At this Dreamforce 2009 session led by Fernando Obregon Almazan, salesforce.com; Lorena Vales, salesforce.com; and Jonathan Hersh, salesforce.com, marketers learned about how and why companies should participate in social networking to generate brand awareness and create a viral effect when clients or prospects recommend their products.

Why should I care about Social Networks? 

While we are in the infancy of adoption, growth is rapid and will continue to increase, some statistics to take note of include:

• By 2010, GenY will outnumber Baby Boomers. 96% of GenY has joined a social network
• There are over 200 million blogs and 54% of bloggers post content or tweet daily
• 34% of bloggers post opinions about products and brands. 25% of search results for the world’s top 20 largest brands are links to user generated content
• 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations while only 14% trust advertisement

But why are people so interested in social networks? It’s because people want to be heard and share their opinion, especially with their friends and colleagues. It’s a time saver, where they can learn what their network is doing and leverage the information already gathered and generated by their peers. For companies, it’s appealing because they can get information about their brands, generate a bond with their loyal base of customers and take advantage of opportunities before social networks become more commercial.

But what should you be doing?

• Generating word of mouth
  • Attract more prospects and engage customers. Your loyal clients will do the heavy lifting and make recommendations
• Generating a viral effect: leveraging the social graph
• Creating brand equity
  • Discover how others are talking about your products
  • Improve user experience and improve their opinions of you
  • Be where they want you to be, when they want to find you

During the session we saw a live demo of how we would use Salesforce for Twitter to make better use of what is happening in social media.  In the demo, a salesforce.com rep tweeted out about a product issue. In Salesforce, we were able to capture this tweet and route it to a service rep in just seconds. They were then able to tweet back with a link to the solution, solving a support issue without ever leaving Salesforce.com. Even better, the rep is credited with that solution because everything was caught in the CRM, allowing product management and support to report on these issues. Here at Marketo, we can use these Tweets brought in by Salesforce to adjust lead scores, start lead nurturing and more.  Learn more in our Press Release: Marketo Connects Social Media With Marketing Automation

The session emphasized that social networks are not a fad; they’re for real and here to stay. However, there needs to be a different mindset concerning these social networks. They are not new sales channels. There are certain rules of engagement and proper etiquette within social network users and now Salesforce.com offers a way to utilize this new channel in a way that will best benefit your company.

What I liked about this session:

This session was very motitivating to marketers and Salesforce.com admin who are trying understand why so much effort should be put into social media right now. It was also great to see the Salesforce for Twitter demo- an application every Salesforce.com marketing user should install.