Lead Gen Technique: Expand to Look at the Category

Lead Gen Technique: Expand to Look at the Category:by Michael Osofsky
This is one technique among a series I’m covering on conversation mining for lead generation.
The techniques described above assume you’re looking at a topic that is a brand. However, if you use the category as the topic, you expand your options to a whole other set of leads. For example, suppose you’re an ice cream maker. As we learned from What Women Want, the number one thing women want, when talking in social media, is ice cream. Knowing this opens the opportunity to tweet digital coupons at these social media users. To do so, you would simply set up a topic on “ice cream”, filter to females and finally filter on the behavior “want” or “need”, just as described above for the brand case.

Thinking about your own business, how would you set up your topic to apply this technique? Is your product part of just one category or multiple? All the time I see users think too narrowly about their category. A specialty chocolatier I know thinks of itself as defining the “Bean-to-Bar” chocolate category. But honey let me tell you something, I don’t care what you call yourself, to most consumers you’re a chocolate . What category does your consumer associate you with? In some cases I see users define their category with industrial nomenclature that’s only familiar to the people that work at their company. This insular thinking will result in generating very few leads so my advice is to mine the conversation for category terms your customer is using. NetBase is a great platform for doing this type of exploratory research about the structure of a category—hint, hint.
What do you think? Please share your thoughts, experiences, advice, etc. to help develop this new field of social selling. For more social lead gen techniques, please refer to the summary blog post here.