David Letterman’s Top 10 SMM Questions List With A Garious Twist!

Today, I am so excited to present the Garious version of David Letterman’s Top 10 List: Have you ever wondered what are the 10 most important SMM questions that marketers must answer?

Garious decided to spare you the effort of uncovering them on your own. Allow me to present the top 10 questions in no specific order and Garious answers to them. Enjoy!

Question 1: What are the tech trends that are driving social CRM?

Garious Answer:

“Integration” is the greatest value of social CRM. Recently Zendesk, an online customer service platform, integrated with Salesforce in order to give sales reps. a deeper understanding of customers issues based on their customer service conversations. This could be very powerful in devising customized sales plans for future products.

Here’s an article that discusses this integration in detail:
Smart Social CRM In Action! Is Salesforce and Zendesk A Match Made In Heaven?

Also, the real-time capabilities of social media allow businesses to respond to customers’ needs promptly and proactively. For more details, check out this article:
Attention Social Media Marketers: Learn How To Use Social Media For Customer Service.

In addition, some businesses are taking their Facebook pages to the next level, allowing their fans to do virtually anything from initiating a support ticket to purchasing products – without leaving Facebook.
Here are some staggering examples:

• See How Some Big Players Took their Facebook Pages to the Next Level
• Learn Intelligent Facebook Marketing Tips From Guy Kawasaki, Lady Gaga and More…

Question 2: What are the most effective tools for monitoring social media?

Garious Answer:

Well, it depends on your social media monitoring goals.

If you are after the big picture of your overall brand performance, Klout can be helpful but if you want to dig deeper and build a community around your brand advocates on social media, I’ve given detailed information in that regard here:

How do you monitor what people say about you on the web?

Here’s another article that gives a roadmap to effective social media monitoring:
Yes, You May be “Listening” to 1% of What People Say About Your Brand! The Good News is…

Question 3: Your social media budget just got an extra $10,000. How do you spend it and why?

Garious Answer:

My number one priority if I got $10,000 would be to build a community of influential brand advocates who will act as my brand ambassadors to millions of people worldwide.

In his free eBook, “Flipping the Funnel”, Seth Godin said:
Turn strangers into friends.
Turn friends into customers
And then… do the most important job:
Turn your customers into salespeople.

That’s exactly what my focus is – even if my budget was $10!

Check out these articles and you will understand why I’m so in love with this idea:

• 9 Reasons Your Company Should Use Brand Advocates: New Research
• 3 Rewards and 3 Risks of Making Customers Brand Ambassadors

Question 4: In what ways has social media made the sales process easier and/or more profitable?

Garious Answer:

Social media can be a tremendous help in accurately identifying qualified leads. On the one hand, it empowers you to reach your target market and interact with them in a natural, non-intrusive way. On the other hand, so many tools have been devised to help you “eavesdrop” on what people are saying about your brand.

By carefully listening to these conversations, you can easily find some “diamonds in the rough.” One of the Twitter branding tools I absolutely love is InboxQ. It allows you to answer questions relevant to your brand on Twitter.

This way, you can easily establish yourself as an expert in your field and those who cared enough to raise the question provide a basis for what I call “effortless prospecting.”

Thanks to social media, you no longer have to dig for leads. Just be there when they scream for help and they will reward you generously. Don’t you love social media?

Question 5: Who are the real social media experts? (and why)

Garious Answer:

You do have every right to be skeptical as the number of self-proclaimed “social experts” is skyrocketing but few of them really deserve this title.

We have tackled this confusing issue on Garious blog several times and discussed it from two perspectives:

1. For businesses looking for social experts:
   So You Want to Hire a Social Media Strategist? Here is What You Should Look For…
2. For social experts who wish to standout and build credibility:
   5 Proven Ways to Establish Yourself as a Social Media Expert

Question 6: What techniques do you recommend if you need to reach a very specific audience?

Garious Answer:

Since social media is Garious playground, I will rephrase the question as follows: “How do you reach a very specific audience on social media?”

For starters, I will assume that you did your niche marketing homework well. In other words, you already narrowed down your audience in terms of age range, gender, education level, demography , you name it.
Now here’s what you need to do to reach them effectively on social media:

• Run a Facebook Ad targeted to this group
• Use a Twitter branding tool called “InboxQ’ to “listen” to questions asked by them and answer them promptly and informatively
• Join their networks/groups on Facebook and LinkedIn
• Answer their questions on forums and Q&A sites
• Step 4 will help you identify their burning needs. Make sure to address them in your blog posts. (You can get the best of both worlds in 4 &5 by offering “teaser” answers on Q&A sites and linking to your blog for more details. This will drive massive traffic to your blog in no time)
• Based on information from steps 2 & 4, create how-to YouTube videos and embed them on your blog

I barely touched the surface as there are plenty of ways to leverage social media for reaching a specific niche. However, accurately defining your niche online can make or break the rest of your plan. Here are some online niche marketing tips to help you out:

• Niche Marketing Tips (1) – the 5 HOWs of Intelligent Niche Marketing Online
• Niche Marketing Tips (2) – Online Niche Profitability Indicators

Question 7: What does ‘listen to your customer’ really mean?

Garious Answer:

The word “listen” has been extensively used but I still see that few businesses really get it. Social media is a mixed blessing when it comes to customer intelligence as so many people may be reviewing your products or buzzing about your brand. Still, it can be very helpful for knowledge assimilation and integrating customers’ insights into creating new products or refining existing ones.

In addition, listening to customers involves getting their feedback on your customer service process. Do they find it too complicated? Is the service poor? Businesses must work hard to ensure they are providing exceptional customer experience.

We have written so many articles on the Garious blog addressing this critical issue. Following are a few of them:

• Why Listen, Partner, Innovate Are 2011 Social Branding Keywords
• The “Thank You Economy” Precious Lessons on Business Humanization

It’s not an easy question to answer, I can tell you that, but we need to dig deep and spare no expense in order to keep our customers satisfied. Otherwise, what’s the point of being in business?

Question 8: What’s the best way for sales people to use Twitter to develop leads?

Garious Answer:

Using Twitter chats, targeted direct messaging, @replies and @Mentions are great ways to start conversations with your leads on Twitter.

In order to identify your leads in the first place, InboxQ is a free tool that helps you answer Twitter question that are related to your brand. I can’t think of a better way to start a conversation with a prospect.

You can also use Google to find Twitter leads. For example, if you’re targeting stay-at-home moms, the following Google search will return a list of all Twitter profiles including stay-at-home mom in their bio: “intext:bio * stay-at-home mom” site:twitter.com

For more intelligent Twitter engagement tips, I invite you to read the following article: 5 Twitter Treasures That Only Insane Marketers Should Overlook!

Question 9: Do you think that video content would be more effective than other types of content?

Garious Answer:

In addition to their excellent SEO rewards, videos tend to have more appeal to a wide range of audience particularly visual people who would favor pictures over words. (In fact, most of us enjoy videos even avid readers)

The only pitfall I see in videos is that they cost more (in terms of time and money) compared to textual content. Still, there are so many workarounds to the time/money issues such as YouTube story animation and slideshow video features.

That’s why; I strongly believe that all businesses should incorporate video content to some degree, depending on their target market and budget. (The bare minimum is having a 3-minute promo video.)

Also, creating video tutorials that detail the value of your products and services is highly recommended. For example, Garious FAQ page includes four video tutorials. Since we offer a social media scheduling tool, we figured that video tutorials are the best way to showcase the value of our product.

Generally speaking, I believe that video content can work for most businesses. In fact, I don’t see any business that should NOT use it to some degree.

Question 10: In what ways do you ascertain ROI for your firm’s Social Media Campaigns?

Garious Answer:

This question is mind-boggling to millions. You see, the biggest issue with Social Media ROI is that, up ’til now, there was no way to “ascertain” anything. Some sincere attempts were made in that regard, but the results they produced still lacked accuracy and reliability.

In a recent Garious blog post, we addressed this dilemma in detail by shedding light on some of the proposed solutions and questioning their effectiveness (particularly for small businesses).

But we didn’t stop there! We then offered an alternative paradigm shift on how we should evaluate our SMM campaigns. I invite you to read this article and let me know your take on it: “What’s The ROI Of Your Mother?” How About Setting S.M.A.R.T. Social Media Goals Instead!

On the other hand, we also wrote a detailed article on how to subdivide your SMM campaign into phases and measure the performance of each phase:
Why Bother Measuring Your Social Media Campaign? Keep it “Chaotic” Sweetie!

What’s your take on the Garious Top 10 SMM Questions list? I know there are many more questions to address. Can you suggest some of them? And hey, one last question: Do you think David Letterman should be proud of our Top 10?