rather than technology (tags: blog internet socialmedia socialnetworking web2.0) [...]

[...] how we ourselves have analyzed the value of social media as a “discipline.” Then I read Jeremiah’s How To: Effectively Talk To Execs….About Social Media. He makes a case for the right orientation overall – not just the right justification (Needs [...]

[...] offers some advice on speaking to senior execs, in their own [...]

[...] Owyang at Forrester has an interesting primer on how to pitch social media projects to clients and execs.  He outlines a hierarchy of [...]

[...] Features, Benefits, and Value,” Jeremiah Owyang advises in his blog post about effectively talking to executives and clients about social media. He goes on to provide concrete examples of all four approaches, and suggests how to establish [...]

[...] Features, Benefits, and Value,” Jeremiah Owyang advises in his blog post about effectively talking to executives and clients about social media. He goes on to provide concrete examples of all four approaches, and suggests how to establish [...]

[...] Web Strategist – How To: Effectively Talk to Execs and Clients about Social [...]

“Undefined social media marketing objectives are basically blogging just to “start a blog”, or having a Facebook group page to “have a Facebook group page”. Companies that employ this “strategy” going into their social media marketing campaign will likely find it nearly impossible to quantify or measure its success. However, if objectives are set from the beginning, measurement is much clearer and easier to quantify.

Objectives should be inspired from the needs of the company. If an e-commerce company wants to start a blog about “product reviews”, then it should measure the funnel of traffic from the blog to the e-commerce site. Through that, the site should further analyze the percentage of products purchased from this segment, and analyze the value of these purchases against other methods of entry.

To give another example I’ll use Ignite. One of our objectives of this blog is to ultimately to gain more clients and further expand our network in this space. With this clearly stated, we track the source of all business leads, so we can quantify the number that are a result of our blog and the quality of those leads. To measure our network, we monitor and track comments, trackbacks, and the social network activities that we are involved in.”

I guess it comes down to knowing who cares about what. So meeting business goals should be first priority.

CMO cares about customer. conversion rates
CIO cares about security and other things
Creative services team cares about efficient collab
Legal council would rather it all go away

I remember reading somewhere the average number of decision makers in a SMB is 7.5, but I could be way off.

It’s imperative to talk about benefits but we it will have to be catered to the needs of each decision maker and I’m assuming that will require more in depth knowledge of practical applications of social media.

I think all marketers who try to convince others on web 2.0 should at lease have their presence on the community sites and have a blog. This will help in “walking the talk” with your piers. Gone are the days that we can speak of concepts.

Cheers,
Aidan