Make your customers your sales and marketing staff

There's a lot of talk about using social media, typically assumed to mean Twitter and Facebook, to address publicly posted complaints or to advertise your company's products or services. If you look deeper into social media as a marketing and PR tool you'll find a lot of companies aren't finding it to be very helpful in sales. It's likely it's not working well as a sales tool for companies that treat it simply as a way to draw in customers or promote the latest deal.

Social media and social networks of course go beyond Facebook and Twitter, and I don't mean LinkedIn, MySpace, etc. By adding some community features to your company's website you allow the conversation about your brand to continue. You switch from a static broadcast that really has nothing for users to a forum for them to build their passion about what it is you do.

By community features I don't just mean share this on Twitter type links. How about allowing comments, rating, taggging, blogs, profiles, send to a friend, subscribing to calendars and RSS feeds, and more. Take your site beyond the brochure. Lose control of your brand. Let your customers take it and mold it. If you do, they'll also sell it and develop your products.

When you equip customers and clients to get excited about what it is you do for them, and respond to them, you essentially let them do your work without compensation. They'll happily tap into their personal network to get people involved. Do you want to know why people aren't using your product? or how they're actually using it? Then let them tell you, and everyone else.

It can be scary. You're running the risk that people might say bad things. But you'll also get the opportunity to respond to those things. The alternative isn't that they won't say bad things, it's that they'll say them somewhere where you don't have the chance to respond and your brand will be toasted. Social media and networking aren't options. They will happen, and they'll happen to your brand. The question is if you want to be a part of it and profit from it or not.