Hi, I’m Kate Dunn with Digital Innovations Group and I’ve been asked to talk a little bit about how social media plays into our role.  Think there’s multiple different ways to look at that. It’s clearly something that needs to be incorporated into overall marketing strategy for your client but it depends which tactics you use on whether it’s a B to C or B to B company that you’re working with.  But it is something that is an inexpensive channel and should be a foundation or an overlay to any other direct marketing strategy that you’re trying to employ.

So for instance, if you’re doing a direct marketing campaign that’s going to push people with direct mail and email and landing pages, but they do have a significant fan base then you want to make sure that that message is also replicated on Facebook or if they’re using Twitter, Twitter is another good venue to replicate that message and reinforce what is coming across in the direct mail cross-channel campaign.

Now I also believe that social media is a tremendous asset for us as salespeople in terms of research and getting to know your clients and their voice and the opinions and thought processes of the decision makers that you’re trying to contact.  And in a B to B world really LinkedIn is your primary element there and it offers us in the industry a tremendous opportunity or way to really position ourselves as thought leaders and subject matter experts on what we do.  So LinkedIn is a really powerful tool especially in the B to B world. And it can also help your clients because if they’re in a B to B selling situation and you’re doing lead generation for them, they’re trying to position themselves as subject matter experts and thought leaders in their worlds they can be reinforcing what you’re trying to say in your direct mail campaign through their voices in LinkedIn or other social media venues. So it’s important, it’s an aspect of everything that we do and it’s a relatively inexpensive additional channel.  So that can get you increased results without a huge increase in the overall campaign costs. 

Another topic that people have been asking me as I’ve been here today is can we charge for it.  And I can’t really imagine a model where we could charge for thought per influence or the number of forwards or re-Tweets or that kind of thing.  I think that would be somewhat difficult but I think you can charge for the time it takes to incorporate the social media presence into the strategy.  And that should be built into the overall consulting costs or strategy charges that you’re including in your campaign or in your contract charges for your customer.