Yesterday was spent in Canton, Ohio, working with the good folks at Incept Corp. Incept is an inbound and outbound call center that helps blood banks with donor recruitment.
We’ve been tasked with helping them to develop a strategy for using social media and new technology to build stronger relationships with their employees, their customers and, in another phase, actual blood donors. It’s a really cool project because we’re building and training a human business team – a group of Trust Agents who will engage the social web and build relationships on behalf of a brand.
What impresses me about Incept and their entire management team is their genuine commitment to improving the company. They’ve created and adopted sincere values, along with an action plan for living and breathing those values. In my experience, most companies don’t follow through with the “action” part of that scenario. I tip my hat to Sam Falletta, Dave Walter, Julia Busto, and the entire management team for staying focused and doing great work.
About My Firm, Social Business Strategies
Yes, we’re actually in business – and it feels good!
Social Business Strategies is a communications and social media strategy firm, based here in Columbus, Ohio. Bryan Fraker, who started as an intern, is now officially a junior strategist, and on payroll. He’s been working his ass off and has more than earned the promotion. It’s also been great to see him grow over the past two months with skills in strategy, project management and even copy writing.
What We Do
We work with mid-sized and large organizations to develop business communication strategies, implement technology tools and train skilled human business teams to use the social web to begin, build,and maintain relationships with customers, prospects, business partners and the people inside their organization.
How & Why We Collaborate
We’ve used our networks to build a collaborative dream team of small firms who, working together, can tackle any type of digital project from soup to nuts. I’m really proud of the dream team. It’s been built with some of the best and brightest talent the Midwest has to offer. Each firm holds their own operations, space and costs, which allows us to pass on pretty significant savings to clients. The “virtual agency” model works. Clients get senior talent and experience without the high overhead of more traditional models. I learned how to make it work by watching my friend, Desarae Viet. She operates a similar model up in Minneapolis. (Thanks, Des).
I’ll share a bit more about each of our partners later on. Cool?
Who We Work With – Past & Present
To date, our client list at Social Business Strategies is small. That’s OK, for now. We’re two people, and it’s only been about 7 months since SBS opened up for business.
- OPENOnline – Past project. OPENOnline provides background screening and investigations.
- Residential Finance – Past project. Some of you may know Jessica Manna. She’s already a rock star in this space and her team is sharp.
- Parallel Technologies – Past project. Parallel provides telephony and VOIP communications and does some really cool stuff with video conferencing.
- Incept Corp. – Current project. You learned about these guys up above and we’ll have more stories to share as the project moves forward.
- Pentastar Aviation – Current project. These guys provide private aircraft maintenance and management, as well as charter jets. We met with Pentastar to help them really dig into to their objectives for 2010, build consensus among their team, set baselines, and show them some potential opportunities. They have all the right ingredients for a successful year and we have ideas and a team to help them get there.
How We Work
At Social Business Strategies, objectives and baseline setting is a critical first step. Without measurement, you don’t really know if a project was a success or not.  I get a lot of prospects who approach with: “Can you help us do social media?”  Yes, we can. But, the real questions that need answered first are: “Why do you want to do social media in the first place?” and “What are you trying to do for your business?”
To get those answers, we start with a full-day engagement where we walk the client through a process we’ve named Sanity. We decided to call it that because without the foundation of clear, measurable goals, both parties involved tend to go a little insane. About half of this process was derived from Young Isaac’s old Clarity process (thanks, Artie) because, frankly, Artie came up with something that worked really well. We’ve modified it to fit our offering, adding in our own thinking based on what we know and have learned about the social web, digital communications, and my own work on the development of the Brand YOU methodology for digital personal branding.
The deliverables from this engagement are a complete deck with our findings and a proposal for continued work. From what we learn, we’ll make recommendations on new communication toolsets, an implementation plan, and the necessary human training needed to get a client up-to-speed on strategy execution.
If this sounds like what you’re looking for, contact me directly. I’d love to chat with you about your business objectives.
What We Don’t Do at Social Business Strategies
We won’t do it for you. What I mean is that we’re not an outsourced social media company that will manage your content, profiles or web presence. If you’re looking for that, I’ll be happy to refer you to people I trust who do that sort of thing. I strongly believe that larger organizations need to internalize the social web. For content and communications to truly be genuine, especially in the business to business sector, your Trust Agents and Content Engineers need to live and breathe within your own four walls.
By the way, that last statement is in no way a knock to outsourced social media firms. They have a place in the digital renaissance and some do good work. I like what Sandy Blanquera is doing with Social Boomerang and where Cheryl Harrison is starting to take Sync Creative in this area. For the right businesses, that model works. But, it’s just not our model.
So what do you think?
Join The Discussion!