The morale boils down to “you have to improve all the steps in a given process to improve the process”. Here it’s applied to the Social Media Engagement process.

Amongst the many things my gentleman was able to do that he could only dream about before, he was now able to keep more than 2000 digital books at his fingertips. He also told me he adds more all the time.

Surely, I can see how convenient it would be to carry a whole library in your pockets.
But after I left him, I did some maths: Assuming he is an avid reader, but works a normal 8hr job, he reads 2 books per week, 200 book per year, thus it will take him 10 years to read everything he has on his iphone.
What’s the point?

The point starts here; technology has made :

1. finding stuff easy while before the ‘cost to access’ was one big limiting factor on the consumer side.
2. producing stuff easy while before the ‘cost to distribute’ was one limiting factor on the producer side

Easy access to music, easy access to books…and: Easy access to people in your market thanks to social media.

That’s not coming without a big challenge
What was the goal of this gentleman? Response: Read. Challenge: I don’t have enough time to read 2000 books.
What’s the goal of marketers in social media? Response: Communication and relationships. Challenge: I don’t have enough time to talk to all those relevant folks I have access to. And C=L+T (smart Communication is Listen then Talk). So I also need to listen!

The truth is you can talk to many people at once but you can listen only to one (You can do mass marketing but you can’t do mass listening and technology can’t help much here at least until we find a way to dump/structure massive amount of info into our brain by bypassing our senses which may not be a good idea anyway.)  On top of that, consumers are smart, they turnoff if they’re talked to unless they know you, but love to be listened to.

The key for marketers today is thus to nurture the relationship over the transaction. As the Buddhist saying goes, “it is what we pay attention to that grows.”

Where do you find the time for it? How do you tune your process so that you reach your goal?

For one you can scale quite a bit by doing ‘team social marketing‘.  Your brand may have an SM guru and the impact of this key individual is real. But it’s the power of the many that really holds the key. It is the many that make real things happened. Find 5, 10, 20, 100 and optimize the workflow between them and your market through social media.

For two, you have to focus on the right segments. In a given niche, there are hundreds influencers. That’s already plenty of folks to listen to as a team and communicate. Handpick them and listen/engage with them. If they know you exists and start liking you, they will likely relay your message to others they know; may be with a bit of a twist but, that’s ok and desired, because we don’t remember what we’re told, we remember how one made us feel.

What people mean by that ? , they recognize how challenging & time consuming it is for marketers to spend hours in blogs and social media  versus online advertising campaigns where a brand can position a value proposition to millions of consumers in one click.

I’d like to share two observations and make my point:

One: Social media has already scaled.

There are 20+ Millions people in LinkedIn, 150+ in Facebook and Myspace, and depending on studies 60 to 80% of americans read blogs. These people (many of them) work for someone. I have collected some data using a LinkedIn question about it. (thanks to participate !)

If you are spending some time in blogs and LinkedIn, you know that a good share of these discussions are work/business related.

Hence, the issue to me is more that companies are not leveraging their people conversations in Social Media.

Two: Does Customer Support Scale ?

I just read a new study mentioning that  93% of customer want companies to interact with them in social media. and there is, to me , some value in looking at social engagement the way we look at customer support:
Customer support does not scale more than social media. At least, before the massive investments in CRM, customer support centers, self help systems aso, one would argue that the Customer Support process was more or less one-to-one personal conversation.

Today, very few people would question the absolute necessity for almost any company to invest in customer support.

I would bet, social engagement will follow the same path as customer service.