Social Media

Not alot of companies and small businesses really get the point of social media and engaging customers.  Often, we'll see people attempting to make sales pitches with social media, and wonder why they aren't getting the remarkable amounts of traffic they've heard about.

Check out this infographic from InsideView: http://cdn.insideview.com/images/social-media-infographic.png. It illustrates the growth of social media usage in the B2B space. Though the data is, well, dated, it’s less about the numbers and more about the overall trend.

Generally speaking, an online item of viral marketing is something that spreads through personal contact, from one person to the next, and the speed at which is spreads is exponential. In the marketing Internet area are viral reports, viral articles, viral videos, even viral blogs and not at last this concept maybe applied to social marketing and Web 2.0 too.

An area that has recently exploded in terms of CRM, is customer service delivered via social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. A recent survey commissioned by Lightspeed Research in the UK found that the majority of customers attempting to contact organisations via these channels are only prepared to wait 'a day' for a response while one in five Twitter complainers expected a response within an hour.

How social media affects relationships? Business people pursue relationship but what they’re ultimately seeking is trust. That is to say, they use relationship to reach customer trust, which is the holy grail of success sales. Trust is essential for customers to decide on the product or company that you represent. You may enjoy spending time with your customers at dinner table or golf club but ultimately it’s more important they trust you than like you.