Social media brings transparency to the sales process along each step of the funnel:

AWARENESS

Your company can join the conversation already happening about your brand or industry online to relate to and educate consumers. You can make recommendations to people looking for more information, thank happy customers, and rectify the situation with unhappy customers all within the public platforms where people already spend time.

Your company can also use tools to monitor the conversation and reach out to potential prospects. Through this, you can make prospects aware of the product and/or service your company offers to help them meet their goals.

PROSPECTS

After the prospect is in your funnel, the company can build trust by providing information about products and services.

The prospect may also be able to witness your company’s dialogue with existing customers, as the company demonstrates its service and response to current clients.

The idea is that you want to make people want to join the “club” of other customers and clients of your organization. Take the Mini for example. The Mini’s Facebook page has almost 661,000 fans as of today. They post photos and videos of Mini’s in landscape shots, “dressed up” for a night out, and other photos drawing thousands of likes on each post. Mini also created an extranet for customers called the Mini’s Owners’ Lounge where people share and communicate with each other. All these efforts make Mini owners feel like part of a select group and provide access to other owners and the brand.

LEADS

Once your company has formed a relationship with a prospect and they become a lead, you can listen to what is going on in their lives and in their companies through social media. For example, you can aggregate all your leads into one Twitter list to make it easy to keep up on what they are talking about. A Twitter list also makes it easy to participate in the conversations the lead cares about, keeping you and your company top-of-mind.

CURRENT CUSTOMERS

Easily sharable social media tools are a great way to continue to make your current clients feel special and use their experience with your company to demonstrate value to new leads and prospects.

In short, social media brings personality and authenticity to humanize big corporations while at the same time giving small and medium sized companies the opportunity to amplify their presence in a genuine way. These are important details in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

I vividly remember my first Facebook status update; I felt like I was crossing a dangerous threshold. This past January, I had an acquaintance tell me he enjoyed that I was always in his news feed, regardless of time of day. I took that as a bad sign, and had flashbacks to reading Emily Gould’s piece Exposed, which detailed her addiction to sharing online. Her job, and thus her life, was online, and over time her sense of privacy crumbled to a point of no return; every action was chronicled via blog, and every reader comment became part of a life-defining feedback loop.

How much are you willing to share online?

The New York Times did an interesting piece this weekend on the “Tell-All Generation”, chronicling a small shift as early 20-somethings realize their online persona is also their virtual resume. Yet, just as some freshly-minted college grads are realizing the discrepancy between their resume interests (volunteering, photography) and their Facebook interests (keg-stands, grilling), a slightly older set of consumers is working to remove the line between their offline and online selves, pushing the boundaries of privacy further and further. And companies are gobbling it up.

Opting-In, With Lots of Pressure

The Facebook privacy conversation is a much-debated topic, mostly because Facebook is trying to own the internet, and they’ll do that better (and make more money doing it) if they have a lot of personal data to work with. They claim they’ve got our privacy interests in mind, but making my info inaccessible is not in their best interest. Their VP of Public Policy argues that Facebook is an opt-in service, which is, of course, true. I’d argue that, within Gen X and Gen Y, the absence of a Facebook account is either a badge of honor or the mark of a social pariah.

Opting-In, With No Pressure At All

I’m far more interested, however, with the one-off services that consumers seek out themselves. I was shocked when Blippy first opened it’s virtual doors, asking consumers to share their intimate transaction data to paint a picture of our bizarre and unique spending habits. I opted out. My decision was vindicated when a few intimate transaction details ended up in Google search, but it appears that Blippy is still going strong, with over $150 million in monthly transaction data. Up next? CC: Everybody, a service that allows you to publish emails publicly, and have them open for public comment.

I Want to Mine Your Data
From a research perspective, I am fascinated. Every day, I have access to more and more data points, both individual and aggregate, that tell me the intimate details of peoples’ lives. No longer is an online persona just a perceived self, a la Match.com. The persona can now be defined by tangible activities, even without going as far as Blippy. How often does an online shopping website ask if you’d like to share your purchase on Facebook? From a personal perspective, I’m a tad nervous, though I can’t quite pinpoint why. It will subside, and I’ll share more. Facebook is banking on this, not because they are pushing me in that direction, but because others are already doing so. Is it really Facebook’s fault?

Extra Reading

There is a ton of back and forth going on regarding this topic. This post is meant to just start the conversation. Feel free to post additional reads in the comments section.

• Lawmakers and Facebook privacy
• Cool infograph on historical privacy settings on Facebook
• Blippy’s API and a new, similar service, Swipely
• Formspring, which seems to me to be a bit like a slambook

However, Facebook musician pages leave a lot to be desired for those promoting their music within the world’s largest social network.  The Facebook music player is either tucked away in the box tab or it is halfway down the page in the side bar.  Even worse, the fans who actually look hard enough to find the music player are unable to share the songs with their own friends.

RootMusic is working to make Facebook pages more musician friendly withBandPages.  Their simple tool creates a tab for your Facebook page where your fans can hear your music while they interact with the page. BandPages also pull in your Twitter stream and offer a functioning Facebook wall, along with providing a shareable music player.

The process of setting up a BandPage incredibly quick and easy. Any band with a Facebook page can head to RootMusic.com and have a functioning Facebook BandPage in about five minutes.  One of the really nice features is the music playerpowered by SoundCloud. It gives your fans the ability share your music with their friends on Facebook or a number of other sites. The music player even expands the functionality for musicians by giving them the option to offer free song downloads.

One big criticism of BandPages is that the music player is still tucked away in a tab. However, this is more of a critique of Facebook music pages themselves.  The best way to direct traffic to your tab is to make your BandPage tab the landing page for all non-fans (Once again RootMusic has made it very easy to do this).

Musician pages on Facebook may not be substantially improved until Facebook decides to do a major overhaul. In the mean time, a BandPage is one of the easiest and fastest ways to customize your musician page and expand it’s functionality.

Check out a few BandPages in the wild:
OONA
Con Brio
BATTLEHOOCH

J Slider, CEO of RootMusic, was nice enough to answer some questions for me in a quick interview:

Interview with J Slider, CEO of RootMusic

Q: Can you give me some background information on yourself and RootMusic?

Answer: We are made up at the intersection where music and tech folks meet.We have a great time working on RootMusic and have in depth experience in our respected fields. As musicians, band managers, venue managers we were frustrated with the lack of good clearly organized tools that were available for the music community. So now we are building them, and always keeping an open ear to ways the music community would like to see things improved.

Q: How many musicians are currently using BandPages and how long have BandPages been available?

Answer: There are right around 100 currently using BandPages and we really just opened it up to the public a few days ago. We had about 15 bands helping us test it out before we opened it up to the public.

Q: How can you offer BandPages for free?

Answer: Well first off this is a very basic need that every musician should be able to afford. That is to represent yourself well on the biggest social network where your grandma, next door neighbor and fans all are. Instead of making them come to your site go to your fans. We have many things already in the works for the future that will be affordably priced , but this is a basic version that everyone should be able to have it they want it.

Q: What are you looking to provide for musicians with BandPages?

Answer: A place that is informative and clean for musicians to represent themselves on the biggest social network. It provides a way to bring all your Facebook tab’s,Facebook Wall, music player and more into one easy to use page. One of our users said “Myspace musicians welcome to Facebook”

Q: Why is there a need for your tool?

Answer: Because every single musician/fan we have talked to has asked for it. To this point we have not heard anyone say…”eh thats not really a good idea” so we figured there’s a pretty big need.

Q: What do BandPages do better than any other Facebook tool for musicians?

Answer: There are a lot of apps out there that were built to do one thing to help musicians. BandPage brings together many of those tools onto one page. Where it makes it easy for new fans and current fans to check out your band. We also keep the music playing so it is more likely for your fans to read your bio, look at your shows etc, because they are free to move around as the music is playing. There is much more to come and things we plan to make better and more useful, can’t wait to share those with you!

Q: Most of a Facebook page’s activity happens within a user’s newsfeed. How can a BandPage help a musician utilize his/her fans to spread content virally?

Answer: Oh you just wait, its gonna be pretty sweet! Currently when you use the wall on BandPages it’s the same as your regular wall, so it posts to your news feed like it normally would.

Q: Tracks uploaded on a BandPage go to the RootMusic SoundCloud account. Why did RootMusic choose to use SoundCloud within BandPages?

Answer: SoundCloud is the best music player we have seen, if you have other suggestions, we are all ears! They have a great reputation a mature api, built in sharing functions,stable, and the public already trusts them.

Q: Are there any new features in the pipeline for BandPages?

Answer: Yes! We will be around for a while and you will see new features coming out in the next few months. We are currently building them for you as we speak! And again we want to hear the public opinion as to what you would like to see. So if you have any suggestions about what features to add let us know. At the end of the day we build what the people ask for.

Q: Are there any new features in the pipeline for BandPages?

Answer: Yes! We will be around for a while and you will see new features coming out in the next few months. We are currently building them for you as we speak! And again we want to hear the public opinion as to what you would like to see. So if you have any suggestions about what features to add let us know. At the end of the day we build what the people ask for.

Google, Pandora, Digg, and Facebook to offer their products to hundreds of millions of people without charging anything. The marginal costs of adding your millionth user and your twenty millionth user are roughly zero. That is because bandwidth, storage, and processing power are cheap, and they get cheaper every year.

Free is no longer a marketing gimmick, but a necessity for most online businesses.

When you get into the mindset of a consumer, cheap and free are completely different from one another. If Google had decided long ago to charge a single dollar for their services, consumers would have found somewhere else to search the web, manage their email, or read the news.

Free-conomics:

The old way to look at a market was to examine how supply of a product and demand for a product would change as the price shifted. Today, free has become an economy of its own as the marginal cost of doing business online has nearly reached zero.

When you charge the online consumer anything at all you move into an entirely different market with far fewer customers.

In the free economy, attention and reputation are what matters.

The goal is to build your reputation in hopes of earning more attention. Consumers have millions of choices to make when they decide where to spend their attention online. A company’s reputation dictates how consumers choose whether to spend time on Site A or Site B.

“There is, presumably, a limited supply of reputation and attention in the world at any point in time. These are the new scarcities — and the world of free exists mostly to acquire these valuable assets… Free shifts the economy from a focus on only that which can be quantified in dollars and cents to a more realistic accounting of all the things we truly value today.” - Chris Anderson – Wired.com

The good news: your reputation is not beyond your control.

A huge part of your business should be focused on social media campaigns and word of mouth strategies that maintain and build upon your reputation. The idea is to first create the buzz then sell the crazy fans your $100 vinyl album or your exclusive product features. Let 10% of your fanatical fans support your business and use the other 90% to spread your message.

You may have a great product, but it doesn’t mean anything until you build the kind of reputation that will make consumers want to try it.

“Make your record cheaply (but great) and GIVE IT AWAY. As an artist you want as many people as possible to hear your work. Word of mouth is the only true marketing that matters.” - Trent Reznor in a post on a NIN forum

For more information, read Chris Anderson’s article: “Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business,” on Wired.com.

Show Notes:
Room 214 Co-Founder, Jason Cormier, discusses social media monitoring tools with Brian Chappell, Senior Social Search Strategist at Ignite Social Media.

In this podcast, we discuss:

1. The most valuable aspects of social media monitoring tools: Keeping tabs on conversations and customers for the purpose of crisis communications and reputation management.
2. Sentiment analysis in social media monitoring tools: Is automatic sentiment analysis developed enough?
3. What are clients looking for in these tools? Engaging in new markets through listening to customers, opportunities to include intelligence in product development cycles.
4. “Social media isn’t a salt shaker”: You have to work it into the base of your marketing.
5. What’s next with social media monitoring: Greater levels of CRM integration, and more consistent pricing models.

Notes: I appreciated Brian’s participation in the discussion, even as some have cited our agencies as competitors. It was affirming that Ignite is working through many of the same issues we are with respect to the tools. Hopefully, there is a nugget or two of insight here for others considering how they should evaluate the options. As one of our partners once put it to me, “it’s always preferable to combine our powers for good instead of evil.”

If at all possible don’t be JohnHucksCliffs on Delicious and JohnnyRockStar onTwitter. Try to keep your identity consistent across as many platforms as you can.

Sometimes that’s easier said than done. Being graced with a common name like James Clark can have its benefits. For instance, I can pretty much go to any major sporting or entertainment event, walk up to the Will Call window and say, “Tickets for James Clark please”, show my ID and I’m in. Now I won’t admit to doing this, but for those of you with common names it’s a plus.

But in the social media world it’s a pain in the…..

A common name, be it personal or a corporate, is often difficult to come by for a username ID. So prior to setting up personal or company profiles, plug potential ID names into UserNameCheck.com and see what is available and what is taken.

Our recommendation is to make sure you’re covered on the bigger sites:
Delicious, Digg, Flickr, Friendfeed, MySpace, StumbleUpon, Twitter and YouTube.

So in case you’re interested JohnHucksCliffs is very available: