A couple weeks ago DELL-Bob P talked with Shaun McInerney and Michael Trent of Precisio about inventory management for small businesses and their new solution Ascent. After reading the initial post, I discovered that they were beginning to explore social media and decided to reach out to Shaun to get his perspective on his small business' use of social media.
KK: In your opinion, why is social media important for small businesses?
SM: Social media gives small businesses a fiscally responsible way to communicate with large amounts of potential clients. If you are confident in your product, you can let current customers interact and communicate with potential clients in order to educate and increase your win rate. Salesforce.com has been doing social events for years. However, as a small company in these trying economic times, we can not afford to have elaborate networking events in multiple cities. Social network groups allow that high-touch networking with almost no financial out lay. However, doing social networking the right way, requires a large time commitment. But, if you can reach hundreds of people at once for a few hours of work per day, I believe it is well worth it.
KK: How do you currently use social media to market, drive awareness?
SM: We have created the Ascent by Precisio group in Linked in. We intend to have all the super users at our customers join the group as well as Salesforce.com employees. The group feature of Linkedin gives us the tool to communicate with our entire network at one time, solicit feed back and hopefully start meaning full conversation on how to improve our product.
We will use our blog at to communicate to our prospects. Linking our reviews from the Salesforce.com Appexchange and posting our new features will allow us to communicate with all our potential clients.
Our Web site, www.myinventorynow.com will continue to evolve and become the ultimate repository for white papers, documents and other Precisio news and events including advertising and support of our bar code scanner and bar code printer suppliers Zebra Technologies and Motorola.
KK: What social media activities do you plan to or want to explore in the future?
SM: I believe Facebook is no longer a Social Media center for kids and people looking for old friends and acquaintances. Facebook is becoming the premier social and business networking tool. Precisio will begin to use Facebook to find and educate our prospective clients, while Linkedin will be used to communicate and solicit communications with your existing customers.
Salesforce.com has done a great job soliciting reviews and success stories from their partners, customers. They have created a public forum that will benefit those partners with Appexchange applications that are meaning full and offer value to potential customers. It can damage the reputations of those partners who have less than stellar products and performance, but then again, an educated consumer will always be everyone’s best customer.