For some reason, however, we often forget these basic social skills in the digital world.

In our most recent webinar, Erik shared examples of brands effectively using social media to promote their business and sell their products. Too many businesses jump into social media and immediately begin selling – pushing messages about their products and brand into an already ongoing conversation. Through what he calls the “social media escalator,” Erik explained the steps businesses should follow to become a welcome member of conversations in social media – listen first, sell last.

Click to enlarge: Qualman’s “Social Media Escalator” urges businesses to listen first, sell last.

Listen. Erik tells businesses to first be quiet and listen on social media. What’s being said about your brand, your products, your industry? See what people are saying before jumping in.

Interact. Join the conversation in a way that adds value. You can’t just start talking about how awesome you are and expect people to engage – you have to contribute to conversations people are already having to gain an audience. Respond to what people are saying about your brand.

React. This is where many companies drop the ball, Erik says. If 70% of people are saying they like something about your product, how quickly are you changing your product to deliver more of what they like? Insights without action are worthless.

The same goes for negative feedback. If people are talking about what they don’t like about your products or brand, how quickly are you working to fix it? For all the companies jumping into social media, most don’t have a plan for acting on what they learn – their social efforts are siloed to a specific department. “Social” isn’t a department – your whole company must be listening and reacting to these conversations to drive any real value.

Sell. If you’re reacting to customer feedback to constantly improve your offering, selling will come naturally.

As you sell, your customers will follow this same model:

• Listen. Customers hear what your product has to offer them, both by listening to what you're selling, and also by listening to each other, on social media and in offline conversations.
• Interact. They’ll then interact with your products, using them themselves.
• React. They’ll react to your product, developing their own opinion of what’s working and what isn’t, what they like and what they don’t.
• Sell. Based on their reaction, they’ll sell for or against you via word of mouth.

If you’ve done your job right – listened to customers, interacted with them, and reacted to their feedback to consistently deliver better experiences – customers will do the selling for you, by sharing their love of your products and brand with their networks, both online and off. And this is where you listen, hear what they think of your business, and the cycle begins again.

Erik shared many examples of brands following these steps well, along with numerous other tips from his best-selling book Socialnomics, in our webinar.

Sean McDonald from Ant’s Eye View started out by having every brand track themselves along the Social Commerce Maturity Curve, where the majority of brands indicated they’re still in the infancy of their social media strategy.

Ant’s Eye View’s Ben McConnell gave specific advice about building a social media strategy based on goals, objectives, strategies and tactics. He’s seen that many brands fall down by getting confused about terminology – i.e., confusing goals with objectives (objectives are measurable) – and making it longer than one page. Social media is new – to gain buy-in, your strategy must be easy to understand and share across any department. Most important? Align your goals with business goals – the bottom line – and set realistic expectations for the timing around reaching these goals.

John Lazarchic, PETCO’s VP of E-Commerce, shared how PETCO has experimented with and measured a variety of social programs, including customer reviews, sponsored stories campaigns, and a variety of Facebook pages focused on specific types of content (such as pet owners who focus on all-natural products at the Generation Natural Pet Facebook page). He also shared how he integrates customer comments and feedback into email and other channels, and built out a team and a new community strategy – and how he got the executive team to buy in. He’ll be sharing his insights on a webinar on May 4 – the details are at the end of this post.

Two diverse brands – a new network marketing company, EvolvHealth and Nationwide Insurance – shared their views on Facebook. Key takeaways include sharing relevant information, avoiding promotional-ism, and thinking beyond your products. For example, Nationwide’s three Facebook fan pages don’t focus on insurance, but on topics that relate to Nationwide. Both brands use Facebook to keep the conversation going, but not necessarily to close product sales.

Dell may be one of the largest brands known for being open to, listening, and taking action on customer feedback. They contact customers that give products low ratings, use customers’ own words in marketing (“Never hire another marketing copywriter,” says Dell’s Senior Manager, Global Community & Personalization, Stuart Wallock). Alex Gruzen, SVP of Consumer Product Group at Dell shared that their product team uses reviews to inform new product development, setting high goals for ratings for new and future products.

Bill Stephenson from Nielsen advised brands to use social networks to listen to what consumers are saying about your brand, then use that information to build real credibility for your brand. He suggests protecting your brand by listening in advance. An explosion via social media can happen at any time – are you prepared to deal with it? Know where you stand before something blows up.

As the Director of Social Media for USAA, Tom Vaughn estimates he works for one of the most conservative industries: a financial and insurance company whose customers all work for the U.S. military. But he tested, measured, and proved the impact of social commerce so much that he now manages a staff of eight and a large social media budget. He aligns social goals with company goals and tracks the same metrics used to show ROI, and listens for trends as well as individual issues. It’s usually fairly easy to solve individual problems, but harder to see the big trends. These trends, however, can deliver big wins – helping you solve big issues before they become large issues for customers in general.

It was an energizing day, full of great questions and engaging conversations. Attendees said they plan to create their social media plans, work to gain buy-in using the insights they gained today, and make better use of the customer content they’ve already gathered.

How to keep customers engaged – and buying.

Want to hear more from PETCO's presentation at the Social Commerce Summit Executive Boot Camp? Register for our free upcoming webinar with John Lazarchic, VP of E-commerce for PETCO. He'll share how communities can (and should) track directly to bottom-line corporate goals, and how to get there.

Setting measurable business goals for UGC

Once Nationwide decided to move forward with a social strategy, their first step was to identify goals for their UGC. At a high level, Shawn and Sue wanted to build trust and confidence in the Nationwide brand among current and potential policy holders. Consumers want to hear from their peers before making a purchase decision. Recognizing this, Nationwide wanted to give customers the opportunity to share their experiences, helping prospects find the information they need at the point of purchase.

At a more specific level, Nationwide needed to show real, direct business benefits from UGC. To do this, the brand aligned its social commerce efforts with three key business goals: increasing policy conversion rate, driving SEO traffic, and improving marketing effectiveness.

Meeting these goals with social commerce

Nationwide has leveraged Ratings & Reviews in a number of ways to meet their corporate goals and grow their business.

Enabling customer reviews on auto insurance. Customer reviews on insurance policies provide relevant content that consumers trust, helping them determine the right policy for their needs and take the next step towards a purchase decision.

Pushing content to customers’ social networks. Using Social Network Accelerators, Nationwide customers are invited to share reviews with their Facebook network, helping Nationwide reach new audiences and bringing traffic back to the brand site.

Driving SEO with fresh content. Enabling UGC provides the site with rich, relevant content that is continually updated, driving organic search traffic to Nationwide.com.

Improving paid search ads. Keywords pulled from customer reviews make for compelling paid search ads, bringing new traffic to the brand site by reaching customers in their own words.

Measuring the results

Nationwide segments site visitors who interact with UGC from those who don’t, and compares their behavior against the goals above.  Specifically, they look at the quote start rate, quote completion rate, and policy bind rate for both audiences, and measure the difference in performance. They also track “intent to buy” metrics, like finding an Agent’s office or contacting Nationwide directly. Additionally, they look at click-through and conversion rates for homepage ads and paid search landing pages with UGC, benchmarking the performance of both segments over time.

Spreading these results to the entire organization

The impact of UGC doesn’t end on Nationwide’s website. Since launching Ratings & Reviews, they have embraced customer oxygen across the organization, transforming the brand’s culture and the way they talk to customers.  “As much as we can bring the voice of the customer to every employee in this company,” says Sue, “the more effective we’re going to be.”

Any Nationwide employee can read customer reviews online, giving everyone from claims representatives to executives tremendous insight into how the brand is doing and what their customers value. This translates into recommendations and improvements, helping pinpoint what the brand is doing well and where they can invest more to better serve customers.

There’s also a strong motivational effect, Sue says. Many reviews praise claims reps that went out of their way to help customers. “We are in the business of putting people back to normal after something bad happens,” says Sue. “When you see that we’re doing that every day, over and over again, and you see the emotions that our customers share in a very positive light, it really helps drive and prioritize our behavior as an organization. It’s very inspirational content internally.”

Want to hear more about Nationwide’s use of social commerce?  The full webinar, “Overcoming Your Fear of User-Generated Content: A Webinar for Highly-Regulated Industries,” is available to download for free, here:

Enter social commerce — combining social interactions and community with a focus on increasing sales and driving measurable business results.

In this webinar, join Steve Rhodes, Head of E-commerce for Vodafone Hutchison Australia, and Sam Decker, CMO of Bazaarvoice, for a glimpse into the tools and strategies available to online retailers. Hear real-world results on how over 750 brands around the world are leveraging customer-created content such as Ratings & Reviews to increase sales, reduce returns, and make business sense of social.

In this webcast, you’ll learn:

• What is social commerce, and how does it work for online retailers?
• What tools and strategies are available for driving sales?
• How are retailers measuring the ROI of social commerce?

Thursday, 11 March 2010

11:30 – 12:30PM Australian Eastern Standard Time

This webcast gets to the heart of these concerns, explaining how Nationwide Insurance tackled these issues – and won big with consumers.

Join us and see how Nationwide partnered with Bazaarvoice and Rosetta to:

• Overcome organizational concerns about posting user-generated content on their website
• Assess the issues and find the right solutions
• Measure the results of user-generated content across the entire business

Thursday, February 11, 2010
11:30 to 12:30 EST

Speakers

Sue McManus
Leader of Nationwide Direct and Customer Solutions
Nationwide Insurance

Shawn Morton
Director of Social Media
Nationwide Insurance

Adam Cohen
Partner, Social Media Lead
Rosetta

Marc Ostryniec
Vice President of Financial Services Division
Bazaarvoice

Now we’re following up with a webinar featuring new media visionary Ze Frank and Bazaarvoice CMO Sam Decker: “Participate, Interact, Sell: Building Relationships Online.”

Tune in to learn:

• How to create a participation chain strategy that captures every interaction possible
• How top brands build successful participation chains
• Top reasons people are motivated to participate or contribute content

Join Ze and Sam for this webinar on Tuesday, January 19, 2010, at 1 pm CST by registering here:

Download the free white paper, “Get Them Talking: How Growing Participation Chains Will Grow Sales,” here.

We look forward to talking more about how to get consumers participating – and buying.

Here are the major points our survey found.

Social must drive revenues, not just web metrics. 81% of respondents expect to link their annual revenues to their social media investment in 2010, up from just 44% of CMOs in 2009. Social marketing metrics that focus solely on web goals (traffic, page views, fans) are starting to be supplanted by metrics like conversion, revenue, and average order value that track to the bottom line.

CMOs unsure about the exact impact of current social tools. 53% of respondents are unsure about their return on Twitter; 50% are unsure about the direct value of LinkedIn; and 50% are not sure how to measure the impact of industry blogs on business metrics. Customer ratings and reviews is the best understood marketing activity from an ROI perspective.

As social spending grows, so do revenue expectations: More than 64% of CMOs reported that they plan to increase their social media budgets within the next year. Nearly three-fourths of respondents (72%) who did not attach revenue to social spend in 2009 reported they would create such a link in 2010. CMOs who are already seeing a strong link between social media and revenue in 2009 expect this impact to be even more profound in 2010, with the majority of respondents (81%) expecting to attribute up to 10% of their 2010 revenues to their social media investments.

Social initiatives must now track to the bottom line. In 2009, the top metrics tracked for social media initiatives included site traffic, number of page views, and number of fans. In 2010, CMOs expect top metrics to track more closely to P&L business goals – not just web-related goals. The fastest-growing metrics for 2010 include revenue, conversion, and average order value, which grew 333%, 174%, and 150% respectively.

CMOs tap more consumer-generated content to shape products or services: Today, 80% of CMOs use customer insights to shape decision-making at the executive level and 90% of those surveyed use customer stories and product suggestions to shape a brand’s product or services. By the end of 2010, almost all CMOs say they plan to incorporate a broader range of content sources including customer reviews (59% increase), pre-sales Q&A (24% increase) and Twitter (407% increase) to influence product decisions.

In short, social isn’t just for the “cool” factor anymore – now it must drive real sales results, just like any other media. Download the full study here for all the details.

We'll share our findings and quiz a panel of top CMOs at this upcoming, insightful webcast.

Panelists include: Sonny Ganguly, Wedding Wire; Kent Huffman, Bearcom; Ted Rubin, e.l.f. Cosmetics; and Sam Decker, Bazaarvoice.

Webcast: 120+ CMOs have spoken – a look ahead at Social in 2010
December 17, 1:00 – 2:00 pm CST

Click here to reserve your seat now – attendance is limited.

Hear a panel of top CMOs share their views on:

• Plans to blend social with commerce in 2010
• Prioritizing the quality of social interactions over sheer quantity
• Measuring social media's direct impact on business metrics