CHAPTER 7

TOOLS OF THE TRADE

Using Online Services and Applications to Help You Find, Track, and Engage Social Customers

The modern sales and marketing machine thrives on data. From analyzing customer profiles to tracking pipeline growth, it's easier than ever before to gather, sort, crunch, and make use of numbers that provide a data-driven snapshot of how you and your business are performing at any given point and time. What's truly exciting is that it's no longer only Fortune 500 companies that have access to this level of detail. Even if you are a small company, or flying completely solo, you have access to a great deal of information that can help you be more successful. As an added bonus, accessing data is quite affordable—and often free. With so much information available at your fingertips, the questions that businesses of all sizes eventually ask is which data (and how much of it) do you use, and how do you make it meaningful.

When it comes to social selling, it may be somewhat easier to answer those questions compared to other areas of your business. Data points taken from social media typically serve as indicators of how well you are reaching and engaging the people who mean the most to your brand. Tracking this type of data, usually referred to as analytics, tells you whether those who matter are actually responding to your messages, or social conversations.

But not all of the data collected as part of your social media analytics is based on raw numbers—such as how many followers you have, or how often someone Likes or shares your posts. In social media, the “who” is sometimes just as important as the “what.” You not only want to track and analyze how often you reach people, but you also need to identify who you are reaching and who else is influencing those you have reached.

SOCIAL INFORMATION THAT MATTERS

To discuss social information that matters, I first need to briefly discuss a couple of terms that have become buzzwords in the business world—and it starts with big data, or what is considered excessive amounts of data that is complicated to process and filter. When you think about data that is typically collected, it's often in terms of structured data, or information that can be easily processed and managed in a database (mainly, lots of numbers!). However, unstructured data, a generic term for information that has no identifiable structure (for example, text, images, and video files) is increasingly becoming of interest. In part, this is because of the rise of social networking sites, blogs, forums, and online communities. A healthy dose of the information that makes up unstructured data comes from, or is associated with, the conversations you are having through social media.

Why does any of this matter to you? One day, in the not-so-distant future, companies are going to get really good at collecting and analyzing big data (structured and unstructured) in a way that helps create a very clear picture of what each individual consumer looks like and how he or she behaves. This information can, in turn, be used to benefit those companies. Insurance companies already use structured data to indicate that drivers of a particular age or sex are more likely to have wrecks, so those customers have higher premiums.

But what if the insurance company is able to gather unstructured data about you, largely collected from your social media profile, data that indicates you partake in a lot of high-risk behaviors (perhaps you enjoy stock car racing for a hobby)? The company may then use that information to raise your insurance premiums, regardless of that high-risk category based on age or gender.

As a salesperson, you can see how this same type of information could be used not only to increase premiums, but to sell that high-risk client a different or an additional type of insurance product (perhaps a life insurance product with a larger payout but at a higher rate!). Whether you are selling insurance or cars, social media is littered with bits of unstructured data that can help you match prospective buyers to your products or solutions. The trick is in knowing how to find and use all of the data that is available to you today.

When you are looking for information that matters as part of the social selling process, you want to know more about that unstructured data—those individual bits of information, or social indicators, that, when pieced together, can tell you how best to identify, reach, and engage with your ideal prospects. These social indicators are found throughout social networking channels, blogs, forums, and groups—basically, anywhere public conversations occur online.

Social indicators often contain enough information to help point to the why in the sales process. They can provide guidance on why a prospect needs your product, why a particular vendor is being considered, why another vendor didn't make the short list of possible solution providers, and so on. Or, social indicators may simply act as a signal that there is a need or an interest in your product (or type of product), without providing much additional detail. Depending on what clues these social indicators reveal, you can try to engage the prospects with the best conversation starters and the most appropriate types of content to help pull the prospect into your social sales funnel.

Before discussing some of the tools of the trade you can use to help spot social trends, here is a list of some of the important indicators you should you look for in social media:

• Mentions: A mention is any time that your name, product, or company is referenced in social media. It can be as simple as someone tweeting, “I learned a lot from the book The Art of Social Selling. Or, it could be someone posting to Facebook, “Not much to do on this rainy morning, so I finished reading The Art of Social Selling.” (This is a good time to mention that I personally monitor and respond to social mentions, so I encourage you to share your thoughts about this book!) A mention can be found within any social channel or blog.
• Feedback: Generally speaking, feedback consists of detailed comments about your brand or product. While a mention may be neutral, feedback is more likely to contain an opinion (good or bad), or be a review of your service. Feedback may also be part of a conversation that is looking for information or support, or asking questions about your products or services. Although you may think of feedback as being more in-depth, it can just as easily occur in the form of a short, 140-character tweet (“Finished reading The Art of Social Selling today. Loved it!”). It doesn't have to be a lengthy 300-word post on a blog or a two-minute video posted on YouTube. Feedback comes in lots of different formats and is often rich with useful, unstructured data to help you better understand how to market and sell your products or services.
• Sentiment: Typically, you are most concerned with customer sentiment, which helps indicate how an existing customer feels about you. But whenever your name is mentioned or there is feedback on your company or product, it can be perceived as having a positive, negative, or neutral (indifferent) sentiment. Public relations professionals have tracked sentiment for quite some time, particularly in reference to a company's mention in a newspaper or magazine article. For a salesperson, tracking social sentiment is a good way to gauge not only how someone feels about your company, but to give you a better idea of how to enter a conversation online and how you may be able to steer the conversation, based on that initial sentiment.
• Competitor mentions and sentiment: It's not enough to understand when and what something is said about your company. To increase your social selling effectiveness, you also want to pay attention to conversations that mention your competitors. If the sentiment is negative, that is an indicator that you may have an opportunity to provide an alternative solution for an unhappy customer.
• Influencers: Potential customers are not the only ones whose opinions matter in social media. Influencers are those who have the ability to engage and persuade others. Influencers typically have a large audience or following, are active and vocal with their online commenting, and their opinions are usually respected or trusted. Mommy bloggers are a great example of influencers. As the popularity of blogs increased, companies who marketed and sold products targeted to babies and young children discovered dozens of influential parents (usually moms) who maintained blogs. The “mommy bloggers,” as they have been labeled, review and recommend products to other parents. Some B2C companies spend a lot of time and effort (and sometimes money) finding and wooing these highly engaged influencers to help them promote their products.

  While you still want to find and engage influencers, giving away gifts may not be the way to do it. As a result of the bonanza of gifts mommy bloggers received over the last decade, there have been some restrictions put in place on the way companies now provide sample products and other compensation to influencers.¹ Even so, tracking influencers also provides you an opportunity to monitor feedback from their audience and find prospects who may be searching for (and researching) your products. Prospects often respond to an influencer's blog post, article, or tweet with comments that are filled with lots of unstructured data or details about their situation.

• Friends, followers, and defectors: Although it's not the only indicator to watch, you still want to keep track of how many people are taking action to follow you on all the social networking sites where you have a presence. Also worth tracking is the number of defectors, people who choose to disengage with you on these networks. A significant decrease in number of followers, or the inability to significantly grow your fan base, could be an indication that you are not having the right type of conversations. Or, maybe you are not offering the right mix of content to attract and keep your audience of customers and prospective buyers.
• Social demographics: Increasingly, more social media networks are providing analytics specific to each platform. There is a decent amount of data that you can access about your Facebook fans, followers on Pinterest, or the groups you belong to in LinkedIn, for example. With this increase in data, you can start to learn more about the people who are behind the numbers. In some cases, you may not only see gender and age, but you may be able to tell in what part of the world (or in what part of the country) the majority of your followers live. You may be able to see which level of job role seniority—senior executive, managerial, or entry-level—engages most, or which job functions—marketing, sales, IT—are most active. Some of the social platforms also make it easy to see what topics, current events, comments, or posts your followers Like or are discussing at any given moment. These are all social indicators that not only help you better understand who is interested in you, but help you determine how to converse with them and how to target others like them, who may be your most likely prospects.

As you can see, when it comes to social selling, there are other types of data beyond Likes and + 1s that you need to capture in order to help you reach, engage, and convert. There are, however, plenty of tools available to help you track and use social data in a smart way.

FINDING PURPOSE WITH SOCIAL TOOLS

If you're not a natural-born number cruncher, or you aren't part of the marketing operations team, whose job it usually is to turn raw data into dashboards that visually illustrate key performance metrics for the CEO, then why should you care about analytics or social tracking tools? For starters, it isn't necessary for you to delve into all levels of data and social indicators. To be perfectly honest, if you spend too much time digging into the numbers—if you fall into the data hole—then you will not have enough time to be an effective salesperson. However, it is still important to understand what types of social data exist, and which tools are available to help you analyze it. From there, you can decide which indicators are most important to you and choose when and where it's worthwhile to invest your time.

When it comes to using data to paint a picture of your social landscape (your customers, influencers, and engagement), you also have to consider content. As discussed in Chapter 6, content is used to spark social interactions and build relationships. Fortunately, there are some social tools to make it easier to create and distribute content across your social media channels. Even better, many of these content tools have the ability to track analytics as they pertain to your content. For example, was your content viewed by someone, or did they view it and then download it? Perhaps they shared your content, or commented on it. Sometimes, your content creation tools will give you that view into your prospects’ behavior, which makes it helpful in gauging the effectiveness of your content. (Getting some level of active engagement, such as having it shared, is always better than just viewing it.)

Some of the tools I am about to introduce to you, including those to help create content, are more likely to be meaningful to marketers, while others may be of better use to you as a salesperson. Considering that marketing teams often own the social media process, particularly social monitoring, they usually pave the way, deciding which social tools the company officially adopts. This is particularly true for more expensive, enterprise-level applications. If the tool requires a significant investment, you can bet that it will be vetted and approved by the CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) and possibly even the CTO (Chief Technology Officer).

Unfortunately, the sales team may be the last to hear about a new social media tool. The good news is that social media makes it possible for you, as an individual salesperson (or marketer), to have your own tools as well. Many social tools are free or low cost, making them affordable. There have even been cases when tools get adopted by the broader organization only after an individual has discovered, tested, and proven them to be useful. The takeaway? Don't be afraid to experiment!

As you consider which types of tools are important to your role as a salesperson or marketer, consider how social tools can help you most. The best social tools should:

• Make you more efficient.
• Help you identify and find influencers.
• Make it easier for you to find and engage with prospects and customers online.
• Improve your rate of response to social mentions or requests.
• Provide useful feedback on who is interacting with you, how often, and in what way.
• Increase your ability to share information quickly.
• Offer a better way to create and deliver content to use in the social selling process.
• Manage your company image or brand reputation online.
• Increase your reach and (positive) social influence.

With these benefits in mind, I have put together lists of tools for the types of social media, along with descriptions of those that are most likely to be of use to you. Keep in mind, each of these categories probably has a dozen or more tools that could be listed, and new ones pop up every day. In order not to overwhelm you, I mention only a few tools in each category, but know that your options are almost limitless.

Also factored into the tools that made this list is cost and ease-of-use. There are thousands upon thousands of social media tools available; but for the average small business or individual salesperson, the price range and complexity puts many of them out of reach. Most of the tools listed here have a free or very low-cost option that is billed either monthly or annually. Since prices fluctuate frequently, I am leaving those specific details off; but the paid versions of many of these tools are often less than $10 per month, and often not more than $20 per month.

Further, there are some social tools that are specific to individual social media platforms (like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn). You will find those tools referenced in later chapters when I discuss each of those top social networks and the features and tools that make them so useful in the social selling process.

MONITORING TOOLS

Conversations move rapidly in social media, and often occur in real time. Granted, it's possible to manually sort through all the interactions happening across the different social channels and find mentions of your company or products. But it certainly isn't efficient to do it this way! And you simply cannot sit at your computer twenty-four hours a day, every day, and watch for your name to pop up somewhere. This type of manual social surfing is going to take you much longer to find and respond to someone when your name surfaces—and that's not going to help you sell. Luckily, there are lots of social tools available to make social monitoring more efficient.

• HootSuite: This social listening tool is a workhorse that allows you to monitor, track, and manage social mentions (and more) using a Web-based dashboard. You can manage multiple social media accounts and track multiple social platforms (included Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+, and WordPress) by creating “streams” of segmented data based on keywords, hashtags, or mentions, all in real time. Hoot0Suite allows you to respond to messages without having to leave the dashboard, and you can preschedule messages to send or post at later times on your different social networks. It also includes detailed analytics.
• Mention: Another monitoring tool, Mention, provides real-time alerts of your brand or product mentions across social platforms and other online resources. In addition, it allows you to respond and engage directly from the application. It can also monitor in multiple languages, forty-two to be exact. While there are extensive analytics and reporting features, they are not available with the free version of Mention.
• Google Alerts: A free tool, Google Alerts notifies you via email when your company or products are mentioned online. You can set alerts for any term, including those of competitors, and you decide how often (daily or weekly, for instance) you want to receive alerts for each term. This is a super simple way to monitor important terms online.

INFLUENCE TRACKERS

With millions of people using social media and millions of blogs and online magazines, how do you find the sites and the people who are going to most help your cause? What qualifies someone as a high-quality influencer? For starters, you want to find influencers who are active in your market space. They may be trusted bloggers, active social media enthusiasts, or passionate customers turned brand advocates. The important thing is they have the ability to help spread positive messages about your brand effectively and often.

You'll probably know or discover some of these influencers on your own, but there are also a few accessible tools to help you do this. Many of the more sophisticated tools used to find and monitor social influencers are fairly expensive. Traackr, for example, costs nearly $2,000 (annually) for the enterprise edition. However, there are a few tools that individual salespersons and marketers are able to afford.

• Wefollow: Self-described as a directory of online social influencers, Wefollow lets people register and identify the subjects that they are most likely to influence. The application identifies and pulls in experts from across social networks as well. With more than 1.3 million users in its database, Wefollow uses a “Prominence Score” to help you determine how valuable or influential a person may be in your area of interest. You can conduct a search using keywords to identify those who are engaged in that subject matter. Their profile also shows their Prominence Score.
• Socialbro: Designed to help you get more from Twitter, Socialbro helps you search for, identify, and target influencers in your key areas of interest by using different filters and search tools.
• Trackur: A social monitoring tool, Trackur has a tool within a tool, called InfluenceRank. Using the InfluenceRank service for approximately $27 per month, you can determine if someone is discussing you (or your product), and how influential that person is. In addition, Trackur automatically tracks and analyzes the sentiment for every item on your Trackur dashboard so you can further determine if the sentiment of a particular social mention is positive, negative, or indifferent.

SOCIAL SHARING TOOLS

At the heart of social media, and at the root of social selling, is the ability to share information and start conversations. Any tools that can help you do this better, or more quickly, is certainly worth using. The primary benefits of these particular sharing tools is that they either offer an abbreviated linking URL (the website's address), or a linking URL that provides tracking information. Like some of the other social media tools, these tools also provide analytics that track what content was viewed, and how and where it may have been shared with others.

• Bit.ly: What happens if you have a piece of content you want to share on your social networking sites, but it has an extremely long and complicated URL (that is basically the equivalent of alphabetical nonsense)? Bit.ly (also displayed as Bitly) is a free tool that automatically shortens your link to something much more manageable. This is especially important with sites like Twitter, where your messages, or tweets, are limited to a certain number of characters. Bit.ly also tracks the number of clicks, shares, and saves that your shortened link receives, along with more in-depth analytics about how and where the shortened link was viewed or shared.
• SharedBy.co: Similar to Bit.ly, on the surface SharedBy replaces long, complicated URLs with shorter versions, but it's much more than that. It allows you to frame your brand around any piece of content shared, using a special “Engagement Bar” at the top of the Web page being shared. Let's say you want to share an article from an online newspaper with your followers. When they click on the link, they see not only the article, but a special bar across the top of the page that contains your name or company name, logo, contact information, and other brand details that you can choose to include in the bar. Additionally, it includes detailed tracking information about your shared links and those who are viewing them.
• Google URL Builder: This is one of many tools available to create unique URLs for link tracking using UTM parameters. “UTM” is short for Urchin Tracking Module, but you are most likely to hear it referred to as “UTM parameters.” This free online tool from Google allows you to add special tags, or descriptors (such as an ad campaign name or source), to any URL. The special code is tracked by Google Analytics to show that you received visitors to your website because of a particular link associated with an ad campaign or piece of content. The only downside to this tool is that because it is tracked as part of your website analytics, it may require some help from your IT department (or whoever manages your website statistics) to get final tracking results.

CONTENT CURATOR TOOLS

Sometimes, you want to easily scrape content from across the Web based on topics you are interested in, and bring those articles, blog posts, and other online content into one place for easy access. As a salesperson, this helps you keep up to date on trending topics or articles and keywords that are important in your industry. Some curator tools are publishing platforms as well and allow you to assemble and spread this content online and in social networks.

• Feedly: As you may know, RSS (Really Simple Syndication) readers allow you to subscribe to and receive updates from your favorite websites or blogs. A true curator tool, Feedly collects information and lets you organize important content from many different sources and then makes it easy for you to get to them from one place. Feedly is also a very visually pleasing RSS reader, which assembles the information as a deck of cards and then lets you share, engage, or respond to articles and blog posts from the application.
• Paper.li: Billed as an online newspaper publisher, this social tool provides the means for collecting articles, blog posts, and videos of interest to you (or your prospects), perhaps based on industry topics or subjects that match or reflect your buyer personas. You select the sources you want the app to pull from, you customize the template (how the information is organized and displayed visually), and then when everything is collected and formatted, you have a nice piece of content to share.
• Scoop.it: Similar to other curators, Scoop.it lets you enter keywords and phrases that are of interest to you. Scoop.it goes out to social media sites and other online resources to collect content that matches your subject preferences. You can pick up or “scoop” the content you like and format it into an online magazine. Your followers or readers can suggest topics for you to include, and you can share the final product across your social media channels. Plus, Scoop.it includes analytics that tracks your readers’ engagement.

APPLICATIONS FOR CREATING CONTENT

In many companies, content is often created for you, from company brochures and product tutorials to white papers and case studies. All of these are great pieces of content to distribute to your social networks, but there never seems to be enough of it. Whether you are part of the team responsible for developing new content, or you're an individual in need of extra information to share, there are some creative tools that can help with the ongoing challenge of content creation. This is a larger category, because some of these tools help with visual content, too, such as infographics, videos, and other presentation formats.

• Visual.ly: Infographics is a visual format for sharing content, and uses mainly graphics and images as opposed to only text. This is an increasingly popular type of content to share through social media. Unless you happen to be a graphic artist, creating an infographic from scratch isn't easy. There are some tools, like Visual.ly, that provide you with some standard templates and auto-generated information (gathered from your social networks) that is developed into an infographic. Visual.ly has a limited number of free templates, but you can also hire from their network of designers to create a customized infographic.
• Infogr.am: Another tool for creating infographics, Infogr.am provides a larger variety of templates, or themes, from which to choose. You can upload your own images, and even video, and you can create new charts using your own data that you upload into Infogr.am. The free version of this tool has plenty of options and flexibility for creating a professional-looking infographic to share online.
• Prezi: This tool makes it a snap to create animated presentations. Think of it in terms of a modern version of a PowerPoint presentation. In fact, you have the option to import directly from PowerPoint. These short online presentations are created from templates provided by Prezi, then you add text and video (if you like) and choose special effects for emphasis. The finished presentation can easily be distributed via social media.
• SlideShare: A sort of hybrid between a content creation tool and its own social platform, SlideShare lets you create visual online presentations based on your existing content in a sliding image format. You can base a SlideShare presentation on a PowerPoint presentation or create it from a PDF or a video. The great thing about this tool is that it lets you insert a call to action, or form, to create a lead and collect the viewer's contact information. You (or the viewer) can easily share the presentation on your social networks, or on the SlideShare network, which has grown quite large.
• Animoto: Creating videos is easier for some than others, but Animoto makes it very easy for all skill levels. You basically select and layer components to build a thirty-second to full-length video. It starts with the selection of your preferred templates, and can even include sound clips or music. The finished product is pretty decent video that presents your message in a more engaging manner.
• Present.me: For a salesperson, Present.Me is a simple way to combine a traditional presentation with a video of yourself. All you have to do is upload your finalized presentation, which can include PowerPoint or any other standard file. Then you use your computer's webcam to record yourself going through your presentation, just as if you were at a live event or a face-to-face meeting. It also includes some simple editing functions in case you need them. Once you are finished recording yourself giving the presentation, you are ready to share your new video-style content across your social media channels.
• Scripted: Videos, shared presentations, and infographics often start with other plain text pieces of content. If writing a blog post, white paper, or even your own promotional tweets is challenging, Scripted has developed a quick, online process to have independent writers do the job for you. Although most of the process is handled via a Web-based form, the writing and editing process is handled by real writers. You decide the topics, content format (blog post, Web page, tweets, etc.), tone, and writing style, and you can even identify keywords to include or avoid. Although this service is not free, it's still very affordable and quick—you can have a piece of content created and finalized in just a few days, and for less than a hundred dollars.

SOCIAL INFLUENCE MEASUREMENT TOOLS

Does your level of social acumen help promote your company's brand or impact your ability to persuade prospects to choose your products and services? These tools are designed to measure your influence, as well as those of others. Each creates a numerical score that represents your social reach and influence.

• Klout: Using a scoring system of 1 to 100, Klout monitors your activity and interactions with others across several social networks and then determines your amount of influence. It also provides a quick overview (along with an actual photo!) of each person who engaged with you and to which post, tweet, or image they interacted with you. It then summarizes of which topics you have expert-level knowledge based on these interactions. Some of the other social monitoring platforms and CRM tools actually pull in Klout scores so that you can see the Klout score of a particular prospect or customer and know whether or not they have influence within their networks.
• Kred: Similar to Klout, this tool also measures social influence (how people engage with you) and reach (how you engage with and share other people's messages). Its scoring system ranges from 1 to 1,000 for influence and from 1 to 12 for reach across social media networks and other online communities. In addition, it uses a visual dashboard to let you search and identify content from other influencers.

MOBILE APPS

Many of the tools mentioned offer a mobile application, or app, for your phone. In most cases, the apps are available for the iPhone and Android devices, and sometimes for the Blackberry. The importance of a mobile app is that it allows you to stay alert while you are away from your office and makes it easy to respond and engage, no matter where you happen to be at any given time. As a sales professional, this probably isn't a new concept. You already appreciate the need to respond quickly to sales inquiries. Social media has introduced that same, and possibly greater, sense of urgency to everyone else.

Online chatter happens quickly, and in some social networking platforms, the discussions are tracking in real time—and almost everyone has equal opportunity to view and engage. Unlike the old days, when a prospect would leave a message on your phone with a question and you would have at least a little bit of time to return the call. Today, your prospect is posing that same question to everyone—across social media channels. Your ability to respond quickly (and sometimes instantaneously) can make all the difference in making the sale. In social selling, time is of the essence. Mobile apps allow you to better compete for the online prospect.

After going through this list of tools, you may feel exhausted just reading about each of them. But I promise that these tools are social boosters. These social media tools are simple, effective, and fairly inexpensive—and designed to make your social sharing life a little more manageable. Even so, it can be time consuming to do everything you should with social media in order to be effective in social selling. There's no time to stress about it, simply keep reading. In the next chapter, I help you sort through all the potential time synchs and develop a feasible schedule that keeps your social (media) life on track, and supports—not distracts from—your professional goals.