Business Development, Telemarketing, and Sales professionals battle everyday to find ways to get past the gatekeeper.  In the emerging market of Social Media many professionals are leaving this untapped opportunity on the table.

Social Media has eliminated the gatekeeper in most cases.  How long will this window remain open know one knows, but it’s open.

Here are some of the ways to go straight to the decision maker using Social Media.

1.        Utilize the search system of LinkedIn, you can often find the decision maker you are looking for by adding the right keywords.   You can then either direct message them or pay for an in-mail account and send them a direct message as well.  Often times the persons contact information will be on their LinkedIn profile.

2.       Join target market groups on LinkedIn and Facebook.  Again utilize the search application to find decision makers or even find those who work at a specific company who can give you the information you need to contact your target.

3.       Find them on twitter using search.twitter.com and send them a message to their personal account or to the staff member who runs the corporate twitter account.

These are just some of the ways that Business Development, Telemarketing, and Sales professionals can find decision makers using social media.

Bonus if you don’t currently use Jigsaw you should check it out.  You can find countless contacts with phone numbers, email, etc.

So what ways do you use Social Media to get past the gatekeeper?

When it comes to business development and marketing it has become more complex and costly in prospect acquisition.  Companies are now awaking to using Social Media in not just B2C, but are realizing its potential in B2B.

Here are some of ways social media has changed B2B Marketing.

Client Prospecting- can now been done affordably through such platforms as LinkedIn & Twitter.  In order to get to your B2B prospect via Facebook companies are looking at more costly prospect acquisition cost.

Customer Share- social media allows you to now due blanket marketing to an existing customer in multiple touch points with many employees being engaged in social media.  Thus, allowing you the ability to influence increases in customer share.

Sales Funnels- social media allows you to build your own exclusive online communities built around industry topics, specific interest, or organizations.  Through this exclusive community ability you can manage them within your own sales funnel as long as you own or create the community. In turn, allowing you to message your entire community as owner of the community.

What are some other ways you are seeing social media changing B2B marketing?

(We work with B2B companies in providing an ROI driven Social Media Strategy that drives the results you're looking for, contact us today.)

When you get into the realm of the small business owner, you will find that social media is truly creeping in at an amazing pace. The majority of this can be found by the usage of social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Some of the basic benefits of using these sites would include the ability to make business contacts and maintain the links that you need between yourself and them.

The sites that I mentioned can be utilized in several different and very beneficial ways.

With Facebook, both an account for yourself as well as for your business can be created. By developing good communication with customers and contacts, you can eventually get people to just opt in to get messages from your company.

Creating a LinkedIn account is an amazing way of finding and communicating with professionals all over the world, even those who are already in a field specific to your own. This is a great way to share ideas with someone who already knows about what you do because they do the same thing.

Finally, when using Twitter, remember the great benefit that you get of promoting your business in such a few short words. You will find that when you look at other tweets from business owners that they are short, sweet, and to the point most of the time. This is yet another way of bringing customers to you.

Always remember that it’s the content of what you have that is most important. Useless and boring information will get you nowhere, but the opposite will provide for a truly strong and growing business as you head into the future.

Learn more how you and your small business can get started on Linkedin: LinkedIn Power User Strategies Webinar every Thursday at 4pm EST with live Q&A

Here are five initial guiding steps to establish a Business To Business Social Media Strategy. This is not a complete guide, nor is it meant to be. I believe these are the first five things a company should be thinking about when they realize they should be engaged in the Social Space.

1. Your Message
Just to confirm you don’t need to change your message, value proposition, or qualifying questions. You just need to list them in concise “smaller” formats in order to getting your message out. So collect your key messages and great one-liners you use everyday. These will be great for status updates.

2. Identify The Key Social Platforms
As you begin the process of starting you need to identify which Social Platforms your target market will be on. I can almost guarantee if your B2B then they will be on LinkedIn, next you will find these same people on twitter and facebook as well. So in reality the Big 3, you will more than likely want to engage in.

***Grab This Complimentary eBook to specifically see how to begin***
to engage, capture, and create buzz around your company
Grab our complimentary eBook:
How Your Company Can Begin to Profit Using Social Media

3. Identify Your Internal Company Resources
Who do you currently have putting together and drafting your marketing pieces. This should be the person handling the day to day initiatives of your Social Media Strategy.

Read more about Aligning Your Companies Social Media Strategy Here:

4. Answer who should oversee your Social Media Strategy
At the end of the day who do you currently trust to generate business for your company who are the people who are ultimately responsible for sales? Your response is your answer to this question. More than likely you have an EVP or VP whom is responsible for sales company wide. This person should give final oversight to this department.

Read more about Who Should Manage Your Companies Online Message Here:

5. Create a Preliminary Social Media Policy. ~ASSUME NOTHING~
This initial policy should be to identify the processes for engagement approval. Who and or which parties will need to approve your final message(s) you are communicating, such as legal. I would not establish to many others until you are involved in it. Create policies before you ever get the opportunity to review every scenario would be a bad Social Media Strategy. In addition, don’t through initial ideas or strategies out the window based off your assumptions on how things have worked in the past in other marketing efforts or dealing with customers. Take the time to learn and review the processes behind each strategy. ~ASSUME NOTHING~

***Grab This Complimentary eBook to specifically see how to begin***
to engage, capture, and create buzz around your company
Grab our complimentary eBook:
How Your Company Can Begin to Profit Using Social Media

*TAKE A MOMENT AND RE-TWEET OR SHARE THIS MESSAGE TO YOUR BUSINESS CONNECTIONS.

When it comes to managing your companies online message and social media branding who should it be? I will share with you some of the pro’s and con’s of each category below. In the end I believe you should review this with the assumption you need a little of each profession and you may need to be more of a mediator when putting these together in a room. So the real challenge for you is to get them all to come together (play nice) and come up with something extremely powerful for your companies Social Media strategy.

***Grab This Complimentary eBook to specifically see how to begin***
to engage, capture, and create buzz around your company
Grab our complimentary eBook:
How Your Company Can Begin to Profit Using Social Media

So lets review:

Internally:
When you consider what your companies already doing to manage its sales message and who is currently handling that it is easy to assume that this person should head up your Social Media Strategy. With Social Media for business being so new, you will want to be sure that person who heads this up is “open” to this new movement as by now you understand it is definitely not going away.

You may possibly hurt your position and strategy by keeping it with your current marketing manager as this new advertising method can be very hard to grasp. In addition the knowledge and understanding it takes to capitalize in this space has up till now come from hands of trial and error.

Social Media Firm:
In the selection process of finding a Social Media firm to handle your Social Media Strategy be sure to secure a firm who has proven successful people on the team. While case studies may be few as this market develops, they should be able to showcase personal success.

In addition, new firms are popping up everywhere. Be sure to dig into these firms experience and understanding of B2B or B2C marketing and how that plays into Social Media Strategies.

Ad Agency (not the same as a Social Media Firm):
One thing many companies are gravitating to doing is to relying on their current Ad and PR Agencies to point them in the right direction with Social Media. This could be one of the worst assumptions to be making as many PR & AD Agencies are not well versed in Social Media and tend to operate off of theory rather than proven successful strategies.

Be sure your current agencies have taken pro-active steps to stay current on the Social Media movement within hiring proven successful social media professionals.

Internet Marketer:
In your search for a strong Social Media Strategy it is very easy to come across successful Internet Marketers. While this is an additional arm that needs strong consideration to your companies strategy. You do not want to throw out your standard processes you have in place in generating leads, engaging customers with key questions, etc… These elements need to be melted together when you do consult with an internet marketer.

I think there is a place for all of the above, I will say again the key is to getting them all to play nice together to bring your company to the front of the Social Media movement.

***Grab This Complimentary eBook to specifically see how to begin***
to engage, capture, and create buzz around your company
Grab our complimentary eBook:
How Your Company Can Begin to Profit Using Social Media

*TAKE A MOMENT AND RE-TWEET OR SHARE THIS MESSAGE TO YOUR BUSINESS CONNECTIONS.

Recently I received a post from a LinkedIn user who was quite bitter about Social Media. This sentiment is not that uncommon amongst my executive contacts and many of the very successful business owners I know.

I understand how at face value, social media seems like a big cluster of chaos. I mean really, how impactful can a tweet be or a LinkedIn group post or a fan page post?

Obviously strategy and tactics are requisite for success with these social tools, but failing social media campaigns are not always because of a poor strategy. Let me share with you some of our core beliefs from My Corporate Media, Your Social Media Advisor.

There are only three major components to creating successful (and profitable) social media campaigns:

1. Quality Content
2. Trust & Credibility
3. Capacity to Communicate/ Distribution Destinations (ie Group)s, Fan Pages, Followers, Etc.)

If any of these are missing from your social media campaign, IT WILL FAIL… period end of story! So for all the nay sayers out there, I challenge you to measure you successes (or failures) against these 3 categories. I would suggest that if you failed, you left out one of these 3 categories.

I share this with great confidence because My Corporate Media teaches others to follow this model and they do profit. They have attracted top fortune 1000 companies, earned 27,000 in 7 hours of real time marketing efforts, earned 250,000 over the course of 12 months, grew communities to 8,500 members in 11 days and there are many more examples.

So, my final thought for anyone that doesn’t believe social media is a place for business or a place for businesses to profit; adjust your strategy around these three principles for your next campaign and let us know how well you succeed!

*Let My Corporate Media recommend the write campaign and help you develop a strong Social Media Strategy. Email us to learn more at support@mycorporatemedia.com  Put in the subject “Help My Company With Our Social Media Strategy”

So why twitter for the business professional?

Many people in my networks are asking me why use twitter for business? I have found most people on Linkedin (which is a business professional networking site) are not really tapping into the “power” of twitter for business.

Here are seven reasons to be on twitter for business.

1. Twitter has grown by over 700% in the last year alone and over 120% in the month of March 2009. Twitter is quickly becoming THE most powerful marketing tool in history.

 
2. The new way of marketing is dialogue rather than monologue and twitter gives business’s the platform to do just that. By carrying on conversations with customers and potential customers.

3. Millions of people are on twitter potentially twitting about your company. What are you doing about brand advocacy if you are not on? Energize your customer base who are participating.

 
4. You can grow a targeted following (secure your own market to advertise) on twitter through twitters advanced search or through other 3rd party applications which can help manage your efforts and time. Hummingbird is one such application.

5. Drive events, conferences, and meetings.

6. Secure deals by twitting you’re following asking the right questions. Those questions are obviously specific to what you are selling. They are nothing more than qualifying questions. (just be sure that is not all you post) Once some have answered than just DM them.

7. Secure appointments.

To learn more on how to get started with twitter here is my twitter tutorial.

Be sure to follow me on twitter for more sales and marketing tips in social media @randyschrum or http://twitter.com/randyschrum