Tagged Under: Social Media

An important lesson to learn is there can be a gap between the tacit permissions your customers think they have given you and the permissions you think you have to engage and promote. There's a very fine line between keeping users informed of critical updates and not making it seem like you're unnecessarily spamming them with fluff.

If you talk to a lot of people online, you're going to encounter someone trying to convince you of the truth of a claim or you're going to have to convince someone about the truth of your claim. One of the things that bothers me the most is when you ask someone to establish a claim, they hand wave to a 30 minute Youtube video.

Most of us are familiar with hashtags on Twitter. Maybe there's a chance you found this blog post from the #scrm hashtag I used in my Tweet about it. On Twitter hashtags are a way of creating ad-hoc communities or discussions organized around a certain topic, like social CRM. Or the NHL. Or some political movement. Need a quick and dirty idea how sentiments are trending on a certain topic? Follow the hashtag.

The biggest mistake people make about trying to sell online is reasoning "people who want to buy X can be found in social groups devoted to X." Yes, you and 2,000 other merchants have thought about that. And you're all in that social group waiting for some potential customer to join. And then everyone pounces on the poor guy with their pitch.

This past summer Twitter sent an ominous message about changes to its API. Twitter signaled the days of open access are over and walls are going up around it's garden. And then just this week, Twitter stopped playing nice with Instagram (owned by Facebook), the social image sharing app. As I noted in a previous blog post, using Instagram over Twitter is a brilliant way for small business to get the emotional content of its brand right.

You want people to follow you. The best way to get someone to follow you is to follow them first. Or re-tweet or favorite something they've tweeted. Or do all three. I've said it before here in the Roo blog but let me repeat: sometimes the best way for people to think you're interesting is if you find them interesting first. Following, re-tweeting, and favoriting tweets is one way to signal such interest. But that's only step one. People do not spend much time deciding who to follow back. There's a considerable body of research in both traditional marketing and online marketing about the very, very small window of opportunity you have to get someone's attention.

It started with a satire in The Onion that North Korea's Kim Jong-Un was named the Sexiest Man Alive. And it ended with a Chinese English news source reporting the story as real news. This is, of course, not the first time an Onion article gets into the Asian news and reported as actual news.

Many small businesses lend themselves to the informal, personal touch. People understand Instagram is not the product of a big media campaign. It's street level. It's a merchant's on-the-spot snapshot of the here and now. You are proud of your office, your building, your warehouse. These things don't really lend themselves to web sites or marketing materials. But Instagram lets you get out these slice-of-business-life snapshots in a way that doesn't seem crass. Keep the photo caption verbiage to a minimum and raw/authentic.

English is too nuanced to create a failsafe script that eliminates all false positive hits. When you find a hit, work from a collection of sure-fire pitches but tailor the message. People who employ scripts ultimately completely underestimate their potential customer's intelligence. It's simply easy to tell organic comments, reviews, tweets, etc. from prepared blocks of text.

So many social networking sites. So little time. This simple flowchart will help you decide which social network is best for you.

There are some articles I want to share on my Facebook. But I don't want every article I randomly surf to be shared. Sure, I want my Facebook friends to see I'm interested in stories about central banking but I don't want them to see for every one serious article I appear to be reading I'm reading five articles about octomoms, incontinence treatments in the pipeline, and Adam Sandler movie reviews.

Social CRM is CRM software that lets you engage customers and potential customers anywhere, including social networking. Bringing a lead into your CRM should be no different if that lead came from a phone call, a business card you got at a trade show, someone visiting your site and requesting more information, or a Twitter user.

So far we've look at Google Plus in terms of the past (Google's forays in social networking) and it's present (company profiles). It's time to turn the scRoo (screw? Huh? Huh?) towards the future and consider what Google Plus can do to avoid its social networking platform going the way of Google Buzz, Google Wave, or just becoming a regional niche social network like Orkut.

Google has recently opened up its Facebook-(not yet)killer Google+ (aka Google Plus) to company profile pages. Actually you can create a number of different "I'm not a human" pages. Are you a rock band? Want to set up a page devoted to a specific product? Want to make a tribute page to the flying spaghetti monster? No problem. No more having to try and setup a human profile with a jury rigged name. So, Mr. Coca Cola you can now create a product page.

I'm glad you asked. Not many of us have in-house talent or resources to create the next Angry Birds (it cost Rovia about $200,000 to develop the game). That doesn't mean, however, you can't think creatively about producing free digital content that can have spin off benefits.

So Google has opened Google Plus to the uninvited masses. Back in July the Roo Blog took a first look at Google Plus. What we found was an impressive collection of features that, compared to Facebook, made it a more compelling and logical place for business. The circles feature was a particularly useful expedient for keeping work/social life aspects firmly and easily separated. One of Facebook's great weaknesses, and a reason it's not been adopted for business like Twitter, is it is very hard to create a firm separation between your personal profile and your professional profile.

Your audience is captured and motivated: Podcast listeners download your podcast by choice. It offers them the content they want. They listen to it to the exclusion of competing media. Unlike listening to music, spoken word podcasts require a greater cognitive investment.

Last blog post we covered some ways to handle the inevitable: finding a customer, tearing down your product or company on some social network. To sum up: take a deep breath, respond with empathetic language, and remember you're playing to the customer's audience.

So, are you racking up large number of Twitter followers or Facebook? Slow down. All that effort might not be doing you any good. Spreading a message is not the same as affecting people with the message. Unless you have the ability to reach thousand or millions of people with empathetic talents of Oprah, re-think your strategy. It's better to build smaller number of high quality online relationships versus thousands of low quality associations. Target users who likewise seem to use their Twitter of Facebook accounts to maintain high quality online relationships.

LinkedIn Answers provides multiple ways for an entrepreneur to market his/her services. Frequently a LinkedIn question might be an overt call for a product recommendation. Sometimes the user is a bit more vague. The user does not want a direct pitch. But merely showing up in the comments with relevant, on-topic knowledge can help you turn up a sales lead. The problem with LinkedIn Answers is finding topics you can comment on effectively can be time consuming. The system has a search engine but it can require some effort to daily search the section for questions that match various key words. Fortunately LinkedIn Answers now has a Twitter account that shoots out new topics as a tweet. Twitter and the power of BlueCamroo's Social Network Scout come to the rescue!