Social Media & The Sales Team
Over the course of the last few weeks, I’ve been privileged to discuss Social Media Marketing issues with some of the country’s largest retailers.
I was impressed and surprised by the level of congruity between Marketing and Customer Service. Many of these brands have finally embraced the fact that chatter about their brands online is as worthy of attention and response as an article in the mainstream media.
Sidebar: For more on this topic, including how Social Media is impacting the Contact Centers of large brands, I sincerely recommend you check out Jeremiah Owyang’s Social CRM Pioneers Google Group, and of course Jeremiah’s own recent post.
As inspiring as it was to see these retailers’ new enthusiasm — for a trend that used to cause them to despair about a “loss of control” — I also noted a not-so-happy disconnect between Marketing and Sales/Merchandizing.
For as much as Marketing and Customer Service have aligned, the Sales teams at these retailers still seemed to very much consider Social Media to be “just another channel” and, worse, a “magical” channel.
Time and again, I heard retailers’ community managers complain of numerous requests from Sales to “tweet about the latest promotions,” as if tweeting about a newly-discounted product would lead to a wild revenue boost.
Luckily, most of these community managers were finding a proper balance. They might push back on Sales; they might create a separate Twitter handle or Facebook page exclusively for branded deals and coupons; etc. In all cases it was too soon to gauge the effectiveness of these approaches: they were stopgap measures intended to “get Sales off our backs” while they went about monitoring/responding/engaging for the sake of community building.
I predict a time in the near future, though, where a rogue Sales team decides that the Marketing/Social team is moving too slowly, and goes their own way.
It’s not hard to imagine the ounce of naivete required for a marketing manager to consider a paid blogger relations campaign. They might not even think to check-in with the corporate PR department – they may give such a campaign no more weight than if they were crafting a new piece of direct mail.
To the unsophisticated marketer, this “blogging stuff” may simply represent a new channel to exploit.
Today I’d only amend it to say, “this ‘Twitter stuff,’” and I’d be more likely to pin the potential troublemaker as a salesman vs. a marketing manager. Today’s marketers have learned from the mistakes of their peers. Because many salespeople are laser focused on revenue-generation, they may have missed those Best Practices and may be doomed to repeat some of those past mistakes.
Make no mistake: while railroads have been built and clapboard towns are being erected, the Social Media landscape is still very much the Wild West.
Continue reading here: Social Media & Crisis Communications
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