A RECENT HISTORY

Between 2003 & 2009 I worked in the Health Club business primarily as a Club or Sales Manager.

During that time I got to see first hand the considerable time and resources spent on retaining and generating new membership sales. Tens of thousands of dollars would be spent on direct mail drops alone, and when the phone rang we had to be ready to inform and entice the person calling prospect or current member to get in the facility and get involved. It was not uncommon for people to be put on hold when they called, most often because they had to be transferred from the front desk to the sales department. I learned from personal experience that having a marketing message to populate our virtual audio environment had value.

While on hold the member or prospective member could learn about new group exercise classes, seasonal promotions, or personal training packages. It makes getting a prospective member to set an appointment so much easier when they already know your club has the programs and services they are looking for.

Having an effective on hold marketing message does not just generate interest in prospects; it also puts your sales team in a much better position to educate current members about referral programs and improvements in group exercise class schedules.

When I came to work for Premier Companies I began to see that the HOLDPLUS service could be used as a valuable relationship management tool as well as a marketing vehicle. The HOLDPLUS service takes your message and creates a dynamic production that is guaranteed to reach a prime target audience, the people who are doing business with you or intend to do business with you. It’s an inbound marketing vehicle.

The periods of time that callers are on hold represent a Virtual Storefront. Just as there is value in having marketing materials in the store brochures, signs, and incentive items, there is value in inhabiting these virtual environments with marketing materials.

From my conversations with Mark Bortz, I saw that the marketing strategy behind HOLDPLUS emphasizes communication with clients and prospects in a virtual audio environment.  He built his business on the certain knowledge that it was better to share with  people free and valuable information instead of leaving them in limbo.

Many of our clients have marketing campaigns in which HOLDPLUS is an important component because they need a professional image created in that virtual audio environment. All the HOLDPLUS success stories I hear from clients have a common thread which begins with an existing relationship or external marketing effort that has been successful but has hit a plateau. The addition of the HOLDPLUS service takes that success to the next level by informing their current clients of lesser known/higher profits goods and services and educates the prospective client with information.

This is how HOLDPLUS functions as valuable element of a user’s internal marketing component.

This examination of what made the HOLDPLUS service successful caused me to re-examine the success of Premier Companies. Over Premier’s 25-year history the CEO/Founder Mark Bortz has been an early adaptor of new technology, and he has relied almost exclusively on word-of-mouth advertising. Premier Companies/HOLDPLUS began as a business that Mark operated from home. He started by cold calling prospective businesses and setting up Message On Hold systems for them. Soon clients of clients were hearing these professionally produced messages and wanted the same service for their businesses. Today we would call that viral marketing.

When I started as Sales Manager for Premier Companies one of my core tasks was to develop new business. To do that I had to adapt how a sales team could find and develop prospects from outside the existing client base. It was at this point that I began to take a closer look at Social Networking Sites (SNS). Premier Companies has web based tools…and in the context of traditional internet based marketing, they are exceptionally forward thinking. Our online brochures incorporate a data capture element to help facilitate sales, and our email signatures include a company directory so that prospects will see the people behind the company name. However, as wonderful as these tools are, the potential audience is limited to the natural market of the individual sales person.

My options seemed simple. I could expand the ranks of the sales force and hope the strength of their contacts and cold-calling ability would sustain them. There was also the option of culling new clients from the old prospects list. Both options are difficult and time consuming and far too often futile wild goose chases. It was frustrating to have such a great product and such a small, and squirrelly, audience to present it to. I needed a larger audience in the marketplace that could interact with me and would do so because they wanted to and not because I called them to solicit their business.

In my experience a good sales person is always in an intelligence gathering mode. I began to develop my digital presence on Social Networking Sites as a way to develop my professional contacts with phenomenal results. Sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter seemed to be made for market research. For a marketing professional these sites are ideal for maintaining existing business relationships and using them to facilitate warm introductions to prospective clients. I realized I had found a solution that addressed my need for a larger audience and my need for market research. SNS gave me more information about what is new and exciting about my prospects’ businesses, what their goals are, and how I can participate in helping them reach those goals. I had discovered a way to give my virtual presence the ability to make relationship based business connections. It was a discovery I would soon bring to Mark’s attention, and because of the success we had with sites like LinkedIn, Premier Companies became a participant in the Social Media Movement.

The movement of businesses, large and small, to embrace the tools which are known by many names, Enterprise Web 2.0, Social Network Marketing, or Social Media Marketing. The urgency that is driving businesses to use these tools is based on the ability of sites like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to mimic the way that people communicate with each other in the real world.

That may not sound significant, but I assure you, nothing witnessed in the last ten years is more important to businesses than this conceptual shift in the virtual world. The reason why this concept is so important for you, the gentle business person, to grasp can be illustrated by two very high profile examples.

The first of these examples is the 2008 Democratic Primary in which then Sen. Obama won the party nomination over then Sen. Clinton. Very early in the campaign Sen. Obama used Twitter to communicate with the masses as did Sen. Clinton, but Obama did something with Twitter that Clinton did not. The difference was that when someone would follow Sen. Obama, he would in turn follow them. Sen. Clinton did not do that, and to understand the significance we must translate that behavior into real world terms. Following someone on Twitter can be loosely compared with the real world behavior of shaking hands. What Sen. Clinton did was like going to a political rally and ignoring the outstretched hands of her supporters. This One Way Street behavior did nothing to endear her to undecided voters. In comparison, Sen. Obama not only shook your hand he went out there and kissed your baby and posed for pictures with your Grandma. In short, his virtual behavior closely mimicked what we would consider generous and altruistic real world behavior.

The second example is that of Best Buy versus Circuit City. This is an outstanding example to which we should all pay very close attention because of its impact on the future of customer service. Best Buy has been encouraging its customer service representatives to use Social Media to communicate with customers. As a result, Best Buy has gained accolades for the ability to effectively resolve their customers’ issues and educate those customers about purchases they will make in the future. Best Buy is building brand loyalty because they are allowing employees to build relationships! Meanwhile Circuit City did the polar opposite by first degrading the sales staff from a group of educated and trusted advisors to mere order takers and then failed to give there customer service reps the ability to interact with buyers through Social Media channels. Again, if we apply what has happened in the virtual world to a real world scenario, what we see is that in the case of Best Buy when customers approach the Customer Service Desk, they are greeted and have their issues handled promptly by knowledgeable and friendly professionals. You know the kind of people that you would buy from again and again. At Circuit City…well they wouldn’t even have a Customer Service Desk. Hence, Best Buy is gaining market share and Circuit City has gone belly up.

However, involvement with SNS is not without obstacles. The first obstacle I encountered with Social Media was to realize what my purpose for using it was and then identifying which tools I was going to use to make it happen. I joined and examined different SNS components. The components’ sites that comprise a typical Social Media Platform are: micro-blogs (example, Twitter), peer sites (examples, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn), and book-marking sites (example, Hootsuite) that make it easy for the user to share content that interests their friends and colleagues. These free and basic Social Media sites give me the ability to go where my target audience has a virtual presence, make an announcement to the audience that I have content for them to interact with, and a means for them to share my content with others.

Once the user has decided to what purpose they will use SNS and selected which components will be used, there is one more crucial obstacle. I call it The Hat Factory Obstacle. The name came from the realization that the Social Networking project I began as a way to re-tool the prospecting apparatus of our Sales Team was transforming into an utterly new job function for me. As I developed the digital presence for myself and Premier Companies and discovered that all of the various components of that presence required maintenance and follow through to maintain those relationships, I was, to use the colloquialism, not merely creating another hat for me to wear…I was creating an entirely new hat factory for myself.

The Hat Factory Obstacle is encountered when you as an individual or as a company realize that while Web 2.0 tools are, generally speaking, easy to use they are nonetheless time consuming and require a long term commitment to reap the rewards. “…The biggest mistake I see companies making is that they’ll set up a Facebook page or community and then ignore it. Social marketing tools are designed to build and foster relationships. They need nurturing and attention. Failure to connect and engage in a transparent way can lead to extremely disappointing results—not to mention wasted resources” (Cassandra Jeyaram, PhD).

In order to overcome the Hat Factory Obstacle and thrive in the emerging Web 2.0 marketplace you should behave in the virtual world the same way you do in the real world. Your virtual storefront (web sites, ON HOLD MESSAGES, Social Networking Sites) should be a mirror image of its real world counterparts. “…To be in the game, you first need the desire to be social and the strategy to do it authentically. Then you need strong team members to execute ongoing core competency and follow it through. As you can plainly see, there’s a big difference between a brand that behaves like a dabbler and one that behaves like a master when it comes to social media” (G. Michael Maddock & Raphael Louis Vitón). To be in the Social Networking game, to have people opt in to conversing with you, to listen to people who are doing business with you or intend to do business with you without the hassle of having to master and maintain all the tools in the Social Media tool-shed was exactly why we decided to translate our HOLDPLUS service into a SNS service.

We feel this translation of our HOLDPLUS Service, which allow clients to deliver marketing messages in their virtual audio environment (telephone hold time), into the infinitely broader, virtual, multi-media environment of Social Networking Sites gives the client the turn-key service that permits the dabblers to have a masterful Social Media presence.

At present, we feel Social Media Traction will enhance the emerging SNS maintenance/monitoring services with our element of capturing the data of those interacting with your content as soon as they initiate contact. Without this two-way communication with your target audience is difficult at best. This is an opportunity we have identified in the marketplace. It is also our intent to provide clients with an Social Media Marketing service that will supplant the Do-It-Yourself social media products currently in the market.

When I first started with Premier Companies neither myself nor Mark (CEO/Premier Companies) had any intent of involving ourselves with SNS beyond where we were with LinkedIn. Interestingly enough, that’s how we originally got connected and began doing business together. Since then we have both radically changed our approach to Social Media, and we are reaping the rewards in many ways for doing so. It seems that this change, and the resulting success, took place over a short period of time. However, the reality is the events that lead to the beginning of this journey were years in the making. Based on the results from our beta testing, and feedback from our interested clients, we have high hopes that with hard work, and the provision of Providence, our soon to be launched new product offering, Social Media Traction will be another example of a success built on years of experience.