Insights for Running Better Business

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.