The Biggest Opportunity of All

The biggest opportunity of all is not your next direct mail. It's not even the campaign you conduct by FedEx and same day follow up call - we see through that already. You won't find it by asking people to give you their email address to get last year's white paper. People have learned to use a disposable email address.

The most you can hope is not that a few people tell you your newsletter is nice - or that they don't unsubscribe but just use the delete key. It's not that they wouldn't want to hurt your feelings. They just don't want to deal with you at all.

The biggest opportunity is not a gimmick to get your message out there to more people who are not interested in buying your services. The biggest opportunity in fact is in listening for and finding those people who want and need your services. Those who are already looking for you.

So many ask me about social media as if it were the answer to all the questions they've been asking about reconnecting with customers and prospective customers. They do not realize that they already have the answers - social media is about social. It may provide you with tools and ways to discover those who are already predisposed.

Too many focus on the tools - give me a blog, fan cast me on Facebook, I'll raise you a Twitter. The latest Web site agency fashion is to stream the Twitter accounts of management on the home page. I'm not gonna go all ROI on you on a Friday, but that doesn't tell me much about me as a client, does it?

Remember it's social. It allows you to more easily join or build a conversation that is about your customers - and not about you. Making it about them means helping them connect with each other. It also means that your product or service makes them look good. That's where the real value is.

And if you're a skeptic, or worse a cynic - well, that means you're missing the biggest opportunity of all.

[make your t-shirt at Spread Shirt]

Comments

[Bruce Christensen]

It is interesting that humans were created with two ears to hear, two arms to embrace, two hands to hold and ten fingers to type.
Yet, we use one mouth to tell everyone how great we are.
Maybe someone is telling us it is about closing our mouths, opening our ears, embracing our customers and expressing our support for others through our actions.

[Terri Waterman]

Yes!!! I just got on someone in a linkedin discussion about his advice on getting more business out of a client by influencing their behavior. Bad attitude to have in an economy like this. I said that we're living in sensitive times, you can't do that to people. It always comes back to you. So yes, what you say here is definitely the way. We have to care, I mean really care - not just pretend to care, people know...

[Yinka olaito]

Given freely and being helpful in a social environment like the social media helps than collecting mandatory data.Listening as you noted helps greatly. Keeep it up valeria

[John Spence]

If you just help enough other people get what they want and need, you will get everything you need. The key to networking - "social" on the Internet or otherwise is simple: give, give, give... add real value... help, help, help -- and everything will work out just fine in the end.

As always -- another fantastic post -- thanks so much - John

[Susan]

I just had a meeting with a business leader and we were able to cover so much ground because I asked questions and then LISTENED.

For fun, another colleague always tells his kids, "You have two ears with which to listen and a mouth with which to talk. Don't text me; call me."

[Harriet Meth]

You have hit on some great conversation points.

Social media is a valuable listening tool for the smart marketers who have developed an inquisitive ear for what is being said. That means that along with listening more, marketers would also benefit from asking more questions - a lot of them - based on what they are hearing customers and others talk about.

Unfortunately, asking good questions to peel back the layers of a conversation is not something that seems to come naturally to a lot of people.

Based on my experience, it's a skill the majority of people think they already know how to do and don't see the value of refining into a more strategic tool.

[siobhan bulfin]

I agree wholeheartedly Valeria. The other common mistake we make is with the assumption that social media is a magic fix for a 'broken' product or service. Whereas it's quite the opposite. Before social media if your product/service was lousy, you could fool people with misleading advertisments etc and know that you'd always be safe with a large naive population base. Not now. News spreads fast.

[Ari Herzog]

Thanks for the Mailinator reminder.

[Valeria Maltoni]

@Bruce - actions do speak louder than words...

@Terri - it just boggles my mind that so many take the lazy way. Glad you are out there holding onto to principles and doing good.

@Yinka - thank you for stopping by.

@John - glad this was helpful to you. We could call it common sense, except for it's not that common.

@Susan - the hardest and most rewarding thing we can do is that of keeping still and opening up to hearing what the other is saying. Those are time times of breakthrough in connections.

@Harriet - asking good questions comes from two places (1) a pure heart; (2) an inquisitive mind trained from experience. Thank you for adding to the conversation.

@Siobhan - social media can be an amplifier, but it reflects back and amplifies what people put into it, just like life in many ways.

@Ari - glad to be of service.

[olivier blanchard]

Yet the more mature a "channel" like Twitter gets, the more "marketers" (and I use the word loosely) insist on pitching from the very first character: As soon as I find myself following one of them - by accident, my inbox receives a DM pointing me to their url or offering me a free gift or some nonsense. Instant FAIL.

When is this scattershot push mentality going to finally die? Grrrr.