Social Media

Getting in on the conversation: What use is Social Media, Part three

Published November 26, 2010 | By Kate Rose

Your customers WILL be talking about you online. And about your competitors, and about developments in your target market. Wouldn’t it be great if you could hear what they’re saying?

Well, guess what….yep, you got it! With an effective monitoring strategy in place, the public nature of conversations in social media makes it really easy to know what’s being discussed. Here’s an example of what even a basic Twitter search tells us about one well known brand.

In true British parliamentary fashion, we’ve redacted it to protect the guilty:

Someone's ears should be burning...

Had that business been listening, it would’ve had the choice to join the conversation. As well as being a great way to build engagement with your customers, being part of that online conversation means that you can encourage more of it, which means more exposure for your business.

This is also one time that unhappy customers are a great bonus. Respond to them and resolve the problem constructively, and you’ve just shown prospective buyers a great reason to deal with you and not your competition; even if something does go wrong, they can trust that you’re committed to resolving any issues.

You can even use that online conversation to help your business strategy develop. That one small example above shows customers doing the hard work for you – they’re actively suggesting things they’d buy if they were able to! Similarly, once you’ve found and engaged with your customers, you’re talking to people who already love what you do. So, if you’re thinking of a change of direction, or a new product or service, why not run it past them first? You have a ready made focus group right there.

So there you are. If you care about engaging with your customers, social media is one of the most effective options you can choose.

Real time communication: What use is Social Media, Part Two

Published November 17, 2010 | By Kate Rose

Continuing our mini-series for those who just don’t “get” social media, here’s the second installment – using social media for instant communication.

So, you have something you want to tell your customers. If you’re not using social media, what do you do?

Harry Potter's social media manager seemed to prefer hiding in trees to engaging with customers

Send out a mailer? They won’t get that for a few days, and they might not read it at all. And every individual communication costs you for printing and postage. Take out an advert in your local paper or trade magazine? Again, there’s a lead time – and the costs may be even higher. Put it on your website? You absolutely should, but who knows whether your customers will be visiting your site that day.

Now, imagine you have a direct line to a big section of your customer base, which costs you nothing to send out a communication, and arrives immediately onto their computer screen or mobile phone. Then imagine that those customers are going to look right away at what you have to say, so that you can influence what they do the next day, or that evening.

Well, that’s social media. Whether you just want your customers to know something – our winter sale starts next week, or we’ve just found a fantastic new product that you’ll want – or you want them to know something right now – we’ve had a cancellation at the restaurant tonight and the first to reply gets a 10% discount off their food to fill that table, or there are returns available for this afternoon’s theatre performance.

So, what could being able to talk to your customers “right now” mean for your business?

Next up: Getting in on the conversation

Posted in Social Media, Social Media Basics | Tagged business, communication, social media | Leave a comment

Social media is useless

Published November 8, 2010 | By Kate Rose

So now we know. According to a survey by the Federation of Private Businesses reported recently in the Telegraph, 52 percent of small firms surveyed believe that social media is of no use to their businesses.

Oh dear.

Of course there’s a bit of deliberate provocation here (as already pointed out by one commenter to the site, 48% therefore think social media is valuable…and we’d guess that no “I don’t know” option was offered). That aside, we’ve all met a few business owners who feel that way.

Writing off a whole communications channel just at the time when starting to use it could pay real dividends in the future, seems like rather an overreaction to us!

So, what’s going on here? The survey respondants can’t all be daft. The same report suggests that one in five of them don’t even have a website, so they must have exceptional skills in something to be staying in business at all…

We’ve all experienced that feeling of “there might be something to this – but I’m up to my ears already”. It seems to us that this might just be behind some of those negative responses. Almost every day there’s a new story about social media, and for many people, that translates into feeling irritated, harassed, threatened, confused and downright fed up with hearing about “that bl**dy Twitter” and the like.

Here’s what we’d say to those people – well, right after “calm down, and don’t write this off until you’ve thought about it properly”!

Social media is a communications channel. Nothing more, nothing less. What you make of it is down to the type of business you own, and the communications skills at your disposal. To write social media off in its entirety as “useless” makes about as much sense as saying “oh yes, telephones – waste of time” or “printed word – i’ll have no truck with that in my line of work”. There will be some circumstances where those ways of communicating are less crucial, sure – but we’re very much doubting that there are *any* where there’s no potential for using those “technologies” to help a business to grow, or work more efficiently.

The next thing we’d say is – check out our upcoming blog posts, where we’re going to take a no-hype look at some of the key uses of social media for businesses.

Posted in Social Media Basics | Tagged SME, Social Marketing, social media | 4 Comments

We hate being right all the time!

Published October 29, 2010 | By Kate Rose

Well OK, that’s a not inconsiderable overstatement brought on by the excitement of being right at this moment in time.

New data reviewed on Smedio.com shows that social media is taking off amongst SMEs in the US right now, and for all the reasons we outlined a few days ago.

Yes, it’s over the pond at the moment – but like many things (except Sarah Palin, one can only hope), it’ll be over here soon.

So yes, just for the moment we’re going to bask in the glow of being in the right place, at the right time. And the excitement of working with SMEs to make sure they don’t miss the boat on this one, and can start building engagement with their customers before the competition do – and perhaps even, before those big corporates have scheduled the meeting to decide whether they need a meeting to discuss it!

For the full article, take a look here

Posted in In the News | Tagged SME, social media, social media marketing, trends | Leave a comment

Tweet your way to great customer service

Published October 26, 2010 | By Kate Rose

The real-time nature of Twitter can offer a great opportunity to surprise and delight your customers. There’s an example here of exactly that – in brief, Mike tweets about a catastrophe with his parents’ oven; the manufacturers, GE, pick it up, contact the parents, and resolve the issue. A happy outcome for the customer AND the manufacturer, as Mike tells the world how impressed he is.

As the use and reach of social media continues to increase, more and more of us are coming to expect that kind of direct channel to customer service. It’s the exact opposite of calling your utility company – finding yourself wandering in a maze of unfriendly automated menus before being put on hold until five minutes before the End of Days.

This kind of great service doesn’t just happen by chance though. A couple of things had to be in place in order for GE to achieve that great PR. Firstly, they needed to be monitoring what was being said about them on the social media platforms. That part is probably easier for a large, resource rich business which can afford to have people dedicated to doing that, probably with access to sophisticated monitoring software.

Secondly, but just as crucially, the organisation itself had to have processes in place to make things happen. Jack in Communications has picked up the issue. It needs to find its way through the various layers of management to provide Sarah in Repairs with authorisation to get a replacement out. For most big companies, that’s about as likely as the Daily Mail running a “more holidays for asylum seekers” campaign.

This is where smaller companies have a real advantage – once you’re aware of the problem, it’s easy for you to delight the customer with outstanding service.

First though, you have to be aware of what’s being said about you out there. Do you have arrangements in place to make sure that somebody is listening out for your company?

Posted in In the News, Social Media Basics, Twitter | Tagged Customer Service, SME, social media, Twitter | Leave a comment

social media

Getting in on the conversation: What use is Social Media, Part three

Real time communication: What use is Social Media, Part Two

Social media is useless

We hate being right all the time!

Tweet your way to great customer service

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