Today Genius.com announced Genius URL shorteners (GURLS) which powerfully help marketers track and measure the ROI of Social Media conversations. (See release.) This release takes marketing automation to a new level.
While it’s great to see the space so lively and competitive, I’ve always been troubled by the term “automation”. Given the radical restructuring of Sales and Marketing that’s been taking place in the Cloud, the traditional automation vision seems limited.
The Genius approach is to bring social media and marketing automation together, and it starts with the simple fact that at the end of the day, a deal derives from a conversation between a Sales Rep and a customer.
With the proliferation of communication channels in the Cloud, customers have a mind-numbing array of options to converse with your “Sales Rep”: seeking out recommendations on Twitter, using a LinkedIn connection to find the executive at a company who might help him get a better deal, or discussing your product with other users on Facebook. If he/she is really interested in your product, he/she may respond to one of your seeding efforts, like an email or a search ad, and carry the conversation over to your website and begin a deeper conversation with the “Sales Rep.” In the beginning that might be an email from marketing offering more information related to the product, or it might be a request to speak with a live rep.
Given the potential volume and frequency of these cloud-based conversations, it is immediately apparent why the old model of marketing automation simply doesn’t scale to the opportunity. You simply cannot “set and forget” these conversations with a triggered scoring algorithm. The whole notion of social media is founded on the idea of authentic, human communication between real people–not between a person and a robot. Automated participants in social media will have as much influence as those annoying computer chat support “people”!
Genius has been at the forefront of democratizing and distributing the ability for any sales or marketing professional in an organization to share the wealth of the marketing system. That’s why our first product, SalesGenius®, was an email marketing tool specifically for Sales, not for Marketing: we wanted to break the old silo’d mode of “Marketing by and for Marketers.” That’s why today we are still the only marketing automation vendor that sells its solution to both sales and marketing organizations, not just to marketing.
With today’s announcement, we are taking this democratizing philosophy and extending it to social media, where everyone in your organization becomes an extension of your corporate brand and your brand ambassador. Sales participates in a series of conversations, more or less structured, between the customer and the “Sales Rep”, many of them in the Cloud. Marketers try and attract these and other prospects as well. Yet, no one marketer, or marketing organization, could ever participate directly in all the potentially profitable conversations that are happening in the Cloud. That’s why the Genius URL shortener is such a powerful tool for Genius.com customers. It empowers anyone in an organization to become a Genius marketer by seeding the social media clouds with trackable links back to the corporate website. In this way, marketers can measure the effect of all those “cloudy” conversations on their overall website traffic and even see those conversations turn into deals.
At Genius, we are already seeing success from this approach. We have a 25% conversion rate from inquiry to deal on leads from Twitter and they close twice as fast as leads from other sources. We’ve heard similar statistics from our early adopters of GURLs and social media. At Genius.com “smarter marketing” means communicating in the Cloud at the right time with the right person with the right message. Today we’ve added GURLs which will make your entire organization smarter throughout the Cloud and that’s how you get “faster sales”.
