Who to Connect with and How to Manage Multiple Networks on Social Media
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@scottalanmiller Why does it have to be a complaint? How about praise for a job well done? Or maybe it isn't the social account of the SMB, but the business owner's personal account.
Imagine the owner of that corner store sounding off on their own personal twitter account about a technical issue they are having and being able to find a quick and easy resolution via a reply.
It's about positioning yourself as a problem solver and building strong relationships.
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@GlennBarley said:
Imagine the owner of that corner store sounding off on their own personal twitter account about a technical issue they are having and being able to find a quick and easy resolution via a reply.
So you think that, and I'm being serious because this sounds crazy...
- Local business owners use computers and have Twitter.
- The guy at the corner store is announcing randomly in public that he has issues running his business and doesn't know how to hire the needed people to help.
- That any MSP can monitor all businesses looking for people like this complaining.
- Could then contact him and offer assistance.
- Could actually win the work.
- The profits could offset the cost of doing all this?
Do you have any examples where this has happened in the real world?
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@GlennBarley said:
It's about positioning yourself as a problem solver and building strong relationships.
Exactly, and I can't see how Facebook or Twitter could possibly do that. Neither builds business to business relationships with viable businesses nor does either lend itself to making you look like a problem solver, it makes you look like an idle teenager who doesn't have any paying clients. The cost of looking around on social media for poorly running businesses would be very high. And failing businesses don't make good customers.
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@GlennBarley said:
@scottalanmiller Why does it have to be a complaint? How about praise for a job well done? Or maybe it isn't the social account of the SMB, but the business owner's personal account.
Because you don't need to respond or monitor if it is a praise. And, realistically, when have you seen business customers going on social media to praise their IT vendors. Do you have concrete examples of MSPs getting genuine, unsolicited praise in this way?
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@scottalanmiller The reason is to build a strong relationship with your clients and help increase the chances that they are going to stick with you as a service provider.
It may seem worthless, but giving clients the feeling that they have a back and forth with their provider is valuable, regardless of the platform.
We have plenty of examples of our partners either voicing a disappointment or a praise on social media and we actively respond to both.
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@GlennBarley said:
@scottalanmiller The reason is to build a strong relationship with your clients and help increase the chances that they are going to stick with you as a service provider.
I'm not arguing building a strong relationship, actually I'm arguing for it. I'm arguing that these technologies don't do that and take away from the time and energy needed to do so.
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@GlennBarley said:
It may seem worthless, but giving clients the feeling that they have a back and forth with their provider is valuable, regardless of the platform.
That's why it is important to maintain strong connections so that the back and forth is reliable, discoverable, repeatable and stable. It's specifically because of the importance of that communications that I feel neither side in a serious business relationship would engage in this manner, cannot picture it actually happening and have never seen it happen nor had anyone suggest that it actually has.
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@scottalanmiller I would have to disagree with you. These technologies are becoming increasingly popular and used for a wide range of reasons. B2B Interactions is one of those reasons.
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@GlennBarley said:
We have plenty of examples of our partners either voicing a disappointment or a praise on social media and we actively respond to both.
You are not an MSP and like we've said over and over, that doesn't qualify. Your post is about MSPs, correct? This thread is about MSPs? And no one has ever heard of an MSP or an MSP client or a potential MSP client doing anything like this, right?
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@GlennBarley said:
@scottalanmiller I would have to disagree with you. These technologies are becoming increasingly popular and used for a wide range of reasons. B2B Interactions is one of those reasons.
Do you have MSP to customer examples then or is this just speculation?
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@scottalanmiller Why does it make a difference? Why can an SMB not interact socially the way that an MSP does with its vendors?
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MSPs engage customers VERY differently than do vendors and other entities. Nothing that is applicable to marketing in general applies the same to MSPs. Customers don't know what they do, have no idea how to find them, cannot search for them and do not want to air their problems with their core infrastructure and stability of their business in public.
This is much like the same discussion we had with every marketing firm a decade or two ago about yellow pages. They are worthless for an MSP because customers do not seek them that way. But the marketing industry knowledge was that that was how you reached people.
You can't take the broad view that "social media is a good marketing platform" and apply it blindly to MSPs. The MSP - Customer relationship is extremely unique and nothing like any where a product is sold.
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@GlennBarley said:
@scottalanmiller Why does it make a difference? Why can an SMB not interact socially the way that an MSP does with its vendors?
Because the interactions are nothing alike. Any MSP can tell you, working as an MSP is nothing remotely like selling a software product or a hosted service. It's a REAL relationship, it's conjoined businesses. As an MSP, it sounds utterly ridiculous that our customers would talk to us on Facebook. We are on email, IM, the phone all day, every day. It's like sitting in the living room with your family and then someone gets up, walks across the street and calls from a payphone instead of just talking in the room that they were just in.
Facebook, Twitter... these are "arm's length" communications. This is what distant vendor relationships use to act connected. They are so much less connected than MSPs need to be. If you feel this is a valuable way to communication at the MSP level, I feel like the relationships must be failing horribly. This is so much less social, less connected than an MSP needs to be.
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When you go on Twitter, it's because you are thinking of your vendor as an anonymous service - a big corporate entity somewhere. I use Twitter to talk to companies when I am the customer and they are distant and I have no tight contact with them.
Once I have any sort of viable relationship with a company, Twitter would be impersonal and cold. Even vendors that I don't do business with I have closer connections to than that. Even the MSP to Vendor relationship, I feel, would be a rocky one if we were to resort to such impersonal modes of communications. Potentially acceptable but only when not working together in a close partnership - not how a good MSP would want their vendor partners, ideally.
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@scottalanmiller Would you not interact with your friends on social media? I have all of my friends phone numbers and text them throughout the day. But if I see an interesting article on social media that they may be interested in, I'll tag them on it so that they can see it as well. Maybe we'll discuss it later when we're chatting. I don't think it has to be one or the other and I'm certainly not suggesting that MSPs rely only on social media to build relationships, but it can be an additional measure to doing so.
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@GlennBarley said:
@scottalanmiller Would you not interact with your friends on social media? I have all of my friends phone numbers and text them throughout the day. But if I see an interesting article on social media that they may be interested in, I'll tag them on it so that they can see it as well. Maybe we'll discuss it later when we're chatting. I don't think it has to be one or the other and I'm certainly not suggesting that MSPs rely only on social media to build relationships, but it can be an additional measure to doing so.
I have customers on social media. So an example.... @Dashrender is a client of @ntg and is on my Facebook. We interact as individuals normally there, not as professionals or as vendor/client or anything like that.
Having the companies have social interactions with each other there is weird. It's for the goofing around stuff. I agree, having unstructured, social, unofficial conversations or sharing cat pics is important. But if you make it a business channel it has to stop being that, right? How would that work?
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Keep in mind we are discussing this on social media. I'm talking about non-professional social media, public, random, ad hoc business to business communications that I think is a bad way for connecting to existing customers. Not that the people within those businesses should not connect and not that companies should not have a presence there (we do, but none of our customers do) but I think that thinking of it as the place to build relationships is where it fails for the B2B MSP to Customer category.
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@scottalanmiller It depends on how you want to brand your accounts. Many of our MSP partners have expressed interest of simply fusing their business into their personal accounts to sort of create a blend of those two worlds. Yes, you can still interact on that personal level, but you can also share helpful, topic content that your clients might find useful.
If the accounts are broken apart (personal and business) you could always use the personal account to point to helpful content shared on the professional accounts.
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@scottalanmiller I don't think it should be THE place to build relationships, but it's another place to connect.
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Facebook is how a good number of people network, chat, get their news, connect with like minded professionals in groups, and more. You underestimate its value because you personally don't use it. Plenty of consumers and business owners actively use facebook, though.
