Today a quick video, this year I will talk much more about a topic I have huge passion for; its self-esteem. In this video I talk about: Is it unprofessional to be personal? Or should I tweak it a bit more for you; is it unprofessional to be you? It seems like I meet two different position takers out there.

What is your take?

Whether you are a startup entrepreneur or corporate entrepreneur, there are important lessons in this book when you heading for uncharted business waters, The Lean Startup (affiliate link) provides you with actionable avoid product-learning mistakes, and how to interpret early signals from the market so you can decide whether to persevere or to pivot. (Follow Eric Ries on Twitter).

Beautiful Mix In This Book

I like how Eric mix storytelling and actionable steps how to start using “the lean startup” in your own projects. If you are an entrepreneur you will mirroring your self in his stories and soon start filling in your own missing links why you failed a specific start up project. Entrepreneurs need this lean start up process to learn how to build a sustainable business and turn their product insights to a winning company.

Entrepreneurship Is Management

Startup success can be engineered by following the right process, which means it can be learned, which means it can be taught. A startup is an institution, not just a product so it requires a new kind of management. This sentence was a bit provoking in the initiating part of the book and captured my attention, this is a contradictory way to look at entrepreneurship, it’s more common that people think you need to be in the right place at the right time to reach success.

A startup is a human institution designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.

Ask The Right Questions

The question is not anymore: Can this product be built? In our modern economy, almost any product can be built. So the right question to ask is: Should this product be built? And can we build a sustainable business around this products and services?

1. Do customers recognize that they have the problem you are trying to solve?
2. If there was a solution, would they buy it?
3. Would they buy it from us?
4. Can we build a solution for that problem?

Are you asking yourself the right question regarding your projects?

How do you know that what you have to say is important? Sometimes I read that you should only blog when you have something valuable to share with your audience, I think a problem here is that you are your own worst critic, I know you maybe believe that what you have to say isn’t worthy enough. In short this could mean you never ship stuff that will make a difference for someone because you lack self-esteem. You are lying for yourself and buying your own excuses.

Writing Habit

Making a difference is hard and if you are comparing yourself with the big sharks in the blogosphere your closest friends name is soon “anxiety”. Honestly this happened to me today, my originally idea was to expand the blog series about the staffing industry how they can embrace social media, but I got that voice inside of my head saying it’s not important to write today let’s do it tomorrow. I took a decision not to give in for that temptation because I know my lizard brain will suck it up in a snap and probably manifest into a habit tomorrow; I know that my writing habit is waiting beyond my limitations.

Focus On The Work

Without self esteem you are trapped with fear and then writing and sustaining a blog is overwhelming, only the thought knowing it’s going to be read (at least by some people) could paralyze your from expressing your point of view. You can get criticized and misunderstood when you are in action but If you focus on it you are bound to hold back so the challenge is to focus on your work to move your own feet, not on the fear that comes from doing the work. A huge insight for me was when I discovered that when I’m in action anxiety is gone with the wind, I could of course still be nervous but I’m not bound to fear; I’m embracing it.

It’s Your Turn

So do you have an area in your life where you’re lying to yourself and buying your own excuses?

The value of embracing my fear is that I make my own choices and own my risks.

Part 4

I finished the last post with this statement: A service company’s most important resource is its employees, and their skills are crucial to maintaining a cutting edge in the staffing industry tomorrow. I believe long-term social media successes for the staffing industry depends much on how well they succeed integrating their employees to become a part of their online movement, but this will only happen if their company culture is ready for it.

Corporate Culture

Who owns the strategy and budget? Answering that question and we know that social media success lies with how well leaders understands this new game of business. The leaders must understand why and how they should bet on this ball and make it a part of their business routines and work. The leaders are the ones that are responsible. I believe Mark Schaefer who blogs at grow explained it very good in his guest blog post at Convince&Convert.

Lead-in Program

In the last post we talked about having different people around your social media table, then you need to arrange your social goals, guidelines and how to roll this social media band wagon out into the organization. I think when the industry is having their lead-in training for new employees they should have social media as a part of the introductory training. I’m not talking about basic LinkedIn training here, each person must understand the big picture and how he or she should use social media efficient to enhance business results.

Support Your Employees

Sales and delivery teams need to have social media integrated into their everyday business routines and work. If you work with sales you need to understand how this works in all different stages of a sales process: Lead – Phone Calls – Sales Meeting – Sale – Customer Care. You need a social media policy and clear guidelines that supports your staff to make their work, remember confusion kills productivity. This obviously creates new demands on CRM systems (social CRM) and internal communication. If  you climbs this saddle with a goal to “be social” online you can’t communicate efficient internally by using email and phone, support your employees by setting up the right context and infrastructure.

It’s Your Turn

What’s your take on company culture and social media?

I have received some questions regarding what I mean with “doing social” vs. “being social”? We can see how the staffing industry is using social media for pushing out job offers, advertisement and different campaigns. They are not using social media marketing to create new leads, sales or more loyalty among their customers.

Screenshots From Twitter

In the screenshots below (Swedish) we can see how majority of the companies are “doing social” in the industry, and it’s severe to find any communication (@mentions) at all with people. When we are looking at their Facebook pages it’s the same thing overall.

Don’t miss my video interview with Gary Vaynerchuk when he is talking about the “push” mindset.

Doing Social

Doing Social

Doing Social

Poolia Is On The Right Way

Gap Creating Business Opportunity

Nobody is creating content or sustaining a serious business blog here. I wonder which company in the staffing industry who will grab the chance first? This is a gap creating business opportunity, and right now my bet is definitely on Poolia.

Social Media Is Not A Title

The first step (video post) towards a social media marketing strategy is to get the right people involved around the social media table and then get the wrong people to step down. A Corporate title has nothing to do with social media. Nobody knows exactly where we end up on this social journey, but I know if we have the right crew aboard; then we will find the right social path. The first step is not to set up a presence on various social platforms.

Include The Sales Manager

Business reminds us about the sports world, the success depends on individual players, team spirit and the game plan. The sales manager is primarily responsible for creating strategies, tactics, monitoring KPI, and keeping the team motivated. The customers will be strongly influenced by the team’s performance here and social media marketing is an important tool to leverage when it comes to competitiveness and success in the B2B industry today. The industry needs to put sales in a new perspective, and the sales manager must integrate social media marketing with the sales process (blog post) before someone is checking her or his expiration date as a sales manager (blog post). As a staffing company today you should have your sales team involved around the social media table.

A service company’s most important resource is its employees, and their skills are crucial to maintaining a cutting edge in the staffing industry tomorrow.

Part 2

Welcome to part two on our journey to help the staffing industry embrace social media. My focus here is mainly on bigger staffing companies in Scandinavia who is operating in several countries like Poolia, Manpower, Adecco, Proffice and AcademicWork (just examples there are some more). Let’s continue this journey by examining the opportunity the industry have with social media marketing. Remember there is no one size fits all regarding this topic and you need to develop your own edge by executing and learn.

The Relationship Account

We all know what a financial bank account is. We make deposits into it and build up a cash reserve for future events when we need to make withdrawals. With social media we have the opportunity to make deposits into the relationship account with our customers on a scale that never has been possible before, but this is not easy, it takes sweat and hustle to reach great results exactly as the existing sales process you have today. You are on the right track being social when you are doing this thoroughly by building real relationships by out carrying your competitors instead of pushing your message with social media.

Measure Your Deposits

We can understand the relationships we are building online and offline by using the social thermometer perspective. If I only had one minute to explain what social media is all about I should use this picture.

1. Don’t have a clue about you: They have no relationship with you yet, they don’t know that you exist.
2. Aware but don’t care: Aware of your brand but have never bought something or never taken some kind of action yet.
3. Single action: Some kind of action maybe they have made a single purchase from you. Maybe they subscribe to your newsletter.
4. Frequent action: You have a relationship with the customer and they are repeating purchasers of your stuff.
5. Advocates: On the top you find the real advocates of your product and service, this is the dream for every marketer to reach this relationship with the end user.

Part 1 Of This Blog Series

Because of the communication culture shift we live in, more and more B2B companies starts to realize that they cant dodge for the possibilities with social media. One industry that I keep an extra eye on is the staffing industry and they have been forced to take some initially steps in social media to meet the demands from the clients to find quality candidates.

Purpose Of This Blog Series

The purpose of this blog series is to help the staffing industry take better decisions regarding their social media marketing efforts. I will identify good examples, less good examples, pros and cons, and then I will give my opinions how I think we can apply social media marketing in this field. The purpose is not to smear your face how bad someone is doing social media, but it’s important to understand differences and I’m not afraid to express my opinions and you are welcome to participate, that’s how we together can fail fast and keeping this learning process up to speed. I will focus mainly on bigger staffing companies in Scandinavia who is operating in more countries.

A dying pitch

A sell pitch for the bigger companies in this industry has been their databases with tons of CV’s but the tide is changing because of the online culture shift and those databases is not so unique anymore. As a middleman these day you must evolve or you will perish.

Industry Experience

The reason why I want to dig deeper in this industry is because I have been working successfully with sales at one of the bigger staffing companies here in Sweden. I left the industry and sailed out on uncharted waters to seek new adventures, now I’m back in the harbor to take a look at the industry with new eyes. So I have a quite good inside out perspective here. Initially I will focus mostly on how we can use social media marketing to get new leads, sales and building more loyal customers. This is a very important subject because it’s now approximately 550 different stuffing and recruitment companies registered only in Stockholm. It’s a no-brainer to understand that the sales people is killing the customers with phone calls, social media is a huge opportunity to approach customers on a channel that no one is savvy enough yet to understand how they should use. Will your company grasp that  opportunity 2012? 

Doing Social Not Being

Staffing companies who has embraced social media have mainly applied it around recruitment and communication with candidates and existing consultants. Overall the industry is still in the push phase, which means they are using social media for pushing out new job offers and their latest advertisements (With other word SPAM). We can summarize it with one sentence: They are doing social but not being social.

It’s your turn

Join the movement! What is your take here? Do you have any good examples of companies in the staffing industry who is being social? 

Get free blog updates from me! Subscribe to mattiasgronborg.com by e-mail I would love to have that relationship with you, and thank you if you already are on the list!

Steps To Follow

1. Create a new page in WordPress admin page section and name it for example gplus in my case my new URL is: mattiasgronborg.com/gplus
2. Use your redirection option, I’m using SEO for WordPress.
3. I don’t want the search engines to find my page so I’m using Noindex and Nofollow in this case.
4. Paste your Google+ profile URL and publish your page.

G+ URL

Redirecting With The Plugin SEO For WordPress

Video

We are referring to two blog posts in this video the first one is a question I raised: The art of traditional B2B sales are changing, are you aware of it? The other one is a blog post Niklas wrote inspired by my thoughts: Rebirth Of The Social Salesperson. These blog entries was the reason why we made this call.

Please Contribute

Share your thoughts regarding what you think is the biggest challenge integrating social media marketing in the B2B industry. What kind of case studies do you think lack in this field? How can we make a difference for you 2012?

We must develop our minds and continually sharpen and invest in the development of our competencies to avoid becoming obsolete, this is mainly a choice we make.

Discipline Yourself

When I started in sales I had devoted myself to sports for approximately 12 years. I was definitely not a talent, but it gave me a strong sense of discipline in whatever I did then and what I’m doing today. So it early became a natural part for me to work with sales because I could apply and use this discipline to create a business momentum. During the journey of this profession I early discovered that most sales people are lazy and they not have the discipline to put in the daily effort to learn new things every day and self improve.

The New Ballgame In B2B Sales

The main difference between old world B2B sales and the new ballgame is that now your potential customers are much more in control of their environment, and you are the one who has to fit in, this is definitely affecting your sales process and you can’t ignore it. I left you with this statement in an earlier blog post “you are losing approximately 80 percent of potential business which shows it room for improving the sales process with social media marketing”. We will start with looking at how you can improve the leads generating phase by using social technology, but first I want to brief a bit more what is going on online today.

The Marketing Channel Is Now Reversed

Internet users can now let the world know what they think about your brand, and trying to play and control this game is totally wrong way to spend your energy. Accept that the game is reversed, rather than top down things now move from bottom up and if your customers are in control I promise you it pays to listen to what they have to say. Don’t make the mistake to think traditional marketing because you hear the word “media” in social media marketing. Unlike the passive advertisement like TV, radio and billboards your customers now can talk to each other, form groups and create a social movement for or against what you have to offer.

Bring Something To The Table

If you want to make impact in the social online world is your responsibility to bring something to the table, and when I say something I mean providing your audience with content and the right context to develop and nurture long-term relationships, so please don’t spam me with your advertisement on your social networks. Start with the most important part in sales; listening!

The Call Is Yours

You must selectively approaching your customers on a more social level today. Select those who are your potential customers and mapping their social life online, if you think that sounds like hard work you are right, but it’s hard work trying to screen people by working the phones too. I will not even spend time on arguing with you about lack of resources and time here. I’m pointing on the clock because the time is ticking and competition is getting more fierce and survival is on stake. The call is your; learn or perish!