Giving a Social Shout Out. Anyone listening?

You’ve been working hard on your social shout outs. The way you figure it, now everybody knows who you are. Really?

With the plethora of social selling tools available, there’s no reason for your market place not to know about you, your company and your products, services and platforms. You have an arsenal of social shout outs. Right?

You have a website. You have marketing communications materials for your sales reps. You have a social media manager to give that strategic “shout out” to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and relevant, targeted sites appropriate to your brand.

Yet your social shout outs don’t seem to work effectively, do they?

Your strategy may be the social version of “Word of Mouth Syndrome.” Especially if it isn’t integrated into your organization.

Your reps, or you if you are a small business, still work hard to gain an audience with prospects. There’s still too many voicemails being left with folks who won’t ever call you back. The expensive four-color marcom materials end up unused, unread, and usually jettisoned into the recycling bin.

There’s a disconnect between your various versions of social shout outs, isn’t there? You can’t seem to put your finger on it, can you?

You are doing all the right things, the right way. Yet at times, nobody seems to know who you are.

You still may be treating marketing like it is the same thing as marketing communications. It isn’t. One’s strategic, one is the tactical implementation of the strategy.

You still may consider marketing and marcom to be sprinkles on the cupcake, an indulgence, to make your products, platforms and services look “pretty” and appealing to buyers. Marketing is the front end of cash flow. No sprinkles in that statement. Marketing is part of your cupcake.

You may consider marketing and marcom to be unrelated to your business development and sales efforts. Are you still separating these functions in status quo silos?  Time to consider poking holes in those silos so the input from one division becomes throughput and output from the other silo. And vice versa.

Your social selling efforts may be completely separate from marketing/marcom and business development/sales initiatives. Why is this so? Your reps in the field may have plenty to say or tweet. They may have a great set of core customers who would be receptive to targeted content.

You won’t know what you don’t know until you get all of these folks around your business table. How frequently does that happen in your organization?

We are all members of the same team, regardless of our professional disciplines. Even in small to mid-sized businesses and startups, there are barriers between teams, groups, messaging and, unfortunately, knowledge.

Does your corporate culture create barriers or poke holes in departmental silos?

As we head into Q4, and you continue to plan for 2014, the fulcrum leveraging innovative business development may reside in your ability to create an atmosphere where there is a horizontal flow to project management and business outcomes.

It may be the slight shift in perspective that you’ve been searching for. It may make all the difference in revenue generation.

Babette N. Ten Haken, Founder & President of Sales Aerobics for Engineers®, LLC, brings entrepreneurial mojo and business- and revenue-producing collaboration and communication tools to small and mid-sized businesses and startups.