All posts in Social Integration for Small Business

Sharing Content – It’s the Little Things

When we sent our Happy Thanksgiving email using Mailchimp it was shared on Facebook. After all, why should our email of gratitude and holiday wishes only be limited to our mailing list? The pesky auto-post-from-one-online-service-to-another. It posted with Mailchimp’s logo from the email.

Mailchimp_Facebook_post_image

Perhaps you’ve done something similar. In fact, you may have abandoned some tools in their early releases because they transfered your well engineered blog post to a lousy text-only-link  on Facebook or elsewhere.  It sounds finicky, persnickety or some other thing that ends in “y,” that means workflow on social tools that just works like my toaster.

There is a bunch of little stuff and getting it right takes time.

Social media managers, community managers and many more are fiddling around with getting all of the details right that can contribute to making things work in concert.  And they break. And they change. The mistakes are public and need to be acceptable.

These days, the learning happens live. Right there in front of you. Hopefully it’s something small and annoying like this and not a contribution to the book of digital cautionary tales.

Of course, after seeing the post appear as it did to the right, this help, How can I choose the image thumbnail that shows up on Facebook was easy to find (Mailchimp has great support ). So, we can do it right the next time.

We’re still grateful. Have any of your own tips or mistakes to share?

 

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Social Media and Sales Relationships by Jon Ferrara

Free to view! Here is the recorded version of Jon Ferrara, CEO of Nimble, presenting and discussing  tips about how to work as an effective team by tracking and managing their contacts, prospects, activities, communications and sales forecasts, including:

Maximize marketing impact
More revenue in less time
The need for unified communication

This webcast is part of the 2012 C7group Business Thought Leadership Series. Watch the video below  or continue reading to learn more about Jon.

A social entrepreneur at heart, Jon founded GoldMine Software in 1989 where he served as the executive vice president of the company until he sold it in 2000. GoldMine is one of the all time best selling CRM products that helped pioneer the entire Sales Force Automation (SFA) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) market. During this time Jon was awarded the Earnst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award while GoldMine was named PC Magazine’s Editor’s Choice in 1993 and again in 1995, 1996 and 1997.

After selling GoldMine and watching the immense rise in power social media was experiencing, Jon entered the startup world again when he noticed a distinct lack of any products that effectively combined Relationship Management, Social Listening and Engagement, and Collaboration with Sales and Marketing. In 2009 Jon founded Nimble to create an extensive Social Business platform to fill this gap.

Jon Ferrara: Social Media and Sales Relationships from C7group on Vimeo.

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Social CRM is at the Heart of Small Business

 

Nimble Solution Partner C7groupSmall businesses can be social businesses. This means small business can use social technology and tools to do their work better and serve customers better. Social Customer Relationship Management (SCRM) is at the center, and a critical component of our solution.  Although we are a “strategy first,” consulting company, we’ve been exploring software in this space for years.  Recently we took a look at all of the lower cost solutions for small business and selected Nimble as a software partner.  Our criteria included integration with Google Apps and public social platform integration.

There were many other features that we wanted to see, but these were the central pieces. Integration with social platforms life Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter also had to include discovery.  This means that once our software  had contact data and an email address, it would suggest online profiles for our contact. Essentially, it is automatically listening to the social web for relevant information that pertains to prospects and customers that might influence a deal. Social integration in CRM also meant a unified Inbox, allowing communication with customers on email, Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn without leaving the page. We’re always looking for solutions that offer the “fewest tabs open in a browser window.”Social Listening on Nimble  - Solution partner C7group Social business

Nimble has recently rolled out it’s integrations with Hubspot, Wufoo and Mailchimp, making it an even more attractive puzzle piece for managing  small business with Internet based tools.

There are real time and cost saving solutions available. How can your business use social networking technology for internal communication and streamlining customer communication across all channels?

Let us know if you want to check out Nimble or learn more about how we can use social business to increase net profit!

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How Small Businesses Are Using Social Media [INFOGRAPHIC]

How Small Businesses Are Using Social Media – crowdSPRING
Crowdsourced Logo and Graphic Design by crowdSPRING

This infographic tells an interesting story about social media adoption by small businesses; perhaps most interesting are the stats near the bottom of the graphic. Namely, it’s the ability to marry social media activities to business metrics like customer engagement, intelligence gathering, external and internal collaboration, and lead generation that really matters. If a business can’t point to tangible results from their social strategy, it might be time for a fresh look.

“Taming the social beast can be a real challenge for business owners who are already spreading themselves thin,” says C7group VP of Communications, Shelly King. “The need for a clear strategy and roadmap, and the right tools to execute it, is more pressing than ever.”

C7group has created a Small Business Social Integration service that is designed to help small businesses take their social presence beyond marketing and create a truly social business, from customer service and retention to employee collaboration and workflow improvement. If you’d like to know more about how we do that, click the link above to request more information or give us a call today.

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C7group Announces Launch of New Offering for Small Business

Since its formation, the C7group has worked to help business owners and executives, from enterprise to SMB, understand that making the move to social is about more than ust using social media platforms for marketing and customer acquisition. A true social business engages customers and employees across the organization, from customer service, to innovation, to employee collaboration.

Small Business Social Business Integration SacramentoToday, we are pleased to announce the launch of a new social business offering designed specifically with small businesses in mind. The Social Integration for Small Business Suite from C7 Group brings cost saving and revenue producing tools that have previously only been available to enterprise level organizations, as well as the expertise to properly implement them, to small and mid size businesses.

C7 Group founder and CEO, Jeff Marmins, says, “We looked around right here in our own backyard, Sacramento, CA, and realized that there was a huge void in the marketplace; no one was talking about how small businesses could, with the right tools and training, compete with much larger organizations by adopting a social model.” Marmins lists the advantages small businesses have over their larger counterparts: speed, agility, centralized decision making, lower overhead. He also acknowledges that many small businesses jump into the social space haphazardly, with no clear idea of how to use the available tools to retain customers and make more money. “We’re a small business. We understand how confusing the digital landscape is today. C7group has taken advantage of cloud based software and social platforms such as Google Docs, the Google Apps Marketplace, Hootsuite, Nimble and others. What combination of the hundreds of offerings are right for you? We can help with the roadmap and tool selection.”

Marmins cites some astounding statistics to make his case (from a study conducted by C7group software partner, Jive): businesses that have adopted a social model have seen a 27% reduction in email sent, a 26% decrease in time needed for meetings, a 30% increase in employee satisfaction, a 42% increase in customer communication and, perhaps most impressive, a 27% increase in sales to new and existing clients. The path to that kind of productivity can be tricky, though, Marmins warns.

“There are a lot of ‘overnight experts’ that have jumped into social media,” Marmins says. “If you don’t know what to look for, you could easily get burned by an amateur looking to make a quick buck or that is looking at marketing in a vacuum. Where can you really create leverage and increase net profit? What should you do first?”

And while other firms have attempted, with varying degrees of success, to assist their small business clients in adopting the use of social media for marketing and PR purposes, C7group is the first consulting firm in Sacramento to offer an end-to-end package that covers employee collaboration and document management to workflow and process improvements and, of course, social media marketing.

“What we’re really taking about is social technology and related practices, not just social media marketing,” Marmins states. “We can show you that the difference is bigger than you might think.”

Get more information about the new Small Business Digital Services Suiterequest a consultation with a C7 Group social business expert or call (916) 538-3767.

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