Is your business proud to be corporate spammer?, Tim Hughes

The term spam, has come synonymous today with email, where you get unwanted messages filling your inbox.

What about spam on social media?

I just went to LinkedIn looked at the #digitaltransformation hashtag and there was a shed load of content, but you can see that nobody is listening to those people.

How do I know this? Look at the "likes" and "comments" there aren't any.

The logic is simple, if people don't like content then they don't place a like on it.

Just scroll through #digitaltransformation nobody cares.

We therefore know there is spam on social, but what about corporate spam?

I'm going to pick on a company

Let me pick on a company, according to LinkedIn they have 376,430 employees and 9,349,889 followers. These are big numbers, so let's look at the engagement they get on their posts.

Post 1 - 4 likes (3 of these people are internal, 1 is external)

Post 2 - 14 likes (6 internal, 8 external)

Post 3 - 5 likes (3 internal, 2 external)

Post 4 - 2 likes (2 internal)

Post 5 - 9 likes (7 internal and 2 external)

Post 6 - 30 likes (24 internal and 6 external)

Post 7 - 10 likes (7 internal and 3 external)

Post 8 - 7 likes (6 internal and 1 external)

Post 9 - 26 likes (22 internal and 4 external)

Post 10 - 18 likes (15 internal and 3 external)

Let me reiterate, this is a company with 376,430 employees, they have 9,349,889 followers on the company page and the companies they serve will have literally millions of employees.

All of these posts have no comments.

That means not one single person has felt compelled to make a comment, to add to the conversation. Nobody feels emotionally connected to the content.

We know that when you see a post that has likes but no comments, that this will just be the person's team. It's an echo chamber. They are choking the market with brochureware.

Why is it that the most they can muster is 30 likes?

What can we conclude from this?

1. Nobody is listening

You can see the same people liking the posts, I suspect one person is from the marketing agency that is creating the material. It's clear that nobody is interested.

The people in my company, DLA Ignite get more engagement and we are only 15 people and have 1675 followers on our LI company page. It's not that we are more clever, this company has people with PhDs, MBAs from the best schools in the world.

This company has employed the best brains in digital, people that should know better than this.

Being part of this company's digital network is like walking down a street in London and representative after representative from this company smacks you in the stomach with a brochure. Then another smacks you in the chest with another brochure. Then another smacks you in the chest with a brochure. When you get to the end of the line of all these brochure pushers, you just get the brochures and put them in the bin.

2. The business is talking in an echo chamber

The average person has 930 contacts on LinkedIn, they are existing colleagues, x colleagues and recruitment consultants. For an average person to place a like on content is pretty useless as these are not the people you want to influence. In our social selling and influence training and coaching, we teach you how to grow a wide and varied network of people you want to influence. When you have a network, not just a bunch of contacts, this is where you spread your influence into the accounts you want to sell to.

"But we are killing it on social" I hear the marketing people say

I can guarantee it, that if we get on a call with the head of social media for this business, they will tell us that they are killing it on social media. Why is this?

To be honest, I don't know.

When pressed on why they do social, say “we’re doing it for visibility, you know “top of funnel” stuff that generates awareness and interest.”

But here is a company, there are many more where there is clearly not generating anything.

Plus .... may + might + could doesn’t exactly sound like a surefire mechanism for generating influence and revenue to me.

The problem with how social media is being run in most companies is that it’s a sort of warm and fluffy “it makes people like us” belief that the audience will remember you and your business when the time is right.

To take action, and stay in control, I need actionable insights.

Social isn't about visibility or posting it's about conversations

Going back to our street of brochure pusher analogy, what we want is a person that will welcome you. An environment where the culture is different. "Come on in and let's talk, I want to hear about your business issues". There is a conversation. Wouldn't it be great if one of the firms experts or managing director was available to welcome the person and have a conversation?

Nobody is inviting a conversation.
Nobody is offering real digital community growth.
Why are they not letting their leaders, young and old a voice?
Why are they not allowing their experts to be experts, walking the digital corridors.

This company is global leaders in spam

Social media is about telling people things they don't know
Social media is about insight
Social media is about educating people
Social media is about entertaining people
Social media is about being human
Social media is about conversations

Ask yourself about your own social media activity

With regard to your own social media strategy ask yourself this. What revenue, influence, pipeline, or cost saving have we created through our social activity in the last month? If you’ve published 30 posts, and had 10 interactions on each…but most of those interactions have come from your own staff or partner network social isn’t working for you.

Take control of your social activity

If you can’t absolutely tie your social media activities to something tangible - revenue (or a precursor such as pipeline, proposals, meetings), influence (such as invitations to speak at events) or cost savings (such as reducing recruitment or PR costs) then you aren’t doing it right.

This is a business that loves social, but does not understand what it takes to be social.

What is social selling?

Here at DLA Ignite, we define social selling as

"Using your presence and behavior on Social Media to build influence,
make connections, grow relationships and trust, which leads to
conversation and commercial interaction."

It's not witchcraft, it's enabling your salespeople to work from home, (or the office) and create conversations with prospects and customers. Conversations on social media and conversations that convert.

The problem with the name "social selling" is that people think that this is selling on social. All these pitches that you get on social are not social selling, they are spam.

The other thing you need to know about social selling is that this isn't about "putting out some videos" or "putting flowers on your profile" or "going viral" this is about revenue, EBITDA, you winning business from the competition and having a competitive advantage.

With anything you do on social there are two questions you need to ask

1. How many leads / meetings / conversations will I get from this post / blog / activity?

2. How much revenue / EBITDA am I getting as a business?

So who's social selling?

In case you missed it, the Bank of America’s Merrill Lynch have banned cold calling and have moved all their people to social selling. This isn't some trendy tech company that might have decided to do this on a whim, this is a very conservative financial services company that has made a decision based on data.

But surely cold calling has a better ROI than social selling? Not according to Merrill Lynch.

"They will also be encouraged to contact prospects over LinkedIn, which has a higher hit rate than cold calling"

The CRO (chief revenue officer), Richard Eltham of Namos Solutions, of one of clients posted a comment on LinkedIn about social selling. See here.

“Social selling is not an option now it is the way of the world and you either learn and execute it or fear getting left behind”

Kevin Murray who is the Head of Sales at MacArtney Underwater Technology recently posted about his success with social selling here and wrote an article about the transformation that has happened in sales here.

Andrew Ferrier who is the CEO of Display Technology Ltd and in this article it talks about why Display Technology have adopted social selling. His team have also created a social media strategy with help from our partner, Crux.

Their social media mission statement is

“We want to position ourselves as a forward-thinking, knowledgeable team of individuals who are all experts in our own right, therefore, collectively awesome!”

Andrew also says in that post

"Adopting this (social selling) strategy has taken all of us well outside of our comfort zones but the rewards we have seen in a short period of time have created an excitement within the business development team (new term for sales team).

Because of the nature of social media, quite often you can get instant results. Even if that is just a comment left on your post, or a like, or someone taking the time to want to connect with you.

The excitement around the sales team is infectious, it’s no longer a chore to reach out to the market place because the results can be instant and are there, right in front of you."

What sort of results can you expect?

If you check out this video of Chris Mason CEO at Oracle reseller Namos, fast forward to 19 minutes 55 seconds. Chris talks about a $2.6 million win from being on social, after completing the DLA Ignite social selling and influence course.

Here at DLA Ignite, we work with our partners such as Crux, Little Bird Marketing, Funnel Amplified, Accelery, EDPE Consultants, etc. We are the only social selling and influence company in the world to offer a certificate provided by an independent qualification body (OfQual) and sponsored by the Institute of Sales Professionals (ISP).

Other articles you might be interested in ....

Would you buy social selling training course from somebody that doesn't use social selling?

How to create budget and build a business case for your social selling project