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There have been so many tales of businesses getting the social marketing angle wrong – posting poorly thought out updates and tweets, in particular, and it often leaves a rather sour taste in the mouth for customers and can damage a company’s online reputation. But what do you do when your customers band together to publicly lay into you on a social media site? For instance, setting up a group for dissatisfied users who are determined to hang all your dirty washing out in public.
1) Be aware of all activity regarding your company, brand, product names. You can do this by setting up alerts on Google, and it is also wise to actively monitor Twitter (using tools such as Twilert or SocialMention, or the in-built tools in Hootsuite and Tweetdeck), and Facebook (more difficult to monitor but one of the most likely places for a group with negative comments about your company to spring up).
2) Don’t ignore negative comments. You are more likely to feed the fire by pretending that it is not happening. It is more important to get to the bottom of why you have dissatisfied customers and resolve the issues. This does not have to be wholly in public, but it is wise to make sure that people reading or posting to any such groups know that you are at least aware of the issues and are endeavouring to resolve these with the concerned parties. Claiming to not understand how social media works in this day and age is no excuse for not replying to concerns on social media sites.
3) The customer is always right. Even if they are now an ex-customer. Listen to their concerns and address them without becoming defensive or going on the attack. It may well be that the issues are a genuine problem within your company and by solving them you are ensuring that future customers will be more inclined to deal with you and stay with you. Be honest about problems that have occurred, humble, and offer a form of compensation, even if this is only a public apology. (Note: if you want any of these customers back, you should look at more than just an apology, especially if they are out of pocket or have been seriously inconvenienced).
4) Antis can become advocates. If dealt with correctly, even the most ardent non-supporter can be turned into an evangelist for your product. Mastering customer service is vital for healthy long-term relationships, even if the initial road has been a little rocky. Ask questions and LISTEN to the answers. There may well be some gems of advice from even the most unhappy customer – after all, that person could be a hugely successful Customer Relationship Manager in their day job!
5) Try to nip these issues in the bud as soon as you become aware of them. It is simple for these things to spiral out of control, or go viral, and you only need one customer to create a parody of your logo, a Youtube video about their experiences and suddenly your reputation can sink like a stone.
6) Keep the channels open for customer complaints at all times and build social media channels into your email, telephone, post and in person complaints. Let your customers contact you through the route that suits them best, not just the processes you are happy with. It is by ignoring Facebook groups, Twitter hashtags designed to scupper your reputation, and forums specifically set up to complain about you that these ripples of discontent become waves, and even tsunamis.
7) Love your customers. Talk to them. Engage with them. Take every complaint seriously before it gets out of hand. Be the best at what you do.
Spreecast has just launched and is a social networking video tool. Whilst Google+ hangouts have become increasingly popular (including with the Muppets!), and Ustream, Bambuser, Livestream and so on allow you to stream your video live, Spreecast adds in the social element that has been missing from Livestream etc, and the record and broadcast side that is missing from Google + Hangouts.
The application is simple to use, and allows up to 4 people to appear on screen at any time, with a chat facility beneath for the audience to further contribute to the conversation. The opportunities that this type of application provides are probably infinite, and from the success of audio apps for broadcasters, such as Blogtalkradio, it is likely that the video versions of such apps will skyrocket.
However, we should think of this not simply as a marketing tool eg creating content to share with website visitors, but also to consider how tools such as this can be used within the company to enhance internal communications. For instance, if a meeting is held between four of the people within a team, the entire conversation can be shared with the rest of the team, the company or, where appropriate, with the world at a later date.
Spreecasts can be public or private, as well as live and/or archived. You can also pre-schedule a spreecast and invite specific people to join. This takes webinars and phonecasting, for instance, up to a whole new level and allows dialogue and interaction to take place.
From a content creation point of view, there is now no need to meet up in real life in order to gather together your top experts on a particular subject to share information with your customers. And once made and archived, you can make the content available through your website, Twitter, Facebook and so on, reaching a wide audience from a single event.
The simplicity of the toolbox, plus the functionality being offered, make this a sweet solution for those wishing to get into broadcasting, video production, as well as video conferencing. The addition of the social media marketing options such as Twitter and Facebook mean that you can share a Spreecast very easily to your followers or to those who you may wish to get involved in a discussion whilst it is ongoing.
There will be more on Spreecast shortly and hopefully this blog will shortly have some examples from the Clickthrough team with thoughts on Spreecast and goings on in the Internet Marketing world this week. This is a new app but the plans for the future as discussed at 35mins in this Spreecast mean it is definitely one to keep an eye on.
Firefox 8, which is now available for download, includes a Twitter search tool built into the browser inside a drop down menu for search.
This may seem a minor upgrade in a new browser version which also isn’t a major upgrade, but for Twitter users the search facilities within Twitter have long been a subject of discussion and ire. Applications have sprung up across the entire cyberworld to try to redeem Twitter’s major failing – searching #hashtags, @usernames and Tweet histories. In fact, there are so many of them that inputting “Search twitter app” into Google may keep you busy for several weeks or more trying them all out.
Being able to search Twitter is a canny move on Firefox’s part after Google dropped real time search from its engine just prior to launching Google+ earlier this summer. Whilst others have stepped in to add functionality by different apps, building it into the browser was an obvious move, and Firefox the most likely opponent in the browser wars to capitalise on Google’s elimination of the feature.
For journalists, news junkies, and the Twitterati, this simple drop down choice may see yet further users running multiple browsers at once simply to get to the information they need when they require it. It is likely that Google will re-introduce a replacement for real time search sooner rather than later following Firefox 8’s release; however, one wonders how Twitter feel about letting Google play again after removing the facility, seemingly with little to no warning.
The removal of third party add-ons and a new feature that checks your existing add-ons for compatability when updating means that you may find that some of the addons and plug ins you had become reliant on are no longer available in Firefox 8 until they are compliant. Whilst this is not a bad thing per se, it is likely that many of us will simply find alternatives for tools we had been using in order to get back to our previous capabilities as quickly as possible. One of the add-ons disabled is Google Toolbar for Firefox so it will be interesting to see how quickly this is brought up to date!
(Much of the SEOmoz toolbar etc also seems to need updating, and I for one will seriously miss that until it is back, so if you use these sort of tools regularly, you might want to hold off the update for a few days/weeks until everyone catches up. Greasemonkey etc all seem fine though….).
Interestingly, whilst doing the upgrade, the first windows that opened after the details of which add ons would be disabled and enabled, were a series of crash reports. Which doesn’t bode exactly well! I shall report back once resolved…..
The full options available in Firefox 8 can be found on the Mozilla blog, and if you are a (website) developer, you will be interested in this list of all the new attributes etc that Firefox 8 supports.
None of us can possibly keep up to date with the ever-growing number of social media contacts we need to engage with, without using tools to automate some of the processes and managing our time carefully.
One of those tools which has become increasingly useful for those with busy schedules is Buffer – the application which allows you to pre-schedule Tweets to be sent to your Twitter account automatically at times set by you.
So, for instance, if you have blog posts and articles which you would like to bring to people’s attention, but you know you will be in meetings all day for the next two days, you can schedule these tweets (with links to your own website, of course) to go out whilst you are otherwise committed.
For a busy team in a large marcomms department, this can make it really easy to see who else is planning to send out what and when, rather than inundating your followers with a deluge of tweets from different authors who just happened not to know what everyone else was about to do.
Now, Buffer has added the scheduling of Facebook posts to the app, which can only be a good thing for companies looking to intersperse real-world communications with news and PR on Facebook. It is vital not to use any of your social media real estate simply as a one-way mechanism, and alternating broadcast announcements with some one to one human communication with those who post on your wall, page or group is of paramount importance if you want people to return.
After all, social media is not just about how many Likes or Followers you have. It is also about the dialogue that you engage in with those who have taken the time to seek you out and indicate their interest.
Buffer offers a number of plug-ins and apps for multiple devices and browsers, so being able to automate tweets from your iPhone or Android for your business. Or for remote workers to tweet from the road or out of office so that others can see what may be scheduled over the next few days and build additional campaigns or marketing around that.
The Facebook addition allows you to tweet to both Facebook and twitter at once, or just one of the networks (as do applications such as Foursquare) which will reduce your workload and ensure that you reach the different audiences who will be following through the social media of their choice.
A word of warning: if you already have Tweets being posted to Facebook automatically via another mechanism (or vice versa), be very careful not to create a loop. This can mean that you post something to Twitter, which automatically gets posted to FB, and is then automatically posted back to Twitter etc etc until you feel as though you are standing in a room full of mirrors! Keep a record of the tools you trial for which automation tasks as they may conflict if you accidentally set up an infinite loop. And it could have been months since you experimented with a new tool and remembering which it was, passwords, and so on, may come too late if you have a group of followers who find themselves inundated with email notifications from you before you have resolved the issue.
Not that I speak from experience. Oh no. 
Give Buffer a try. It’s free and definitely worth using if your time is limited, if you need to manage a large team, and if you want to schedule in advance any communications when you know you will be otherwise engaged.
Tools
The first tools you should use are those which are available on Twitter to personalise or brand your Twitter profile – logo, bio, website link, background etc. When people look at your profile and timeline, they should be able to learn all about your brand, business, products, USP etc from that profile.
There are people who will argue that personalising your profile is pointless when so many use the tools we recommend below – Tweetdeck etc, which generally do not show the actual Twitter profile design, but it is an undeniable fact that there are now many people sharing visually attractive profiles, as well as others making money from creating them.
If you are team posting from within your company, you should brand each Twitter user in a similar fashion to give a corporate look/feel to the accounts.
The next most important is a tool which allows you to keep track of all that is going on in your own Twitterverse – the website is too clunky to do this easily. You need to be able to easily follow:
Also, most tools offer stats, trends and search facilities, as well as lists so that you can keep track of what is working as well as what isn’t, what is trending, and group users into different departments or lists. You can check Twitter trends by region too, as well as trends in London, Birmingham, Manchester and Glasgow on Twitter itself, so if your audience is local, you can keep an eye on what is trending right now near you.
Essential for all of this are either Tweetdeck (acquired by Twitter this week), Hootsuite or Seesmic.
These tools help you to both aggregate the tweets from those you follow, your followers, hashtags, search terms etc, and separate them out into columns to make life much easier.
Try all three to find which one best suits your modus operandi – there are plenty of how tos, videos, FAQs and tutorials across the Net to make the most of their features. It may take an hour or two to investigate but will pay enormous dividends if you have the right tool for the job. All also offer mobile solutions which will give you more chance to follow and post to Twitter on the move.
Automate your tweets
You will send tweets for one of two reasons: a) to communicate/respond or b) to promote. The vast majority of companies are using Twitter only for the latter, which can be fully automated from your blog, website, RSS feed, or for tweets written ahead of schedule e.g for upcoming press releases.
There are so many tools to do this job that you just need to assess what you are attempting to conjoin with Twitter eg wordpress blog, Facebook or Linkedin status update, RSS feed, press releases etc and choose the right tool(s) for the task. These requirements will be unique to each company and based on the existing resources that you have for marketing both on and offline.
For example, Socialoomph (previously known as TweetLater) offers you a wide variety of tools to automate many of the tasks that you may find you need to carry out to harness the power of Twitter for your business. This not only includes automated tweets, but autofollow, welcome messages, stats, linking multiple social accounts and blogs, monitoring follows/unfollows and so on.
Personalised Engagement
The area that you cannot automate at all, if you value your reputation, is the personal side of Twitter – responding to a technical support tweet, answering questions, expressing opinions, conversing etc.
This is the most important part of a social media strategy, so you need to assess the human resource needs for this. You can start small and bring in further resources as you find you need them, and as they begin to generate results.
If you don’t engage on Twitter, or use Twitter to promote a route for human engagement eg a forum on your site, blog comments, a phone line or online chat, webinar or real world seminar etc, then you are not being social, you are broadcasting.
Decide what tone or personality your company wishes to adopt on Twitter – this is really important and needs to be upheld reasonably consistently. Customers want to feel that companies are far more approachable than in the past, especially large corporates, and it is easy to develop a personable, friendly style, even in a technical help centre format. Instead of Business to Business, or Business to Consumer, think Person to Person.
Then, decide who is going to be responsible for monitoring and maintaining your tweetstream, Build in redundancy so that you have at least two people responsible, even if not both full-time, and each knows what the other one has done, conversations that have been held and so on.
Tomorrow, we will continue to look at how to use these tools and strategies and your Twitter account to maximise your business strengths and create social signals to help improve your search engine optimisation and internet marketing.
Internet marketing services providers may wish to look at ways of how they can take advantage of a new update to Google's Latitude app for iPhone.
The search engine giant has added the ability for users to check in at locations through the app, which could open up a new avenue for location-based marketing.
Check-ins through Google Latitude – which is already available on Android-powered devices – enable users to show other Latitude users where they are and also offers them the option of constantly sharing their location with others.
"If Latitude is set to continuously update your location, you'll also be automatically checked out when you leave," software engineer at Google Maps Greg Blevins explained in a post on the firm's blog,
Google has also rolled out an update for its Places app that means it can be used in 20 different languages and, earlier this month, overhauled the Google Mobile app, giving it a new name – Google Search – and a revised use interface.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – a provider of SEO Services & Pay Per Click strategies.
Printer companies have blotted their copybooks when it comes to retrieving and recycling their old equipment, according to a new study.
The latest report card from the Electronics TakeBack Coalition (ETC) shows the industry received low marks across the board, with only Hewlett-Packard bucking the trend.
Makers of computers, games consoles, televisions and printers were rated by the organisation for their efforts to take back and recycle used products from consumers.
The report card looked at the number of collection sites set up in each state, the volume of equipment recovered, companies' promotion of "closed loop" recycling and whether items were being reused in a responsible way and not exported as waste.
Dell, Samsung and computer hardware specialist Asus received the highest marks overall.
Brother, Kodak, Lexmark, Philips, Epson and Funai were among the worst performers.
"Most electronics companies have some kind of takeback programme – but what we are looking at is whether these programs are actually effective in collecting their old products and are making sure they are not just being exported to developing nations," said ETC vice-chair Robin Schneider.
Members of the ETC include the GrassRoots Recycling Network, Friends of the Earth and the Center for Health, Environment and Justice.
Yahoo! chipped away at Google's dominant position in the US search market during August, according to new figures from comScore.
The search engine, which is in the process of switching its natural and pay per click marketing to Microsoft's adCenter platform, saw its share of queries from home, work and university-based internet users climb by three per cent last month to 2.72 billion.
Microsoft itself also recorded an increase in its share of overall searches. Its sites handled 1.74 billion enquiries during August, up two per cent on July.
Ask Network searches climbed two per cent to 598 million, while AOL remained unchanged on 366 million queries.
Nevertheless, despite the increase in traffic for its competitors, Google remained streets ahead of the pack in terms of searches handled with 10.2 billion – or 65.4 per cent of the total.
Earlier this month, the Mountain View, California-based company unveiled Google Instant – a new "search-before-you-type" system that predicts a user's most likely query and streams results in real time.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in Search Engine Marketing & Internet Marketing.
The new Bing iPhone app could make PPC campaigns more straightforward for businesses.
Microsoft’s search engine said that comparison shopping using the new app could make it easier for consumers to find the best deals on products and this in turn could be a good way to boost PPC marketing.
Research has revealed that 56 percent of iPhone users compare prices when making purchases and by searching using the new Bing feature, these individuals can find the best deals quicker and more easily.
It works by allowing users to take a picture of the item they are searching for and this will then link to a search results page – meaning typing in queries is no longer necessary.
"Bing is an important first step forward in our long-term effort to deliver innovations in search that enable people to find information quickly," commented Steve Ballmer, Microsoft chief enterprise officer.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – specialists in Search Engine Optimisation and Internet Marketing.
The new Bing iPhone app could make PPC campaigns more straightforward for businesses.
Microsoft’s search engine said that comparison shopping using the new app could make it easier for consumers to find the best deals on products and this in turn could be a good way to boost PPC marketing.
Research has revealed that 56 percent of iPhone users compare prices when making purchases and by searching using the new Bing feature, these individuals can find the best deals quicker and more easily.
It works by allowing users to take a picture of the item they are searching for and this will then link to a search results page – meaning typing in queries is no longer necessary.
“Bing is an important first step forward in our long-term effort to deliver innovations in search that enable people to find information quickly,” commented Steve Ballmer, Microsoft chief enterprise officer.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – specialists in Search Engine Optimisation and Internet Marketing.
