In many ways, the advent of social selling has changed how we do business.

Gone are the days of faceless organizations.

Now, businesses rely on getting and maintaining the good will of their customers in order to make a sale.

How do businesses do this?

By harnessing the power of social selling and driving sales from the inside out. That is, entering its customers’ social circles in order to become a trusted brand for goods and services.

Let’s take a look at social selling and how you can ethically increase sales and engage with your customers.

What Is Social Selling?

To know you’re doing social selling ethically, you first need to understand what the term means.

Social selling, or social commerce, is using online social networks and tools to reach customers and engage them in a sale.

It’s a bit of a balancing act: Get it right and you’ve earned yourself a pleased customer who is likely to share his positive experience. Get it wrong and you’ve invaded someone’s personal network and abused his or her trust in a way they are not likely to forget.

How Not to Do Social Selling

Before we get into how to start social selling ethically, let’s take a look at what an unethical approach might involve.

Sales is and always has been, social – it’s about who you know after all – and web 2.0 means we have dragged the social side of selling back to the forefront of business. However, many companies end up breaking these new rules of engagement. Here are three trademark behaviors of an unethical social seller:

• They lie about their true intentions in order to get inside its customers’ online circles.
• They spam customers with unwanted fake offers.
• They embarrass users by tricking them into condoning their products online.

How to Ethically Reach Your Followers and Drive Sales

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with using online social networks to sell to customers. There’s just one golden rule: Do it on their terms.

Easy enough, right?

Here’s how:

Understand your audience’s frame of reference
To ‘do it on their terms,’ you need to know what those terms are. Today’s customer is more informed than any you’ve had to deal with before, so you need to understand where they’re coming from. In a world bursting with advertisements, customers simply want to find out about products from real companies – and they often turn to their social circles to determine which businesses are credible.

How do you make your business real? Stop hiding behind the corporate brand and let your customers know real people work for your organization.

For example, if you try to recommend something that’s receiving bad online reviews you’ll look disingenuous. But, talk honestly about a product’s weaknesses and you’re much more likely to make a real connection with a potential customer because you’re showing that your business is run by real humans.

Don’t have a one-track mind
You’ve just managed to get inside a potential customer’s online social circle? Well done. Now do anything except sell. The minute you look like you’re trying to make a quick buck out of a new relationship is the minute you’ll lose the trust and respect of your audience.

Instead, stay completely transparent about your motives and make sure you provide value elsewhere in the relationship. Ask questions unrelated to a sale and engage with your followers on a personal level. Bide your time and, when the right opportunity comes along, you’ll be able to make the kind of recommendation you’d make to your best friend – which will most likely result in a sale.

Stay up-to-date
Just like you keep your organization’s various social media profiles fresh, so should you keep your customer interactions ticking over. This doesn’t mean spamming your audience with your latest self-promotional blog post or sale, it means conversing in a way that leaves you better informed about where your customers are right now. When your customers see you are engaging with other people like them, they will want to jump in on the conversation.

Listen and be alert
The world of social selling doesn’t shut its doors at five o’clock Monday to Friday. If you want to engage your customers in their online social networks, you need to be there when they want you. This doesn’t just mean being there for the sale or the positive reviews. You need to answer questions, provide objective advice, and deal with any complaints as quickly and helpfully as possible. Then, when a customer wants to spend money, you’ll be the name that springs to mind.

Ethical social selling allows you to form more meaningful relationships with your customers. Word-of-mouth and social recommendations are more prevalent than ever, so entering your followers’ social world will help you become a trusted source for goods and services to them, as well as to their peers.

Kieran Flanagan is the inbound marketing manager for EMEA at Salesforce, which has just launched its social success site in the U.K. that aims to help businesses harness the power of social media for their business. You can follow him on Twitter @searchbrat.

We say, “Sure! Have two guys kick one another in the privates and it’s sure to go viral!”

The fact of the matter is, you can’t MAKE anything go viral. It’s not about how many shares you can get from your friends and family.

It’s about great creative, great content, and some fairy magic dust.

And, just because two guys kicking one another or cute puppies might work this week doesn’t mean they won’t be overshadowed the following week by a celebrity crying over a sloth.

According to an article in The Atlantic this month, companies are installing every imaginable share button on their content, writing articles, and then praying to the viral Gods that they would become overnight success because of all of the shares.

But then, surprise! An entrepreneur named Uzi Shmilovic examined eight ways Internet giants, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, have used virality as a vehicle for success.

Shmilovic emphasizes using a “Virality Coefficient” — “how many new users on average does one user of your product ‘infect’” — to measure to virality of a piece of information. A coefficient greater than one indicates exponential growth, the type that describes wildly successful Internet campaigns like the Old Spice Guy:

So now everyone is rushing to figure out what their Virality Coefficient is in order to make their videos, podcasts, blog posts, white papers, and more go viral.

The problem, of course, is “making” something go viral isn’t possible. It’s not a mathematic equation. There are human beings with emotions involved. There is nothing mathematical or scientific about that.

And, as much as we like to think everyone uses the social web, it turns out there are plenty of people who don’t. In fact, more people use email than social media, despite the growing number of users at Facebook. Most people create their accounts, spend a few days discovering what everyone is talking about, accumulate some friends, and never return.

I have a better idea. Determine your vision.  Invest some time (as in years). Work really hard. Build a community. Empower your brand ambassadors. Listen to your critics and detractors. Make changes. And someday, somewhere, you will have something that goes viral.

Everyone will think it was an overnight success because it’s the first time they have heard of you. But you’ll know the real secret.

Hard work, patience, and perseverance trump all.

Thanks to the Daily Mumbler for providing an image to prove my point.

I bet you’ve heard plenty about the importance of conversation in social media.

We’ve all heard companies must engage their customers online. We’ve probably said it ourselves.

But is conversation the most important thing in social media?

What’s The Value of Conversation?

Few will question the value of conversation. It extends customer service and makes PR more personal. But does conversation improve the bottom line?

Case studies suggest social companies do better than their non-social competitors.

If we’ve proven conversational companies are more profitable, is it because conversation made them more visible?

There are more reliable ways to reach the masses.

You could advertise on Facebook for $0.25 per thousand views, and you wouldn’t be subject to that notoriously unreliable viral phenomenon.

Did companies who got social first simply get media (and its associated benefits) because they were first?

Can late-adopters get the same benefits?

Will we always have to do something novel to get noticed?

Do social prospects buy more because we talked to them?

Or was it because they already liked our brand more anyway, and that’s why they talked to us?

Have you really tracked how many of your new customers heard about you because you got their attention first from a social media platform?

What Are We Talking About, Anyway?

Business card cartoonist Hugh McLeod wrote a post about social objects years ago. Let me paraphrase: People need something to talk about. Let’s give them something to talk about.

In day-to-day life, we talk about art, TV shows, movies, fashion accessories, and sports games – all creations or performances. Businesses use blog posts, whitepapers, and infographics to create conversation or get a lead form filled out.

That’s content marketing. It’s not the same as conversation. Conversations without any content are less likely to go anywhere. Your executive suite cares where conversations go- they want them to go toward the bottom line.

Conversation Isn’t Enough

Talk is cheap. Conversation is ephemeral, substanceless, too easy, not as valuable. Quantity conversation doesn’t make up for lack of quality content. And yes, content is harder to do than conversation.

You have to create value with content. This is why books are valued. This is why people love infographics- they look valuable and usually they are valuable. It’s not easy to do, because it’s hard to create value out of nothing.

Quality content creates better conversations. If your search and social popularity aren’t great, you may not have enough content, or your content may not be good enough for people to care about.

If They Aren’t Talking To You, You’re Invisible

I hope you paid attention to Facebook marketing in 2010 and 2011, because even being generous to Twitter in estimating its active user base, Facebook reaches at least four times as many people. You probably heard about EdgeRank, the algorithm Facebook uses to filter what posts people see in their newsfeed.

Do you know only three percent of fans ever return to your business’s facebook page after liking it?

Are you aware your Facebook page fans, if they aren’t liking and commenting on your posts, will stop seeing your posts?

Did you know the average Facebook page reaches just 17 percent of its fans?

The average page’s posts are not being seen by 83 percent of their fans.

Mediocre engagement leads to horrible visibility.

We must get more likes and comments on our Facebook posts if we want more of our fans to see them. We already wanted more retweets and clicks so we could demonstrate an impressive number of visits to websites from social media.

Now we need to go figure out what content is most engaging and viral, figure out why that content works, and then reproduce that success. We need to use tools such as Infinigraph to discover what content is working best for us and our competitors.

Then we need to monitor which content creates the most leads and sales for the company, because controversy doesn’t necessarily create sales. Oh shoot- this social media thing has to be connected to direct marketing and sales? Is it PR or is it marketing? I’m not sure there’s a line anymore. Everyone needs to learn new skills.

Start Caring About Which Content Is Most Engaging and Viral

Google’s “Search Plus Your World” makes all search results more social. You’re more likely to see search results for things your friends have shared or created. One of the biggest effects this will have in the next couple years is to move more of the search experts away from link building and more toward content creation.

These guys live on analytics. They get off on turning a 250 percent ROI campaign into a 700 percent ROI campaign. They’ll bring their nerdy analytics focus to the task and make sure the content they share gets lots of tweets, likes, plus-ones, shares, and comments. In other words, if you don’t get quantitative about your content, these geeks are going to beat the pants off you.

Brian Carter is the author of the bestselling books The Like Economy: How Businesses Make Money With Facebook and Facebook Marketing: Leveraging Facebook’s Features For Your Marketing Campaigns (3rd edition).

Today?

It’s in the upper 40s.

Mother Nature is clearly confused. As much as I love snow, I do not want it in June. Do you hear me, Mother Nature? No snow in June!

As a side note, Anne Weiskopf took the photo I use in every other Gin and Topics. I saw her the other night and guess what she ordered to drink?

That’s right! A Hendricks. It made me giggle.

And, on that note, I present you this week’s Gin and Topics.

5. Puppies Learning to Walk. Thanks to Jenn Whinnem, you get to see puppies learning how to walk. It might be one of the cutest things I’ve ever seen. Plus their little barks? OMG.

4. The Toilet Paper Emergency. We’ve all been there. No toilet paper. This man uses Twitter to have some brought to him while he’s stuck in a public bathroom. #freakingbrilliant I wonder if Dan Perez will use this technique next time he’s out? Thanks to Deb Dobson for forwarding it along. The story. Not the tweet.

3. The Conjuror 1899. I don’t know what to say to this other than it’s incredible. I mean, INCREDIBLE. Claudia Anderson sent it to me and she said, “This video is circa 1899 by George Melies the magician/film maker/producer who is honored in the recent movie Hugo.  George Melies is thought to be the father of cinematography special effects and you can see how he used film to create the illusion of magic.” It’s incredible.

2. Nine Tech Terms You Need to Know Before Starting a Business. Heck, if you’re in business you need to know these terms. Do yourself a favor and educate yourself on things of the web. I even recommend learning basic programming so you can adjust things in your content management system.

1. Hold On for Safety. All I have to say about this is you’re welcome.

P.S. Seven more shopping days until my birthday!

P.P.S. See how I did that? Three of the five Gin and Topics were produced by YOU. That’s right! Filled with stuff from each of you. Let’s keep it up! And…thank you!

Except.

I didn’t record a video.

I’m not really sure what happened. Typically I get up long before the sun comes up. This morning, however, Mr. D’s alarm went off at 5:45 and it woke me from the dead.

It means I was a little more than an hour behind.

Which equates to no video. Well, no video from me.

Instead I thought I’d share a video with you that had me laughing so hard, I was crying.

I was on the El, headed to the Loop to have drinks with Danny Brown and some of our social media friends, while I watched this. I was laughing out loud.

Sitting by myself, earphones in, on the train.

Laughing. Out. Loud.

Let’s be real. Ellen, by herself, is hilarious. When you add in Kristin Bell and a sloth, downright gut belly laughing ensues.

I thought it was worth having its own blog post vs. being one of five in Gin and Topics tomorrow.

I hope you find it as hilarious as I did.

If you can’t see it in your Reader or email, click here. Trust me. You want to watch this.

Oh! And go stop by our Facebook page and leave us a question on the wall. That way I’ll feel guilty if I skip the video again.

Today’s guest post is written by Anne Weiskopf. 

Shaw’s supermarkets (part of the SuperValu chain) launched a holiday giveaway in November worth more than $15 million in prizes and money saving offers across their 169 stores in five states.

The concept of the “Wish Big Win Big Holiday Giveaway” is simple and compelling: Shoppers are given a number of tickets based upon their total grocery purchase spend and specially marked items.

These tickets, when unsealed, reveal a 25-cent coupon for a product from a participating brand as well as four game markers.  Match the marker to a spot on the Official Game Board and you are “playing the game.”

I’ve never participated in a game contest or sweepstakes. But as the mother of two teenage boys, I shop for food – a lot (There’s a reason food is #2 on Maslow’s Hierarchy). And I hate going to the grocery store. Each step in the process from filing my cart, to packing the bags, paying (have you seen prices recently?) to loading my car and then unloading the groceries at home and putting them away – sucks.

This is the underlying (and enduring) appeal of Shaw’s giveaway. It takes a necessary evil and turns it into something fun.

Yes, I became hooked.

Win or lose, opening game pieces and finding a match is quite the thrill, which is why I consolidated my grocery shopping at Shaw’s and have not frequented my preferred grocery store.

Thrills aside, where Shaw’s misses the mark is in not using web or social channels to educate, motivate, and create brand ambassadors.

Research tells us women do the majority of the grocery shopping, and more than 50 percent of Facebook’s audience is women aged 25 years and older.

To demonstrate this point, it was a friend texting me a photo of an in-store promotion from Shaw’s that alerted me to a “Double Tickets” day.

And, it was then my post on Facebook that notified several other game players.

Offline, I’ve seen the contest promoted in Shaw’s weekly circular and in-store promotions (Of course by then I’m already in the store).  According to a Shaw’s representative, the contest is also being promoted in television, radio, Shaw’s website, and Facebook.

While Shaw’s does have an active Facebook page almost none of its content is dedicated to the contest. And Shaw’s makes it very challenging to find updates on contest winners. In order to do so, you need to go to their  website and click a link to a Facebook page (not searchable on the web).

As of November 10^th more than 100 winners had been announced. This page has not again been updated and the contest ends on February 9^th.

Shaw’s further missed an opportunity by not referencing their Facebook presence on the Official Game Board, leaving customers to surmise that social media was not a component of the contest.

And Shaw’s Twitter account has yet to Tweet.

Successfully creating and promoting customer contests are a significant endeavor and expense for any organization. Kudos to Shaw’s for embarking upon a major contest program and for developing a companion game for their employees called the “Associates Game.” It’s played in a similar way but uses completely separate game boards and markers. Of course, they can do better.

Seven Ways Shaw’s Can Win Bigger with Their Next Contest

1. Leverage data from the Shaw’s loyalty card: According to Malcolm Fauds, SVP of Marketing at Bzz Agent, “Companies are missing an opportunity to track permissioned data schemes in order to better target customer experiences.” In the case of Shaw’s, alert me when the products I buy frequently are being promoted for double points rewards.
2. Use social networks to expand contest reach and increase player interaction.
3. Cross-reference social channels in all promotional material.
4. Dedicate more of your Facebook presence to the contest. Encourage, even reward, customers to “Like” your page.
5.  Use Twitter to organically share time-based contest information.
6.  Announce contest winners in more public forums. This will create demand, excitement, and urgency for those who are playing.
7.  Embrace the blogger community, identify, and leverage brand ambassadors.

Anne Weiskopf provides sales and business development services to agencies and companies who are in the social media and technology space. She blogs at Rip Off the Roof. You can follow her on Twitter @AnneWeiskopf.

I hereby commit to change that.

Therefore, today I have created a list of 10 types of content you can use for your blog. When you have writer’s block (cough, Lindsay Bell and Jason Konopinski, cough), you now have something to jog your brain.

It’s not just a list, though. Obviously my examples are PR, marketing, or social media relations. But you can easily turn these ideas into something for your industry, blogging niche, or particular interests.

And now let’s see if I’m right about seventh tip. Will this blog post get commented on and shared more than some of our more popular blog post (Pinterest!) in January?

I’ll report back!

10 Shareable Content Ideas

1. The Manifesto. At the beginning of the year, there were lots of blog posts written about the three words people were using to drive their success in 2012. While I didn’t write a blog post about it, I have “focus, delegation, and vision” posted on the wall in front of me. You could easily get 500 words out of that.
2. The Pop Culture Tie-In. I am terrible at this, but Molli Megasko is fantastic at it. She can tell you what’s happening on The Bachelor or with the Kardashian sisters and tie in a PR lesson.
3. The Debate. We often commiserate there isn’t enough debate on the social web, so why not create it? That’s what Paul Sutton and I did last week when we debated Pinterest (I won). Giving people the opportunity to see two sides of something works incredibly well.
4. The Good. I have to admit I was a bit leery about showcasing good PR case studies, but if it’s researched and written well, with some valuable lessons professionals can use in their daily lives, it works well. I tested this theory with how FedEx handled a customer service crisis using video and it’s our third most popular blog post this month. That said, when I wrote about Ocean Marketing being fired and how the new PR pro is handling the N-Control business, it didn’t rank in the top 10. My theory is it was an overplayed story by then. So be timely.
5. The Bad. It’s no surprise the bad case studies are shared over and over and over again. The Papa John’s and Boners BBQ case study I wrote about employee communication and how to handle a PR crisis when they go rogue is our second most popular blog post. But when you write these types of case studies, do it in a way that is valuable to the reader and doesn’t attack the people involved. Attack the idea, not the person.
6. The Ugly. Let’s be real. People like train wrecks. They can’t stop watching. If you can figure out how to write about one without attacking a person, it’s going to be pretty popular. Ragan does a nice job of this quite often by using terms such as “most hated” in their headlines. It grabs attention, makes people want to read and share.
7. The Lists. Voila! Just like I’m doing today. Nate Riggs is the foremost expert on the blog lists. In fact, he did an entire webinar for Spin Sucks Pro on the topic. People like lists. They’re easy to read, bookmark, and return to later. Make sure you include the number of things in your list in the headline.
8. Freebies. Give stuff away! It might be a book a friend has written, a collection of free eBooks available from other bloggers, or your own eBook. John Falchetto does a nice job with this. Right on his home page, there is a big orange box where you can get several free things. People like free.
9. Ranked Lists. This isn’t something we do here because, well, we don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. But this works really well for other bloggers. In fact, Forbes just released their 50 most influential social media professionals and it was shared all over the world.
10. The Something of the Year. Just like People does their sexiest man alive issue, you can do the same for your niche. Maybe it’s an app of the month or a productivity tool like Michael Schechter did with his Perfect Computer blog post. I do a book review on the first Friday of every month and a blogger to follow on every other Friday. There are lots of ideas for the something of the week, month, or year.

There is likely a part two and three to this blog post because there are so many tried and true ways to have your content commented on and shared. But I’ll stop here for now. After all, I sometimes need ideas for blogging and now I have two!

Thanks to Hubspot for the image.

Today’s guest post is written by Eric Wittlake.

Be Authentic.

A chorus of advisors and consultants that have beaten the authentic drum in recent years.

It only takes a brief look at the world around us to realize we really don’t want to see authentic in social media. What we really want is something carefully constructed, with enough personality and individuality to look real instead of robotic.

Before you jump back on the authentic bandwagon, consider what a real authentic social media presence would reflect.

Corporations Serve Shareholders First

Yes, some will say corporations should serve their clients, their community, and their employees. However, beyond ideological arguments, the justification for these positions comes back to creating a profitable long-term business.

Good corporate citizenship is ultimately about good corporate results. If corporations didn’t believe it could serve long-term shareholders, most companies would not respond to customer service complaints on Twitter or develop communities on Facebook.

The bottom line of ROI is the corporation’s income, not our satisfaction.

“Authentic” would tell us discounts are designed to increase revenue, profits, executive compensation, and shareholder dividends by convincing us to spend more. As individuals, we want to believe we are important, that a deal is a great opportunity for us.

We don’t want to be reminded that your business isn’t in business to serve us.

Real People Lie, Cheat, and Steal

People have been criminals and cons for as long as history has been recorded. Turn on the news any night, in any city big or small, and you will see a side of people you don’t want to like on Facebook or follow on Twitter.

Criminals, cons, ponzi schemes, spam bots… There are real people behind every one of these. In social media, we rail against these self-serving manifestations of authenticity at the same time we blindly call for authenticity!

Authentic Means Showing ALL Your Flaws

Companies carefully craft an image for themselves. Today, that image often allows personality and distinction to show through, but that does not make it authentic. It is carefully crafted to project a certain image of your company.

Cindy Crawford proudly displayed her signature mole as part of a crafted image of herself. Her mole created an element of distinction for her, but her entire image was carefully crafted with makeup, hair, lighting, photography and likely, photo touchup as well.

Like your social media presence, this is part of a projected image, not an authentic one.

In Summary

We don’t want to see the authentic you in social media. So put on your face. Project your carefully constructed image. Just never let us see the real spirit behind your activity.

Always remember: Your audience is ruthless. If you are authentic and display your true motives, we will call you a jerk. If you carefully project your image and then slip up, we will call you a fake. So project your image and always stay in character.

Eric Wittlake is an B2B marketer and blogger. You can find Eric on Twitter @wittlake or on his blog, B2B Digital Marketing, when he isn’t working with B2B clients on media and integrated marketing programs at Babcock & Jenkins.

Lead image: Creative commons, commercial use allowed with attribution

Bicycle image: Eric Wittlake

Why, you ask?

Because NO ONE sent me funny videos this week. Here I sang your praises last week and then you let me down this week.

Bah humbug.

So you’re going to have to think this week. No fun for you!

If you want out of intellectual prison, you should send me videos or funny stories to feature next week.

5. Radical Copycatting of Pinterest. When Paul Sutton and I debated the merits of Pinterest earlier this week, Karen Rocks alerted me to Pinspire. Go ahead. Click on that link. I’ll wait. Can you believe how EXACT they’ve copied Pinterest? This Forbes article describes the phenomenon. It’s incredible.

4. #McFail: McDonald’s Loses Control of Hashtag. Hello, McDonald’s? Didn’t this very thing happen to Skittles a few years ago? Don’t you do your research? Did you check to see if brand sentiment was mostly positive before embarking on this idea? No? Huh. Well, now you know what happens when you don’t do these things.

3. Chobani Yogurt Tickles the Taste of Pinterest Addicts. Look! Look! A brand is using Pinterest and it’s working! Paul Sutton, look! Howie Goldfarb, you should read this one, too. Just because you love Chobani.

2. Google Plus Now Allows Pseudonyms. I don’t know how I feel about this. The whole idea of social networking is to get to know people, not their alter egos. There is Reddit for that. If you want to use social networking, you should have to use your name. I think I just saw they’ve also now opened up to anyone older than 13. It’ll be interesting to see if the teenagers glom on to the “social network.”

1. Social Media Command Center. Leading up to the Super Bowl! Through a newly installed social media command center, visitors to the big game in Indianapolis will be able to ask questions and receive answers leading up to the big game. The idea is curious because it looks to be answering questions and comments from those who will be in Indianapolis for the game. I don’t really understand the strategy. I’m going to watch and see what they do.

And that is that, my friends. Have a great weekend!

P.S. Only 14 more shopping days until my birthday. Better get to it!

I think it was because she kindly linked to a Spin Sucks blog post on her blog, PR in Pink. And, like I do with anyone who is nice enough to link to us, I headed over to her blog house to check things out.

When I got there, I discovered not only a smart communicator, but pink. Lots of pink!

And, let’s be real. Pink is my favorite color so I was drawn to her blog just because of the name.

Anyone woman who is confident in the fact that she likes the color pink is awesome in my book.

In fact, she says:

Remember that girl in grade school who had the pink folder, pink shoe laces, and maybe a unicorn pencil case?

I was that “pink girl,” and, despite having grown up into a young professional,  I still embace my favorite color as a way to express my personality.

Krista is in alumni relations and communication for Temple University School of Medicine. It’s kind of a big job!

Her background is in healthcare, where she got her start as a patient advocate. She later worked for an agency servicing pharma clients.

She has experience in journalism, public relations, corporate communication, and marketing communication. Which means she definitely knows there is more to our jobs than publicity.

But you know what is going to endear her to you forever?

This:

HOW CUTE IS THAT?!?

She has a weekly blog post called, “A Little Birdie Told Me,” in which she recaps PR, marketing, and social media news. She always does a really nice job with it so, if you’re pressed for time, I recommend going there to stay on top of what’s happening.

She also is doing PR in Pink Chats, where she chats with interesting professionals from around the globe.

So check her out!

You can find her on Twitter, on LinkedIn, on SlideShare, and blogging at PR in Pink,