I create social media strategies for a living.  I have clients that are big companies, small companies, and everything in between and one of my jobs is usually helping brands figure out where they should spend their money online.  We look for specific sites and online audiences, spend a lot of brainpower on how we might be able to help or be a resource, convince CEO’s that conversations online are important, and then collect our budgets to ask these communities how we can help them.

One of the BIGGEST roadblocks to making this happen is the sales staff at these sites and communities.

Recently I was building a plan and picked out a whole slew of amazing communities and wrote them emails telling them that we liked their site and that we’d like to give them some money and come up with some cool ideas to work together. MOST of those sites didn’t respond.  So I wrote another one.  Still nothing.  So I wrote a little more aggressive email that if they could possibly find just one second to call me I’d like to talk with them about doing some social media projects with them.  I got one email politely sending me a traditional media kit and said I could email her back with questions. I had no questions.

This, my friends, is why most sites have no sponsors or revenue.  Traditional advertising can sometimes get done by emailing a media kit.  Social media means that you might have to talk to brands about a unique way for them to fit in.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love email.  I am a digital kind of girl but sometimes when  I have  bigger ideas to shoot around with a site it’s just easier to get on the phone for a few minutes.  Some salespeople would apparently rather die a slow death by leprosy than talk on the phone.  I would love to tell you just how many sites have lost a lot of dollars (it’s a lot) and which ones you’d likely recognize the names of (seriously) but this post isn’t about calling out specific sites.

It’s about teaching your sales staff to recognize opportunities that come along that are outside the media kit because a lot of the opportunity online these days isn’t a banner ad or even a sponsored blog post.  Some of the best social campaigns to date clearly didn’t come off the media kit menu so it’s important that your sales staff have the authority and the incentive to work with social media folks.

I suspect that the moment I say “work together” and “social media” some salespeople think “no commission” and don’t bother.  This isn’t good because when I do have to buy a banner ad it’s never, ever the star of the campaign and it certainly doesn’t make me, the brand, or the sales person look like rockstars.

This is also  a shame because “social media partnership” sometimes means $10,000 a month for the community.  Sometimes it’s more.  That’s a lot of revenue for some of these mid-size sites that’s lost because the brand can’t get past the sales team that isn’t aware that they can sell off the media kit.  Yes, it’s more labor intensive to have to talk about video ideas than it is to just sell off of a media kit but the payoff can also be far better for the site and the sales team.