My Favorite Story on Social Business

A landscape gardener ran a business that had been in the family for two or three generations. The staff was happy, and customers loved to visit the store, or to have the staff work on their gardens or make deliveries – anything from bedding plants to ride-on mowers. A great social business example, yes?

For as long as anyone could remember, the current owner and previous generations of owners were extremely positive happy people.

Most folk assumed it was because they ran a successful business.

In fact it was the other way around…

A tradition in the business was that the owner always wore a big lapel badge, saying Business Is Great!

The business was indeed generally great, although it went through tough times like any other. What never changed however was the owner’s attitude, and the badge saying Business Is Great!

Everyone who saw the badge for the first time invariably asked, “What’s so great about business?” Sometimes people would also comment that their own business was miserable, or even that they personally were miserable or stressed.

Anyhow, the Business Is Great! badge always tended to start a conversation, which typically involved the owner talking about lots of positive aspects of business and work, for example:

the pleasure of meeting and talking with different people every day
the reward that comes from helping staff take on new challenges and experiences
the fun and laughter in a relaxed and healthy work environment
the fascination in the work itself, and in the other people’s work and businesses
the great feeling when you finish a job and do it to the best of your capabilities
the new things you learn every day – even without looking to do so
and the thought that everyone in business is blessed – because there are many millions of people who would swap their own situation to have the same opportunities of doing a productive meaningful job, in a civilized well-fed country, where we have no real worries.

And so the list went on. And no matter how miserable a person was, they’d usually end up feeling a lot happier after just a couple of minutes listening to all this infectious enthusiasm and positivity.

It is impossible to quantify or measure attitude like this, but to one extent or another it’s probably a self-fulfilling prophecy, on which point, if asked about the badge in a quiet moment, the business owner would confide:

The badge came first. The great business followed. And that my friends is the best social business strategy that I know of.

What do you think?

7 Key Benefits of an Innovative Social Business Strategy

I am about to tell you how to build an extraordinary and innovative social business strategy. But first I want to tell you an important story about one such strategy. This is a story about a business near my home … a landscape nursery business.

People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

– Maya Angelou

A landscape gardener ran a business that had been in the family for two or three generations. The staff was happy, and customers loved to visit the store, or to have the staff work on their gardens or make deliveries – anything from bedding plants to ride-on mowers.

More details to study: 10 STEPS TO SUPERCHARGING YOUR E-COMMERCE WITH SOCIAL MEDIA

For as long as anyone could remember, the current owner and previous generations of owners were extremely positive happy people.

Most folks assumed it was because they ran a successful business.

In fact, it was the other way around…

A tradition in the business was that the owner always wore a big lapel badge, saying Business Is Great!

The business was indeed generally great, although it went through tough times like any other. What never changed however was the owner’s attitude, and the badge saying Business Is Great!

Everyone who saw the badge for the first time invariably asked, “What’s so great about business?” Sometimes people would also comment that their own business was miserable, or even that they personally were miserable or stressed.

Anyhow, the Business Is Great! badge always tended to start a conversation, which typically involved the owner talking about lots of positive aspects of business and work, for example:

the pleasure of meeting and talking with different people every day
the reward that comes from helping staff take on new challenges and experiences
the fun and laughter in a relaxed and healthy work environment
the fascination in the work itself, and in the other people’s work and businesses
the great feeling when you finish a job and do it to the best of your capabilities
the new things you learn every day – even without looking to do so
and the thought that everyone in business is blessed – because there are many millions of people who would swap their own situation to have the same opportunities of doing a productive meaningful job, in a civilized well-fed country, where we have no real worries.

And so the list went on. And no matter how miserable a person was, they’d usually end up feeling a lot happier after just a couple of minutes of listening to all this infectious enthusiasm and positivity.

It is impossible to quantify or measure attitude like this, but to one extent or another it’s probably a self-fulfilling prophecy, on which point if asked about the badge in a quiet moment, the business owner would confide:

The badge came first. The great business followed. And that my friends are the best social business strategy that I know of.

So do you and your staff like making new friends and building new relationships? This is becoming the most important element of a social business strategy.

Creating positive experiences for building customer relationships often will take some serious thinking. But hopefully not at the expense of the little things you can do to build customer relationships.

What is social business? Is your company a social business? If your answer is no, think again. It’s not rocket science. What makes a social business? Why put emphasis on being social, of course.

Sometimes small actions or inactions by a business can have a big impact on customer experiences. And it is usually due to a lack of an explicit customer experience strategy.

Here are some further thoughts on a social business strategy.

Social networks

The fact is that social networks are facilitating huge numbers of people to share their ideas, beliefs, and stories – creating communities of influence. Social is now the top Internet activity and by 2017, the global social network audience will total 2.55 billion.

Nick Blunden, Senior Vice President of Digital at The Economist Group describes the social business as a mindset or a culture. Social recognizes that collaboration, particularly collaboration facilitated by technology, and the collective knowledge that results from that collaboration is a large source of competitive advantage for businesses.

Social networks are giving people a voice to share their stories – and ultimately be heard. People now have a microphone to share their experiences with clients and partners that want to better understand how to drive transformation, inspire innovation, build collaboration and create amazing, personalized customer experiences.

And when you put people at the center of the conversation through social business, the audience begins to listen, co-creation and collaboration occur, and most important – the community becomes engaged.

Social business … source of competitive advantage

Social recognizes that collaboration, particularly collaboration facilitated by technology, and the collective knowledge that results from that collaboration is a large source of competitive advantage for businesses. Moreover, social business leadership comes in all shapes, forms, and sizes, as it smashes down silos and fosters connectivity and new levels of collaboration like never before.

Innovative social business strategy

A social business strategy isn’t just about tweeting and likes – it’s about something far more powerful. As Bryan Kramer explained in his book: “There is No B2B or B2C: It’s Human to Human: #H2H” businesses are starting to behave and sound like real people dealing with other people, rather than “business” to “consumer.”

Example of social business … connecting and personalizing

It’s about connecting people – employees, partners, and customers – with each other to share knowledge, identify expertise, and better reach customers. Leaders are using social business strategies, technologies, and practices to make a significant impact on their businesses and communities.

Using the power of personalized storytelling through social business, impactful stories can be unleashed into the marketplace – and shared like never before.

Customers today are demanding a more personalized experience than ever before, which leaves businesses working harder to meet these rising expectations. When used effectively, the rewards of personalization can be enormous – increasing sales and revenue, enhancing online conversion rates, boosting average order value, driving cross-sell and upsell initiatives, and strengthening customer loyalty and retention.

But even more powerful than personalization is a concept that marketers have been familiar with for years: real-time personalization. It’s not just making advance decisions about what message customers will see the next time you interact with them – it’s also being prepared to make fact-based decisions about personalized messages to create real-time, meaningful interactions.

And while most companies are beginning to understand personalization and even real-time personalization, others are taking this concept a step further to include personalized engagement, which, in society, is a two-way conversation.

They are leveraging personal connections and giving people a platform to tell their stories through social networks – exposing large numbers of people to others’ ideas, culture, beliefs, and technologies, and creating communities of influence.

what is social business — Are you amplifying connections?

Social business ideas … amplifying connections

Customers have grown increasingly overwhelmed with outbound marketing offers, and consequently, the effectiveness of traditional outbound marketing campaigns has significantly declined. The ability to connect with customers on their own terms, at any time, with any device can dramatically improve the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. We already know that real-time personalization allows you to successfully:

Social business strategy … message relevance

To increase response rates of inbound channels consider maximizing the relevance of messages presented in real-time.

Improve each customer’s experience by personalizing his or her interaction with your company
Maintain a consistent dialogue with customers across all channels
Achieve better overall marketing results, including increased sales and revenue, improved online conversion rates, and strengthened

Customer loyalty and retention

But social business takes all the benefits of personalization and brings them into a very public forum. It gives people a way to share their insights with others – on a massive scale – and creates overwhelming value for everyone.

Tying it all together

In the end, it’s about social, mobile, and real-time connections – and how those pieces work together to enable stronger connections among people. They can share more easily than ever, right at the moment, at any given time.

What companies need to do is live and breathe what the principle of social stands for – which is being open and listening.

Understanding how customers want to interact in the future – and meeting them there – will become increasingly important when it comes to interactions, and truly creating a sense of personalized engagement.

The bottom line

It’s all about wearing and expressing your enthusiasm and passion all the time, isn’t it? That is a true priority of running a social business.

Companies that are proactively managing all elements of being social to improve their business are most successful in achieving customer trust and loyalty.

Remember, customers create the most value for you … when you create the most value for them.

Need some help in capturing more customers from your social media marketing or advertising? Creative ideas to help the differentiation with your customers?

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.

When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.

Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

Are you devoting enough energy to innovating your social media strategy?

Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Employee Traits: Staffing for a Social Business?

Wayne Dyer once said: When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. What is the most challenging element of your social business? We feel one of the most difficult, yet most important elements of any business are the hiring process. This is particularly true for a social business. Here the employee traits take center stage, don’t they?

Check out our thoughts on team leverage.

These days more and more companies are turning their attention to social commerce business. Meaning? The simple meaning is they believe that they need more attention to building customer relationships.

From customer relationships comes trust, the most important factor in a customer selecting a company with whom to do business. The secret to building customer relationships is customer engagement and there are many ways you’ll need to engage customers.

During the hiring process steps, you really must take into consideration personality. Even the person who is talented, sometimes they don’t have the right personality because they are not really people oriented.

Bringing in exactly the right people is paramount for any business and being successful at social engagement is growing as most important for many businesses.

Put simply; people matter. The problem is that very few people actually possess the talent to identify talent. Identifying and recruiting talent requires much more than screening a resume and having a set of standard interviewing questions to guide you. There are issues of values, vision, culture, and most of all personality that need to be addressed in the hiring process.

In today’s post, we’ll share our philosophy on the best qualities to look for to ensure that you hire the correct personality traits for a social business.

We recommend the following 7 behaviors, attitudes and strengths to look to hire and develop in our client businesses:

signs of a good employee — Signs of a good employee.

Engaging employee traits

Some people have so much personality, presence, and magnetism that they brighten a room when they come in. Others have so little, that they brighten the room when they leave.

A person with a truly magnetic personality does not have to be the “life of the party” or the “class clown” in order to attract attention. Instead, he or she may say very little in the way of idle conversation or chit-chat.

What this person does best is make everyone he or she interacts with feel empowered or validated. The positive energy and the selfless interest in the other party make the person very popular indeed.

Employee traits … connects personally with professional

The fundamental truth is that your personal life is almost undoubtedly more interesting than your business life. Period. And, associating some sort of noteworthy character trait in your personal brand makes you more memorable in social media. The fact that you run a PR firm? Meh. The fact that run a PR firm, but also grow prize-winning roses? People will remember that.

In a socially connected world, where countless opinions and options are just a finger swipe on a mobile device away, differentiation is harder than ever. You have to build some hooks for yourself than transcend the office. That’s why I make it a point to emphasize my hobbies … love to work in my perennial garden, try new golf courses, and do a lot of reading.

Your personal life? Your professional life? One and the same. I know that’s often uncomfortable. But it’s the truth.

Signs of a good employee … great storyteller

The point that I like to make is that how you say something is just as important as what you are saying.

Storytelling is a great means for sharing and interpreting experiences, and great experiences have this innate ability to change the way in which we view our world.

Stories, when properly practiced, pull people into a dialogue. It’s about engagement and interaction. The audience is just as active a participant as the storyteller. And it has a great deal to do with how you tell the story.

Born a collaborator

It takes a great entrepreneur with a vision to start a business, but it requires strong leadership collaboration skills and a collaboration of many people to make it a success.

Collaboration is working together to achieve a goal. It is a recursive process where two or more people or organizations work together to realize shared goals. Note that collaboration is NOT cooperation … it is more than the intersection of common goals, but a collective determination to reach an identical objective by sharing knowledge, learning, and building consensus.

Here are three important traits of a great collaborator:

Don’t try to be the smartest person in the group – even if there’s a chance you are.

Offer your ideas as just that – an idea – not THE idea.

Never outwardly attack an idea or suggestion.

Listener

Some people are very good at speaking, telling their stories and being able to inspire others. But being a good listener is often more important than speaking. It gives a deeper level of understanding of someone’s situation and helps to know what words are best to use and what words should be avoided.

As simple as listening may seem, doing it well, particularly when disagreements arise, takes sincere effort and lots of practice.

Listening is the key to having good empathy. Tim Brown, the CEO and President of IDEO, the global innovation, and design firm, describes empathy as making an effort to “see the world through the eyes of others, understand the world through their experiences, and feel the world through their emotions.”

Customer-centered

Customer-centric, in its simplest and most pure sense, means making the customer’s life easy; designing processes that are focused on delivering a positive experience to the customer; making it extremely easy for the customer to learn about you, buy from you, and get support from you when they need it.

There are always situations where the designed process doesn’t flow as smoothly as intended. And those situations are the ones where your customer-centered trait is really tested.

When a process goes off the tracks, customer-centric businesses don’t let the customer feel the bumps. They stay focused on delivering a positive customer experience, while they absorb the bumps through alternative or ad-hoc procedures.

Change agent

Change has become a much bigger, more interwoven part of the overall business fabric – an embedded leadership requirement that plays into everything that we do, every day, and how we go about getting things done. In the end, every employee must be a change agent.

A change agent lives in the future, not the present. Regardless of what is going on today, a change agent has a vision of what could or should be and uses that as the governing sense of action. To a certain extent, a change agent is dissatisfied with what they see around them, in favor of a much better vision of the future.

The bottom line

The biggest mistake people make when it comes to listening is they’re so focused on what they’re going to say next or how what the other person is saying is going to affect them that they fail to hear what’s being said. The words come through loud and clear, but the meaning is lost.

A simple way to avoid this is to ask a lot of questions. People like to know you’re listening, and something as simple as a clarification question shows that not only are you listening, you also care about what they’re saying. You’ll be surprised how much respect and appreciation you gain just by asking questions.

Are you devoting enough energy to improving your enablers for success for being a more social business?

Need some help in capturing more improvements for your staff’s leadership, teamwork, and collaboration? Creative ideas in running or facilitating a team or leadership workshop?

Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job.

Call Mike at 607-725-8240.

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And this struggle gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.

When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.

Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

Are you devoting enough energy to innovating your social media strategy?

Do you have a lesson about making your advertising better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?

Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he writes about topics that relate to improving the performance of the business. Go to Amazon to obtain a copy of his latest book, Exploring New Age Marketing. It focuses on using the best examples to teach new age marketing … lots to learn. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.

More hiring material from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:

Recruitment Process … Avoid These 5 Killer Hiring Mistakes

People Are Your Business, So Recruitment Is Lifes Blood

Employee Traits … 7 You Need to Be a Social Business

Like this short blog? Follow Digital Spark Marketing on LinkedIn or add us to your circles for 3-4 short, interesting blogs, stories per week.

Building Collaboration and Sharing Skills Are Key to Business Growth

How many times in your business career have you been in an organization where real energy was expended to building collaboration and sharing? How successful were these efforts? To build team collaboration and sharing is not an easy job, is it?

But we’d all agree that the payoffs certainly outweigh the efforts, wouldn’t we? As Ralph Waldo Emerson said: The years teach much which the days never knew.

Over the years in my career, I’ve had the good fortune of being exposed to many smart people and worked as part of many teams trying to build collaboration and sharing.

It never ceases to amaze me how just a few moments of discussion, or sitting and listening to well thought-out debates, can open your mind to ideas you can’t believe you didn’t think of on your own.

Creative convergence depends on group collaboration … how well do you work in groups?

Related: The Small Business Crash Course on Creative Business Ideas

I have always found the wisdom of others to be something of a gift: free of charge, no limit to its value. No limits to its value because these pearls of wisdom can be connected to some of your ideas to produce something greater than what you might have created on your own.

external collaboration — **External collaboration.**

For example, consider this example. It takes a great entrepreneur with a vision to start a business, but it requires strong leadership collaboration skills and collaboration of many people to make it a success.

Collaboration is working together to achieve a goal. It is a recursive process where two or more people or organizations work together to realize shared goals. Note that collaboration is NOT cooperation … it is more than the intersection of common goals, but a collective determination to reach an identical objective by sharing knowledge, learning, and building consensus.

Collaboration is an attribute that cuts across many businesses and business processes. We need to make it an intentional process and cultivate it into the team’s culture.

We recently came across an interesting IBM Report: Charting the Social Universe.

In an atmosphere where your value is defined by your ability to share your expertise rather than safeguard it, collaboration is crucial. In this Center for Applied Insights study, Charting the Social Universe, respondents were asked how they defined the term “social business.”

Their response? It’s all about collaboration: 74 percent defined a social business as one that uses social technology to foster collaboration among customers, employees, and partners.

Collaboration doesn’t happen overnight. To better understand organizations’ approaches to adopting social, they were asked which social capabilities they had deployed, and for what business purposes. From these questions, four important ideas were derived:

Drive both internal and external collaboration

Build and educate employees

Gain customer insights and engage them

Use what you learned to improve business processes

Let’s examine driving internal and external collaboration, which was the most common entry point for organizations. This idea includes social capabilities such as collaborative apps, enterprise social networks, and social media marketing.

The study outlines some additional key findings, but here are the insights from organizations focused on driving internal and external collaboration:

Because this ambition is often a company’s entry point into social, many are still in a relatively immature phase:

43 percent of respondents say they’re in the early stages of adopting these types of capabilities. But that will soon change as 53 percent say they’ll have an enterprise-wide strategy for these capabilities in the next two to three years.

69 percent have no formal qualitative metrics to assess the effectiveness of these social capabilities. Instead, they have a general, informal sense of their performance. But, interestingly, their #1 concern when deploying these capabilities is uncertainty in the return on investment.

It’s all about encouragement:

What was their #1 catalyst for deploying these capabilities? 39 percent say employee evangelists championed the use of these social capabilities.

52 percent say the best way to drive the adoption of these capabilities internally is regular encouragement.

And two wildcards jumped out to the study team:

54 percent have a published set of guidelines for these capabilities.

For social media marketing, Facebook is most commonly used, followed by Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+.

Are you looking to drive internal and external collaboration within your organization? Want your employees to share their unique knowledge and expertise instead of keeping it to themselves?

Here are a few tips you need to consider:

Develop formal metrics to prove the value of your social efforts.

Pursue an enterprise social strategy.

Identify employee evangelists to spread the word about social capabilities.

Focus on employee adoption – keep encouraging them to use social, and remind them why.

The bottom line

Creative ideas on how to build collaborative teams must include exploring, imagining, experimenting, and learning with others. Most of all, it requires reaching out to others to collaborate. The sum of group collaboration is always greater than the work of each individual.

So how do you focus and motivate a group of individuals to share their knowledge and collaborate as a team?

Related: 7 Creative Ways to Support Innovation With Team Collaboration.

What do you believe is a fundamental requirement to support innovation in a team environment? We believe collaboration and teamwork are fundamental to good innovation sessions and we work hard in our workshops to build these qualities.

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.

When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.

Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

Are you devoting enough energy to continually improving your continuous learning?

Do you have a lesson about making your learning better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?

Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find him on Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.

10 Ways Personal Development Can Improve Long Term Success

Creative Ideas to Build Collaborative Teams in Organizations

The Story and Zen of Getting Things Done

How to Take Charge of Your Peace of Mind

I am about to tell you how to build an extraordinary and innovative social business strategy. But first I want to tell you an important story about one such strategy. This is a story about a business near my home … a landscape nursery business.

People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

– Maya Angelou

A landscape gardener ran a business that had been in the family for two or three generations. The staff was happy, and customers loved to visit the store, or to have the staff work on their gardens or make deliveries – anything from bedding plants to ride-on mowers.

More details to study: 10 STEPS TO SUPERCHARGING YOUR E-COMMERCE WITH SOCIAL MEDIA

For as long as anyone could remember, the current owner and previous generations of owners were extremely positive happy people.

Most folks assumed it was because they ran a successful business.

In fact, it was the other way around…

A tradition in the business was that the owner always wore a big lapel badge, saying Business Is Great!

The business was indeed generally great, although it went through tough times like any other. What never changed however was the owner’s attitude, and the badge saying Business Is Great!

Everyone who saw the badge for the first time invariably asked, “What’s so great about business?” Sometimes people would also comment that their own business was miserable, or even that they personally were miserable or stressed.

Anyhow, the Business Is Great! badge always tended to start a conversation, which typically involved the owner talking about lots of positive aspects of business and work, for example:

the pleasure of meeting and talking with different people every day

the reward that comes from helping staff take on new challenges and experiences

the fun and laughter in a relaxed and healthy work environment

the fascination in the work itself, and in the other people’s work and businesses

the great feeling when you finish a job and do it to the best of your capabilities

the new things you learn every day – even without looking to do so

and the thought that everyone in business is blessed – because there are many millions of people who would swap their own situation to have the same opportunities of doing a productive meaningful job, in a civilized well-fed country, where we have no real worries.

And so the list went on. And no matter how miserable a person was, they’d usually end up feeling a lot happier after just a couple of minutes of listening to all this infectious enthusiasm and positivity.

It is impossible to quantify or measure attitude like this, but to one extent or another it’s probably a self-fulfilling prophecy, on which point if asked about the badge in a quiet moment, the business owner would confide:

The badge came first. The great business followed. And that my friends are the best social business strategy that I know of.

So do you and your staff like making new friends and building new relationships? This is becoming the most important element of a social business strategy.

Related post: Adapting to Major Changes in the Social Media Climate

Creating positive experiences for building customer relationships often will take some serious thinking. But hopefully not at the expense of the little things you can do to build customer relationships.

What is social business? Is your company a social business? If your answer is no, think again. It’s not rocket science. What makes a social business? Why put emphasis on being social, of course.

Sometimes small actions or inactions by a business can have a big impact on customer experiences. And it is usually due to a lack of an explicit customer experience strategy.

Here are some further thoughts on a social business strategy.

Social networks

The fact is that social networks are facilitating huge numbers of people to share their ideas, beliefs, and stories – creating communities of influence. Social is now the top Internet activity and by 2017, the global social network audience will total 2.55 billion.

And when you put people at the center of the conversation through social business, the audience begins to listen, co-creation and collaboration occur, and most important – the community becomes engaged.

Social business … source of competitive advantage

Innovative social business strategy

Example of social business … connecting and personalizing

It’s about connecting people – employees, partners, and customers – with each other to share knowledge, identify expertise, and better reach customers. Leaders are using social business strategies, technologies, and practices to make a significant impact on their businesses and communities.

Using the power of personalized storytelling through social business, impactful stories can be unleashed into the marketplace – and shared like never before.

And while most companies are beginning to understand personalization and even real-time personalization, others are taking this concept a step further to include personalized engagement, which, in society, is a two-way conversation.

They are leveraging personal connections and giving people a platform to tell their stories through social networks – exposing large numbers of people to others’ ideas, culture, beliefs, and technologies, and creating communities of influence.

Social business ideas … amplifying connections

Social business strategy … message relevance

To increase response rates of inbound channels consider maximizing the relevance of messages presented in real-time.

Improve each customer’s experience by personalizing his or her interaction with your company

Maintain a consistent dialogue with customers across all channels

Achieve better overall marketing results, including increased sales and revenue, improved online conversion rates, and strengthened

Customer loyalty and retention

But social business takes all the benefits of personalization and brings them into a very public forum. It gives people a way to share their insights with others – on a massive scale – and creates overwhelming value for everyone.

Tying it all together

In the end, it’s about social, mobile, and real-time connections – and how those pieces work together to enable stronger connections among people. They can share more easily than ever, right at the moment, at any given time.

Related post: Facebook Business Page … How to Improve Social Marketing?

What companies need to do is live and breathe what the principle of social stands for – which is being open and listening.

Understanding how customers want to interact in the future – and meeting them there – will become increasingly important when it comes to interactions, and truly creating a sense of personalized engagement.

The bottom line

It’s all about wearing and expressing your enthusiasm and passion all the time, isn’t it? That is a true priority of running a social business.

Companies that are proactively managing all elements of being social to improve their business are most successful in achieving customer trust and loyalty.

Remember, customers create the most value for you … when you create the most value for them.

Need some help in capturing more customers from your social media marketing or advertising? Creative ideas to help the differentiation with your customers?

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.

When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.

Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

Are you devoting enough energy to innovating your social media strategy?

Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

More reading on social media design from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:

Creative Tips for Stunning Infographic Design

6 KLM Airlines Marketing Examples for Winning Campaigns

Facebook Design … 8 Secret Factors for Most Successful Marketing

Check out our thoughts on team leverage.

These days more and more companies are turning their attention to social commerce business. Meaning? The simple meaning is they believe that they need more attention to building customer relationships.

Related post: Who Will Be Your Next Employee?

From customer relationships comes trust, the most important factor in a customer selecting a company with whom to do business. The secret to building customer relationships is customer engagement and there are many ways you’ll need to engage customers.

During the hiring process steps, you really must take into consideration personality. Even the person who is talented, sometimes they don’t have the right personality because they are not really people oriented.

Bringing in exactly the right people is paramount for any business and being successful at social engagement is growing as most important for many businesses.

In today’s post, we’ll share our philosophy on the best qualities to look for to ensure that you hire the correct personality traits for a social business.

We recommend the following 7 behaviors, attitudes and strengths to look to hire and develop in our client businesses:

Engaging employee traits

Some people have so much personality, presence, and magnetism that they brighten a room when they come in. Others have so little, that they brighten the room when they leave.

A person with a truly magnetic personality does not have to be the “life of the party” or the “class clown” in order to attract attention. Instead, he or she may say very little in the way of idle conversation or chit-chat.

What this person does best is make everyone he or she interacts with feel empowered or validated. The positive energy and the selfless interest in the other party make the person very popular indeed.

Employee traits … connects personally with professional

Your personal life? Your professional life? One and the same. I know that’s often uncomfortable. But it’s the truth.

Signs of a good employee … great storyteller