InsightaaS: Today’s featured post is one of the most unusual you’ll see on LinkedIn: a discussion of social selling that is clear, relevant and practical!
That may be a bit unfair, but only a bit. Much of the discourse one sees around “social enterprise,” “social selling” or the many extensions to the “social” theme are long on the promise of future importance/ubiquity and short on advice that can be applied to immediate business concerns. In today’s feature, though, Toronto-based consultant Andrew Jenkins looks at “five Cs” – culture, change, content, curation and collaboration – and how they combine to shape the success of social selling initiatives.
I especially enjoyed Jenkins’ comments on content and curation. I suppose this is natural; after all, InsightaaS is a content business, writing a combination of reports, whitepapers and deep editorial on the IT industry, and ATN itself is an exercise in curation, so I might be expected to ‘vigorously agree’ with Jenkins’ belief that “companies unaccustomed to the volume of content being created, consumed, and distributed within social channels face a daunting task” and his emphasis on the importance of ” sourcing complementary content from other sources that is non-competitive and aligned with their message.”
To revert back to some of the generalities I was poking fun at a few sentences ago…content marketing, social selling and the social enterprise as a framework for corporate action and interaction are a lot like some of the emerging technologies we write about at InsightaaS, such as Big Data and IoT: it isn’t easy to define a path forward, it’s difficult to point to current success models and ROI can be very difficult to define, let alone capture – but debate focuses mainly on how quickly they will become relevant, not whether they will be important in the future. Jenkins’ post helps to illustrate some of the issues that companies face today, and some of the steps they can and should take to ensure that the path they set out on leads to the destination they need to arrive at.
When discussing social selling, much of the conversation is about sales and marketing. While those are key areas involved and impacted by social selling, there are more aspects of the enterprise that need to be discussed to ensure the successful rollout of a social selling initiative.
Culture
You have probably heard the expression, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”. Well that expression applies to social selling strategy too. Culture is an aspect of enterprises often overlooked when it comes to the adoption of social selling or, more broadly, a social media strategy that cuts across the entire organization…
