Social media for sales (don’t get caught with your jorts down)

If you’re like me, you probably occasionally find yourself torn between two social media personalities; the fun, after 5:00 person and the get-down-to-business, before 5:00 person. This identity split in social media has been widely discussed in a plethora of different places online, but in the shameless spirit of self-promotion, I have discussed it here, here and here.

In this post, I will discuss some important dos and don’ts for representing your brand or company in a sales capacity in the social media space. It’s important to remember that we are all human and we all make missteps and commit errors when tweeting or facebooking or linkedinning, so consider the following info a set of loose guidelines and don’t hang yourself with your belt if you are guilty of any infractions. Oh yeah, and remember that I’m just a guy offering advice and not a ‘social media guru’ or ‘maven’ or ‘whatever other term du jour people use to describe themselves as someone who knows how to talk to people without looking or acting like a fool online.’

When discussing social media and the mix between personal and professional images on the internets, it’s important to figure out why companies are in the space in the first place. I break down the general motivation for a corporate online presence into three categories: sales, customer service and crisis management. Each category can be further broken down to more granular objectives like promotion in the sales category or troubleshooting in the client services category, but let’s leave these three categories intact for now.

When you decide to represent your company using a personal social media profile or account, first ask yourself this question: how am I furthering my company’s goals in one or more of these three categories? If the answer is that you aren’t, and you’re just complaining about how bad your day was, I’d leave your company out of it entirely. Trust me. You’ll thank me for it when the girl next to you gets canned because she tweeted about how her client is making her want to stick toothpicks in her eyes.

It seems to me that most companies encourage positive, cost-free promotion of their products or services (Did that just sound as dumb as I think it did?), but keep in mind that there are rules. Especially in the sales category. Especially.

Sales is about image. Your personal image, your online image and the image that you project of your product or service. When you decide to interact with a client or potential client on behalf of your organization, consider your personal online image first and foremost because that’s exactly how a prospect will judge you, and ultimately, your product. Based on your twitter account, do you look like someone who is knowledgable and proficient in the area of social media? If not, why are you using it as a medium to interact with a customer in the first place?

Think about it this way: would you buy a high-tech medical device from a person wearing jorts? Let me explain. Without going into the analogy too too much, your image online is a lot like your image in person. It suggests income level, education level and level of expertise in a given area. If you are interacting with customers or potential customers online, the image that you are portraying of yourself is transferred directly to your product or service and may very well affect a customer’s decision about whether or not to do business with your company.  I, for one, would be awfuly skeptical about any product being pitched by a person wearing jorts. But maybe that’s just me.

So if you swoop in on what you consider a sales opportunity on twitter from an account without a picture, without a background, and you are tweeting for the second time in the history of ever, be prepared to be taken about as seriously as our friend wearing the jorts and trying to sell medical devices.

Here are a few things to consider when representing your company online in a sales capacity. First, the number of followers that you have is not the end-all-be-all of online judgement. But it doesn’t hurt your cause either. The number of people who care what you have to say is superficial, but does play a role in whether or not people will listen to you. Secondly, I think that the amount of interaction that you have with other people online is a great way of determining whether or not you are a person that someone would want to do business with. Lastly, I think that what you talk about online is an important factor. If all you do is pitch products or services, you are less likely to be someone who a customer would like to talk to. Based on your history, your conversation with a prospective customer will likely be a high-pressure, uncomfortable sales pitch.

I probably should have started with this disclaimer, but it’s always a good idea to speak with someone already using social media in your company before doing ANYTHING on behalf of them in the social media space. Every company is different and figuring out what initiatives are currently in place will help you figure out what you can do to help.

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