Michael Bird, Chief Revenue Officer, Netprospex

By Allan Maurer

BOSTON –A major element in using social networking well is to create a process in which the customer engages with the company and the company, in return, engages with the customer. So says Michael Bird, chief revenue officer at Netprospex. One company doing it in a way others can learn from, Bird says, is Best Buy.

“What they’ve been able to do, their application of this, has been amazing,” Bird says. Via their “Twelpforce”  on Twitter, Best Buy engages both its own workforce and its customers.

Something a lot of companies could do

“We all love buying the latest gadget, but then you plug it in and it doesn’t work and we all dread calling customer service. We expect to be let down. It’s just a question of how hard you fall. But they have used Twitter to attack this issue headon building their reputation and creating evangelists of their customers.”

By encouraging their employees to join the Twelp Force and participate in helping people solve problems, they engage their employee base while solving problems for customers in real time.

“It’s something a lot of companies could do,” says Bird.

Netprospex, addresses the key problem in doing business of knowing who to talk to. “You can spend a lot of time and energy trying to figure that out,” he says. Netprospex uses crowd-sourced methods to collect user-contributed business contacts. It also includes social media connections for contacts.“If someone goes to a conference and collects 50 business contacts, he can upload them to Netprospex and we’ll send him 50 of ours,” explains Bird.

Bird is likely to make quite a few new contacts himself when he appears at the third annual Internet Summit in Raleigh, NC, Nov. 17-18, which in addition to participants from top Internet brands, draws around 1,000 attendees.

Bird has deep experience in sales, media and the tech field. He has nearly 20 years experience in media, six with CNET Networks and 13 years with Ziff Davis Publishing. He was with BzzAgent, a company that pioneered developing word-of-mouth media, helped launch a small Internet company and helped build a boutique venture capital firm, a $50 million fund that invested in early stage startups.

A new level of influence

In that time, he’s seen social networking take on “A new level of influence. The culture is evolving and using it in a much deeper way. It has started to permeate the skin and enter the central nervous system.”

Although you have to drop into the teens on Netprospex’s  Social Index of the top 50 companies using social media in its Social Business Report before you find a non-tech company at the forefront, even many smaller firms are managing to use social media well,  says Bird.

As an example, he points to the food trucks bringing a variety of gourmet meals in numerous cities now. “They promote where they’re going to be through social media, Twitter, Facebook. You should see the lines, they’ve built so much demand and engagement. They’ve built a phenomenal business that’s growing astronomically.”

Smaller companies have an advantage in using social media, he says. “They’re not as encumbered by bureaucracy. And, he points out that by using the Internet and social media they can compete nationally or even internationally.

Creating brand evangelists

The way to get some bang for the buck out of social media, says Bird, is to create evangelists for a firm and its products. To do that, he says, “Once you sell someone a product, you create an evangelist by solving a problem.”

It may not be as hard as some might think, however. “You would be amazed at how much enthusiasm people actually have for brands,” he says.

“A huge percentage of conversation is about a product, a car someone drives, the PC they use, a movie they liked, where to go to dinner. We talk about products all the time and generally in positive ways.”

So, once you engage with a customer, provide them with information that makes them feel like an insider. “Give them information that makes them feel as if they went to a BBQ and talked with the brand manager. Tell them all the stuff you can’t say in an ad. Your level of engagement will go through the roof and you can’t get them to stop talking to you.”

Now that’s a problem lots of companies would be happy to have.