Social media for Sales and Marketing departments. February webinar

Social media for Sales and Marketing departments

Posted on Saturday, February 20, 2010 by Fred

Last Thursday, February 18th, we offered our second webinar.
Even though our monthly sessions are for companies that want to embrace social media, this one was more oriented to staff in the Sales and Marketing departments.

We’re very happy with the results, more than double the people signed up and attended this webinar.
We’d like to extend a special THANK YOU! to our guest speaker, Neville Hobson (@jangles), Head of Social Media Europe at WCG, that contributed with great insights.

As many of you may know, we’re relying on Gotowebinar‘s technology. One of the cool features shows the level of engagement from the audience. It was nice to find out that the results were pretty high! Thanks everybody!!

As promised, we compiled all the relevant info below:

Full recording of the webinar
The slides
The conversation thread under the Twitter hash tag #sm4sm
Questions & Answers (in the comments below)

Subscribe to Channelship’s You Tube channel

Social Media For Sales And Marketing Departments

View more presentations from Channelship Web Agency.

You may also download our slides from our Slideshare account!

Find below, also the conversation generated LIVE on Twitter

Thanks very much to everyone that helped us spread the word in the different social networks.
We’re looking forward to have you on our next free monthly webinar: “Social Media for Internal Communications“

How to grow your business network with social media

Posted on Monday, January 25, 2010 by Fred

Last Thursday, January 21st, we successfully launched our first free monthly webinar. We believe it’s a great way to share and reach out to our audience and will continue to explore this method throughout the year.
We had a brainstorming session a few months ago about how could we share more value through a different channel than the blog or social networks, and the idea of the webinars came up. It takes a good few days of preparation to deliver 1 webinar hour per month, but we’ll try to be consistent and bring you topics of interest, LIVE!

The first one was : “How to build your business network with social media” and as promised, we compiled all the relevant info below:

Full recording of the webinar
The slides
The conversation thread under the Twitter tag #sm4biz
Some questions…

Subscribe to Channelship’s You Tube channel

The slides are already available on our Slideshare account!

My Power Point slides also contributed to the Twitter conversation
Have a look at what was said during the webinar by clicking on the image below:

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Category: Free webinars, Social Networking, Social media, Tips to develop your business.

Frank

A lot Business to Consumer perspectives and examples here. Is Social Media applicable for Business to Business, and are there any examples/case studies?
Channelship

Thanks for the question Frank.
I definitely believe that social media can be applied for B2B as well. AS I mentioned during the live session, to me is all about the content and the story behind it. Neville also made the point that as long as there are people interacting with people, there's no different in B2B or B2C (Check minute 46th from the recording above)
Regarding examples, a few months ago I came across http://socialmediab2b.com/ I found it a great source of information about social media for B2B. You can get get studies, trends and very interesting articles. Hope it helps :)
Laurentia

Could you use an ad on social media for testing? Would it be feasible? (e.g. Lyons Tea)
Channelship

Nice one Laurentia.
You could indeed. The funny thing though is that if you take social media as this "testing space" so you can then get it right on TV afterwards (i.e Lyon Tea) you may find out later than more people viewed your ad on social networks rather than TV :s
Social networks are a great place to test ads, products, services, etc. It's important though that for "testing purposes" in this case, you have the mechanism clear. Remember that way you put online stays there! If you didn't have the "testing" plan clear and that product, service, etc goes wrong or delivers bad feedback... then all that info is out there, making it tough for the team to work on a comeback.
Simply, have a plan, listen to what people are saying about your product/ad, reply promptly, make them feel exclusive! Enjoy the journey :)
Rosemary

Is it more advantageous to have a dedicated member of staff for social media marketing or is spreading the duty of keeping up conversation with customers better if it is carried out by a variety of employees from different departments?
Channelship

That's a brilliant question Rosemary. I bet many people in Sales & Marketing are wondering the same...
Everything comes down to: the size of your company, the amount of people that will be able to help, the budget and ultimately, your strategy.

If you had only one member dealing with social media, that's OK as long as everybody in the company or at least that department can learn about the experience as well. If you can involve more staff I would strongly recommend you to do so. This way the adaptation and learning curve would be shorter. Also, imagine if that person in charge of social media for the entire organisation leaves the company? There would a be a lot of catch-up and you'd probably end up going a few steps backwards :(
If you are part of a big organisation, especially with several markets in different regions, the approach of having specific teams looking after the communication and interaction of each regions is not a bad idea at all. If you look at wholefoodsmarket.com, for instance they started with one or two people managing their Twitter @wholefoods and Facebook accounts until they decided to go BIG and offer dedicated local "dialogue avenues" in each area.
Going back to your question, even if you're planing to go HUGE at some point, it's always better to take social media one step at a time :)
Guang

Is there any technical knowledge requirements for people in sales & marketing departments to properly use the social media?
Channelship

Great question Guang. The answer is no. Once you pick the tools to engage in social networks and you invest a bit of time in trying to figure them out, you'll find out not only that you don't need a PhD but you could also come up with ideas on how to use any of this tools differently as well!
The fact that there isn't a fixed way of using these tools and also that every single brand, product, cause, etc are different, it gives you space to be creative and play with the tools until you find your way around them. Gary Vaynerchuk @garyvee is a great example of this.
Anne Marie

Do you know how much nutshellmail costs or is it a free tool? Its sounds like it could save one a lot of time. Thanks
Channelship

Hi Anne Marie!
Yes, it is definitely a free tool (for now at least :) Sorry that I forgot to mention it during the live session. Find out more: http://nutshellmail.com/
Stephen

No one doubts the explosive growth of social media, but how do we make it relevant for B2B? Is social media not a better bed fellow with B2C e.g. Honda Facebook site or with Charities e.g. Twitterfone to raise money?
Channelship

Thanks for your question Stephen. Even though we were short of time, your question went live at the end of the session, where Neville and I shared our thoughts. You can find the answer from minute 46 of the recording above :)