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Black Ops Social Media Marketing and Sales
I just finished up the latest book in the Jason Bourne series, Bourne Deception. I love the action and intrigue of a good spy thriller. It pulls me back to my early days in the intelligence community…
Okay, maybe not quite the same–I never had to kill quite so many people to accomplish my objectives. However, it did get my creative thoughts going on how similar our “tradecraft” was to savvy social networking and marketing.
That’s right I spent quite a few years in the Air Force and later in a boutique consulting firm in Washington DC practicing the fine art of Information Warfare. This experience taught me a lot about motivating people to help you meet your own objectives.
I have a few quick thoughts that may be useful in applying these methodologies to your social media marketing strategy.
1. Objective(s)
No intelligence operation or marketing campaign goes well without a clear objective in mind. Intelligence work is a messy interaction of people, motivations, and emotions. The game plan often takes a hard right or left after the first few moves—so having a clear final objective is critical for getting back on course.
Marketing is no different. Are you trying to create an audience? Create a perception? Generate loyalty? Generate leads (customer inquiries)? Get access to a decision maker? It might be one or more.
Define it before you make any moves.
2. Profile
To achieve that objective (especially with social media) you need the help of one or more people. But, what kind of people?
It is relatively simple to attract an audience of thousands on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook. However, the likelihood of these arbitrary followers returning real results (revenue) on your marketing investment is slim.
This is where a well thought out profile makes you money. Think about: who will promote you, who will connect you, who will buy from you? These are the people you want to attract.
A profile will accomplish a couple of keys objectives:
- Helps you find and identify them easier
- Helps you understand what motivates them
- Helps you find their communities
- Helps you discover past campaigns that worked
Profiles are great for designing influence strategies and campaign maps. Yes, just like spook work!
3. Searches
Now it is time to find these people and communities that may contain dense pools of candidates. There are a variety of ways to identify a large “pool” of prospects for fanatical customer agents.
Nearly every major social network or community has a sophisticated search engine and of course Google is the power tool of Black Ops marketers looking for recruits!
Here are a few places where I monitor for opportunities:
- FriendFeed
- Google (Alerts, Reader, Blog Search, Buzz)
4. Candidates
Searches are going to fill you full of opportunity, but the numbers will be unmanageable. You need to quickly get down to a reasonable number of targets. However, be careful not to exclude outliers returned in your searches.
One very effective approach will be to segment your candidates (prospects). These various groups can be used for a variety of purposes, from testing to alternative campaigns. Most importantly segmentation allows you to manage more opportunity and yield higher returns.
Some example segmentations and opportunities:
- High followers count, but low activity: May indicate other reputation or communities within which this person may be a strong leader or influencer. This person may be a strong candidate for your marketing, just in another venue
- High activity, quality content, but low count of followers: May be an aggressive newcomer with potential. In addition, these candidates may have a high motivation to network, refer, and evangelize new products, services, or people.
- High follower count, high activity, responsive community, but little relevance: These can be challenging, yet lucrative if done smartly. Candidates like these are excellent for new market penetration. Think: Is there a way to tie into this market and this person’s community in a natural and valuable way?
5. Monitoring
You have you pool of candidates, your recruiting targets, you potential “agents.” It is time to start laying the groundwork for recruitment…
Marketing and sales like to call this customer relationship management (CRM). I am here to tell you, that thinking dooms many a marketing campaign. People are not interested in having relationships with brands.
Here is what they are interested in:
- Personal Ego
- Reciprocity
- Consistency
- Social Proof
- Liking
- Authority
- Scarcity
Surprise, this is not a secret list if you are a student of Robert Cialdini. These are the basic tenets of “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.” This is what makes it easy to influence others to do our bidding—in a good way.
This is what you are monitoring for. Look for examples and opportunities to understand what influences your prospective audience.
6. Vetting
This is probably one of the most critical parts of segmenting good opportunities from the average crowd. Who is willing to help others and who simply has blinders for their own self-interests?
This can be a relatively difficult task requiring hours of monitoring. However, there are a few simple shortcuts.
Here are some great ways to search for relevance and popularity on various social networks:
- FriendFeed Search: Filtering for Popularity and Relevance (Web Worker Daily)
- Take Advantage of Twitter Search Operators (Web Worker Daily)
- Get More Out of Your Google Blog Search (Web Worker Daily)
Save these searches as RSS feeds and you have a running database of agents. Even more impressive is that these people are relevant to your marketing objectives, have a sizeable and active following, and are willing to promote products and services similar to yours.
7. Recruitment
Now you are into the scary part—recruitment. You need to convince your agent(s) to promote your products or services.
If you have done the preceding steps this may be quite simple.
You know a lot about your candidates. You know who is influential and who isn’t. You know who is willing to promote others and who isn’t. You probably even have an example or two of how to successfully pitch these candidates. In fact, they may have even told you in some social post.
Of course, if you don’t ask you won’t know. In this social networking world I suggest that during the vetting process you are actually engaging with candidates, helping them out, and gaining some level of reciprocity.
8. Training
You hooked them of course. Now the rubber meets the road. Don’t assume they know how to help you. The Web world can be a complex place. Just because someone knows how to blog or Twitter doesn’t mean they know the best way to give a good back link, to ReTweet you, or cut ‘n paste your affiliate code.
Talk about what works best, considering your marketing agent’s skills and style. Try to make promoting your product or service as simple and natural as possible for that person.
9. Motivation
Getting a new agent to Digg a post, ReTweet something, link to you, or even reference you in a blog post can be relatively easy. The hard part is motivating them to do it again and again. Even better, doing it without you even asking the favor.
The secret is in your motivation strategy.
Motivation is a tricky thing. It’s all about getting paid, right? The facts will amaze you.
I will go back to my intelligence training here. Did you know that even the most notorious and famous spies in history have made more than $100,000? Not per year. For the entire time they were spying (most for years). Many spies are barely paid enough to cover their expenses. Most are paid nothing.
So, it must be ideology? No. Few Americans that spied for the Soviet Union had any great love for Communism or great hate for America. Motivation is elusive and often tied to some emotional (often illogical) need. Find it, tap it.
Study your agents. Find out what prompts them to do things. Find where that emotional gap is. Help them fill the gap.
10. Activation
Your agents are trained and motivated—it’s time to activate them. Give them something to do. I see a lot of people in social networks that have accumulated hundreds and even thousands of followers, but do nothing with them.
Believe it or not this is not only a waste of value, but also demotivating for the network. People like to feel a part of something, which means doing something, visible and useful. Build your marketing strategy to hit that button.
Case Management
None of these steps will do you any good if you don’t have a good strategy for case management. Any good intel operation needs good case management. Good operations (marketing campaigns) produce their best results when they are sustained over time.
Continue to repeat this operational process. Revisiting your pool of candidates and agents will help you to continue building your network of agents and strengthening the ones that are already active.
Do you have any of your own black ops social media marketing techniques? I’d love to hear about them.
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About Bill Rice
