Social Media and Lead Generation

This weekend I am attending and chairing a break-out session at SoCon 09 - a social media conference being held here in Atlanta. I am very excited to be going and I am most looking forward to talking to my peers about what they are doing with social media. Social media is all the buzz right now and I frequently have clients asking me - "How should I be using social media?" In the B2B world of lead generation (my world) this is still the trillion dollar question. My first response to this question is "What are your prospects doing on-line, where are they?" I recently had this conversation with a very conservative, 100 year old printing company in the mid-west. When we began to explore who their buyers and buying influencers were, we hit upon a particular profile of a "packaging engineer" and discovered that these guys (gals) live on the web. So, we are creating a social media strategy - very low key - something like Bob's Blog - that will create an interaction among this group sponsored by the client. And, the important thing about this strategy will be to LISTEN to what these engineers have to say! It is an experiment and we do not have a set of lead generation metrics tied to it. We are going to play and see what happens.

This brings up my second comment about social media. For all of us of a more "mature" age, if you really want to understand social media - look at your kids. We now have an entire generation of kids who have grown up in the digital age and it is simply a part of their DNA. I am an "informal" mentor in the GA Tech MBA program and from time to time, they will ask me to talk to one of their students about the big bad world of Web 2.0 marketing. I met with one of these students last November and as a 22 year old, she had done an internship for a major insurance company, suggested a social media strategy for them, they adopted it and offered her a job! When I asked her how this happened, she replied "It was just obvious!"

As this group of kids become the managers and leaders, social media will zoom! I am taking my 22 year old with me to SoCon and she will probably know more than me! Maybe she should run the break-out session!

Finally, I am working on my own learning and experiences with social media. I personally blog, facebook, linkedin and twitter and am a proponent of all things Web 2.0, find myself still fully in the exploration stages. I am currently working on "creating a work flow" for how I interact with all of my social media. Here is what I do: - When I fire up my laptop early in the AM (yes, I am an early bird) I: - check my blog - and take the time to respond or write one (love, love, love to blog) - set up my IM - I am connected to my entire team all day as we work on client projects - set up TWIRL - a little app that helps me twitter (this is on all day). I use Twitter all day for my brainstoming comments and quite frankly for social media ideas - check my LinkedIn Groups (I use this a lot for finding people, creating new relationships and communicating with professional groups) - check my Facebook (I use this a lot for current relationships) I will frequently re-visit many of these late in the day as well.

In closing, we live in a very exciting time to be a marketer. It's a time to explore new ideas and new technologies so education is key. Keep communicating on line, going to conferences and seeing what people are actually doing. I look forward to a great dialog on this post!!