This is interesting. It also seems fundamental. I am sure way to many of us are guilty of “believing the buzz about social media and aren’t paying attention to a basic premise.

It is about establishing relations first and then generating sales. It is about tracking the relationship and experience. What good does it do to acquire a prospect and then not to track them?

If I, as a B2B marketer, could do only three things with social media, social marketing, today, I would chose the following:

• First, I would design my campaigns to be socially sharable. I’d write content that is shareable; that adds to the discourse; that shakes it up; that shows an edge.  And I would use social sharing tools to get my content in play.
• Next, I would grow my prospecting network by mining social networks for likely prospective buyers and engage them.
• And then I would develop a strategy to engage with social influencers. That is actually easier to do than it sounds. If I am getting that first bit right. If I am creating that engaging and valuable content, then social influencers will engage with me. I might want to accelerate the process by identifying them first and commenting on their blogs or retweeting their tweets. But, if I am adding, in a positive way, to the discourse on an important topic, I am going to raise my digital and social profile.

I would be interested in your experience. Any thoughts? Are you converting social media contacts into prospects? Prospects into customers?

The University of Massachusetts released its annual survey of social media usage at Fortune 500 companies. The report revealed that in the past year, these business giants have increased their adoption of blogging by 5%, their use of Twitter for corporate communications by 11% and their use of Facebook pages by 8%. Sixty-two percent of the F500 have corporate YouTube accounts and 2% (11 companies) are posting on Pinterest. Sixty-six % of the F500 are now on Facebook. 73% of the F500 have active corporate Twitter accounts.However, what caught my attention was another recent survey that the University was also promoting on the same web page.

This survey examined how universities use social media to attract students to their MBA programs. The study showed the same sort of increases that the F500 survey revealed. However, the headliner take-away from this research was “The Missing Link in Social Media Use Among Top MBA Programs: Tracking Prospects” The report concluded that “the missing link appears to be tracking those who first become interested in the program through one of the program’s social media sites. Being able to measure whether these prospects actually apply to the program is something schools may be looking to do, but have not yet mastered. Without this piece of information it is difficult to really assess the effectiveness of the social media plan and to know where future investments should be made.”

via The Missing Link in Social Media Use: Tracking Prospects | Forrester Blogs.