"Social Media, Are You Kidding?"

Objection-handling--My fellow product marketers will relate to this because it’s a regular function of our jobs to understand the common objections customers and prospects will have relative to our product and service offerings, and to train our sales teams in how to best respond.

The same holds true for your internal audience when it comes to deploying marketing programs in accordance with strategic campaigns, product launches, and offers. Common objections to exploring how social media can improve your bottom line may include such things as:

• “Are you kidding? We cannot possibly add new programs during this time of cost-cutting”
• “We don’t have the people/cycles to sustain these efforts/update content/track responses”
• “What are you smoking with this Web 2.0 talk? Our customers don’t use (insert social media tactic of choice here).”
• “How redundant. All of our content is on already on our corporate website."
• “If we allow things to reside in too many places, we’ll lose control over what people say about our content”
• “This stuff is too confusing. We’re already tracking leads through online registration forms for our content downloads.”
  

….and so on. The list is by no means exhaustive. Resist the temptation to take a one-size-fits-all approach. This is a conversation that should be fostered with the particular revenue and marketing goals of your business at the core. Kyle Flaherty lent good perspective in his Nov 6 blog post, Stop Talking, Start Doing when he advised us to stop asking how the economy will affect social media, but rather to ask, “How can I improve how social media effects my business?” And to those who resist a conversation focused on revenue, I have to ask, Are You Kidding?