Educating Channel Partners to Use Social Media Tools

Resellers are not marketing machines. In fact, most channel partners are not very good at marketing at all. Reseller-driven marketing campaigns, when they occur, are all-too-often ad hoc, disjointed, uninspired, and un-sustained. The results, therefore, are predictably uneven. Vendors compensate by providing Lead Generation Programs, Market Development Funds, and other incentives to enable their channels to meet the minimum marketing requirements for business growth.

Manufacturers have learned the hard way that marketing is too important to be left in the small hands of their channel partners. Vendors have to initiate marketing activity, control it, and even fund most of it if they want to see any success. As a result, marketing-related channel-support initiatives have become the backbone of vendor channel organizations at virtually every IT company that has recruited resellers to sell their products. And everyone who works in these channel organizations has a vested interest in maintaining or growing these traditional marketing programs in order to justify their budgets and even their jobs. Change represents risk, and no one wants to increase their risk in these already tenuous times.

Unfortunately, traditional channel marketing (lead generation) programs are increasingly ineffective as social media powers a significant shift in consumer buying behavior – even for B2B transactions. On-line reference selling is in – traditional lead generation is out. Time to get with the program.

Many manufacturers are embracing social media for corporate brand building and customer engagement, but these kinds of marketing initiatives are rarely channel-related. And while channel sales managers are waking up to the potential of social media in influencing their partners, their resellers remain gloriously ignorant of what their vendors are doing or why. Someone needs to invite resellers to the social media marketing party.

Educating resellers on social media and getting them re-connected to their vendors online is a huge task. It’s not enough to say, “OK. Everyone open a Twitter account!” Someone has to figure out the best ways for their channel to take business advantage of new social media tools. Maybe more important, they have to get their resellers into a position to reap the rewards of huge investments that leading vendors are making in their ongoing social media marketing campaigns. This is not going to happen overnight, and it’s going to cost some money. So the big question for 2010 is:

WHO IS GOING TO EDUCATE THE CHANNEL ABOUT SOCIAL MEDIA? (Poll at left)

One possibility is that vendors can retool their channel marketing programs to embrace social media and then provide some kind of training (webcasts, video, even classroom training) to bring their channel partners up to speed. Alternatively, trade associations like COMPTIA, SMB Nation, or ASCII, have a long history of educating resellers on how to improve their businesses. Or maybe resellers should just step up and figure it out themselves. What do you think? (Please vote!)

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Educating Channel Partners to Use Social Media Tools

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Social Media Certification for Consultants is important, but …

Like everything else associated with social media, the issue of consultant certification is complex. So far, 67 people have voted (including the poll on LinkedIn) and the results are definitely trending towards a qualified dismissal of social media certification as a key criteria in awarding consulting projects. The general consensus seems to be that certification is OK, but that experience, references, and professional background are more important for consultants hired to help a client to achieve their business objectives. No surprise there.

However, several important issues about social media certification emerged in the discussion and I have attempted to summarize them below. (There were 24 excellent posts in the various spaces where this question was asked).

• “Social Media” is complex and changing. It would be impossible for any certification to be up-to-date on the latest hot site or technology.
  
• The characterization of a certification is not always clear.? Does it mean you have mastered Twitter and Blogger? Or that you can name the top analytic tools? Or that you can set up a good Facebook page for a client?
  
• Some certifications are more rigorous (and valuable) than others. Certification is more meaningful if students are tested on their skills and go on to apply the lessons learned in real-life business situations.
  
• The real value of a social media consultant is their ability to apply their understanding of how social media works to the bigger question of how to use social media to meet the strategic communication and marketing goals of clients.
  
• Certification is mostly for professionals that will be leaders of the “social media” discipline, not consultants using a tool casually or tactically. In other words, training is essentially worthless without application and no one needs to be certified to set up a Twitter account.

While few professionals describe social media as an art form, most would agree that there is a fluidity and lack of predictably that relegates social media education to a tactical realm. (Like learning how to use HTML to create a web site but not how to use the web site to attract customers.) It’s another way of saying that the industry is still a long way from having the social media methodologies, measurements, and established best practices that make certification meaningful for a large and disparate group of practitioners.

So get your certifications if you must. Use them in your marketing if you can. It won’t hurt. Just don’t expect that your next major project will happen if you are certified, but not experienced.

http://xeesm.com/mikedubrall

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Social Media Certification for Consultants is important, but …

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Social Media Certification - Yes or No

Is it possible to really be an expert in Social Media Marketing? It’s very difficult to be an authority on something that is changing and growing so rapidly; and which, as a result, is embroiling the business world in a series of gut-wrenching adjustments that make a mockery of the term “status quo?” So when someone, especially a consultant, tells you they are a “certified” social media expert, it’s best to be skeptical.

What is the definition of a social media “expert?” Do they have a document that certifies their training and experience makes them a better advisor than someone who is not certified? Does this certification prove their competence? Is certification an early indicator of a successful engagement? These are important questions for executives to be asking.

Social Media certification is open anyone willing to pay a few thousand dollars and complete an on-line course. You can get certified from a variety of educational intuitions, training centers, and even from a few product vendors. Some certifications require that you actually show proficiency in using social media tools, others do not. After completing the coursework, “graduates” get to claim certification in their email signature line, on their blog, and everywhere else they want. Just look for the logo.

Understandably, there is a lot of discussion about social media certification in the blogosphere. Many very smart bloggers say that social media certification is rubbish. They argue that the only people who want to be certified are those who came to social media late and are trying to substitute a short training class for real experience. These bloggers say that real social media experts got started even before certification was available.

The truth is that there are a lot of people calling themselves Social Media Consultants. Some of them are very good and some of them are not. Most are in the middle someplace. And certification is one way to differentiate them when you don’t have a lot of information about their past work.

Does social media training matter? How do corporate decision-makers view certifications? Are they important or just interesting? In other words, given the choice between hiring a consultant that is social media certified (to have actually received some training) and hiring someone that only has experience and references, which one gets the project?

If you work for a company that hires consultants, answer the question (upper left column). If you are a consultant, share your thoughts on certification below.

http://xeesm.com/mikedubrall

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