Presenter: Greg Cangialosi (@gregcangialosi), CEO of Blue Sky Factory From the program:

It is the oldest of sales and marketing stand bys. Form a relationship with the customer before trying to sell them something. The reality of social media tools allows a new level of relationship building for companies large and small, B2B and B2C. Join Greg Cangialosi as he discusses how he has used relationship building and community support to steadily build the email service provider Blue Sky Factory into a successful and social brand.

What are the goals of social media?

• Provide value
• Build relationships based on trust
• Get as much mindshare as you can

 

How did Blue Sky Factory do it?

• Found our internal champion(s)
• Turned marketing into a publishing organization
  • Social web is a beast and it must be fed with good quality content.
  • Content must add value, be relevant, share best practices, show examples, and be helpful.
• Work from an editorial calendar
  • You need a schedule to get all this content out regularly.
• Use [enter tool here] as distribution & conversation channel.
  • Be everywhere your audiences is and in as many places as you can
• Monitor & listen to the conversation
  • Blue Sky Factory is big on the dashboard. (Radian6, iGoogle, NetVibes)
  • Their whole team is generally socially aware.
  • They send relevant sentiment from social media with the staff.
• Use social networks to engage & connect (on one-on-one basis).
  • Use tweets, etc. as testimonials.
  • Engaging on one-on-one basis. (ex. Retweeting where it’s relevant to Blue Sky Factory.)
  • They’ve created and are active in LinkedIn groups.
  • Building community simply by actively engaging in it.
• Send frequent email communications.
  • Cross-polinate. Use social networks to pull people into database and email.
• Experiment, evaluate, adapt.

 

So, is it working?

Blue Sky Factory has (as of the beginning of Greg’s presentation) 424,351 inbound links to website (and growing…). These links are blog posts, comments, tweets, references, landing pages, ebook promotions, etc. Also, social has brought in 22% of their revenue in 2010.

Some takeaways…

• Sales is a by-product of participation.
  • Don’t ever lead with sales.
• Avoid the “Kumbaya Effect”
  • Social is a happy place for a lot of people, but it gets misconceived about what it is and what it can be doing.
  • The misconception is that it’s all about fun and games. Social is SERIOUS business.
• Brands need personality (people work with people).
• It’s all about trust & real relationships
  • Be genuine. You can’t fake it. It’s not possible.
• Can your brand be social?
• The show goes on…