Interview with Jeff Molander: Making Social Media Sell

Written by anni on Monday, February 20th, 2012 with 0 comments

Jeff Molander is a keynote speaker, author, trainer, and original co-founder of what has become the Google Affiliate Network. He also serves as adjunct digital marketing faculty at Loyola University’s School of Business.  Molander’s new book, Off the Hook Marketing: How to Make Social Media Sell for You, focuses on how businesses can create leads and make sales via Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and blogs.

Molander spent a year researching and documenting the hype surrounding the so-called “social media revolution.” He believes this pervasive media trope is distracting businesses and entrepreneurs from the real opportunity presented by social media: bringing customers closer to the products and services they need most.

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What do you think social media changes about the corporate landscape?

Social media’s “game-changing” ability is so overstated and sensationalized that what most businesses are doing with it, right now, is likely working against their best interests. How can this be? There is no money in your knowing the truth: The Social Media Revolution is a lie. Need proof? Look around. Where’s the revolution in your business? People actually acquiring customers and selling using Facebook, blogs, YouTube, and LinkedIn know the truth; they know something most of us don’t.

The difference between fooling around with social media and selling with it relies on the use of proven, time-tested (old) practices—not new tools and techniques. If your goal is to make social media marketing sell, you’ll need to start developing three habits. This is what I discovered when writing my book, while interviewing today’s best social sellers. These three habits are the fundamental ideas responsible selling products and services on social platforms.

If you could give one piece of advice to a start-up entrepreneur just setting up her social media accounts, what would it be?

Stop. Don’t do it… yet. Learn from the mistakes 90% of us have already made, myself included. Resist the urge to ask, “Can we use social media to sell or improve customer service?” and “What should our social media strategy focus on?”

Don’t do this:

Social media is the new big thing—Get into social media—Develop social media strategy.

Do this:

Business problem—Business strategy to solve the problem—Incorporate social media into said business strategy.

What is your favorite social media tool and why?

The ones that I can connect with my customers on. The others don’t interest me professionally speaking. 

When you speak to a large group, what one thing do you hope they remember most?

Making social media sell for your business/brand (no matter how big or small) is rooted in a return to basic practices. Successful social sellers understand the difference between fooling around on social media and selling with it relies on developing these three habits:

1) Solving customers’ problems.

2) Designing to sell (planning social experiences to provoke customer responses that connect to the sales funnel).

3) Translating (discovering customer need as it evolves and using this knowledge to improve response rate… feed it back into #2).

I encourage audiences to examine successful businesses under a new lens: Problem solving. Notice how each of your competitors that are truly thriving are—at their core—solving problems for customers in ways that lead them toward taking actions… becoming members, purchasing products, telling others about their discovery (how they got their problem solved by your community/product/service), etc.

Notice how they are not entertaining or merely informing with social media. If you are interested in earning momentary, glancing, fleeting attention of customers/members then by all means entertain them. There are plenty of social media gurus preaching this. But if you want to sell products and services *solve their problems* in premeditated ways that exchange value with them, trade useful knowledge that is unknown to them in exchange for a specific behavior that you can convert (ultimately) to revenue (nurture the lead).

How do you prepare for public speaking event?

I study my audience like crazy and rehearse. Oh, and I sleep.

It seems like keeping on top of social media and keeping content fresh is a full-time job in itself. How do you avoid burnout?

The question presumes social media is fast-paced and, yes, it is. But the question also presumes the answers we’re all seeking are technical, complex, always changing. This is simply false. Every time there is a sizable shift in the way businesses communicate with consumers, there is always a cadre of “experts”… people that advise that a new business paradigm has arrived, one in which traditional theories of running a business get thrown out the door. What these experts ALWAYS miss is that the theories (that drive “what works”) remain the same. It’s the ways you execute those theories that change. Keeping on top of social media technologies is a snap since the majority of them are solutions seeking problems. They’re not valuable at all within the context of a business need. Some are but most are not. And that is liberating, freeing, empowering!

Do you think there is one underlying strategy to successful social media utilization, or can it be done in many different ways with the same results?

It depends on the goal desired. If your goal is to sell, yes, there is one underlying strategy: To solve customers’ problems in ways that induce customer behavior with every tweet, post, or update you make on social platforms. And that takes a plan, a designed system of question-and-answer driven interactions.

Making social sell is simply a matter of facilitating and then connecting question-and-answer oriented, digital conversations to helpful products and services whenever they’re relevant. It’s an old idea that you can leverage to drive sales with “new,” social media.

What is your favorite public speaking moment?

There’s a moment where people have this realization about why they came to my speech. And at that moment the way they look at social media changes—what to do with Facebook, how to use blogs or LinkedIn to create sales—all these things suddenly become clear. They see how social media can serve THEM for a change, not not the other way around. The best part of my job is when people suddenly see exactly what to do, when, where and why. I think it’s because I don’t teach what’s trendy—I teach what works. I only teach the principles of success that have withstood the test of time. And that is what seems to be empowering to people—this idea that what we already know IS what works in these times of dramatic technological change.