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If you give a man a fish, he will eat today. If you teach a man to fish, he will eat forever. If you teach a Community Manager to fish, she will get a promotion and a raise.
Ancient Chinese Proverb Adapted by Eric Boggs, CEO, Argyle Social

There are two types of social business specialists: oceanographers & fishermen.

Very few social business practitioners think like fishermen. The allure of monitoring ocean trends and social sentiment distracts most social media professionals from meticulously tracking the fish theyre charged with reeling in ( or retaining! ) as customers. A fisherman-like social practice cultivates individual relationships at a massive scale and uses social to move these relationships down the consideration funnel.

Largely, social business practitioners think like oceanographers. They monitor and measure the flowing currents, roaring waves, and ever-changing tides across the endless oceans of social chatter. An oceanographic social practice is important: it illuminates the public zeitgeist, it reveals the strength of your brand, and, when done well, in can provide prescriptive strategic insight.

We believe that fishing-focused practitioners will drive the next wave of social business innovation.
Mentions are up off to port! Hoist the sails, we need to get more followers!

( or fisherwomen )

Website

Social Business Spans the Enterprise

Organic Social
Community management stands out as a business practice because it spans functional areas. From activating customer conversations to routing leads to the sales team to serving as a first-touch support contact to cultivating product feedback, the Community Managers social programs touch all parts of the business. When done well, strategic social programs should be a part of a business core strategic framework, tracking prospect and customer interactions at all stages of their life cycle. Enter the CRM The CRM is the system of record for the customer it is tasked with tracking the entire history of a customers interaction with the business and driving all customer-related processes. Your CRM contains all of the fish that your organization has caught in the past and those that it hopes to catch in the future. Regardless of company size or technology implementation, the goal of CRM remains the same: a single view of the customer that spans from the first interaction of the consideration cycle to the most recent retention interaction.

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Fishermen vs. Oceanographers

With this CRM-centric framework in mind, lets revisit the oceanographer vs. fishermen thesis and consider some important contrasts.

Many social professionals should be oceanographers. If you sell low-cost products to high volumes of customers, it may not make sense to attempt to track every individual fish. Consumer products companies like Coke or large retailers like Whole Foods need to operate in aggregate, because they have too many customers and each customer is of (relatively) low value. Companies like Coke and Whole Foods track broad ocean trends to anticipate where the schools of fish are today and where they might be headed tomorrow. They manage very large brand advertising budgets to drive high-volume, anonymous transactions from fairly small fish.

Other social professionals must learn to think like fishermen. For organizations that sell higher-cost products to individual buyers and maintain one-to-one relationships namely B2B companies with sales teams CRM is the business. The B2B Community Manager must think like a fisherman because B2B organizations build their entire operation around the fish. Fisherman organizations look at the world fundamentally different than the aforementioned oceanographic organizations. They build relationships with each individual fish so that they can reel them in one at a time, as quickly as possible.

Different methods require different tools. Oceanographers use Van Dorn bottles, Soft-Bottom Modified Peterson grabs, and plankton collectors to sample parts of the marine ecosystem and track trends over time. Radian6 ( now Salesforce Radian6 ) is the overwhelming tool of choice for the oceanographer social professional that needs to track macro trends and monitor broad-based chatter. Fishermen, depending on the scale of their operation, use fish finders and some combination of rods, reels, nets, and lures to haul in their catch. No social marketing software provider has fully addressed the social fishing problem very well yet...

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The Social Business Blind Spot

B2B marketers do a good job tracking prospect activity on their websites and in their email campaigns and then mapping this activity to the individual. This enables targeted email marketing, efficient sales teams, and insightful revenue performance management. On the other hand, B2B marketers do a poor job of tracking prospect activity on social media and mapping this activity to the individual. As more of the B2B buying cycle occurs in social channels, more of the fish are starting to swim out of view of traditional fish finders. B2B marketers are left casting in the dark. How quickly is this blind spot spreading? According to the data, pretty darn quickly.
The multi-billion dollar marketing automation industry exists solely to solve this problem. Companies like Unica, Aprimo, Eloqua, Marketo, Pardot, and InfusionSoft ( & plenty of others ) are the fish finders that B2B fishermen use every day. And only a very small piece of the overall B2B market uses these products, so this trend is only beginning.

People spend an overwhelming amount of their day on social sites. 60% of the B2B purchase decision happens before they talk to a salesperson.

If you put 1 and 1 together, it is pretty obvious that social media plays an increasingly important role in the B2B buying cycle. Prospects no longer contact your sales team for product information they seek it out themselves from the web and from their colleagues via social media sites. 12 ComScore, http://ar.gy/1CdF Corporate Executive Board, http://ar.gy/1CdI 13

Fishing In A Blind Spot

How well are B2B organizations integrating social into their sales and marketing processes? By and large, not very effectively.

Leakage occurs at the top of the funnel.

Social is an amazing sales enabler. Prospective customers seek out referrals and reviews from their social networks as a part of their evaluation process, and are immediately able to connect with a representative from the company. The personal recommendation combined with the low barrier to direct communication would, in an ideal world, be an extremely effective way to initiate a sales conversation.
Anyone know a great smm product out there?

Businesses miss opportunities to drive prospects down the funnel.

Social interactions such as retweets, mentions, comments, and likes all create excellent prompts to re-start paused sales conversations. But organizations dont connect the dots between social interactions and CRM records. At most socially active companies, an attentive community manager will receive and respond to social interactions. But this community manager, being the steward of many thousands (or millions) of social connections, is unable to know the context of any individual prospect. Is @jthandy a new lead or an opportunity that is scheduled to close next week? Is this the first time Ive talked to him or the 37th? Obviously, this information would be extremely actionable in the hands of a community manager. It would be even more useful in the hands of a prospects assigned sales rep. Marketing automation tools built around the email stack do an excellent job of connecting marketing interactions (email clicks, collateral downloads) with the assigned sales rep. This alerts the sales rep of an opportunity to restart a stalled sales conversation. No such connections exist within the world of social media.

Im looking for one, too...

Have you checked out @argylesocial? Let me know if I can be helpful! Happy to show you what weve got

In reality, nearly all organizations drop the ball somewhere during this process. There are the obvious pitfalls of a) not listening or b) not empowering employees to respond, but companies are learning to do better on both of these fronts. The real problems are c) the community manager fielding the inquiry has no effective way to feed the lead into the established sales pipeline, and d) if the sales person is notified of the lead, he/she doesnt have any context for an ensuing conversation. What should have been a speedy introduction leading to a friendly interaction with a sales guy has instead turned into nothing at worst and a ham-fisted exchange at best. 14

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But for two reasons, it is unlikely that social networks will ever provide user-specific data to their marketer partners:

Platforms will not provide the fish-finding data that marketers need.
Social networks aggregate massive amounts of data to enable targeted advertising the Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter ad platforms all provide unique examples. Many networks also provide platform analytics like Facebook Insights and Twitter Analytics that surface aggregated insights.

Privacy concerns and associated public outcry creates a PR and government regulatory roadblock. Releasing person-level social data by social platforms is already illegal in Europe and could potentially become so in other areas of the world in the future. All major social platforms currently base their business models around aggregation and monetization of data, primarily via ads. While they are happy to provide this data in aggregate format to oceanographic marketers, giving away individual data points ( the fish ) would erode their market position.

So marketers cannot rely on the platforms to provide them with the insight into prospect activity that they need. And as an increasing percentage of the purchase decision continues to move outside of the website and onto social networks, businesses will continue to lose visibility into core marketing data and buying signals. The prospect remains anonymous for longer and marketing interactions sales conversations, targeted email marketing programs, on-site offers, etc. suffer as a result. Marketers need to bridge this gap without help from each social platform.

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Envisioning the Solution

Email marketing automation changed email marketing from a standalone activity into one that is deeply integrated in the day-today operation of sales and marketing teams. In the same way, social business automation will transform social media from a sideline marketing activity into one with connective tissue through the entire selling organization. And it will do this by focusing on the individual fish.

Social Lead Scoring

Lead scoring is an incredibly valuable tool to judge how engaged a user is with your brand. A lead score is a proxy for activity level, and is an effective indicator of sales readiness. In fact, lead scoring has been shown to nearly double the ROI of lead generation programs.

77% improvement in lead generation ROI from lead scoring

Lets try a simple example. Compare these two prospects and make a determination which prospect is most likely to welcome a sales call: Prospect A
Downloaded a white paper from a landing page. Exited your website.

Prospect B
Downloaded a white paper from a landing page. Clicked through to your website and spent a few minutes browsing, including viewing your pricing page and your product description.

Prospect A has a passing interest in your content. Prospect B is curious about your product and is likely somewhere in the buying consideration cycle. If your sales reps call more Prospect Bs and less Prospect As, they will become more productive. Lead scoring tools reflect this by assigning a higher score to Prospect B, thereby allowing reps to easily prioritize their activities.

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Search Engine Watch, http://ar.gy/1Cmk

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Current lead scoring technologies account for actions taken on your website: forms filled out, pages viewed, content downloaded, etc. Social signals such as comments, likes, retweets, and replies are completely left out of this equation. Lets see what the world looks like when you include these signals, revisiting our example. Prospect A
Downloaded a white paper from a landing page. Exited your website. Then sent a Tweet to @YourBrand: Hey! I just read your whitepaper. Great stuff! Id love to take a look at what you folks are up to...

Prospect B
Downloaded a white paper from a landing page Clicked through to your website and spent a few minutes browsing, including viewing your pricing page and your product description.

This interaction happens all the time in the world of the new B2B buyer. And current technologies would have you believe that Prospect A is disinterested while Prospect B is engaged. In reality, Prospect A has shown far more interest and engagement than Prospect B and should be contacted as soon as possible. If your company used social lead scoring technology, Prospect A would be assigned a higher score than Prospect B, ensuring that a rep would reach out to them sooner.

Social lead scoring is a powerful augmentation to your existing lead scoring methodologies. Social signals round out the prospect activity profile and empowers sales teams to more effectively organize and prioritize their time. All of which boosts your revenue performance, of course.

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Prospects

Social Sales Enablement

Community Managers are paid to be plugged into The Matrix. Epic volumes of social data flow around and through them all day long. The good ones develop extremely sophisticated filtering mechanisms to absorb and respond to as much relevant information as possible. But the rest of your organization doesnt reap benefits from this connectedness. Community managers simply dont have the bandwidth to keep the rest of us in the loop when theyre responsible for listening to and participating in hundreds if not thousands of conversations every single day. As a result, significant information disconnects emerge between the community manager and the rest of the organization. One of the most significant is that community managers often have conversations with in-process sales prospects and the assigned sales rep never even knows about it. This is obviously less than ideal. It creates the potential for confusion and mixed messages, and hides valuable information from the rep that could be used to push the deal forwards. Social sales enablement closes this communication gap. With a fishing-based community strategy and some social data trickery, Community Managers can build programs that automatically notify sales reps when their prospects are engaging in social activity related to your brand (e.g. retweets, replies, comments, and likes) and assists them in taking corresponding actions. This type of information can restart stalled sales conversations or push active ones further down the funnel. 22

Swim around all day looking for tasty morsels. Suspicious of anything with a string attached.

Community Managers
Responsible for setting out delicious bait and getting nibbles from prospects.

Uncharted Territory
Information from community managers never makes it across the vast expanse between marketing and sales.

Sales Reps
Operate in complete isolation from all of the activity between prospects and community managers.

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Imagine the following notifications as received by a sales rep paired with these follow-up activities: Notification
Your lead Lead A mentioned @YourBrand yesterday at 2:15pm: Hey @YourBrand, whats your pricing? I cant find it on your website... Your lead Lead C liked your recent Facebook post called How to Fix your Golf Swing and Your Inbound Marketing at the Same Time

Follow-up Activity
Sales rep hops on Twitter to craft a personalized reply and follows up with a phone call to ask if the lead is interested in more information. Sales rep uses the opportunity as a conversation starter and sends a brief email saying Thanks for sharing our blog post! We havent spoken in a while; I hope all is well.

Sales reps are always looking for reasons to stay in touch with high value leads, and social sales enablement gives them the tools they need to do so efciently. The Community Manager does the hard work to create the interaction; a social sales enablement program captures that value by connecting the dots.

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Social Customer Service Enablement

Social media is an increasingly important channel for customers to voice customer service inquiries. A recent study conducted in the UK showed a doubling of inquiry volume over 8 months to 18 million total inquiries. This same study showed a wide demographic breakdown for those who used social channels for customer service, indicating that this volume isnt just driven by millennials. But despite the volume of social inquiries, most companies dont have their customer service organizations tuned for social. The main problem, as we saw earlier with sales, is an informational disconnect. Case management tools are the center of the customer service world. Reps arent sitting on Twitter or Facebook during work hours, theyre glued to their case management screens. If a customer inquiry doesnt show up in their queue, a customer service rep doesnt know or care about it. If an organization wants to effectively serve their customers who are now reaching out to them via social channels more than ever it needs to integrate its community management function with its customer service case management tool. Community managers need to be able to answer basic questions but escalate true customer support inquiries. And this entire process needs to be seamless; the entire escalation pathway needs to occur within the tools that each department is most comfortable using.

Be careful when setting the boundaries between these two organizations. There are several pitfalls that companies sometimes fall into.

Dont dump your entire social stream into your case management tool. Most social messages dont require a response, and crowding up your case management tool will just lead to inefficiency within Customer Service. Dont push off all questions to Customer Service. Community Managers are better suited to deal with social messages, as they are native to the medium. Allow them to respond to questions to the extent possible, and then provide a seamless escalation pathway to Customer Service. Dont respond to a Tweet with an email. Most case management platforms are email-based, and most customer service organizations are used to sending emails. But if a customer messaged you via a social channel, their expectation is that they will receive a response via the same channel. We call this symmetry of response.

Customer service reps use the tools that facilitate their workflow. Community managers use the tools that facilitate their workflow. Social Customer Support Enablement integrates these tools together so that community managers can selectively escalate conversations into support cases, and service reps can easily follow up.

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The Next Web, http://ar.gy/1Ccd

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Social Marketing Automation

So far all of the capabilities that weve discussed have been centered around a theme: equipping staff with additional hyper-relevant social data to improve their effectiveness. Social marketing automation sails further into uncharted waters. Instead of attempting to claim that we can see that far out into the future, were going to explore this topic with a set of questions.

Visible with a Spyglass

Visible with the Naked Eye

If you could automatically follow every lead that submitted a form on your website, how many of them would the follow you back? If you could automatically tweet everyone downloading your white paper on gluten-free cat food @catlady329, thanks for downloading our white paper! Let us know if you ever have any questions about the benefits of gluten-free cat food!, how many of them would respond and start a real conversation?

If you could identify all of your biggest influencers people who, when they share your content, generate the most awareness and send them targeted messages and offers within your marketing automation tool, would you be able to create more value out of these relationships? If you could identify your lurkers people who love to read your content but never interact with you and proactively start conversations with them, would they be more likely to interact with you in the future? If you could send drip campaigns from your marketing automation platform based on a prospects socially-sourced communication preferences and interest data, would response rates increase?

These types of capabilities will be available to community managers in the not-too-distant future. Be on the lookout for intelligent automation tools that will use data from your CRM and marketing automation platforms to deliver targeted, valuable content to your social audience.

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Social Pipeline Reporting

Measurement is the core of effective digital marketing. Finding out what works and what doesnt and iterating messaging, targeting, and channels is the critical iterative process that leads to strong program returns. One of the key data points needed to feed this process is the return on investment for a given marketing campaign. Campaign ROI is the key data point required to feed this measurement process. A marketing programs efficacy is measured in business returns leads generated, website purchases, opportunities won. Marketers are used to reports like this within most major channels that they use every day. Email, paid search, affiliate, and display advertising all have ROI baked in to their standard reporting. Social does not. The reason for this is simple: the technologies are only now being developed to allow marketers to associate social actions with individual prospects and their individual purchase decisions. And it is only when you can map marketing activities to purchase decisions that youre able to come up with a meaningful ROI. Currently, community managers are reporting on leading indicators ( follower counts, number of retweets, etc. ) rather than business outcomes. But they want, and need, to report on actionable business metrics. Social campaign reports for B2B companies need to have the following metrics:

Audience Size ( # of fans or followers ) Penetration rate ( # of interactions / audience size )

think of this as email open rate Leads generated Opportunities generated Opportunities won New Revenue

This is a social campaign report. If you dont have this data, youre not conducting sound, results-oriented marketing campaigns. You cant get this data without mapping social actions to underlying prospects.

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The Community Manager Gets A Raise

We made a silly claim at the top of the document

Teach a community manager to fish, and she will get a raise and a promotion.
The delivery is obviously a joke, but were absolutely serious about the sentiment. Community Managers play a pivotal role in the evolving social business. They have the most public-facing position of anyone in their organizations they must be, at the same time, a brand ambassador, a customer support rep, a sales rep, a product strategist. And they need to do all of this while seeming like a normal human being that your audience can relate to. Up until this point, the community manager has been an unsung hero. This manifesto is, more than anything, about taking the work that the community manager does day-in, day-out, and elevating it throughout the business. Putting sales insights in the hands of sales reps. Surfacing customer support cases. And giving the CMO real insight into socials impact as a marketing channel. We want to make these things happen. And if you are a community manager, you should want these things too. Its time for social media to take its seat at the table. And its time for you to ask for that raise.

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The Argyle Social Solution

If youve made it this far, thanks for sticking with us and thanks for reading. We entitled this document a manifesto for a reason. We think that the stuff weve been preaching for the past 30 pages is important. Social media can be transformative for B2B businesses, but only when Community Managers have a tool that connects them directly to the individual fish, and connects their activities with the rest of the enterprise. As of June 1st, 2012, that tool didnt yet exist. As of June 1st, 2012, you couldnt connect community managers activities with prospects social interactions with your CRM, help desk, and ecommerce data, even if you wanted to. Today you can. Companies have two ways to get this functionality:

The Argyle Social Signals API allows companies to take this

social data and feed it into any of their core enterprise systems. And Argyle for Salesforce.com is a plug-and-play integration that makes this data available within your Salesforce.com instance. http://ar.gy/1Ceb

Transparency is a core value at Argyle, so we figured we might as well give notice to our customers, our competitors, and our partners what weve been up to and where were headed. If youre a Community Manager and youre interested in these ideas, give us a shout wed love to take you on a fishing trip. 34 35

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