Looking for Social Media Marketing Help? Listen to This First!

Neal Schaffer: 0:02

Welcome to another edition of social business unplugged practical advice on how to best leverage social media for your business. Now, the host of social business unplugged, author of the forthcoming book, maximize your social published by Wiley and founder of maximize social business. Neal Schaffer. Greetings, everybody this is Neal Schaffer. And welcome to another edition of social business unplugged. Today I am back in Orange County, California. But I tell you, I was actually in New Jersey over the weekend. And because of the weird weather and the thunderstorms we had in the United States, my plane was actually delayed for six hours yesterday. Can you believe that? I travel a lot. That was a first for me, didn't get back home until 3am. But I am awake and well, and really excited about today's podcast. So today I want to talk about and it's funny, because as I was getting ready for this podcast, I just received a call from a realtor. And last week got a few new engagements or I guess you could say a few new leads one of them coming from a small business, but I think they all have the same problem. And it's a problem that if you're listening to this, either you or potentially your clients have as well. And it all comes down to I want help with my social media, how can you help me? How much is it going to cost. So if you are trying to engage with someone to help you with your social media, or you're trying to help others with your social media, this podcast is for you, which I assume are all the listeners now, in my new book, maximize your Social, I'm really excited. I'm just going through the page proofs and the endorsements in the book and the back book cover. And it's really coming together. We're on target for our September 30 release date. You can search for it on Amazon and preorder at maximize your social. And I go through this in a lot more deeper process. And obviously the book is about how to create an implement and maintain and optimize your social media strategy over time. But it really comes down to that beginning, okay, where I know I need to do something with social media. I've heard a lot about it, what the heck do I do, and I get those calls a lot. And I offer social media coaching and social media consulting services for that. So really, I want to give you a snapshot as to how I talk to my potential clients. So that potentially, it can help you as well. So it all starts with I get these calls, how can you help me with my social media, and as you know, social media, it's like the internet, or it's like email, it is a tool, it is a means to the end, not the end itself. So how can I help you with social media? Well, it's almost like going to the doctor's office, okay, going to the doctor's office, and you're not feeling well, same doctor, how can you help me the doctor doesn't know until he or she doesn't exam until they take a blood test, until he or she listens to your heart asked you to open your mouth, there's a lot of things you need to do in order to be able to diagnose an illness. In this case, the illness is either the use of social media or the perceived use of social media utilizing best practices for your company. So if you think about it that way, if you're asking someone for help, you're not going to get an answer into divulge more information. And if you're not divulging more information, and you will just want an answer on a price, well, guess what? You're getting a cookie cutter approach, which almost 99% Certain is not going to help you reach your business objective. So let's move on. What is your business objective for using social media? Where does it hurt, right? And without knowing those details, and it really does come down to that objective. You want to do email marketing, what's your objective, you want to launch a website? What's your main objective? Whatever you do in business, right, you want to hire someone, what's your main objective for hiring them? That's really what it comes down to. And that's how we start to derive our ROI from our activities and social media. Because we have that objective. You know, not everybody's using social media the same way. And I talk a lot about this when I speak, one of my first customers was social media for customer service, it was actually a pretty unique type of customer service, not an active customer service, but more of a static type of customer service type of application pretty hard to describe. But with NDAs in place, I can't click More details, sorry, you know, social media for reputation management, a web 2.0 startup that wanted to better integrate social media API's into their application. And then we have the Evergreen, I want more business, I want more Leads. Well, do you want more business? Do you want more business from current customers? Do you want it from new customers? Are we talking about new product lines, old product lines, you get the picture, right? And I'm sorry, from sounding like a New Yorker, but spending three days in New Jersey had this effect on my accent. But hopefully you get the idea of what I'm talking about here. And this is what it comes down to really is that first question. Okay. And I'm gonna go through a few questions here is what is your business objective? Take social media completely out of the picture. Where does it hurt? Where does your business hurt right now? So let's move on. Now we get into the perceived benefits of social media. With the democratization of information and news and content out there with the internet and social media. I always say the viral video that you saw that I saw yesterday could be two completely different videos, right? And we may not even be aware of each other's videos that we've seen, because we're all over the map, so to speak in terms of what and how and where we consume information and media, what is your understanding of social media? And what do you think it can help you do? Right? This comes down to sort of the expectations if you're going to hire someone, right? Or if you are going to invest in social media, what do you expect to get out of it? And that's a good starting point, in addition to obviously, where does it hurt? What are your business objectives? So why did you come to the doctor? What do you hope to achieve from today's appointment? Well, with the human body, it's pretty clear, but it's not always get well sometimes it's I want to have more movement in my knee, which in this case, my knee is still a little bit tight after my knee surgery a few weeks ago, it could be I have this redness in my eye that I want to get rid of, it could be all sorts of different things. Now, the third one is sort of like the audit, reverse simple audit. What are you doing now on social media? And without knowing that right, what are you eating for your diet? Are you exercising? Do you drink? Do you smoke, right? Without sort of understanding those things, and what is working, what's not working? If you feel you're trying to lose weight, and you sometimes eat healthy things, and sometimes you eat things that aren't healthy, and you're weighing yourself every day, you should have a good idea as to what you think might be working, what might not be working. But anyway, with your social media, what do you think is working? And what do you think isn't working, it could be that we're having a little bit of success on LinkedIn, seems like we're spinning our cycles on Twitter don't know what to do. Or we have a few 100 fans on Facebook, but really hasn't generated in business. So you know, this is sort of like the audit is a self audit of you telling me how you're doing. So the next question then comes down to how do you reach your business objective now? So if you're contacting me for reputation management, what are you doing now to help you improve your reputation online? What are you doing now to generate new leads? What are you doing now to get new business from current customers? And what is working there? What's not working there? Because there you're gonna find some clues, right? Is your customer actually spending more time on social media? Is that potentially a reason why you're getting less because your competitors are engaging with the more what have you without understanding that because as I always say, social media doesn't exist in a silo. It just helps complement everything else you do. So how do you do it now? And are there pieces of social media tactics and things that we can do to help you better achieve those, the last two questions come into the ROI aspect. Now, if you could spend just 24 hours on social media every day, you can get a lot done, you can engage with a lot of people. And if you do it right, you can probably help accelerate your reach of whatever business objective you have. But here's the killer question, what is it worth to you to reach your objective? Now this gets into my solution selling background? Where I was selling six, seven figure software packages in Asia? What is it worth to you, right? If you only want to invest a few $100 a month for cookie cutter approach is the benefits that you may get from social media only worth a few $100? In that case, I get it right. But if we were to help you reach your business objective or Accelerated or increase X by y, what is the value? What is the potential benefit to you in money, and that's important? Partially, it's important from a sales perspective, to help understand how much I can charge because we call this in sales extra in the budget, but on a deeper level, okay? If we're looking at the social media ROI, and we're looking at trying to reach a business objective, how much did we invest? How much did we get back? It comes down to okay, this is what it's worth to reach our objective. So let's say it's worth $100,000 a year just throwing out a number. Do you have? Or are you willing to invest in a resource to make that happen? If it's worth $100,000 a year? Are you willing to invest $10,000 a year to make that happen, and that's the killer one, that's the one where people assume social media is free, people assume I can get an intern, people assume I can get my nephew who's in high school, or my daughter's friend who is in college and is really active on Facebook. And if that's the route you want to go, you get what you pay for, right? Because we're talking about the business application of social media, not the personal application of social media. So that really hits home, the proposition of utilizing social media for your business is no different than hiring someone for SEO for pay per click for web design, hiring an administrator hiring a new employee, hiring a new salesperson, it is exact same thing, business comes down to sale and profit, and how you invest your money to maximize your sales to help you maximize your profit. Social media isn't and shouldn't be any different. So I'm gonna leave you with those comments just sparked by these recent people that have reached out to me companies looking for my help. I'm not talking fluff here. And I'm not trying to say how social media is the shiny new thing and you need to do this and you need to do that you don't need to do anything. In fact, for some companies, if that realtor was targeting a community where the average demographic was in the 70s and 80s, one of the the older communities in the United States, those people aren't on social media, and if they are, they're not using it that active, reaching out to them. You're probably going to be a lot more effective doing offline events locally in the community. Although their children may play a role in deciding where they live. In that case, there still is a social media complement, or a angle that social media can play. But hopefully you get my picture. I never tried to sell social media, my clients, you have to understand the value of it yourself. Otherwise, you're not going to be truly invested in it. And it's going to be frustrating, obviously my book maximize your social beat illustrating case studies, what have you to help you understand the value of social media for business. I think that most businesses, the latest stat that I read was 93% of marketers were utilizing social media for their business. Obviously, I hope you're still at that level. If you're not buy some books, there's some great ones out there. But I'm over my eight minute allotted slot today. I'm gonna end it here. Hope you enjoyed this, as I always say, really appreciate your ratings on iTunes. You're telling your friends about this podcast, and always open for feedback on what you'd like to hear. Or if you're active in social media and you have a special message that you'd like to share with our podcast listeners, please feel free to reach out to me now I am no longer promoting my women on networking sites. So it's going to be meal at maximize social business.com. That's it for today. Make it a great day, everybody. Until next time, bye bye. And since next time, I'll probably be talking to you from Japan. Sayonara. Thanks for listening to another edition of social business unplugged. We appreciate your subscribing to our podcast, and adding your rating and comments in iTunes. If you would like to appear on this podcast or have content that you would like covered, please contact Neal Schaffer Neal at maximize social business.com for additional social media for business advice. Please make sure to check out your new social media for business resource at maximize social business.com Thanks again and make it a great day.