Connie Bensen

In my first position as a community manager I worked directly with customers. Our products ranged in price from $40 to $350. That B2C (business to customer)  environment was intuitive for me.

For the past six months I’ve been working with a company that’s mostly B2B (business to business). We offer the ability to white label our software. In turn many of our customers are agencies that offer the service to their clients. We also have companies/organizations that use our tool for their own needs.

Some of our customers realize quickly that I’m not in sales. When I was hired, my CEO specifically told me that I was not doing sales work. There was a period of time where we were growing and I tried helping out with sales. It was quickly apparent that I’m much better at opening conversations rather than closing deals. But I am pleased to say that our sales team has written some contracts for my sales so there is hope for me if I need a career change!

People wonder how my role fits into sales? It’s a great question for two reasons:

1. Customers sense how my team has evolved a great model of how a community manager can compliment & enhance the efforts of the sales team.

2. It underlines how invaluable community building can be in every organization.

One of the best things about my present role is that we have evolved together. I taught our sales team about social media and they in turn have taught me about the sales funnel. Because we have a web 2.0 product I believe that our company has to live and breathe it. I noticed that someone commented on my blog that my team should be closing sales rather than participating in social media. I disagree. I think that they all should be building community. I’ve created a team that’s well versed in my role. They are all practicing community managers!

My philosophy is that if a company provides resources & excellent customer service then people will purchase. This is how my role interweaves with the sales funnel.

• Outside the sales funnel – I build product awareness by providing information and interacting on the web at large. I help direct traffic if people are interested in learning more about our product. It’s a conversation though, not push marketing.
• In the sales funnel -  I provide high level training & specialized support. My team also knows that they can always call on my expertise in social media. This is not limited to sales but includes the executive level in regard to assistance with partnerships. Our focus is on building relationships & ensuring that the potential customer is confident that our product will serve their needs.
• After the sale – We are a software as a service (SAAS) so we really don’t have an end point  of sale but rather a monthly contract. It doesn’t matter to me because I would never consider a sale as the end of the company’s commitment. Once a customer joins the Techrigy family by purchasing they experience excellent customer service. Our customers are delighted with weekend support. This is the most important time to continue building relationships & educating on product use. We can see the result as people recommend our tool to others. Positive word of mouth isn’t something that can be bought. It’s earned.
• All around the funnel – No matter where I connect with people I’m continually gathering ideas & feedback on our product. This is imperative for our evolution. We need to provide what our customers need and what they don’t even realize they need.

In melding my role with sales the purchase cycle is 2/3 shorter in time. I have some ideas on why that has happened: 1) We have a symbiotic relationship that benefits our customers in every way. And our customers have not only noticed, but they want to know more. 2) The leads are people that are sincerely interested in our product & it suits their needs. They already know that before exploring a trial.

What could a community manager do for your business? Would you like to:

• shorten your purchase cycle?
• increase the number & quality of leads?
• increase your brand visibility?
• increase satisfaction with customer service?
• re-energize your sales department?
• gather product feedback directly from influencers, potentials and customers?
• gain market research ideas directly from the community at large?

Can you afford not to?

I’m blogging on a regular basis on the Techrigy blog  I put this post up today:

Every business wants to know how engaging in social media can increase their bottom line.

There are a number of challenges in explaining the value of social media:

• How do you show a direct benefit?
• How do you show an immediate return?

Answering those two questions is challenging because we also know that:

• much education needs to take place
• customer engagement is a long term commitment, not a short-range campaign

Social Media Monitoring Provides the Answers

Does the business have competitors? of course they do!

1. My suggestion is to set up keyword searches for the brand & it’s competitors. Then there is a two step process:

Depending on the results the discussion is indicated:

• If the brand has more conversation around it, then:
  • Doesn’t the brand want to maintain their lead online?
• If a competitor has more conversations around it, then:
  • Shouldn’t the brand get busy & consider their strategy?
• If neither the brand or competitors have any conversations around them, then:
  • Shouldn’t the brand get a head start on their competition? Seth Godin suggests that whoever is first will get a lead that’s difficult to overcome.

The next question is how to show an immediate ROI.

2. Use the results from Step One you now have a benchmark. This will provide a basis for setting goals.

Using Techrigy SM2 for social media monitoring offers many ways of analyzing the conversation. It offers an efficient way to measure brand presence, brand perception, opinion & tone. And it also identifies the conversations that the brand should be engaging with.

What will provide value to the customer?

• Is it improving customer service on the web at large?
• Is it identifying the influencers & engaging with them? 
• Is it increasing sentiment around their product?
• Does the business want to gather product development information & feedback?
• Will knowing where the conversations are taking place geographically be valuable?
• Is increased brand visibility important?
• What is the brand perception?

Once you have established what will be measured then goals can be set. What percentage improvement would the business like to achieve? That provides direction for the strategy.

I would also suggest incorporating web analytics into the strategy because those will most likely increase & are generally already a part of a business plan.

3. Finally what will be the ROI? The business needs to know what value the various points in Step 2 have. Using the goals & the cost of implementing the social media strategy then the ROI can be calculated.

Examples: each customer service call is worth $8 or each new customer signup is worth $5

The exciting part is that the conversations are benchmarked before you start. So moving through the engagement, SM2 facilitates the engagement, tracks it, analyzes the conversations & offers reporting at whatever level is needed.

Imagine if you could show your client the following chart. The blue line represents the benchline of the two previous months with no social media efforts. And the red line depicts the amount of conversation in the past two months surrounding their brand & products. With the tool you can help the client translate the ROI based on the value realized from their goals.

After reading his article on ROI vs Value, I’m going to call out Lewis Green for his input on this.

And what do you think?

Update: I’m doing a webinar on Business Cases of Monitoring Social Media on Thurs Jan 15 at 2 pm est

More info here & sign up.

You also may be interested in: Metrics for Building Brand Online

There have been many references to ROI in terms of social media. A couple of my favorites are:

• Return on Influence
• Return on Interaction

There has been a lot of discussion recently about the Community Manager position.And the article in the WSJ about the Deloitte study brought out many from the industry in defense of communities. My take was that it underlines the importance of the community manager role. Brian Solis recently had an article on the new MarComm. He highlights why companies need to start considering marketing in relational terms.

A friend that’s a VP of Marketing of an Open Source solution says it provides 12x the valuation at his company.

Here are a list of returns:

• Humanize the company by providing a voice
• Nurture the community & encourage growth
• Communicate directly with the customers
• Connect customers to appropriate internal departments
• Ensure that messaging will connect
• Build brand awareness through word of mouth
• Lower market research costs
• Add more points in the purchase cycle
• Provide support to customers that have fallen thru the cracks
• More satisfied customers because they’ve been involved with product development
• Shorten length of product development cycle
• Build public relations for brand with influentials in the industry
• Identify strengths & weaknesses of competitors
• Collaborate & partner with related organizations
• Provide industry trends to the executive level

Ian’s suggestions:

- Identify popular problems in user work flow
- Communicate use case developments to team
- Represent the user experience to organization

Your first comment will be – there aren’t any numbers there! You know your organization best so I’ll let you decide what value each of those offers. There are other factors to consider before deciding if you need a community manager, but I hope that that list starts you thinking about the value of the position.

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*cross posted at Marketing 2.0

Really this post should be titled: 

Please join me in celebrating our success!

Because a Technorati Rank is a combination of my writing & your linking to my blog and listing it on your blogroll. So let’s have a party!

First let me explain Technorati Rank as I see many people wondering about it. There are bazillions of blogs out there. When you create an account & claim your blog on Technorati it starts to index it giving you Authority & Rank. Here are definitions for them:

Technorati Authority is the number of blogs linking to a website in the last six months. The higher the number, the more Technorati Authority the blog has.

Technorati Rank is calculated based on how far you are from the top. The blog with the hightest Technorati Authority is the #1 ranked blog. The smaller your Technorati Rank, the closer you are to the top.

I benchmarked my blog when I started blogging ten months ago. My goal when I started was to get to a Rank of 90,000 which was what I had achieved at my niche blog, DigiScrapInfo.

I was at 180,000 for a long time, but today when I saw a rank of 19,703 I was speechless. Here are the top 100. TechCrunch is #2 today. Problogger is #23.

Does it matter? It does because it means that my blog is interconnected with my community. It is a living & breathing entity and most importantly growing. (I did know this because my Facebook crowd has grown to 700 and my Twitter groupies count is over 1,000). And you all rock! You’re my inspiration & provide my motivation

And it reaffirms my decision to go in a new direction! This past week I resigned from my community manager position at ACD to pursue new opportunities. It was hard to leave the great friends that I’ve worked closely with for 2 years. But if you’ve read my recent posts you’ve maybe noticed a shift coming? I want to expand my horizons & work more directly with social media & in a variety of ways. And I’m really excited to start sharing my new ventures with you.