Selling Social Media Marketing Internally

It is an issue that many marketers face. You know that social media marketing will help your company/brand/product/service grow online. The problem is how to you convince your boss and their bosses of the value of social media marketing? Well recently Rohit had a great post on this very topic.

In the post Rohit identified a couple of activities that you can do that will help you sell SMM internally. They are:

People are talking about us or our industry. Using Technorati or Google’s Blogsearch, do relevant searches for your brand name or your industry by using tags (for Technorati) and keywords (for Blogsearch). Note the number of blogs or conversations listed and have those numbers ready to share.

A generalization is that people in management love data. The more data that you can provide about what the blogosphere is saying about your industry or company the stronger your argument will be.

Our competitors are moving faster than we are. An important ingredient to sealing the deal is often finding 2-3 others that your business might consider competitors doing more with social media than you are. Does a competitor have a Wikipedia page and you don’t? Is there a MySpace group for your rival that is gaining in users? Each will help to illustrate why and how your competitors are moving ahead without you.

This is a great suggestion. You can talk about social media all day long, but a lot of the time a company will not make a decision to move into a new area until they see a competitor their first. Looking at the online activities on what your boss considers to be your competition, and identifying social media tactics that they are employing will go a long way in successfully selling social media internally.

We can start small and work our way up. Assuming you have painted your picture of the necessity for using social media in a smarter way - the last argument should be about action. For this stage, you will need to think about the ways that you can get started with social media quickly and easily. It might be by first starting to listen to conversation out there and participate in the conversation by commenting on blogs. Other ideas include internal blogging, attending blog events, or starting to use social media tools and sites like Digg or del.icio.us.

Once you have got you boss interested don’t get too elaborate in the beginning. Start off with some low hanging fruit like Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon or Wikipedia where you can demonstrate success, without taxing a lot of internal resources. After having some success, then I would look other tactics like blogging and Digg.