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top objections to social media and how to respond
We have all heard of the objections
in using social media. That’s great and all, but how do you respond to
these objections.
- Why should I? I don’t need to. Just because everyone
else is doing it, doesn’t mean I have to.
- Getting involved in social media allows you to be more
engaged with your current and potential clients. The word
“transparency” was probably 2009’s most clichéd word used to describe
social media, but it’s true. Social media allows companies to have
a voice and to show the public that your company is willing to listen and
garner unsolicited feedback. Social media also allows your company
to provide that extra customer service option outside of the traditional
email and phone outlets.
- Fear of change; I’m going to stick to what works for
our business; we’ve been fine without it
- We won’t quote the 100’s of statistics and studies
that prove social media isn’t just a fad. Instead, the best way to
argue against this is to consider it. If you don’t give social
media a chance, aren’t you afraid of the missed opportunity in lead
generation or cost savings social media can offer? The
business/marketing world continues to evolve and many companies are
re-inventing themselves as innovative by their usage of social
media. Think Ford. The fact that fortune 50 companies are
embracing social media should be enough to warrant consideration.
- It costs too much
- Contrary to popular belief, social media is NOT
free. There is time investment involved and you will not see the
impact social media will have on your company right away. However,
it’s important to consider that revenue should be viewed as equally as
cost savings. It can save a company money by reducing customer
service outlets as well as reducing the cost of marketing campaigns.
For those relying heavily on direct mail, try testing a social media
campaign where you only invest time/money spreading the word online.
- I’m in no hurry
- Fair enough, but maybe your competitors are.
It’s about missed opportunities. Look at all the Fortune 500 companies
(Walmart, Dell, Bank of America, General Motors, to name a few) that lost
out on their name on Twitter before it exploded into a phenomenon.
- I have no desire
- No one is forcing anyone to use social media, but
there are very convincing reasons
Social media is more than just a
fad, and for many companies, it is becoming a bigger, more integral part of
their overall marketing mix. Social media presents numerous opportunities
for businesses that might otherwise cost a company thousands (if not millions)
of dollars in marketing and advertising spend. According to eMarketer, in 2010 social media spend for B2B industries is projected
to increase 60 percent over last year. But, what does this have to do with you
and why should your business use social media?
- The cost to enter and participate in the social space
is minimal. Compared to other forms of
marketing, such as print, broadcast and even online advertising, the cost
to market your business and your brand in social media is relatively
low. The greatest cost will be time spent and human resources, but
your investment will go a long way (see other reasons below) – talk about
cost effective marketing!
- You can boost corporate and executive thought
leadership. Focus on sharing industry
expertise, insight and knowledge so that people view you and your company
as a resource first and foremost. This develops a company’s
trustworthiness.
- Opportunities for providing customer service and
feedback abound. Maintaining and improving
client relations, and courting and conversing with potential customers
create many opportunities to improve your company’s customer service
reputation, and also allows for increased engagement with your
stakeholders.
- You can dramatically increase traffic to your company
website. Your presence on search
engines will increase. For example, a Google search for “Marketwire”
results in page-one ranking for our YouTube
channel and Twitter
account. This presence is an inevitable way of increasing traffic to
your website.
- You can better manage and monitor your brand. In social media, everyone has a voice. If your
customers are not talking about your brand, you don’t exist. Whether
you choose to listen to the conversations about you and your company is up
to you, but realize that people are indeed talking about you.
Seize the opportunity. Positive comments should be rewarded with
gratitude. Negative comments will happen on occasion and should be
dealt with on a case-by-case basis. You will be surprised how often
a perceived negative comment was a simple misunderstanding, how
enthusiastic folks in the social space become when they learn that
companies are listening to them, and how eager they are to rectify adverse
situations. If you don’t monitor what is being said about your brand
on social media networks, you will miss these opportunities.
- Social media is a great place for (free!) competitive
research. It is critical in business to
know your competitive landscape. Social media allows you to easily monitor
what your competitors are doing and what other people are saying about
them. Did they recently redesign their website? Did they
launch a new product? What do others think?
- You can generate leads and better develop your
business. If your current and potential
customers are online, you need to be there, too. Social media
participation requires equal investments of time, strategy and patience,
and generating leads through your social media efforts can be the ultimate
payoff. But remember to be true to the spirit of social media and
act honestly and transparently. Don’t use social networks as one-way
marketing and advertising channels. Instead, talk to people and engage
them and leads will begin to trickle into your sales funnel.
- It will require too many resources within our company
- Just like any other marketing campaign, social media
will require resources. In order to debunk this objection, you have
to look at the reasons why social media benefits your company – missed
opportunity, cost savings, lead generation, etc. Focus your social
media strategy on what you want to accomplish through goals, objectives,
and success metrics.
- I’m worried about the legal ramifications/regulatory
issues
- This objection can be overcome by drafting a social
media policy that clearly outlines the responsibility of using social
media as it relates to legal and regulatory issues.
- It’s too risky; we’re better off doing nothing
- The only risk is the risk of doing nothing. Do
you really want to risk letting your competitors take over the
opportunities you are missing? Do you not care what customers (and
competitors) are saying about you online? Monitor and engage to
offset that risk.
- You can’t measure it; social media results are not
easily visible to non-users
- We all love the term ROI. Social media ROI
involves more in depth analysis than traditional stats.
- We give up too much to the customer; privacy issues
- This is a valid objection as in some industries, there
are client privileges or at least want to avoid showing favoritism.
The key point to remember is that you are voluntarily participating in
social media meaning you can control what you put out to the
public. If you are in the position where revealing certain
aspects of your company is against the rules, then develop a social media
policy. Clearly state the roles and responsibilities for those
participating in social media on behalf AND outside of the company.
The latter is extremely important because it requires a level of trust
with your employees.
- We won’t make any money/no ROI potential; it will take
too long to pay off
- Social media will not have an immediate financial
impact, but it will have an immediate impact on brand recognition.
Social media takes time and energy, but what successful venture doesn’t
require time and energy? Don’t just think about the revenue that is
generated, but also the cost savings involved. Look at the traffic
your website is getting due to your social media efforts. Are you
noticing more positive mentions? It’s all part of the benefits of
social media.
- We can’t control the message
- Social media is the voice of the customer and a
channel that is influenced by the customer. By taking part in
social media, you can start to monitor conversations about your brand and
competitors. People will say whatever they want about your company
whether you like it or not, but isn’t it better to know what they are
saying rather than standing on the sidelines and not knowing? It
feels like a common sense business practice to monitor, engage, and
understand the situation. In reality, social media actually gives
you MORE control over the message. An example: a customer starts
badmouthing your company because of outdated pricing information on a
website. [Scenario 1]-not participating in social media results in
you never knowing so this bad testimonial spreads (which you don’t know
about). [Scenario 2]-by participating in social media, you can
reach out to the dissatisfied customer, ask where they got the information,
correct the issue with IT due to this customer’s feedback, and explain
the situation to the customer. More likely than not, that customer
will thank you for the correction, correcting any negative misconceptions
about the company.
- We want to control the message
- What you can control is your engagement with the
public and how you respond to comments. What you can’t control is
what is being said about your company. Participating in social
media gives you more control.
- It will take too long to implement
- Social media does not take long to implement, however,
it’s important to spend time creating a social media strategy to
understand goals, objectives, success metrics, and plan of action.
Social media is a time investment and you will not see results overnight.
It takes time and commitment. If you tackle social media
half-assed, you are wasting your time.
- It’s just a blog, Twitter and Facebook- What’s that
going to do?
- Social media does the following: SEO, increase in
traffic, lead generation, increased customer service satisfaction, brand
management, customer engagement, acts as a focus group, cost savings, on
and on and on and on…
- Our customers are not on social networks/don’t use
social media; Not our target market
- This is just a bad excuse. You will be surprised
to see how many of your customers and potential customers are using
social media. You know what they say about assumptions right?
The most useful social networking sites are meant for the general
audience.
- It’s too complicated; we don’t know the first thing
about social media
- There are many tutorials available on the web that
will help you get started in the world of social media.
- We can’t control our employees using it
- Believe it or not, your employees are using social
media. So no, you can’t control whether your employees use it
outside of work. What you can control, however, is allowing your
employees to use social media in the workplace and setting strict
guidelines for writing about the company’s products, service, clients,
etc. If you are concerned about employee usage, I recommend that
you develop a social media policy that outlines usage terms and
responsibilities of using social media.
- We’re B2B so there is no reason for us to engage
consumers
- The great thing about social media? It doesn’t
discriminate. Social media works just as great for B2B as it does
for B2c. In some cases, B2B is all the more reason to participate
in social media.
- Don’t want to acknowledge negatives
- With the global acceptance of social media across all
types of businesses and industries, negative comments will happen whether
you want it to or not. The power of social media is in the public,
i.e., the users. It gives your customers and potential customers a
voice they didn’t have before. Negative comments is inevitable so
instead of ignoring it, embrace this opportunity to reach out as
needed. The missed opportunity is to let it happen behind your back.
You will be surprised to find out that many negative comments are based
on inaccurate information. In addition this type of feedback can
lead to improved business processes or product/service
enhancements. The power to influence is extremely powerful.
You don’t have to respond to every negative mention, but at least follow
the conversation.
- Don’t have time to adapt to the technology
- If you don’t adapt to new technology, you will become
obsolete or fall behind your competitors to the point of
extinction. Embracing social media is viewed as an innovative new
approach to marketing, PR, customer service, R&D, etc. If you
hear this particular objection, perhaps it’s time to start thinking about
joining a new company.
- There is too much meaningless discussions online; no
trust
- Very true, but luckily there is a filter for all that
noise. You can monitor from whom you want to listen and what you
want to listen to whether it is your brand, related keywords, competitors
or a select group of followers. The great thing about social media
is the ability to engage with your audience. Spark a conversation
by asking a simple question or join a Twitter chat where other users tweet about similar tastes.
If you are reactive to the conversations that are happening online, you
will only see meaningless tweets. Instead, be proactive and spark
those conversations. There are more than enough users willing to
discuss subjects that matter to you.
- Lack of expertise
- Social media continues to develop and everyone is
still learning. My advice is to experience social media
yourself because nothing beats experience. You can read all the
articles you want and listen to all these “experts” talk about social
media, but these should be used as guidelines only. Your own
experience will determine how you use and benefit from social media, no
one else.
- We already do social networking, we have a facebook fan
page.
- That’s a great 5th step, but what are you doing with
that fan page? Social media not just about setting up a fan page or
setting up an account; it is so much more than that. Develop a
social media strategy to understand your goals, objectives, and how you
are going to measure your success. You can’t just create a fan page
or Twitter account, snap your fingers, and poof, you do social
networking. In order to really “do social networking”,
provide useful links to industry related articles, don’t sell your
product/service, engage and participate in conversations, don’t sell,
offer any help whether they are your current clients or prospects, and
listen.
- We’re waiting for it to mature
- If you want to risk doing nothing and waiting for your
competitors to jump ahead, fair enough. How do you define a site being
“mature” anyway? Check out these statistics
- Facebook
claims that 50% of active users log into the site each
day. This would mean at least 175m users every 24 hours… A
considerable increase from the previous 120m.
- Twitter now has 75m user accounts, but only around
15m are active users on a regular basis. It’s still a fair increase from
the estimated 6-10m global users from a few months ago.
- LinkedIn
has over 50m members worldwide. This means an increase of around 1m members month-on-month
since July/August last year.
- Facebook
currently has in excess of 350 million active users on global basis.
Six months ago, this was 250m… meaning around a 40% increase of users in
less than half a year.
- Flickr
now hosts more than 4bn images. A massive jump from the previous
3.6bn I wrote about.
- More
than 35m Facebook users update their status each day. This is 5m more than
towards the end of July, 2009.
- Wikipedia
currently has in excess of 14m articles, meaning
that it’s 85,000 contributors have written nearly a million new posts in
six months.
- Photo
uploads to Facebook have increased by more than 100%. Currently,
there are around 2.5bn uploads to the site each month – this was
around a billion last time I covered this.
- There
are more than 70 translations available on Facebook. Last time
around, this was only 50.
- Back in
2009, the average user had 120 friends within Facebook. This is now around
130.
- Mobile
is even bigger than before for Facebook, with more than 65m users
accessing the site through mobile-based devices. In six months, this
is over 100% increase. (Previously 30m). As before, it’s no secret that
users who access Facebook through mobile devices are almost 50% more
active than those who don’t.There are more than 3.5bn pieces of content
(web links, news stories, blog posts, etc.) shared each week on Facebook.
- There
are now 11m LinkedIn users across Europe.
- Towards
the end of last year, the average number of tweets per day was over 27.3
million.
- The
average number of tweets per hour was around 1.3m.
- More
than 700,000 local businesses have active Pages on Facebook.
- Purpose-built
Facebook pages have created more than 5.3bn fans.
- 15% of
bloggers spend 10 or more hours each week blogging, according to
Technorati's new State of the Blogosphere.
- At the
current rate, Twitter will process almost 10bn tweets in a single
year.
- About
70% of Facebook users are outside the USA.
- India
is currently the fastest-growing country to use LinkedIn, with around 3m
total users.
- More
than 250 Facebook applications have over a million combined users
each month.
- 70% of bloggers
are organically talking about brands on their blog.
- 38% of
bloggers post brand or product reviews.
- More
than 80,000 websites have implemented Facebook Connect since
December 2008 and more than 60m Facebook users engage with it
across these external sites each month.
- We tried it and it didn’t work.
- Trying is good until you ask these type of
questions: how long did you “try” social media? Did you have
a strategy in place? What did the strategy consist of? How
did you measure success? What were your goals and objectives? What
gave you the conclusion that social media did not work? What
results from social media would you have considered a success? What
process did you go through when participating in social media?
- It doesn’t fit the company’s brand.
- The most useful social networking sites are meant for
the general public with no preference to any type of brand or
industry. Social media is not a fad and is starting to become a
best practice for PR, marketing, customer service, business development
etc. What is important to consider is your company
culture. I truly believe that your company culture is reflected in
whatever social media participation you do. Whether you’re in a
bland industry or not, your brand will come out shining.
- We can’t convince upper management/management doesn’t
support it
- If it comes time to present your case to upper
management, you will likely encounter more than a couple of these
objections.
How to sell
social media to your boss
- Think like your boss and align
your reasons with company objectives – Whether it’s customer service
oriented, revenue/cost reduction, or reputation management, you have to
think of what senior management wants to get out of placing extra
resources in social media. Explain and present the anticipated costs
involved, manpower needed, and time investment required. A way of
turning around the “how much are you generating” attack is to respond with
“this is how much we can save the company”. Revenue generation and
cost reduction should be viewed as equivalents.
- Create a social media strategy
and offer to implement in phases - This is the biggest mistake I made when
presenting. I didn’t have a clear cut strategy for implementation
and execution. I also went all out instead of keeping it simple
especially for a company that was new to social media. Make sure you
spend some time to break down your strategy that includes company
objectives, social media objectives, implementation, execution, and
analytics. Managing social media implementation in phases is
less overwhelming and you will be able to see the impact more clearly.
- Keep IT involvement at a minimum – Your IT/tech department is
most likely overworked with numerous other requests within your
company. One of the biggest selling points is to keep IT involvement
at a minimum. For a small businesses that hire IT consultants, this
is an even better reason why you need to sell social media as a marketing
campaign first with little tech involvement required. Be sure you
have a couple IT people on your social media bandwagon and to show your
boss that these people are willing to help with the necessary enhancements
required. If no one in IT is willing to help with any issues and
your boss asks the “what if” question, you’ll be at a loss for
words. Be proactive.
- Find “the one” who also believes
in social media to CYA
– This is a tricky one. If you’re in a small business, you are most
likely the biggest and possibly only believer in social media.
However for larger corporations there will be at least a couple that
aligns your beliefs with theirs. Find that person and network to use
them as support. It’s all about leverage and Covering Your Ass.
- Show and tell – Show your boss what is being said
about your company. Tell them
about case studies and statistics - Examples are a
must; stats help too. Think about your college days when you were in
(insert your major) class. How much did it help to see a real life
example of what the heck your professor was talking about? There are a ton
of case studies out there that prove social media works from a sales perspective and to a brand management and culture perspective.
- Set expectations for your boss in terms of timing and what kind
of reporting/analytics to expect. Define success metrics. This
is the second biggest mistake I made; I oversold. Social media is
not immediate and the dollars generated from your social media efforts
will take even longer. You need to find your voice in the social
media world and develop a foundation. It takes time and
commitment. Half-assing it will take you back a few steps.
- Explain the reasons why businesses should use social media
– Get to the point of why social media works: brand management, SEO
benefit, lead generation/cost reduction. You want to mix in tangible
results with intangible results. Explaining the tangible results,
e.g., bottom line revenue, cost reduction, should be proceeded with
expectations to your boss about timing. Social media takes time and
commitment.
- I suffer from information overload so I don’t need
anymore.
- Social media can certainly be overwhelming at first
especially if you believe in any of these objections. Don’t just
jump into social media and think you are ready. Take it in
stride. Set goals and monthly expectations. Information
overload will only continue to grow and you do not want to fall
behind. It’s also inevitable. Technology continues to change
and improve the way we obtain information.
- We’ll stick with traditional media
- Traditional media outlets are also using social
media. In early 2009, CNN purchased a Twitter account that had nearly 1MM followers at that time (it now
has almost tripled that amount of followers).
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