As you’re aware by now, there is a big difference between social media and social commerce. I am way more concerned with being good at business than I am with being good with social media. Everybody seems to want to rush off to all their favorite social networking sites and start talking. Fortunately, you’re smarter than that and much better educated as we begin the second half of this book.

You know it’s true. Most businesses have some sort of social media programs in place, but what you might not know is that most of them don’t have any strategic plan for using social media at all. In a study published by the online magazine Social Media Examiner in May 2013, its founder, Michael A. Stelzner, reported that 86 percent of marketers consider social media to be important to their businesses and at least 88 percent of marketers want to know the best tactics and strategies to engage their customers in social media. This is a huge issue. It means nearly all business owners recognize social media is important to their businesses, so they’re on social media. But even more of them recognize they’re uncertain about how to effectively use the sites. This uncertainty makes strategic planning impossible. You already know it’s not enough to just try to find your King Consumers. That’s a beginning, but now it’s time for you to decide and plan what you want social media to do for you once you find them. Without a plan, you’ll have nothing of any value to share once you become part of the crowd. This is probably the number one reason why social media is failing for most business users. People rush to create an online presence without deciding what they want to do with it. Without a clear strategy, how will you know where to engage your King Consumers and what to do once you get there?

Maybe you’re not surprised that so many business owners go rushing onto social media sites without a plan. You may have already done that yourself. If so, it will not surprise you to learn that these same people who put lots of effort into their “social media marketing” plans often don’t bother to put measures in place that allow them to gather the data about how their efforts are actually working for them. Of course, they can’t measure what they’re doing. They didn’t plan to do anything in particular, so how are they going to measure whether or not they accomplished it? You can’t improve what you are not measuring, and you can’t achieve what you haven’t planned to do. This brings me to some good news and also a bit of bad news.

The good news is that you’re not going to do this same bone-headed thing. You’re going to know very clearly what you hope to achieve as you use social media to complete your social commerce plan. The bad news is that you’re not going to get much farther here unless you sit down and do the strategic planning so many of your peers have decided to skip. No way. If you’re going to make this trip with me, you’re going to know how to plan it in advance. Now, actually “bad news” is an exaggeration. It’s not exactly bad news. It’s going to set you up to achieve real goals, and I’ve done my best to make it painless. I admit it’s not fun, but it is necessary. Let’s begin with a couple of pieces of wisdom.

Let me be the first one to tell you right now, there is no magic formula that every business should use to find the answers to their social commerce objectives. If someone comes to your door to sell you on social media and starts out spouting the averages, you can be sure they will do just that for your business—make it average at best. I want us to go way beyond the average. We want the super-fantastic-hyper-killing-it methods. Glad you picked up this book? Good. Nobody is going to care more about your business than you do, and nobody is going to understand the workings of your operation like you do. You must do this work yourself, no arguments.

Luckily for you, step-by-step instructions for how to use every single platform covered in this part of the book are not included. That would be an insult to you. All of these platforms are designed to be easy to navigate and use. I trust you will be able to figure the nuts and bolts out on your own. I’m here to help you with the “what” and “why.” I have confidence you will handle the “how” part of it by yourself. Here’s an analogy to keep in mind. Many people know how to use a hammer. What’s to know? You basically swing it and make the head of the hammer hit the head of the nail. When working with my dad, he taught me that if I moved my hand down lower on the handle of the hammer it would work much better and hit the nails in faster. He did not tell me how to pick out a particular hammer. He showed me how to use any hammer more efficiently. That’s what we’re about to do. I am not going hammer shopping with you. We will not talk about how metal handles compare to wooden handles or any of the minutia of hammer technology. So I won’t cover setting up a Facebook page or how to register for Twitter. That information is on the Help pages. You can get to them easily. And if hundreds of millions of people have already done it, I know for sure you can, too. You’ve come here to focus on learning how to position your hand on the handle so the fulcrum of your hammer swing is maximized for optimal nailing.

ASSESS YOURSELF

Just so you know the truth, I didn’t begin my business with the kind of preplanning I’m asking you to do. I’m like so many e-commerce merchants. I never planned to be in business. Sure, I’ve always had a sense for the business hustle, but I’m a circumstantial entrepreneur. When I started selling on eBay, it was just for fun. By the time it turned into a real business, my partner and I were so busy trying to keep up that I didn’t even take time to breathe, let alone really plan. I’ve learned over the years how important the planning step is, because I missed it!

Now my partner and I have a tradition. Every New Year’s Eve we go to a great hotel. We have a party with all of our friends and enjoy the night. The next day, before we check out of the hotel, we find a quiet corner and plan what we want to accomplish in the year ahead. So do whatever you have to do to make this a good exercise. If it means you check into a nice hotel, go for it. It works for us. If you’d rather take to the park or the beach or your local coffee shop, do it. There’s no right or wrong place to be as long as you’re not skipping ahead to the next chapter by now.

Well, you may be feeling exhausted by now, so I’ll give you a little boost. Below you’ll see a list of potential business objectives you can address through social media. I’ve even organized them by category, like a menu, so that you can easily select one from Column A and one from Column B. Or even more, of course.

Brand Awareness

Increase brand awareness.

Reach a specific audience.

Brand your staff as experts.

Get your customers to talk to one another.

Gather comments, feedback, photos, or video (UGC).

Get press coverage.

Understand what people are saying about your brand.

Customer Relations

Manage your reputation.

Get feedback.

Share information.

Build your e-mail list.

Provide insights about products.

Answer questions.

Share stories about our business, products, and services.

Promotion

Get press coverage.

Build excitement about an upcoming product.

Promote an event.

Get your customers talking (word-of-mouth ads, and they’re free).

Get people to take action.

Sales

Generate leads.

Increase store traffic. Improve sales.

Increase relevant visitor traffic and page rankings.

Networking

Stay informed with news about your products.

Keep informed about changes to your marketplace.

Build a community.

Connect with other like-minded businesspeople.

THE MORNING JOLT

So, you’re done, right? You didn’t skip over the last few pages and join me here unprepared, right? Okay, I’ll take your word for it. As a reward for all the thinking you’ve just done, I’m going to let you look over my shoulder as I counsel our imaginary entrepreneur, Janice, through her planning and strategy session, so you can see how all of your thinking can be put into place and turned into action.

Janice owns a neighborhood coffee shop, the Morning Jolt. She and her partner have been in business for about ten years. They’ve weathered a lot through those years. Some of it has been helpful. People’s increasing knowledge about good coffee and the availability of it in American culture during the last decade has been great. The arrival of a new Starbucks in her neighborhood and McDonald’s selling great coffee has brought competition that Janice survived but simply never expected. How can Janice use social commerce and the Five Fingers to supercharge her small local coffee shop?

Janice gave the following answers as she assessed her current social commerce strategy:

Which social media channels are you currently using, Janice?

Channels Used: Currently I use both Facebook and Twitter, but only on a personal level to keep up with friends and family. We do not really have, nor have we thought much about, social for our business. I feel a little behind the times. I really want to get started with this wave, but it also has to pay off. I am very active daily in my business, and I can carve out time to work on my social commerce, but it has to pay off.

Time Spent Weekly: Right now I spend two or three hours a week in social, just browsing around and chatting with friends. We just opened a little store online where we sell Keurig coffeemakers and pods. They’ve been pretty popular in-store at the coffee shop. The locals come in regularly for the camaraderie and conversation or just to find a place to get away and work. Recently having a few items to sell has helped boost our bottom line slightly. So we just thought about putting up a web store. There has been very little activity there, but I did spend time uploading the coffeemakers and some of the coffee we sell for Keurig. If I got really serious about this, I could spend two to three hours a day on social commerce for sure.

Measures Used: I have not used any tool or platforms. This is an area that I know absolutely nothing about … sorry.

Competitor Profile: I went in and checked on the local competitors. The local coffee shop did have a Facebook page with more than sixteen hundred fans, and its webmaster was posting and chatting with customers. The webmaster even posted the story from the local newspaper about the store. When I looked at frequency of posting, though, it was slow; only eleven posts since October, so fewer than two per month. The local shop had a Twitter account, but it looked abandoned. The last tweet was in June of last year!

Now of course Starbucks was doing big things with fans and followers and content. Its Facebook page had 33 million followers for the national page, with postings three to five times a week on average. A lot of pictures were posted of the coffee and confections it sells. Starbucks has 3 million followers on Twitter and posts reminders for people to join up for its coffee club. It also has links to blog posts, and it was retweeting stories about Starbucks in the press. It was letting people know about drink specials in stores and advertising the availability of gift cards. But, as I explored, I also noticed there was no local page for the Starbucks shop located near us. Maybe that’s an opportunity for me.

Now and Next Year, Too

My Social Commerce Objectives: I really want to get a Face-book page for the coffee shop and have a blog set up, too. I have 137 friends on Facebook now. Some are family and personal and others are people I have met from our business. We would use this page to make people aware of specials or events, and to establish the brand of the coffee shop.

I Want to Begin with This Product: I really want to begin with our coffeemakers as the first product. The customers could be anyone. We have all kinds of people buying from us. There are no real specific people, just all types.

I Want to Influence This Part of the Sales Funnel: When it comes to the parts of the funnel, I think the cross-selling and up-selling are important for us, and brand loyalty, too. People come in and compliment us on the service and the coffee. We need more people to see some of those comments from our customers.

Next Year at This Time I Want to Be …: I would like to see five hundred followers of the Morning Jolt coffee shop on Facebook and Twitter. I want a blog set up and also the ability to sell some of our stuff on the web. I would like to see us making sure we get more comments from customers.

I Have My Eye on Trying These New Platforms and Tools: I just do not know where to begin or what I should be doing. One thing I do know is that I will not go another year without doing something! I guess it will be easiest to begin with Facebook. I just don’t want to do it wrong and mess up.

JOHN TAKES JANICE BY THE HAND

We can give Janice some credit. She clearly took the time to answer the assessment questions and think about where she wants to be a year from now. She did pretty well in assessing where she is on social media now and what her competitors have been doing. Good for her. But, unfortunately, in looking forward, she fell short. She ended up not doing enough research, so she clearly has not learned all the lessons I was hoping you’d know by the time we got to this part of the book. Luckily, there are more chapters to go. Let’s take a look at where Janice went wrong.

For the first half of the assessment, there really is no right or wrong answer. That exercise was meant to help Janice quantify what she has been doing and see where those efforts have left her. The same is true for you. You couldn’t have made a mistake, because everything you’ve done so far has taught you something. It’s the second half of the assessment—figuring out where to go next—where it’s easy to slip back into pre-Kick-Ass days!

Not Enough Research

Janice began strong when I asked her to research her competitors. She came back with some pretty specific information about what they were doing with social media. But from thereon, she really fell off the mark. Maybe research isn’t your thing, either, but you still have to do it. It’s bad enough to postpone your research until you’re sure you understand all the issues facing you, but it’s another thing to not bother doing it at all.

I’m sure, faithful readers, you know that Janice really dropped the ball when she said “anybody” would buy her Keurig coffee machines, and she had customers from all over the spectrum. That’s probably true for her coffee shop customers, but it’s crazy to think it’s true for her potential online customers. In Chapter 2, we completed another exercise: creating a specific consumer to keep in mind when planning how to use social networks. Janice must have stepped out for a cup of coffee during this section of the book, because it took me less than five minutes to learn a lot about the people who may buy from Janice.

If Janice had given it a bit more time, she may have decided to set up Google Alerts to check where people are gathering to talk about her product. I’ll help her. To find these conversations I’ll do some keyword searching. The two best tools for researching keywords are Google AdWords and Wordtracker. Both are free and easy to use.

While Janice is waiting for that data to come in, she could go back and search “Keurig customer reviews.” Now she can see what people who have purchased the machines are saying about them. She can read through these to learn who they shop for, how they use it, and what they think about it.

The first site I visit shows a review written by a woman who bought a machine as a Christmas present for her adult son. She admits she’s not a coffee drinker, but explains exactly why her son and her husband are. She goes on to explain why the Keurig was the right choice for her son, and she details her experience with the product, including how she fixed some issues that came up when the machine stopped working. In the end, she admits that even she loves the Keurig, because it makes her tea so quickly in the morning.

So now we know. This King Consumer bought the machine as a gift, suggesting it was a bit of a splurge. She’s not going to be Janice’s targeted King, but she is a customer. She had some trouble with the machine but was able to easily find help for addressing it. And, she is happy to have the device even though she only drinks tea. This is an awful lot of information to have gathered with just a few keystrokes, don’t you think, Janice? It also shows a picture of a real customer who not only bought the product Janice sells but is also dramatically different from the type of customer Janice may have thought she had. That’s a whole lot better than passing off this vital question with the lame response that she was selling it to “anyone!”

Missed Opportunities

Janice was able to pull things from the sales funnel to add to her objectives, but she failed to even try to say how she would achieve those objectives, and some of them are pretty easy. How hard is it to ask your most loyal customers, who you see all the time, to “Like” your Facebook page, post a review, make a positive comment, or share your blog post? There were plenty of opportunities to begin and, although her first task was to complete the assessment, she could have been applying what she already knew to plan how to achieve her objectives.

If I were sitting here with Janice right now, I’d give a pretty good review for answering the assessment, but I’d also push her to do more. As we continue with this book, you’re going to learn about new platforms and techniques with each chapter. I need you to come along with me while also keeping in mind all the things you learned in Part One. You’ve already come half the way to social commerce finesse, so let’s keep it up.

IT’S ALIVE, SO KEEP PAYING ATTENTION TO IT!

I expect you might be a bit exhausted, what with having just completed a detailed assessment of your business, your social commerce life so far, and your next twelve months full of goals and objectives. Then we did the same for Janice’s business. I know it was no picnic. But now you have a plan, and as you move through your social commerce work, you’ll be doing it with purpose. We’ve stepped into the nuts-and-bolts part of this book. You’ve spent many pages getting yourself ready for this, and now you are. You’ll take this assessment along with your very specific and measurable business objectives, and move into the next twelve months ready to watch your business grow and your profits increase.

If you work alone, post your plan and objectives right next to your work space. Make them a part of what you do, think about, learn, plan for, and consider every day. If you have employees, or you hire freelance help, share your assessment and objectives with your staff. Let them give you their input and recommend some changes and suggestions you may not have thought about. You should have a whole new view of your operation based on what you’ve done in this chapter, and that view can only be enriched by having the input of the others who know your operation from the inside. Nothing here was set in cement, so you can always come back and recalibrate your efforts if you need to. As a matter of fact, that’s exactly what you’ll have to do in order to make progress and achieve your objectives. So, the gotcha in this chapter is that you’ll continue on—and endlessly—studying and improving everything you do for your business. Now you have a step-by-step plan for doing that through social commerce.

SUMO LESSON

Janice had some tough lessons to learn. She was thinking toward social commerce, but she was still solidly stuck in the model of her brick-and-mortar store. This led her to make some simple but avoidable mistakes. She assumed who her King Consumer was based on the people who came into her store. The people who stop by the neighborhood coffee shop to pick up a cup on their way to work are not necessarily the same people who will visit her online store and buy her products there. She has to stop thinking of her shop customers as her only Kings.

She also has to stop putting herself in a box as someone who has no clue as what to do with social commerce. She may have been that when she first picked up this book, but we’ve all learned a lot since then. Go back and reread how she answered the question about exploring new platforms and technologies in the coming year.

Okay, I’ll help you out. Here’s what Janice said:

I just do not know where to begin or what I should be doing. One thing I do know is that I will not go another year without doing something! I guess it will be easiest to begin with Facebook. I just don’t want to do it wrong and mess up.

Oh, no, she didn’t say that, did she? If she takes this approach, next year will come and find her every bit as clueless as she is now! She’s learned a lot, and she’s learned how to learn more. Janice needs Google Alerts. Janice needs to research to find out more about who her King Consumers really are. She needs to remember that once she finds those Kings, she’s going to listen to them before she tries to engage them. You get the idea. The only way she could mess up is if she sets about to “do something.” So, let’s turn the page and get to work on what I consider to be central to your social commerce efforts. Getting your blog right is a great place to begin.