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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Using Social Media

Educating Channel Partners to Use Social Media Tools

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Social Media Tools Week = Great Information

There has been a lot of discussion about partner communities and how to make them more active. This presentation provides a Health Check Methodology to help every channel marketing department move their online community to the next level.

Social Media Tools Week Communities As A Support Hub Ss

View more presentations from Mike Dubrall.

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Using Social Media

Social Media Tools Week = Great Information

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Planing Your Personal Social Media Publishing

Lately, I have been talking to quite a few folks about how to setup your own personal publishing system.  There is no shortage of platforms for an individual to publish content on the web.  There is also no shortage of tools which can distribute your posts to other sites.  Without planning, the whole system becomes and echo chamber and your message gets bounced from one service to another.  Some services will get the same post multiple times, which leaves the message that you either don't know how to manage you publishing or don't care about wasting each constituent's time.   

The answer is to do a quick inventory of the sites you wish to use to post on, and map out the distribution strategy. 

Here is what I came up with:

Facebook - Primary for personal interaction,  I try to only use Facebook for connecting with people that I know.  I keep the flow of business/technical items to a minimum.   Links in Facebook feed to Friendfeed. 

Twitter - Quick thoughts and links to interesting sites, feeds to Facebook and FriendFeed. 

Delicious , Digg, StumbleUpon - Quick bookmarks feeds to friendfeed

Posterous - Main blogging platform, where I post more in depth content feeds friendfeed. 

I have accounts a most social tool sites, I don't use them often, but it does help reinforce my personal brand, and all link to my personal site ProjectMechanics.com 

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