Indirect distribution channels have a specific challenge when it comes to social media engagement: Vendors want to be closer to their partners, grow their channel and eventually empower the partners to engage with their customers via social media. But managing two or more tier distribution channel isn't that easy. Most channel managers don't know enough people inside their partners and definitely don't know their LinkedIn profiles, Twitter handles or YouTube channels unless they specifically ask.

Channel Partners – The new gold mine.

The Channel is one of the most influential forces a vendor has and enabling that channel to be active in the social web is pure gold. Just imagine someone is tweeting about a customer experience with a certain product and 500 partner re-tweet it. Imagine a partner channel with 5,000 partners and 5 people in each partner working with that vendor and like their page. That is 25,000 likes right there. And this is only the numbers game on the surface. A strategic social media engagement with an indirect channel will rewrite the market power of the given company.

XeeMe plays a key role

The very first step for a channel manager is to find out where their partners are. Now – asking 500 partner to share their Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Google+, StumbleUpon account and wherever they are is a lot of links. The best way to get that information clean and clear in a structured way is to ask their partners to create a XeeMe and share it with the respective channel manager. That way the channel manager can simply add all the partners with a single click into their social address book which is part of the free XeeMe and has a list of all the places and spaces the partners care to share.

Social Partner Relationships

Once the channel manager knows where all their partners are, they can begin to connect with them, get social and get to know them better. That social relationship which often times took a year for a manager to develop, can now be developed in a few days or weeks. A very important side effect: Partners who didn't see an advantage to use social media in business experience in a very easy way the power of relationship development online. In XeeMe the partner manager can track how often he or she visited a partner online, when was the last visit and how much attention they get from the partner.

Amplification Strategies

Obviously the real power of leveraging the channel for social media initiatives is to engage partner in campaigns and programs. Only if you know where the partners are and they know where you are you can easily communicate news and important information that the partners may relay into their respective networks. The original value proposition of a channel was to reach people the vendor could not reach. And in an interesting way that is still true and the social web helps partners to continue playing that role. XeeMe/Flights is an important application to track those social media initiatives.

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