Getting Social With Your Leads

Twitter. Facebook. Digg. YouTube. Flicker. Most have heard of these new social style vehicles. Many companies are jumping on the bandwagon and creating pages or groups for their ‘fans’ to follow. But what is their goal? How are they measuring the success of their efforts?

An excellent blog post “Moving Marketing From Your Eyes To Your Hands” by Mitch Joel, provides an relevant analysis of how you as an organization should view social media.

“The old Web and traditional mass media were always about “eyes” - how many people were looking at the content (remember in the early days of the Web, how excited we all got over the amount of “eyeballs” and “stickiness” our websites had?) Social Media changes the body parts from “eyes” to “hands”. What are people doing with this content? What are they creating with it? How are they sharing it? How are they re-inventing and creating their own pieces of content around it?”

The concepts of engagement and presenting your brand need to be adjusted to a much more personal level. The goal with social media should be to drive a higher quality engagement with your customer base versus past models where the goal was to engage with as many potential customers that could be purchased for the budget that is available.

So what do you do with this content? Do you have the processes and systems in place to not only capture this information but to analyze and generate insights that are actionable?  A best practice is to start integrating social media engagement into a lead management program that will allow you to respond quickly to your customer when they are asking for information, and use that knowledge to better understand the type of message is needed to be delivered and when.

I will be going deeper in future blog posts on the topic of lead management and the components that make up a program, including lead acquisition, qualification scoring, and lead nurturing.  I will be looking at the processes needed to run a lead management program as well as the technologies available to manage, execute and provide insights to ensure that the program is effective.