Twelve Ways to Sell Social Media to Your Boss

August 3, 2008 · Comments

bossman This was a request from Jennifer

You probably already get social media, and see its value, and think it’s really nifty cool. But if you can’t articulate the benefits and the return on the effort, and several other little details to the folks upstairs, it’s going to be hard to get your ideas moved from “wouldn’t this be great?” to “let’s assign a project manager and get started.” First and foremost, you have to jump over the fence from where you’re thinking, and get into their mindset. From there, look back at social media, and create values you believe they can understand. Here are some ideas.


Twelve Ways to Sell Social Media to Your Boss

  1. Social media tools like blogging, social networks, and social bookmarking are more effective in reaching the millions online than a traditional website.
  2. Blogging can act as a way to reduce customer service calls (if there’s helpful how-to information on the blog).
  3. Cost of implementing a blog is free or cheap. No more than $100 for a year of hosting. And most software is free. (There are some benefits from professional blogging software, but for most people, free is plenty fine).
  4. Social networks are now used frequently by your customers, your prospects, and your competitors. Connect with people, learn their business needs, and respond more simply and flexibly.
  5. Social media provides robust tools for listening, ranging in price from free to inexpensive, to reasonably expensive. Even the free tools help an organization find out who’s talking about them, so they can choose to respond.
  6. First steps can be simple, like establishing a blogger relations process to go along with your press relations process. You might find bloggers who will want updates on your space, and even this is a good first step.
  7. Internally, social media tools can be used to help with status information, training, project collaboration. Most tools like blogs, twitter-clones like identi.ca, etc can be set up internally instead of used on the public web, for more privacy.
  8. Building an online social media component to most marketing and PR efforts ensures a better reach for the media created, and potentially better tracking through clicks and other metrics captured online versus in traditional media (like TV, newsprint, magazines, radio).
  9. Blogging helps a business differentiate and establish a thought leadership position.
  10. Using social network sites helps in customer prospecting, HR background checks, product marketing, and community awareness.
  11. Building a social network group (either on someone else’s platform or around your primary site) encourages customer retention (a huge metric for lots of companies).
  12. Another way to help is to find other companies or organizations, either in your vertical, or similar, and present information on how they’ve used social media.

Your mileage may vary, but consider these starting points. Any others that you would want to add? How have you encouraged them in the past.



Photo credit, foundphotoslj

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  • Great article. Now is the time for companies to get on board because the more time you allow for social media investing the greater chance of compound interest.

    I would also like to see an article on the topic of how small businesses can creatively use twitter.
  • Chris,

    About n°3 : If it is free or cheap, why do you tell your boss ?
    Boss usually care about real things, you know, things that cost a lot ;-)

    Best,

    Stephane.
  • "Cost of implementing a blog is free or cheap. No more than $100 for a year of hosting. And most software is free. (There are some benefits from professional blogging software, but for most people, free is plenty fine). "

    Sure, but the hours necessary to contribute to make your site effective will cost far more (yes, plenty of returns) but do keep in mind there is more cost to this than purely hosting.

    If you're trying to get the idea approved be prepared to come back and be honest with the time commitment - otherwise you may get yourself in something pretty deep and still have other responsibilities as well.
  • gosh, its the hardest thing to do, while u wanna add some value to your company, there is a big obstacle front of u!
    Boss!!!
    i have been already rejected couple of times, but will try this advices....
    http://greekmind.wordpress.com
  • Just the article I was looking for! And to answer Stephane, your previous commenter, the reason you have to get your bosses' permission/buy-in is because most bosses don't want their employees IM'ing and on MySpace all day. I'm going to forward this article to a couple of my clients who are "very corporate" and with my direction are just starting to dabble in the social media space.
  • What is the value of having a blog in lieu of a quote-unquote Web 1.0 website, per #3 above? Shouldn't firms have both to both display non-changing data but also interact with people about the static list? Moreover, there will always be associated costs, e.g. owning a custom domain for your blog and not associating your business with company.wordpress.com; not to mention some firms may want to host their blogs on their own servers so they own the content.
  • Thanks, Chris - some great ideas. I'm going to bring it to my work.
  • gregorylent
    social media will kill your company if your company is an idiot. the whole world will know it.

    it is a tool of exposure, not of correction.
  • maybe that is what you have in mind, though. i shouldn't presume ... :-)
  • Great List! Very helpful for companies of all sizes thinking of heading the social media route. On number 2, I would recommend adding forums. Blogs are a great way to announce the fix to a popular issue, but forums can be a better place for users to help companies identify issues before they even hit the call centers (i.e. long before there is a fix to announce on a blog). In addition, customers will often resolve each others issues through communication back and forth in forum threads. This is a big support benefit you don't get from blogs.
  • Great Post! I wrote something similar a while back, and I even created a PowerPoint presentation that you could give to your boss to help convince him or her that social media and inbound marketing is a worthwhile investment.

    http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/292...
  • As always, an excellent post.

    One suggestion: quantify it. For each point, quantify its impact. Show that boss the cost savings or increase in revenues each way will produce.

    Cash is king. Cash makes kings. Quantify how each of these ways will add cash and you'll be the king.
  • In my experience it´s easy to sell it to your boss by the common "buzzword, buzzword, buzzword" strategy, which works for most bosses. Your list is needed to explain why to put real time and effort in it and you can´t do it in 5 minutes a day, which is the real hard part to me.
  • Here's another way to sell it to the boss.

    Social media is a great way to spy on the competition. You can read the writing on their Facebook walls, see what projects they're working on over at Twitter, and learn what questions they are answering at LinkedIn. Also find out how many times their answers have been flagged "best answer."
  • Great article. Blogging is definitely a great platform for going corporate online. It is also a cheap yet effect way to go global if used correctly.
  • Good advice and we need more in this area. I find a good way of letting organisations know they need to adopt social media is to show them examples of how their customers are talking about them online and also to show them examples of how other companies are using social media. I don't think it is worth emphasising it is cheap. I think it is more to do with focusing on the need to be part of social media. Media is social. It is by the people for the people and companies need to get involved otherwise they will be left to talk to themselves.
  • Agreed that social media is something many companies should be considering, but another step in the process of getting management buy-in is the drafting of company-specific protocols for social media communications. What can be said, when, by whom, where, etc.

    It will probably be easier to get approval by at least acknowledging that this step will be taken.
  • I really like your point about how some companies are using tools like identi.ca to enhance productivity. I think companies have almost as much to gain in their interactions with customers on the Web as they do in being able to communicate more effectively internally through a number of these micro-blogging, wiki, and instant messenging tools.
  • > Cost of implementing a blog is free or cheap. No more than > $100 for a year of hosting. And most software is free.
    > (There are some benefits from professional blogging
    > software, but for most people, free is plenty fine).

    Of course, in order to be effective, blogs need to be updated and comments responded to.

    Or have I missed something here - is the US Job Market so bad that "community managers" work for nothing?

    If I look at the time I spend blogging personally, and look at how much that "costs" in my charge-out rate, then my blog "costs" several TENS of THOUSANDS of pounds each year. The reason I blog, however, is that it's led to exposure and indeed income that otherwise I'd not have had.
  • Good list. I wanted to add that blogging also helps create awareness for your brand by posting comments on other blogs which are leaders in your industry.
  • Thanks for your post. But you seem to say engaging with social media effort doesn't cost much. Which is eventually not accurate. It costs time (as says Mark Harrisson above). And needs the company to get accompanied (you job right?). Which also costs. Tech doesn't make it all, we all know that well. To go through your points:
    1. Social media isn't more effective, but would target more accurately your consumers. And it depends of the level of the Internet knowledge people in charge have. Can turn to be a waste of time if you need to manage and monitor all their actions (remember you're giving those people the company credit and reputation when they're speaking for you outside the box)
    3. Implementing a blog is cheap or free. Right. And experience curve to well blogging? how much does it cost? Time to evangelize within the company to show blogging has added value. How much does it cost? Software and hosting does do nothing. Human being in front of the computer (when not outside being a representative) costs.
    9. Blogging helps a company differentiate and establish a thought leadership position: ok but only if the company's mindset already like that. Blogging is about exposure, not changing mindset
    11. Building Social Network Group increase retention rate: to do so you need a community manager to maintain and stimulate the group, which takes time (you know the rhyme)

    Engaging with social media efforts takes time and needs company to get ready to jump. But then, it's all about ROI ;)
  • Social media is a great way to stay competitive. If you don't stay 10 steps ahead of your competition then you will surely DIE. They will swoop down hard on you and steal your customers if you still believe "twitter" is a delicacy in Mali.
  • Those are excellent suggestions - thanks for sharing!

    Thank you so much for stopping by - I love hearing from my friends!

    Hope you have a wonderful day!

    Marti_L from Twitter
  • A thought provoking post especially for the uses of social media it brings us face to face with. It gives some crucial ideas to survive and succeed in online business. We get the point very clear that social media is indispensable for every business and we can not afford to miss out on this relatively important business tool, otherwise, we may be left out. To stay competitive and keep our customers hooked to our business like never before, the tools of social media like social networks, blogging and social bookmarking come handy due to their global impact. Blogging especially is a great platform for going online as it is an effective way to create awareness about your brand and differentiate your business. We get information about what our customers have to say about our business so as to improve on our weak points and also get them acquainted about how other companies are using social media. Social networking sites come with the added advantage of providing best product marketing to a wider audience. So, all you corporates looking for ways to enhance your success, here is the recipe from Chris Brogan, use social media and get your business see new heights! Anyone listening….
  • Nice post man....
  • Not just helpful for boss-convincing but also for student-convincing. I get a lot of "deer in headlights" looks when I broach social media for the first time with students, I think this is a great list for hitting some of the key reasons why it should matter to them, too. Thanks!
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