Insights for Running Better Business

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.

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.

The most powerful trend these days in communicating information is the "infographic". As the name implies, it's communicating information using images. Anyone who has ever witnessed a political race knows how powerful a pie chart or bar chart can be ("Number babies my opponent eats per month"). Good infographics take it to the next level, presenting complex information in ways that are easy to digest and scales/relationships can be quickly grasped.

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.

Be careful about who you outsource your online reputation management to. Make sure the company has responsible track record. It's not some foaming-at-the-mouth kook operating from a laptop in a Starbucks.

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.

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.

BlueCamroo's Social Network Scout provides a number of ways to monitor your online reputation. Searches under Social Network Scout Buzz and Support channels can keep you on top of bad PR wafting its way through Twitter and Facebook. Unfortunately, even Social Network Scout can't (yet) provide the kid gloves needed to handle these types of situations. What do you do?