Social Business Trust Points – Strategy Or Integration?

What are you moving toward? More specifically, when you’re tweeting out, Facebooking and blogging up a storm, what are your objectives? I’ve thought about this at length and I keep coming up with, you’re trying to create trust points.

Trust points: Points at which people trust you, as a brand or organization, that lead to actions that directly benefit that brand or organization.

Actions: Links to your website, writing about your brand, talking you up over breakfast with friends, direct referrals and actual buys of your product or service.

The question really becomes, how do I create content and interaction that naturally leads to those trust points, which get people to take the kinds of actions that benefit my company?

This becomes the game.

Let me introduce myself. I’m Ryan Critchett, I’m a blogger and an entrepreneur, I love people and am fascinated by the social revolution, but most importantly, as it relates to this, I’m really into doing things the right way, when it comes to human interaction.

Let’s talk marketing. Traditional marketing is about strategy right? Even social media is about strategy but what has been making its way into our world is the growing need to actually become something that naturally attracts people, leads and if you can convert, sales as well.

Let’s talk social media integration. Social media integration is the act of integrating a permanent social business operation into your organization, becoming a social company, and as a result, attracting great customer interaction, leads, solving problems, putting fires out and a whole group of other beneficial business elements.

But coming from a traditional media marketing standpoint, a lot of people just want to execute on a strategy, and let it all fly. They go “let’s design a campaign.” They say “how many impressions can we get,” and their sole mission in social is to push and make dollars as a result.

Sadly, to their dismay, the results are sub-par to say the least: the customer (or potential customer) tunes them out.

So what is the answer? How do we really “do” this social thing and get real results?

Well if you know anything about people, and more importantly as it relates to this, the shift in the collective business mindset taking place right now as a result of social technology, you’d know that more and more, what we’re really seeking, is authentic, natural human interaction mixed with a lot of excitement.

Well what happens if you have a company that is not human? That doesn’t really like communicating with the public? That’s only into whatever will get people whipping out their credit cards and doesn’t believe they have to be exciting, or social?

They fall behind. Times are changing. People are changing. Media is changing and an alignment is necessary.

Social business alignment really demands that business organizations change themselves psychological and systemically to align with the increasingly social consumer. Moving forward into 2012, that’s going to be the big win.

Let’s bring it all together. Trust points are what you’re moving toward. To naturally create trust points that create lead generation, sales, and whatever else your social media goals are, you need an actual social integration as opposed to a “campaign,” which implies a kind of one shot deal.

People from your organization have to change their behavior to become more social. You have to begin to consider hiring charismatic, naturally social people in the selection process for positions in your company.

Leadership in your business needs to learn how to create content and engagement that actually hits people’s emotional centers, as opposed to just their buying triggers.

And you have to have an ongoing integral strategy of creating content that excites people, builds trust points with them and naturally pulls them in.

Social media is not a strategy, it’s something that works best when fully woven into the fabric of an organization and building solid trust points with your target market, that lead to the kinds of actions that benefit your company, is an ongoing, time consuming, but well worth it, reality.

Thanks Ryan for a great well thought out idea and explanation, if you want to see more about Ryan remember the link in the intro and you can always click here to see what’s new on Spirocks.com