Professionals primarily deliver their clients value by their services (rather than products) and these services are usually tailored to the individual, and thus personal in nature. As a result professionals tend to develop strong relationships with their clients, and their clients in turn bond to “their” provider.

This means that to a great extent your professional brand is your personal brand.

But it gets more interesting: clients of professionals generally have no way of knowing the quality of the services they are receiving from a technical perspective – they can’t assess how good a surgeon is with a scalpel for example, or how much research and knowledge a lawyer has contributed to a task.

So how do client’s assess the skill, quality and value of their professional service provider? They use Proxies.

Personal Appearance as a Proxy for Professional Service Quality

Proxy: a figure that can be used to represent the value of something in a calculation.

The post Personal Branding for Professionals – how your appearance matters appeared first on Influential.

“We tried Social Media once… it didn’t work”

I’ve long been fascinated with how “serious” businesses like professional service firms can use tools like social media, blogging and digital marketing to grow their practice.

It’s no secret that the way people search for, compare and buy products and services has changed enormously in the last decade. Remember the last time you used a phone book? Do you even own one anymore?
These days people turn straight to Google when they have a problem that needs solving. They check out advice from self-proclaimed experts on internet forums, and compare providers on review sites. They might even ask for advice from their friends and extended network on social media.

Clearly, professionals need to tap into this online search and referral network if they want to build their business. It sounds easy when you hear the advice of “social media gurus” – just share something on facebook and twitter and watch it go viral, and watch the customers come rolling in.

Most professionals encounter a very different experience when they try their hand at social media, blogging and online marketing – the sound of crickets.

“We tried Social Media once. It didn’t work” – 1001 different professional service firm owners

I’ve found this myself, when I first developed a website for my veterinary practice group Cairns Vet Clinic in 2004. People just didn’t seem interested in what I was writing about, even though it was really great, helpful stuff (honestly!).  I’d slave over a blog post or spend time on social media with frustratingly little response.

I’ve seen the same thing occur when my professional colleagues dabbled with social media or online marketing. Lots of effort in with little results.

Does this mean that social media is a waste of time for professionals? Absolutely not! I’ve watched some professionals who have been really successful online marketers. When you see what they get right, it’s easy to see why most professionals fail in their online marketing efforts.

In future posts I’ll be sharing some case studies of professionals who have been highly successful in their social media and digital marketing efforts.

But to whet your appetite – lets review where most professionals go wrong with social media

Top 7 reasons professionals fail on social media

1. They lack focus – they don’t concentrate on specific high value clients and being the very top provider to those clients.
2. They’re antisocial – you can’t just pay lip service to social media – to get the real benefits of social media you really need to listen and genuinely interact with your clients.
3. They don’t offer value and expertise – at least not what their clients value. High value clients have very specific needs and expectations and won’t work with someone who can’t demonstrate their value and expertise up front.
4. Their website sucks – It’s from 1999, it doesn’t generate leads, it doesn’t allow interaction or connect to your social media channels, or your client’s needs, or your business goals. This is a big one!
5. They aren’t where the people are: This sounds like a no-brainer, but businesses need to go to where their customers are: this means being found when they search for problems, being active on social media and getting featured on the industry news sites,  blogs and mainstream media that your clients read
6. They don’t engage – Another no-brainer, but it’s a mistake we see again and again. Social media is about relationships and conversations. Building relationships and engaging with clients and influencers online and offline are essential to get results from social media. If you don’t do this you are just using social media as an advertising channel. This is like turning up at a party and trying to sell to your friends – very uncool. and sharing great stuff you’ll do much better.
7. Their brand isn’t shareable – Think of the stuff that people love to share on social media – it’s fun, cool, interesting, family oriented – Stuff from their accountant or lawyer… not so much. To succeed with social media professionals need to be more creative.

and a bonus:

#8 Bonus: They quit too soon – Social media and digital marketing are long term strategies – the benefits take a long time to accrue but once they do they keep paying off.

What are the top mistakes you see professionals make in their marketing?

The post Why professionals fail on social media appeared first on Influential.

The rise of social media and influence monitoring tools like Klout means that we can now measure the previously invisible interactions that mark and transmit influence within human networks.
In the increasingly important Social Economy, influence is something that brands and marketers are struggling to understand and to harness.

The new connected economy

We are witnessing the rise of a new connected  economy where value is delivered across human networks. Relationships and personal interaction form the foundation of this economy, and the subtle currents of influence through these networks are being recognised as a powerful force which affects the broader economy.

This social influence has always been important, and has become enshrined in many cultures as class and political structures. The rise of social media has allowed the rapid and massive measurement of units of human interactions for the first time, leading to the development of a whole influence industry – as covered in this article on The rise and rise of influence.

For the last couple of hundred years our economy has been built on transforming our interactions into transactions.The most successful businesses have built industrial processes which deliver value and captured profit. Success in this economic model is measured by profit and capital. To increase the market for a product or service, industrial marketing strategies and tools (broadcast, advertising, interruption based marketing) were used to increase the number of consumers entering the sales funnel.

Influence trumps advertising

People are much more likely to buy a product because a friend recommends it, rather than because you saw an advertisment. Most consumers today avoid most of the traditional advertising channels. This is causing real headaches for big brands which have relied on industrial marketing campaigns to feed their business models.

Brands are turning to social media and advocate marketing to capture the power of influence over consumer buying decisions. Without understanding the economics of social influence they risk poor outcomes and even brand damage by applying industrial marketing models to the social mileu.

The Social Economy is Built on Relationships Within Networks

New social and technological transformations are causing an growth in a parallel economy of relationship and networks. In this economy, success is harder to measure – we are still learning how to measure engagement, influence, connection, and relationship.

Can Influence be converted into Profit?

Naturally industrial businesses want to know how this new currency of influence can be turned into the old currency – something they can put in the bank. Likewise many people who enjoy the Social Media experience are interested in turning their influence into cash – whether it is a “pay per tweet” model or representing a business as their “Brand Ambassador”.

Without understanding how influence works in a social economy we risk destroying social credibility if we attempt short term capture of profitability from influence – we’ll “kill the golden goose”

What is the role of influence and the network economy in business thrivability and profitability?

We’ll cover that further in our upcoming post and webinar on Brand Elevation.

The post Is Influence the Currency of the new Social Economy? appeared first on Influential.

Throughout human history, access to resources, and the tools, processes and systems to turn those resources into useful stuff have been scarce. At times there has also been a scarcity of labor of sufficient skill to supply services such as turning resources into useful stuff, or helping people choose or use their stuff.

In the early 21st century in spite of incredible depletion of the world’s natural resources, there remains a surfeit of stuff – with more and more ingenious people figuring out new ways to make stuff and get it to you. Many of the barriers to making more stuff (including copyright and patent laws) have been overcome, ignored or sidestepped by developing countries.

In many cases the whole business model is being replaced – a great example is the shift from expensive enterprise IT systems (requiring extensive in house hardware, software, resources and personnel) to SaaS solutions.

What is still in demand? It is meaning, value and connection – that vital piece of the puzzle that makes people feel more complete.

People don’t just buy your stuff, they buy your story

Companies that only produce or supply products or services are incredibly vulnerable to someone copying, improving on or superceding their cash-cow.

How can businesses overcome this race to the bottom which sees old, established companies being eaten alive by new, irreverent startups.

In choosing a brand, people are choosing to weave the brand story into their personal story. Brand decisions and other purchases say something about us as people.

Telling an enchanting brand story

Some of the most successful companies today have succeeded in spite of having the same technology as everyone else – a well worn example is the Apple iPod. Hundreds of manufacturers created mp3 players, yet the iPod somehow won the day.

Create a Brand Story Universe

Part of the reason for Apple’s triumph in the MP3 battle (and subsequently in the phone, tablet, music and computer wars) was that their brand story was a self-contained story that was compelling on it’s own, but was connected to a much bigger picture – almost like a self-contained fantasy world. Alternate realities are highly compelling as backdrops for a story – something almost like reality, but different enough to suggest that things that are normally impossible can become possible. This partly accounts for the massive success of cult hit stories like Lord of the rings, Narnia, Star Trek and Star Wars as well as most of the world’s mythologies.

Keep the dream alive

If you’ve built a brand (rather than just making stuff), people are buying your product as a side effect of buying your story – the story is more important than the stuff.

This means your story needs to continue even when they aren’t buying the stuff. The story needs to make sense, and be there for them, like something familiar and trusted even when they don’t need your story at the time.

How can you continue the story – where can you take them that nobody else can?

Maintaining your brand story via content marketing and customer engagement can help take your business from the world of stuff to the world of dreams.

Once upon a time…

What comes next in your brand story? That’s up to you.

The post Your brand story – more important than your product? appeared first on Influential.

Creating a great brand really relies on expressing your essence as a story which people connect with on a deeper level. Many people and businesses can’t imagine summing themselves up in a story. They feel like “But I’m pretty boring”, or “Everyone knows what I do” or “I’m an accountant and I help people with tax returns”. Naturally, if that’s your story, people aren’t going to get excited or interested in what you can do for them. Many of us just can’t imagine writing an interesting story at all.

In reality though, there are threads of meaning, motivation and values that run through our lives which can guide us in developing a meaningful story. If you think of why you started doing what you do, or what made you choose one path over another at critical junctions in your career, you will get ideas about what makes you tick. Likewise if you ask your friends or clients their strongest memories of you, or why they choose to do business with you, you may get surprising results or they may confirm your expectations about what is special and distinctive about you.

We can turn this into a great story by following a narrative structure, such as setup, conflict, resolution, which helps ensure the story is engaging, meaningful and satisfying.

When creating a brand story we want to move beyond simply a nice or interesting story. Brands are built of symbols, meaning and feelings as much as details about facts or features. For this reason, rather than following a generic story structure it is more powerful if we look instead to the most powerful and enduring stories from human history – mythology.

Mythology – stories that speak to a deeper truth

The most enduring myths of humanity owe their power to both their structure (which we’ll review below) – they are built to make a great, appealing, satisfying story, but also because they speak about a fantastical reality beyond the boring everyday world. This adds a certain excitement, but it also allows them to speak to people from different cultures and backgrounds about things that are universal to human experience. In a way, the fantastical nature of story helps people disregard their critical mind and be more receptive, and also to view their own situation through the lens of the story.

Brand Mythology

The greatest brands weave these elements in to a brand story which often takes on a life of it’s own. In many cases the stories become bigger than the events that inspired them, and might not be strictly accurate.

What makes apocryphal stories about business leaders or creative individuals so powerful? Usually these succeed by speaking the language of myth which is much more emotional, symbolic and meaningful than our everyday story of facts and figures, dates and data.

The power of these stories doesn’t lie in their factual accuracy so much as what they say about the person or business – that might be more general and eternal than any specific event or fact might convey. Sometimes a fictional story or quote tells the story better than any real life event.

For example, Henry Ford is often quoted as saying “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

There actually isn’t a record of Ford ever saying this, but it does indeed sum up his unique value: innovation so well that it deserves to be true. Great individuals like Ford develop a  mythology built around them, their companies or inventions that build a powerful brand that works better than any advertising.

Many of us are already living out a story, often without realising it. Understanding your current personal or company mythology and consciously telling more energising and empowering stories can transform your life, business or career. This doesn’t mean making up lies – to work these stories need to convey deeper truths about your values, challenges, vision and gifts.

The power of brand mythology

When most of us think of myths we think of kings and magic, gods and immortals, dragons and unicorns – fantastic things which don’t really exist. It can be hard to imagine how we can apply this to developing a personal or business brand.

In fact, the foundations of mythology are in the symbols, characters and story structure. The fantastic details are mostly there to tell our brains to enter the non-rational world. They are like a signpost saying – what I’m about to tell you isn’t for you to remember like facts, but to imagine and believe and take into your heart. Because these magical stories speak to our subconscious they can be much more powerful and persuasive that dry ideas that deal with boring everyday life. Understanding and using the power of myth and storytelling in telling our story and building our brand can help us achieve this. It’s worth noting that of the world’s most prominent brands, many of them are based on characters from mythology, or use them in their symbolism.

Mind you, we don’t always need to invoke dragons and wizards, knights and magic to enter the mythological world. In the modern world, dragons might be replaced by corporate dinosaurs. Wizards appear as wise old mentors or computer whizkids. People who battle for justice and truth to protect the environment are modern day knights. And in many ways, we live in an age of real magic. Transformative technology, systems or new ways of seeing old things can all represent the magic of your brand story.

The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Portraits by Martin Schoeller morphed by Micaël Reynaud

A great entry point into understanding mythology is the work of Joseph Campbell and his concept of the monomyth.  Campbell was a mythologist who spent decades studying the myths of cultures from around the world and throughout history. Campbell was particularly interested in the most prominent myths which survived for thousands of years. He noticed strong similarities between seemingly unrelated myths cultures removed by thousands of miles or thousands of years. Campbell proposed that there was a fundamental structure to all the great myths through human history. Excerpt from Wikipedia – The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

As the name suggests, The Hero with a Thousand Faces can appear in any time, or culture. For our purposes, the Hero is every one of us. Every person must make the hero’s journey to discover their gifts and the unique value they can bring to the world.

In a well-known quote from the introduction to The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell summarised the monomyth:

In laying out the monomyth, Campbell describes a number of stages or steps along this journey. The hero starts in the ordinary world, and receives a call to enter an unusual world of strange powers and events (a call to adventure). If the hero accepts the call to enter this strange world, the hero must face tasks and trials (a road of trials), and may have to face these trials alone, or may have assistance. At its most intense, the hero must survive a severe challenge, often with help earned along the journey. If the hero survives, the hero may achieve a great gift (the goal or “boon”), which often results in the discovery of important self-knowledge. The hero must then decide whether to return with this boon (the return to the ordinary world), often facing challenges on the return journey. If the hero is successful in returning, the boon or gift may be used to improve the world (the application of the boon).

Very few myths contain all of these stages—some myths contain many of the stages, while others contain only a few; some myths may have as a focus only one of the stages, while other myths may deal with the stages in a somewhat different order. These stages may be organized in a number of ways, including division into three sections: Departure (sometimes called Separation), Initiation and Return. “Departure” deals with the hero venturing forth on the quest, “Initiation” deals with the hero’s various adventures along the way, and “Return” deals with the hero’s return home with knowledge and powers acquired on the journey.

The classic examples of the monomyth relied upon by Campbell and other scholars include the stories of Osiris, Prometheus, the Buddha, Moses, andChrist, although Campbell cites many other classic myths from many cultures which rely upon this basic structure.

Why should we care about this mythological theory?

Mythology is all around us. We are so immersed in myths that we barely notice them.

An obvious place to start looking is fairy tales, movies and fantasy novels. In many ways the monomyth describes a successful narrative structure, so it’s no surprise it occurs so readily across different cultures. Campbell’s work was inspirational to many artists and storytellers, and some of the most popular stories of our time are consciously built using the concepts and structure of the monomyth. For example, George Lucas credits Campbell’s work as an important influence in developing the popular Star Wars trilogy.

In her great book in visual storytelling, Resonance, Nancy Duarte covers the Hero’s Journey followed by Luke Sky-Walker in Star Wars in a visual format.

What can we learn from Campbell’s concept of the monomyth?

Understanding the monomyth can help us to craft our brand storytelling in a way that conveys our deeper values and messages in a way which is more direct, persuasive and meaningful. Review your own life, or the growth of your business.  When have your felt the call to adventure? When have you faced trial and tribulation? What was the unexpected benefit? What was the hard won knowledge? How can you bring it to the world?

Another great place to start is to take a look at some of the stories you find most inspirational. What makes them powerful? Can you see the elements of the monomyth within them?

Do this both with your real world heroes, both those you know personally (maybe a family member, business partner or personal mentor), real people you don’t know (such as successful entrepreneurs, brilliant inventors or transformative political figures). With many of these people you will already have a simple story about them in your mind which closely follows the monomyth structure.

Likewise thing of your favorite books and movies from childhood and today. It’s great to re-watch some of these to rediscover some of the joy and power of myths and heroes.

Many fantasy books and films like The Hobbit, Harry Potter and Superhero films like Spiderman closely follow the monomyth formula.

Doing this helps you to identify what is meaningful and powerful to you, and is a great inspiration for discovering what the power of mythology can do for your own brand.

In many ways, while we might laugh at other civilisations with all supernatural tales of gods, ghosts or dragons, our own culture remains obsess with mythology in the form of superheroes and celebrities. Mythology holds eternal appeal for the human psyche, and ever culture creates it’s own unique stories of the Hero’s Journey.

The Hero’s Journey  can help you understand and develop your personal story because it not only provides a framework for a great story, it helps draw out what is most important and valuable to you, find strengths from your weakest moments, celebrate victories over adversity in your past and identify the unique skills and insights you have developed as you overcame them.
Importantly the Hero’s Journey isn’t complete until you bring your gifts back to the everyday world and use them in service of others.

Read more about The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Monomyth and Joseph Campbell

The post The Hero With a Thousand Faces – The Mythic Brand appeared first on Influential.

The post Define: Influential appeared first on Influential.

I realise there are also real downsides which we are only just beginning to see, but lets face it, it isn’t going anywhere, so we need to learn to adapt and make it work for us, rather than trying to avoid it.

1. You never have to not know the answer to something ever again.

2. Find people who love the things you love, and love what you do:

3. You can do what you love for a living:

4. You can have an influence over things you care about:

The post On doing what you love appeared first on Influential.

The way people discover, research and choose products, services and businesses has been changed forever by Google, the web, and social media. Old marketing strategies like interruption (advertisments in the middle of your favorite TV show etc) just aren’t working anymore.

Now the best brands are letting their customers do their marketing for them – they are leveraging the power of sharing.

Personal referrals and recommendations are still gold

Personal advice from the people we trust is still the most powerful factor influencing our purchasing decisions, but the way these are communicated and shared is shifting more into the digital space. Not only are people using tools like social media to share opinions and facts about products and businesses, the very nature of these tools means the reach of these communications has been dramatically increased.

Learning how to harness the power of this virtual referral network is essential for businesses that want to survive, and thrive in the next few years.

In this presentation The Sharable Brand, I explain why your business needs to create remarkable customer experiences and then needs to make these easy for your customers to share online.  We’ll also cover the process of nurturing leads into engaged customers and  passionate brand advocates..

The main topics we’ll cover in The Sharable Brand are:

1. The new referral process
2. Online business strategy
3. Crafting a shareable brand
4. Building lead and referral systems
5. The importance of campaigns

I’ll also give you a sneak preview of my brand value elevator process.

Join us at the BNI Cairns Harborview meeting on 26 June, 2013 at the Holiday Inn at 7am. Please give me a call to RSVP in advance, or contact another member of the chapter.

The event won’t be recorded but I will do a follow-up video presentation if you can’t make it.

The post The Shareable Brand appeared first on Influential.

Inbound Marketing involves getting prospective clients to find you, rather than chasing them.

When most of use think of marketing, we think of outbound marketing – also known as push marketing or interruption marketing. The most familiar examples of this is broadcast advertising, cold calling, junk mail and billboards. The main premise of this marketing strategy is that you need to get out there and interrupt your prospective audience to show them your message, hoping that some of the will be interested and buy.

Not only can this be annoying, but it is becoming less and less effective every day. A few decades ago, before remote controls, TV recorders, the internet and smartphones, advertisers had a captive audience. If people wanted to consume media, they just had to put up with the ads.

Now people have dozens of options to avoid seeing advertisments. They are also much more savvy about advertising and marketing messages.

Even more significant, consumers have become much more sophisticated in their buying processes.

The new buying cycle

Whereas once they would buy after brief exposure to a new product or service, now consumers spend much more time researching their purchases, mostly online – by visiting the business website, reading review sites, forums and industry blogs, and by asking their friends directly via social media or via text, phone or in person.

This means just showing an ad isn’t enough to acheive a sale anymore.

Inbound Marketing means making it easy for your customers to find you, then making it easy for them to buy from you.

Instead, if you want to reach your market and encourage them to buy, you need to be their number 1 source of information, and then remain present throughout the buying cycle.

This means being visible in search results, being mentioned in forums and blogs, and being active on social media. To top it all off, you need to have an awesome product which people will rave about.

Most importantly, you need to create “WOW” experiences and make it sharable

This lets your happy customers tell their friends and other prospective buyers about your product or service.

This all sounds like a lot of work, but this represents the future of marketing. The businesses that understand and implement this new inbound marketing process have a huge advantage over their competition who are still trying to interrupt their prospective customers to tell them how great their product is.

Inbound Marketing  Process

How do you set your business up to benefit from the new customer buying cycle? The best explanation I’ve seen of this is by Impact Branding and Design. Their Inbound Marketing Process infographic stands out as one of the most beautiful and informative infographics I’ve seen.

The post Inbound Marketing Process – Attracting Clients appeared first on Influential.

Is social media really worth your time, money and effort though?

Most businesses are wasting their time on social media

Unfortunately, the majority of businesses get a very poor return on investment from their social media efforts. Social media is often free or cheap to use, but it can be very expensive in terms of time and effort required to get results.

For most businesses, this means that social media is costing them time, energy and money that would better be spent on serving customers or working on other marketing channels.

The vast majority of businesses ROI for social media are negative
Should you give on on Social media then?

Why your social media efforts aren’t paying off

First let’s see why your social media efforts are failing. Then we’ll see what you can do about it. Finally, we’ll talk about why you should continue learning about and working at Social Media, even though it isn’t paying off yet.

1. You don’t know what you are doing with social media –It takes time, effort and help to learn to use any new tool or skill. You didn’t know how to use other technology until someone taught you. Take some courses, read some books or get some coaching to learn how to use social media well.
2. No one knows what they are doing with social media –  There. I’ve said it. The secret of 99% of people in marketing and social media – this is a brand new world – the rules are constantly changing! Because social media is still very new – even most experts in the industry have been using for less than a decade.  New tools, networks, and strategies are appearing all the time. The top social media practitioners spend more time learning than they do working – they need to in order to keep up with the rate of change. Also, the strategies that work on social media are different to what has worked in other marketing channels. As a result, even experienced marketers are struggling to get the most out of their social media efforts.
3. You are trying to sell on social media – Social media is supposed to be social.
   Wikipedia defines social media like this:

   Social media refers to the means of interactions among people in which they create, share, and exchange information and ideas in virtual communities and networks.

   Think of social media like one big party – people are there meeting friends, having fun, making new connections, and exchanging great stories and funny photos. If someone walks in and starts trying to sell something (like Amway or used cars) you can guess what this does to the conversation and atmosphere. Chances are the interesting people will join a different conversation, and likely avoid that sales person in future.

   Social media is about creating visibility and likeability, then building on this to boost your credibility. None of this is going to make you money immediately (and that is how it is supposed to be).

4. You don’t have a sales funnel – This might sound funny after the last point, but if you are going to make money in your business, you need a sales funnel. This shouldn’t be on social media – it should be on your own website, physical business or other structure you control completely. Your sales funnel should be capable of capturing qualified leads and turning them into sales. Social media is one of the way your get new customers into your sales funnel, but if you try to sell on social media you will usually just kill the social aspect
5. You don’t mean business – Social media can be an enormous time suck. Its easy to spend hours on facebook and not complete anything really concrete.People who succeed on Social Media do so by having a strategy, and working their networks. This still means being fun, friendly and social, but it means having a plan. For example, rather than just randomly connecting and commenting, you can systematically work through connecting with a specific group of prospects.
6. You are too superficial –Don’t worry, there is a cure! The key to getting ROI from social media is building deeper, real relationships with key people in your circles. Just connecting with someone online the blasting them with your own stuff works about as well as a conversation where people don’t listen to what the other person is saying. Learn more about your network, find out how you can help each other, and start by giving and learning.
7. You aren’t generous enough – Gee, this is a tough list, isn’t it! Just like in real life, people respond best to those who listen, give, and offer to help. They aren’t so interested in people who are always needy or trying to get something from you. Stand out from the crowd of selfish sales people and be the one who goes the extra mile and thinks of others. Be positive, giving and generous and watch the rewards flow.
8. You are not consistent enough – A common mistake with social media is to get started and do heaps…. But then forget about it or not follow through.Its much better to spend a regular 15 minutes a day to growing and connecting your network than it is to spend 5 hours once a month. In particular, make sure you respond to comments and follow through with leads. An unattended social media account is worse than no account at all.
9. You aren’t leveraging your existing networks and strengths –Don’t make the mistake of trying to build a social network from scratch – be sure to connect with real life friends and colleagues, search out the people you inspire you, brands you love, and communities who share your passion. Remember, it is social! It’s much easier to figure social media out when you have a few friends to chat with both online and in real life. They can be great allies with any online project and let you know when you are missing the mark.
10. You don’t track your metrics, or you track the wrong metrics – At this early stage in social media, the metrics we use are still crude and unreliable. For a while, everyone was obsessed with Facebook Likes and follower counts, but it is clear that these aren’t reliable indicators of Social Media ROI. If you have a great sales funnel set up and your product or service is well marketed on Social media, you are much better tracking social leads, conversions and sales.For many businesses though, Social Media is about building good will. To a degree, this can still be measured as lifetime customer value and referral rates, but just like real-life relationships, not everything can be reduced to numbers.

In summary, It’s still early days. Don’t expect instant results – social media needs to be part of a holistic long term strategy to grow your business – it’s not a way to make a quick buck or get instant results.

Building a decent network, making online friends, figuring out your voice and your message: these things all take time.

Why you really should continue with social media (Even if you suck at it!)

Social media is the fastest growing communication phenomenon in human history. Invalid LeadPlayer video - ID not found!

It is changing every year, and rapidly becoming the preferred online communication tool for an entire generation (many young people no longer have email accounts).
The reason you should persist with social media is that communicating social is the new literacy.

Let’s face it – the first few years of your learning to speak were pretty unimpressive. The same goes for your first few years of writing.

For most of us, social media is another new medium – one which is complex, rich and constantly evolving.

It isn’t going anywhere – it is taking over how we socialise, communicate and do business.

Learning to use social media today is like learning to use a computer a generation ago. Like learning any new skill it can be a challenge, but one that will pay off for years to come.

The post Why your social media ROI sucks (but you should keep doing it anyway) appeared first on Influential.