Customer Service Gone Social

 Posted by
Nov 132012
 

Social media customer service is similar to being on a retail floor and responding promptly to a customer’s need. Chances are that customer will return if your service is great, and they may even tell a family member or friend about their experience. This could translate into potential customers for your company.

The same rule applies with social media customer service. When I am out consulting with brands that are just getting started, I advise them to include customer service into their social media strategy, so they know how to respond to certain adverse commentary.    "Social Care"

As social media continues to evolve more and more consumers are using social networking platforms to voice their concerns. According to research firm NM Incite, 47 percent of social media users are engaging in social care.

Existing companies primarily using social media to promote their namesake will have to embrace two-way conversation.

Increasing your response frequency to customer comments is by far the biggest adjustment you can make. If you’re unable to provide up-to-minute answers that’s fine. The next best thing would be to prep your team for the kind of comments that raise red flags. Any time these red flags present themselves someone from your team should respond in a timely fashion.

Most importantly, you need to keep in mind that what works for others may not work for you. Whether you develop a community forum or manage a Facebook page, an effective social media customer service strategy will reflect well on your company and possibly boost a return on investment.

To get a better sense of how some of the larger companies are using social care take a look at the listed brands in this businessinsider.com article.

Beginner’s Guide to Twitter

 Posted by
Sep 042012
 

Twitter has over 140 million active users. It’s fair to say that if you are selling a product or service then you should have a presence on the social media network where you can engage existing and potential consumers as well as professional organizations and media that follow and cover your industry.

Tweets should be informative and offer educational information relating to your brand – avoid pitching, instead socialize and get to know your consumer base’s likes and dislikes. Clout Media always discourages tweets that compromise brand prestige, including disparaging tweets about your competitors, unfavorable media coverage, politically- or religiously-charged topics, or client-related happenings.

Whenever tweeting, you should remember that Twitter is a method for immediate publishing to the Internet and that tweets are visible to potentially anyone in the world. If you wouldn’t feel comfortable seeing something on the front page of your hometown newspaper then don’t tweet it!

Tweets should always be positive in nature!

The Basics

Here are some key considerations for aspiring Twitter users or for current users who are less familiar with the media.

What is Twitter?

Simply put, Twitter is a social media network that allows users to share real-time content (e.g., ideas, opinions, news, pictures, videos, etc.) with their communities of friends and followers in 140 characters or less, similar to a text message. Each “text message” is called a tweet, and can be viewed by all who follow you. (Note: All tweets from public profiles can be accessed by other users regardless of whether they follow you or not.)


Twitter language

There are four basic words in Twitter’s lexicon that you must understand. They are:


  • Mention: Once you’ve signed up and chosen a Twitter username, you and others can mention an account in your tweets by preceding it with the “@” symbol, e.g., “Glad your shipment arrived @janesmith!”


  • Retweet: When you see a tweet by another user that you want to share, click Retweet below it to forward it to your followers instantly.


  • Message: If you want to privately tweet to a particular user who’s already following you, start your tweet with “DM” or “D” to direct-message them, e.g., “DM @joesmith234 what is your order number?”


  • Hashtag: Users often append “#” to words in their tweets to categorize them for others, e.g., “Check out our new products for the Fall http://t.co/link2 #fallsale.” Think of a hashtag as the theme of your tweet. Users can then click on a hashtag to see other similarly themed tweets and find yours in search.

If you are interested in learning more Twitter words visit Twittonary.com.


Getting more from your Tweeting


Strategies for effective (influential) tweeting

Share your expertise with informative tweets that will educate your followers and establish you as a thought leader in their eyes. Feel free to include links to content like news articles, videos, graphs, and other information to highlight your expertise.


 

Also feel free to retweet media and other organizations that have mentioned our work:


Utilize popular industry-related hashtags to tailor and broadcast your tweets to your target audience en masse (e.g., #, #finance, #investments, #insurance, #healthcare, #pensions, #retirement, etc.).

 

Along with hashtags, it is useful to cite influential leaders in industry-related organizations and media.


Just as you appreciate being sourced by your followers, so do they; reciprocity is key to establishing positive rapport with the aforementioned organizations, which leads them to follow you back over time and enables you the opportunity to establish yourself as an social influencer in their eyes.

 

Here is an example where a Clout Media client cited both the news organization and the reporter who wrote the article:

 

Create lists to categorize the different industries, organizations, and people you are following. Also, feel free to subscribe to lists from the same industries, organizations, and people you follow and see what possible social influencers they are virally listening to.


Tools for effective (influential) tweeting

Timely: This tool allows users to schedule tweets.


Timely schedules tweets to go live during peak hours in order to maximize your tweet’s reach in relation to your target audience.


You can even input a URL link into the dashboard and Timely automatically shrinks it so you have more character space to type your message.

 

Twellow: Twellow is a categorized directory of Twitter users; the site used to be referred to as “the Twitter yellow pages.” Once you set up your account, you can add yourself to relevant categories where other users can find, follow, and network with you—you may want to do the same.

 

TweetBeep: TweetBeep is to Twitter what Google Alerts is to Google. The app alerts users to conversations that mention keywords, hashtags, or other Twitter users relevant to Milliman or your area of expertise on a daily basis. Use this app to listen to what is being said about important news and issues in your field and join the conversation!

 

There are many more tools users can utilize to gauge audience, reach, and interactions. These should suffice for starters. However, here is a list of 30 other tools and apps if you would like to learn more about tweeting effectively.


Also, tweets posed in question form as well as tweets citing empirical figures (i.e., price/cost, percentages, etc.) have a higher retweet and click-through rate. Straight-forward tweets that simply direct people to content do not do as well.


Good content is never the problem, but the presentation of a tweet maybe. Tweets need to read more like sound bites in order to pique interest from other users. Dry and formal tweets are generally ignored.


Hope this guide helps get your Twitter campaign off the ground. All we ask, if you have downloaded it and implemented our strategies, is that your share it with your followers and friends on at least one of your social networks (e.g., Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.) and also follow at least one of Clout Media’s social networks listed underneath.

Facebook.com/CloutMedia

Twitter.com/CloutMedia

Google+ Clout Media

Content Marketing; Build It & They Will Come

 Posted by
Jun 122012
 

With the advent explosion of social media, today’s playing field has been leveled for small business owners, independent artists, and other entrepreneurs seeking to reach their target demographics on a small marketing budget.

Even so, the most important aspect of a good marketing campaign is CONTENT! Creative content is the driving force behind any productive marketing campaign, allowing consumers insight into your brand and engaging them in what you are selling. Without content you’ll just be sitting in a vehicle without an engine.

Video, audio, blogs, pictures, and infographics all help tell your brand’s story. Here’s an idea on how content marketing can help raise your brand’s visibility.

You are the owner of a newly opened restaurant and you want to connect with locals virally, right? Why not film a virtual tour of the restaurant? Accentuate the restaurant’s ambiance, showcase the kitchen’s amenities, interview your chef, and, of course, give them a sneak peak of the food you’ll be serving. Make it fun! You’ll have a lot of footage to work with.

Also, you don’t have to release the footage as a virtual tour at all; perhaps you’ll decide to leak the footage as a series to keep customers coming back for more.

After all the right edits have been made to the content you can easily upload the footage onto Youtube and share it throughout your social network. You don’t need a five- or six-figure budget to publicize your restaurant virally as you would for a 30-second slot on cable TV – that’s not even including production costs.

How about another scenario? You are an independent author without a big-time publishing house’s budget which would allow you to go on a city-to-city book tour.

With such social media tools and websites such as Skype and Google+ Hangouts, respectively, free (with some exceptions to Skype Premium) to use why not attempt to create a series of video chat sessions where you can discuss chapters, characters, topics and themes from your book with other bookworms possibly interested in purchasing your material.

By cross-promoting these chat sessions on other social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and Amazon’s Shelfari.com for instance, you will be able to generate interest in your book session and eventually the book itself, leading to more purchases.

What’s the key message here? Content marketing is golden! And it doesn’t have to cost you an arm and a leg either.

These are only two example of how creative content can be used to interact with your target market. Generally speaking though, there are several key ingredients needed to produce great productive content that will help lead to consumer conversions.

  • Entertain – Focus the content on entertaining consumers and coddle their needs and wants. Yes, it is important to educate consumers about your brand, however, don’t bore them with an instructional infomercial showcasing how your products or services work. The content should elicit excitement which will make your brand desirable to them.
  • Experiment – Play with different mediums in order to figure out how your audience wants to interact with you and your brand. Perhaps they want to learn more about the brand’s leadership and direction more intimately, in that case provide them with webinars or webcasts where consumers can engage in direct Q&A sessions. If they want to be educated then provide them with a running blog or podcast where they can attain the information they seek and learn more about your products and services. Maybe they simply want to be entertained, if so, charm them with videos that engage them around your brand – Red Bull is the best at this!
  • Build a Community – There is no better representative for your brand than those already using your products or services. Involve your most loyal and enthusiastic consumers to participate in the creation of your content, after all, they know exactly what captivated their interest.
  • Leverage Your Staff – Allow those on your team to tell their stories, especially if there is a human interest element that your audience will connect with intimately.
  • Sharing is Caring – Make your content easy to share across various platforms. Place social sharing buttons in easy to access location throughout your website to allow your audience to share the content with their network and increase the chances that your content will go viral.

I can go on for days with ideas but this marketer would rather hear some instances wherein you have created content for your brand and how it worked out? Did it go viral? Did it bomb? Why so? What made your content a success or failure?

Analyze Your PR Campaign’s Success

 Posted by
Jun 112012
 

Identifying proper public relations measurement tools can be an arduous task. The objectives and benchmarks you set for yourself as well as your market research or data collection should reflect in your public relations program.

The goals set should ultimately be measured so that you can get the most out of your budget and generate a return on investment (ROI). Goals should be reasonably defined to have clarity on what your campaign aims to enhance such as brand integrity, sales, and more. Thus, when your campaign has ended, you’ll have the ability to review your time line to gauge what strategies have worked; what strategies have not worked; and what strategies can be improved upon.

Your benchmarking efforts should be set against worthy competition and focus on more than products such as areas like the organization’s relationships with the media and consumers for starters.

Providing a client with a clip portfolio is just one aspect of how we can measure a program’s productivity; outcome vs. output has become ever more important. The use of Ad Value Equivalency (AVE), which in layman’s terms simply compares news coverage against the price of advertising space wherein the news coverage appears in, places a value on your PR efforts.

Although the AVE has its critics, those in the public relations industry who support the formula’s use in evaluating services or products believe it places an empirical assessment for a client’s campaign.

With the addition of social media marketing to boost public relations efforts you have the ability to measure more than the traditional media channels. You can go a tad more in-depth by tracking and measuring conversations, consumer influence, consumer reach, web traffic, sales, and can intimately develop brand loyalty among consumers.

Conversations can materialize from anything like a new blog post, special events, youtube upload, or webinars from your campaign. Using one of the many tracking tools out there, Google Alerts for instance, you can set up keywords to monitor the conversation from your campaign, which can help measure your effectiveness.

Web analytics has become a great tool to help measure your campaign. With the collection of data you can keep track of subscriptions, see what landing pages are driving traffic to your site, track how many unique visitors frequent your website, page views, and click patterns. You can use free measuring tools like Google Analytics or paid services like Google Urchin. The difference between free and paid tools determines again on the metrics set at the beginning. Tracking off-site analytics will help generate specific data in regards to competition, what is trending and provide insight on your audience. You can also use Compete or the Alexa toolbar.

Do remember that not all of your material will go viral or get consumers in line for a purchase the first time round. This is where developing relationships and engaging with your demographic comes into play. You should benchmark your “buzz” before engaging your audience, using one of the many buzz-monitoring tools available (i.e., Commentful, BlogPulse, Addict-O-Matic, etc.). You’ll be able to see your buzz gain momentum as you engage your brand demographic as well as your reach.

Once you have seized the opportunities to interact with the decision makers in your target audience you can facilitate calls-to-action amongst the community that can result in ROI depending on what action is desired. Engaging your audience can even help build relationships that can result in brand loyalists and consumers.

Your monitoring and measuring efforts here should allow you to make adjustments to your plan if you have to alter your key messages at any point in your campaign to broaden your reach.

To summarize it all, measuring your public relations efforts doesn’t have to be an end-all process, providing you have the right goals, benchmarks, and  tools in place to coincide with your overall publicity needs.

Along with doing some advertising research to coincide with the Ad Value Equivalency formula, there are many analytic programs, including social media statistics, available to you that provide extensive insight on your target audience, allowing you to craft your strategy and garner your campaigns productivity.

Google+ Enhances Aesthetics and User Friendliness

 Posted by
Apr 132012
 

With more than 170 million people on the social media network, the powers behind Google+ have changed the layout to a more simpler, yet sleeker, look as it moves to become more aesthetically appealing and user-friendly.

As mentioned on Google’s blog, “A critical piece of this social layer is a design that grows alongside our aspirations… We’re introducing a more functional and flexible version of Google+. We think you’ll find it easier to use and nicer to look at, but most importantly, it accelerates our efforts to create a simpler, more beautiful Google.”

The first thing you’ll probably notice are your chat buddies on the laid out on the right-hand side of your page, making it easier on your eyes to see who’s currently online to chat.

Navigating your Google+ profile’s apps is quicker now too. No more static icons at the top, now there’s a dynamic ribbon of applications on the left which allows users to create the order they want their apps to appear in by dragging them up or down. Users can also hover over certain apps to reveal a set of quick actions and can also show or hide apps by moving them in and out of “More.”

Photos and videos will now appear larger and more prominent now, bringing more attention to your stream. The trending list has been placed to the right of the stream to quickly allow you to see what conversations are most popular at the moment.

Google+ even improved on its most distinctive feature, the Hangout, by adding a Hangouts page that creates even more opportunities to connect in person. Some of its features include:

  • An always-updated list of invitations from the people in your circles
  • Quick access to every public and On Air hangout, for those times when you want to meet someone new, or watch a live broadcast
  • A rotating billboard of popular hangouts, pro tips and other items you don’t want to miss.

For more on the Google+ improvements visit Google’s blog, here.

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