Dude, Blog Your Business!

Adam Coomes (@adamcoomes), President of Infegy, sets up a search in Twitter for “social media whores” (or some such term for people who might be interested in his product).

Finds @BlogDudes and checks out their profile.

Adam follows BlogDudes.

I get an email telling me that Adam is following BlogDudes on Twitter

I check out Adam Coomes profile and follow the link to his website.

I check out the info on his company’s product – Social Radar

I Tweet Adam back saying ‘thanks for the follow, I would be interested in finding out more about Social Radar’.

I get an email from Brooks Morgan from the same company regarding setting up a webinar

Talk to Brooks on the phone to sort out mutually agreeable time

I participate in webinar

I am impressed and will likely become a buyer for our next client project.

Bish Bosh – done deal – sweet meat from one tweet!

And that, B2B ers, is how you increase your business using Twitter!

Its called “Inbound Marketing“.

Social Radar's graphical depiction of key influencers on the social web

Not the musical theme from the enigmatic Geico branding in this case, but highly pertinent to anyone with a brand to promote. Probably more a question of ‘who’s talking’ though.

“If you’re a brand manager, do you want to know who’s searching for your brand? Absolutely.  Do you also want to know how many people are talking about your product online? Absolutely”.

So wrote Eric in yesterdays’ post – ‘The New Rules of Branding‘ on buzzstudy.com (well worthy reading).     You can also extend that to who is talking about your competitor’s brand and why, so that you can tweak your message accordingly if necessary.  How do you find out though, especially when there are potentially thousands of sites, blogs, forums and social chatter to search through? 

You find someone with the right bit of technology, of course.  In my last post, Searching The Social Web for Your ‘Buyer Personas’, I mentioned Radian6 and today I had the pleasure of participating in a webinar with Brooks Morgan of Infegy,  looking at their social research application, Social Radar.  When you want to know your market and consumers quickly this is the sort of resource to use.  Traditionally, the only way to access this sort of information is through extensive consumer surveys and focus groups studies, all of which take a lot of time and a lot of money. What applications like Social Radar do is monitor the buzz – what people are saying about your product or company online – and they can do it in seconds rather than weeks. It is perhaps a narrower demographic than you can access using traditional methods, but we are chiefly concerned here with companies looking to market through social media.  In this respect an application like Social Radar, though not cheap, can save you a considerable amount of manual online information gathering which can end up being a laborious and expensive process in itself!

“Companies that can create real-time interaction and involvement with their customers will be best prepared to succeed in the new media world”, Eric so rightly says.  However, companies want to know two essential bits of information before they will hire you to manage their social media campaign for them:  

Where is the conversation taking place that they need to be part of and,
how can they monitor the effectiveness of their participation in that conversation – that all important ROI.  

And our answer will be – “We have an app for that”.