It is impossible to have a social brand unless you become a social business. So you may be asking, why and how? 

There are two tiers that fit into each other for the social business part 

1. External information where you get bloggers to talk about you, monitor the things done on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social marketing and getting advocates to talk about you. 

2. Internal information which tend to be the things that get neglected such as the information that is being posted, the culture change in your company, and how to get out in the open without hurting your brand. 




 Here are some tips on how to prepare your business for social media: 

• Create a social media policy 
• Train your employees on what is acceptable and what is not for a common goal 
• Create an open corporate culture 
• Think high level strategy 

Here are some reasons why you should start with small projects on social media: 

• Using small projects is a way to test the waters, to see where your target marketing is at in social media. 
• Using social media for sharing customer experiences to build a know, like, trust community. 

Many view social media ROI as an excuse for inaction not to do things. People think that social media is not measurable when, in reality, it is but just in a different way than before. 

How to identify more economic metrics other than sales: 

• Everyone is focused on sales and sales is not the only economic metric in social media. 
• What are people saying about you in social media? You can measure if you influenced a behavior – is someone saying positive things about you versus negative? 
• Communicating via social media versus making so many calls or sending so many emails that go unread. You can share how you shifted money in social media strategy and streamlined by making less calls and send out less emails by using social channels and share how this was measured. 
• Measure how many times something was shared in the social media circles. Example: how many times did something get tweeted and did the information get carried in other blogs and posts? 
• Another economic metric is sharing how you prevented a crisis and how much did you save? 

It’s all about the Quality of your posts and not the Quantity of your posts. 

What success is for businesses on social media: 

• Creating a social experience creates an emotional response from people and can in turn create customer loyalty. o It’s not just about being entertaining, it’s about being helpful and creating an emotional bond with clients. 
• Having the ability to create fresh and relevant content everyday. o In the future social media may incorporate into customer service becoming a social experience. 
• We may be going back to a new way to handle customer service with a customer’s experience.
• Create ambassadors for your social media output for developing customer experiences. 

Why is it critical to have the ability to create a social experience? 

• Customer service will become a social experience. 
• The ability to engage in public will become key to a company’s success. o Everyone will have to become a spokesperson. 

DJ Heckes, CEO & Author 
EXHIB-IT! Tradeshow Marketing Experts 
www.exhib-it.com 
Full BRAIN Marketing 
www.fullbrainmarketing.com