Social media channels have changed customer service forever. In today’s fast pace and hyper-responsive world consumers are not willing to wait on hold on the line for a customer service call. Customers expect instant response and perfect service. Leveraging social media tools can help spread positive brand reputation learning from customer feedback.  According to sources at an IBM conference “customers are five times more likely to post something positive than negative, and that companies usually have at least 10 warnings before someone posts a negative comment”.  Therefore, companies have the opportunity to fix their wrongs and foster positive comments that increase their brand recognition.

There are several keys to turn customers into brand ambassadors. The first key is to be fast. Consumers that use social media for support expect almost immediate response. Taking too long to answer on social media is very risky, it gives the impression of either not knowing how to answer or not caring enough about customers. Either situation turns into a lost of esteem to the brand. Unsatisfied consumers are only half a step away from starting to write negative feedback about the company. Be careful.

Being visible is another key. It is very important to be totally transparent and visible. Sending private messages through Facebook or Twitter is good. But answering to a concern publicly is likely to help many more customers than previously expected. Joining user conversations about your brand and understanding how they talk about it and being able to participate in those discussions is benefitial to engage customer with the brand.

It is very important to be consistent too. Consistency across channels is key. It is very important to deliver the same messages with the same tone regardless of the channel or the person replying. Each answer should communicate the same solution, this is key to avoid consumer confusion, which leads to unhappy customers. The same consistency expected from products is also expected not from messages and channels.

Being consistent is not enough to create brand ambassadors. Being organized is equally important. Maintaining the speed, visibility and consistency across different channels is very time consuming. Even if you have a full time employee to take care of the social media tools it is crucial to be organized. Disorganization can be spotted miles way by consumers, this will cost the company a loss of respect and trust to the brand.

Finally, besides being fast, visible, consistent and organized it is also completely crucial to be human. People respond better when they are treated like a human, rather than a code or just a customer. Social media tools allow us to get basic information from customers and use this information to engage with them on a human to human basis. Creating that kind of relationship with your customer should be the priority of any company.

Due to its large amount of users, Facebook is not only a great social platform for individuals, but also a great medium for companies and causes to mobilize users. People want to share with their friends what they are doing, especially if they are doing something good.

Mashable has published an article where it highlights 4 ways companies and causes use Facebook. Here is a summary of the 4 types of campaigns and a brief critique of them:

1. Like-for-donation

After Facebook added the “Like” button functionality in 2009 the one-click cause marketing format was created. The way this works is very simple: a company or organization creates a campaign and every time a user “likes” it a donation is released to a charity or cause. Usually this donations are about $1 per “like” which is inexpensive for a company and relevant for charities. This is very simple to implement and therefore has been fairly successful and dominated the cause marketing space over the past several years. Although popular, the results for these campaigns have been mixed and its effectiveness challenged.

One of the factors that threaten the effectiveness of this type of campaign is that the audience is starting to experiences some “Like Fatigue” due to the overuse of the like-for-whatever campaigns. Besides that “liking” something on Facebook takes no time, so it is not clear how much engagement with the cause a “liker” has.

2. Simple-act-for-donation

The next in the hierarchy to engage consumers are campaigns where users are asked to perform a simple task, such as posting a picture, video or comment on the Facebook page of the organization. By doing so they unlock a donation to a chosen cause. In order to attract more people organisations often offer exclusive content to increase user participation and engagement. The desired outcome of this actions is to take advantage of the exponential power of social networks by having this actions shared.

These campaigns are more engaging (since they require more effort) than the “like-for-donations” campaigns. The challenge for this type of campaigns is to create content that is both meaningful and engaging. Simple-act-for-donation campaigns have the potential of becoming viral and taking advantage of the “six degrees” of friends of their participants. However, the large amount of content and campaigns existing make it challenging to stand out.

3. Interactive-action-for-donation

This type of campaigns, based on custom-design applications, are a bit more sophisticated than simple-act-for-donation and are design to increase user interest, engagement and appeal to share. Example of such campaigns are “Set a Place” for Frigidaire’s Save the Children campaign, “Make a bed” during TownePlace Suites’ American Red Cross campaign or Timberland’s “Plant a tree”. Different types of fundraising apps (i.e. Facebook Causes) and games are used to achieve the same goals. The later, games, are fueled by a large and very profitable market for virtual goods. Games have become a fertile ground for cause marketing, and integrated campaigns have begun to appear with increasing frequency. Gaming for good is an are of increase opportunity for cause marketers.

The advantage of this type of campaigns are the potential engagement and appeal perceived by users. If used right both applications and games can have a great outcome. They can be entertaining and fun, while being educational and raising money for a good cause. The only downside of these campaigns is that the development of such apps and games is more costly and long than the previous two types of campaigns.

4. Voting Campaigns

This campaigns consist of companies offering a cash on in-kind price to the causes that gather more votes (or other online actions). Due to the massive amount of users on Facebook it makes it the perfect platform to run such campaigns. Some of these campaigns have become very popular and gained major media attention, largely due to the significant amount of money donated by organizations. An example is the 2010 Pepsi Refresh campaign, where the company donated $20 million to local organizations and causes via Facebook instead of investing this money on SuperBowl commercials.

Mashable published an article titled “4 Tips for Optimizing Your Resume with Social Media”. Since I am currently looking for a job I thought there could be some tips I could use. This is a summary of the article, the four tips to use social media help you find a job and my view on them:

1) Link your CV to you social media.

The stats say that over 10% of resumes nowadays include a link to social media, mainly LinkedIn. The article also recommends to “Include your Facebook, Twitter and especially LinkedIn profile URLs along the top of your resume, next to your name, email and phone number. Make sure the links are handy so the employer can quickly learn more about you, without having to do a lot of digging”. Using LinkedIn could be useful, although most times the CV has exactly the same content as the LinkedIn profile. As per Facebook and LinkedIn I think it could work for some people and some types of jobs. However, for most people I see a big privacy problem. People feel Facebook  is an environment where they can be themselves and share experiences with their friends. Sharing with possible employers might alter this. Nevertheless nowadays it is really easy for companies to search candidates on Google and social media tools show up .

2) Fast check yourself

It is crucial to keep you CV and social media profiles updated and synced constantly. An employer should not see one thing on your resume and something different on LinkedIn. Your public information has to be updated and uniform. The advice Mashable gives is to “keep a list of all the social media and career sites on which have professional accounts or information. Once a month, check to make sure everything is up-to-date and matches your current resume”.  This structured approach to keep you information consistent and up to date is a great advice on how to help build your personal brand.

3) Don’t just copy paste

Resume are full of content that can also work great for social media profiles. Mashable advices to “use information from your resume for social network sections like “work experience,” “about me,” etc.” It is important however to share content carefully and not to just copy and past the entire resume into your “about me” section, but to adapt it to the tool being used. In stead of copy paste the advice is to “select a handful of solid phrases or anecdotes for your social profile. That way, you’ll guarantee that anyone reading your profile will get the most important information”. I think that doing this is also a relatively easy and smart way of using social media to build one’s brand and increasing the consistency across social media tools and offline content.

4) Use Keywords for SEO

Everyone nowadays uses Google for their searches, that includes your potential employers. In order to show up to the right search the recommendation  to stay on top of current industry jargon is to “study similar job listings for words that pop up frequently”. Some SEO tools which were designed for marketer could be easily used to help with your resume search. While this might be the most difficult of the 4 options with a little research and learning the right tools might make one CV stand over the others.

Overall, I think these are relatively easy techniques to use social media in your benefit to market yourself professionally. Nowadays, the competition to find good jobs is getting harder. So, keep an updated and consistent online information, use the social media tools in your benefit and ….good luck!

Last Saturday I went to Commercial Drive to buy some groceries for dinner. While I was in line waiting to pay, suddenly I saw this:

A little hand written paper that read “Dollar Grocers is now on Facebook”. I thought to myself “Awesome, that’s a perfect post for my Internet Marketing class!”. While I waited to pay I took the picture and started thinking about how little sense it makes for a little grocery store like them to be on Facebook. Why would people follow them? What kind of communication with shoppers are they expecting to have? The more I thought about it, the more convinced I was it made no sense at all.

I had in mind more or less the kind of post I would write. But before I started writing it I decide to look them up on Facebook.

I expected to find a FB page with no friends and no content. After seeing the very poor way they announced their Facebook page I had very little faith they knew what to do on Facebook. Oh surprise! They happen to have 223 friends and they seem to be posting twice a day! I decided to dig in a bit more and find out how they actually created content that someone would care about.

First of all they are active, they post twice a day or so. They also post a lot of pictures: customers in funny poses at the store, new products, one of the workers putting the produce out despite of the rain and so on. Most of their post have “likes”, comments and shares.

Against my intuition I discovered that one can have a little grocery store on Commercial Drive and actually engage shoppers via social media. The right combination of product information, sharing relevant information with shoppers, making shoppers participate on their posts and a humble but creative approach to Facebook works! Obviously 223 friends is not a huge number of people. However, it looks to me like a very decent number given the size of the store. I looked for a computer in the store and could not find one. So, I assume the owner takes care of their online marketing strategy at home. A very good example of what companies can do with some creativity, a bit of time and absolutely no budget!

Well done Dollar Store!

Everybody knows YouTube, but do small businesses really understand how YouTube could help their business?  Small businesses launch YouTube campaigns expecting a lot of exposure at a very low cost. The cost of a YouTube campaign can be near zero and according to many examples before the potential for exposure is great.  Now ask these companies what their strategy is for their YouTube campaign and you might hear “we are going to go viral” even more than you expect. Expecting to “go viral” is the equivalent of crossing your fingers and expecting to win at the casino. Sometimes it works, most times it doesn’t.

The most common business use of YouTube is for marketing and advertising.  However, there are other ways companies can leverage YouTube’s potential.  Visual walkthroughs, FAQs, public presentations or media attention to the company are other uses companies can have for a YouTube campaign to increase the customer bond with the company. Companies can also use private videos to send messages to employees (for trainings, events…). According to Mashable “If you can create interesting content that’s relevant to your brand or products, a positive visual association with your company can attract new interest, build company culture, turn inquiries into sales, and give back significant brand dividends over time”. This sounds rather complicated and theoretical, not really something a medium-sized company with no experience can follow.

So, here are 6 tips for a small business wishing to create successful YouTube campaigns:

1.       Watch a lot of YouTube

You have to know the tool you are using. If there is something anyone can do for free and unlimited, that’s watching YouTube. If you haven’t heard from a baby panda sneezing, a kid called Dave after the dentist or lately how some kids cry over stolen Halloween candies, you should watch more YouTube.  The goal here is to be able to recognize what people like and discover the common treats.

2.       Don’t expect the video to go viral, most likely, it won’t

If your plan is to upload a video and expect to go viral, well…bad news, it will not! There are 48 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute; being highly visible in the immensity of videos is nearly impossible. Instead of expecting “going viral” the aim should be at reaching the right customer and getting the message across to that customer.  The success of a YouTube campaign should be measured with the quality of the hits, rather than just the quantity.

3.       Buy ad space

Since chances are your video is most likely not going to go viral the best you can do is buy ad space. Currently, YouTube rates are very good when compared to AdWords (search ads on YouTube go for 50 cents pre click, while Adwords run at $1.5 per click. YouTube charges 3 times less). As with AdWords, you can obviously limit the daily budget. This allows very small budget to be able to take advantage of the whole potential of YouTube. However, no matter how much the budget is the key is to make sure the content is relevant to the search term key words. This will increase the relevance Google uses to rank videos and also ensure the content is delivered to relevant (potential) customers.

4.       Use any feedback you can: comments and other

Bigger companies with YouTube budget companies can afford to run ad focus group testing to predict the reaction on their viewers. However, given no budget, small DIY advertisers rely on comments and feedback as a way to judge the effectiveness of their campaigns.

Besides the comments there are some tools that can be helpful determining the performance of a campaign. Hot Spots is a “technology that lets you see when people are tuning in and out of your video”. This way you can tell when people get bored of your video and leave or at what stage users are most likely to stay until the video finishes. A/B Testing, also used by large companies, enables you to run two alternative videos and compare them easily. Google Analytics helps you determine referring traffic.

5.       Track the ROI

ROI? Yes, Return On Investment! If you spending any money on YouTube (and, of course, time is money) you will likely wonder what the return on your efforts is. Getting views is great, but does that translate into achieving the campaign goals? Now, there is no one bulletproof way of measuring the ROI of a YouTube campaign is. Companies might want to check views (of course) but also try to infer relationship between campaign running and number of visits to their website, referral visits or simply first-hand customer feedback.

 6.       Find your niche

After following step 1 and watching tons of YouTube videos, now you should be able to determine what’s going to work on YouTube.  Now, you also know the vast amounts of videos out there. The choice to make is whether you are going to place yourself as the reference brand for a niche or try to appeal to a determined lifestyle. Depending on the product one or the other works best. Harder to sell a lifestyle if you are selling canned tuna than if you are selling surfboards, right?

See what other people have done in similar space and get the best out of each example. Whatever you do, try to be different and innovative, there are already tons of mediocre videos. It’s not just about advertising, at least not in a traditional way, is more about creating things that help people or that people connect to.

Sources:

http://mashable.com/2011/11/05/youtube-small-biz-tips/ & http://mashable.com/2009/10/26/socia-media-entrepreneurs/

After watching comedian CK Louis video on how much he hates Twitter (Louis C.K. Hates Twitter ), I stopped thinking and realize actually he points out some really good points about social media and how people use it.

These are some key points from CK Louis:

1. “I have Twitter so that I can tell people what I want them to buy”. 

Although “social media are media for social interaction, as a superset beyond social communication”, the truth is that most people use social media to sell something. From big corporations trying to understand our behavior or sell us something to people using social media to self-market themselves. Is all about selling, all the time.

2. “People get mad at me because I don’t follow anybody”

Just as in real life people expect a certain socially accepted behavior in social media. CK Louis has over 715,000 followers on Twitter. However, his profile shows he follows 0 people. It might seem contradictory to have a twitter account if you do not follow anyone (and earn you names such as “arrogant prick”) since you will not get any twits from other user. But if the objective is purely selling (as stated in #1), isn’t it more honest to not follow anyone and just send your messages for your followers. Again, social behavior patterns that repeat themselves in social media.

3. “Everything that is available is not necessarily a good idea” 

True. More and more applications appear everyday. It is one’s responsibility to choose the ones to use and use them responsibly. However, many companies nowadays realize that the “social media thing” is big and a great way of putting your name out there for a very low cost. However, using social media effectively requires a previous step. A step where companies (or people) define the goals of their online media. Being on Twitter or Facebook if you have no real goal, or message to communicate is a waste of time both for publisher and viewer.

4. “OMG, @Jesus is in front of me”

Social media and the technological advances have definitely changed the way people interact with the surroundings and one another. The ability to be constantly connected and share literally whatever is really powerful. Initially, social media enabled you to share your life with friends, now it seems that the social media themselves have become the life itself to many of its users.

Hope you enjoyed my first post, or at least……the video!

S