I recently conducted another social media session for a group of executives that focused on using Twitter as an effective part of their sales strategy. As a big fan of Hootsuite, I also shared tips for using Hootsuite to manage and schedule their messages. During the discussion, one gal asked me, “What the heck does RT mean?”  I couldn’t help but laugh, and her question reminded me that the lingo of social media can be a little frustrating and intimidating to the newbie.

In no particular order, here’s a list of many of the common terms used in social media and in texting. There are probably loads more, so weigh in with any you feel that I’ve missed.

Peeps: Peeps started on Twitter, but I find myself using it as part of my language referring to the folks in my network. As in…”I’ll alert my peeps to the news.”

BTW: By the way.

FB: Facebook

FP: Fan Page. People are often confused about fan pages. Think of this as your business page. On Facebook, you have your personal profile and you can set up a fan page. I have a fan page for Talent Builders and for The New Handshake.

Blog: Web log. Think of it as a personal or professional diary on the web. You share your musings about things that interest you.

Tweets: Messages sent via Twitter

RT: Retweet. Think of this as “forwarding” a Twitter message on to others.  When your messages are being re-tweeted, you know people liked the information enough to share it with their network. Gives you more visibility too.

FWIW: For what it’s worth.

LOL: Laugh out loud.

LMAO: Laugh my a** off.

LMK: Let me know.

FF: Follow Friday. This has become a tradition on Twitter. Every Friday, people tweet about the people they like or follow using the hastag (we’ll get to that one in a second) #FF.

Hashtag: it is a fancy, schmancy term for putting a “#” symbol in front of a topic that you want to not only track but have your messages included in the hashtag stream. For example, I use #newhandshake in many of my Tweets. It is a term that supports the work I’m doing to get the word out about my book. It makes it easy for me to track conversations by searching on #newhandshake. The cool thing is that when people re-tweet or use your hashtag in their messages, you gain even more visibility. Conferences use this all the time.

LI: LinkedIn Also uses the hashtag #in on Twitter.

DM: Direct Message. Via Twitter people can send you direct messages. These are messages that only you see. By the way, you need to be following each other in order to use this function.

Auto DM: To take the DM thing a bit further, you will find that many people – I’m not one of them – have an automatic DM set to go out the moment that you follow them on Twitter. The reason that I don’t like it is because many folks use this as a way to send you a sales pitch with a link back to their website, fan page, blog, whatever. I don’t believe your first interaction with someone should be a sales pitch so this approach gets on my nerves.

SEO: Search Engine Optimization. Using keywords on your website, blog or social profiles garners you greater visibility and traction when people do searches. I mention social profiles, because you want to use keywords in your LinkedIn headline and throughout your summary also to increase the likelihood that your profile pops up when someone searches on those terms.

Sales executives are feeling the pressure to ensure that sales quotas are met and that pressure often leads to fear, desperation and a focus on short-term sales results.

Don’t get me wrong…achieving monthly sales objectives are important. If there are no sales then ultimately there is no business to run. I’ve been a sales professional for close to 30-years and a business owner for almost 10, so I get it. Consistent revenue flowing in the door month after month is a must. Here’s what worries me though. This short-term focus leads many sales reps to ignore some of the basic fundamentals of selling in a social sales world. I know this because of the steady stream of unsolicited sales pitches I receive on a daily basis.

Don’t Abuse the Medium

A phrase that I’m fond of using is “Just because you can, that doesn’t mean that you should.” As the world of sales continues to evolve and transform as a result of the widespread use of social media, many sales professionals need to take a crash course in online etiquette. Sending potential buyers a spam sales pitch is akin to a cold call only worse. With voice mail, your message leaving time is typically pretty short, but when you send email you can go on forever about how grand your product is service is and believe me…many do.

Relationship First, Selling Second

If sales teams aren’t producing consistently, perhaps the answer isn’t in pushing them to “work harder”. Let’s face it folks… activity should never be confused with sales effectiveness. Insisting that your sales reps make 100 cold calls per day is activity, but is it truly effective? Though many old school sales folks will respond with a resounding – yes, cold calling works – the reality is that cold calling doesn’t work and adds expense to the sales cycle to boot. To me, it seems a bit delusional to think that calling 100 strangers whose business you know nothing about will lead to anything meaningful from a sales perspective. The same goes for sending your peeps out into the world telling them to “go bang on doors”. Seriously?

Social media provides a unique opportunity for today’s social sales professional. Instead of banging on doors, sending spam email or calling 100 strangers, why not put that time to better use? To improve your sales close ratio, what if..

• You created a target list of the top 50 companies that you want to do business with and you used tools like LinkedIn or InsideView to learn more about their people and their business BEFORE making that first connection.
• You looked for ways to do something of benefit for the prospects that you are targeting without asking for anything in return? Use LinkedIn to share industry presentations, articles, white papers or perhaps send a sales lead their way.
• You understood that you get ONE chance to make a solid connection and a great impression. Don’t blow it by sending people the same old boring sales spam email that you just sent to everyone else.

Fix the Right Thing

When sales are off, please avoid the temptation to insist that your sales people just “do more”. Doing more of what already isn’t working will not lead to different results. Einstein defined that as insanity.

If you want different results – do something differently!

Recently, colleague Scott Williford of My Interview Link helped me to create a series of video clips that talks about our business services. Scott offers a great service for the job seeker and/or the business professional looking for a professional way to showcase what they offer. When I showed up that morning to film my segments, I was impressed with the professional set up. Brent filmed the segments and did a nice job making me look good:). Check out the 5 vignettes here. At the end of the shoot, Scott asked me to film a couple of blog clips talking about social media. Enjoy the clip posted here.

Today, I’ve got my social sales evangelism hat on, because I sometimes forget that not everyone sees the value in using new technology to augment their sales process. Though by now it’s pretty obvious that social media is here to stay, there continues to be debate about whether or not the use of social media can actually have any impact on your sales. Many sales professionals still view the use of social media as either something that “the kids” are using, or they believe that the use of social media has no real role to play in the sales process. Unfortunately, these attitudes cause many folks to completely ignore the opportunity that social technologies offer them. That, in my opinion, is a shame.

Let’s do away with the first myth right now…that social media is just a kid’s thing.

As you might expect, this sentiment is most often expressed by the boomer generation who’ve not quite accepted that social goes way beyond their kid’s texting about the concert they attended last night. Yes, the younger set has grown up digital, so it’s more natural for them to use Facebook or Twitter to keep up with their social networks. But as evidenced by the skyrocketing growth of LinkedIn, more than 90 million business professionals are using LinkedIn as a viable medium for networking with potential buyers, referral partners and current customers. In fact, did you know that roughly 70% of those LinkedIn users are decision makers? In other words, these are the people who can buy your products and services. Now, it is true that far too many LinkedIn users aren’t using the technology as effectively as they could be, but that’s a subject for another post.

What about the mistaken belief that social media has no role to play in sales?

After hundreds of conversations with business owners and sales executives, I think one main reason many sales people resist using social technology is because they have unrealistic expectations about what social media can do for them. A LinkedIn profile today doesn’t mean an immediate sale tomorrow. Frankly, that’s just as unrealistic as thinking you’ll meet someone tonight at a networking event and by morning will have a deal. The value of social media is about increased exposure with a wider audience of people who can buy from you. I like to say that just because you have something to sell, it doesn’t mean that your prospect is ready to buy. If you aren’t visible in the social space, it’s not likely that your name will rise to the top of potential vendors when the time comes.

Remember…

Your prospects have far more options than ever before. They also spend a fair amount of time gathering information online. It’s cool if you don’t feel the need to have presence in the social space, but your savvy competitors are no doubt there. Are you sure that’s a risk you are willing to take?

What a great webinar session I held today with our guest expert, Peggy Duncan. Though I’m a bit of a tech dweeb myself, I picked up some great tips, which I plan to implement immediately. In fact, I’ve already put a few of Peggy’s suggestions into action. Since it was such a power packed presentation, I thought that I would summarize some of her key points. You’ll find a list of the “technology” suggestions listed at the bottom with links to their sites.

• Benefits include: boosting your search engine rankings (SEO), building your brand and providing another way to reach the masses. These things translate into building credibility, loyalty and increased sales.




• Email is still a very viable marketing vehicle and should be an integral part of your overall social media strategy.  And on that note, remember that your social media plan can also incorporate things like blogging, webinars, video, as well as using LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.




• Always remember to provide compelling information that not only showcases your core expertise, but creates value in advance of the sales opportunity. You always want to give people a reason to keep coming back to your blog or sign up for your email list.




• Write for people. Every day things are happening in your business world that can become a great blog post. As an example, as I’m summarizing the webinar information from our session today, I now have a blog post.




• What if I’m not a writer? Hire someone to help you. If you are better verbally, get a tape recorder to record your thoughts and then type them up. Also consider a service like www.jott.com for both recording and transcribing. Plus, the service will help push out your messages through your social sites.




• When you are getting started, consider setting up a “hosted” WordPress blog from the beginning. You can host with companies like Host Gator, GoDaddy or any number of hosting platforms. The benefit to doing this from the start is that you can customize to your specifications. When you run a “free blog” with WordPress.com you are limited (due to security issues) to the number of widgets and gadgets you can add to your site.




• As you create your content, Peggy recommended that you write about what you know. Talk about how what you do solves problems for prospective buyers. Don’t forget that blogging isn’t just about writing. You can have guest bloggers, video interviews, whitepapers and more.




• Make those posts sizzle with compelling headlines and don’t forget to incorporate phrases that tell someone how you solve their problem. Remember that when someone has a problem to solve, that’s what they Google. For example, “I need help creating a Twitter background.” If you’ve created your headline to incorporate that message, your rankings improve.




• Build traffic by promoting to your various social sites. And for you LinkedIn users (and you better be using LinkedIn as a sales networking tool!), you can integrate your blog to feed your LinkedIn profile.

Take Action

As I concluded the webinar today, I reminded everyone of the importance of taking action. What’s the point of sitting in on webinars, whether you paid for them or not, if you never do anything with the information? If you are looking for a low cost learning and coaching option to help your put social media to work for you in driving sales revenue, I’ve just launched a group coaching community that not only will give you the training that you need, but the coaching and encouragement along the way to help you put learning into action. Learn more here. You’ll find other individual coaching options here.

Technology List

Finally, here is a list of the technology that Peggy discussed during the session. I plan to get started with a few of them myself!!

www.viddler.com Incorporate your video into your blog, as well as host on YouTube. You’ll find the vidget tool that Peggy mentioned here http://vidgets.viddler.com/

www.feedjit.com This nifty little tool lets you know when someone visits your site. Remember, just because people may not be actively commenting on your blog that doesn’t mean they haven’t dropped by to read what you’ve posted.

www.linkwithin.com This WordPress plugin increases page views and keeps your readers engaged. The widget links to stories that are relevant and interesting to readers of a particular post, keeping them engaged with your blog, and increasing your traffic.

www.facebook.com Use the notes section (to the left under create group. Note, you may have to expand the list), to drive additional traffic to your blog, webinar or events.

www.google.com/addurl Use this to register your blog URL. Why? To increase traffic of course. If you want more visibility for your business locally use https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=lbc&passive=1209600&continue=http://www.google.com/local/add/businessCenter&followup=http://www.google.com/local/add/businessCenter

www.hootsuite.com For managing your content posts, you can use Hootsuite to post to multiple social media sites. The free version lets you post to 5 social sites and/or RSS feeds.

www.postling.com Similar to Hootsuite, but here is the core difference. The free version of PostLing only allows you to post to 1 social media site. The free version of Hootsuite lets your post to 5 sites. Could be Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.