Insights for Running Better Business

Take a step back. What ARE you protecting? The Crown Jewels? Then crank up the CAPTCHA. A random spam comment showing up once a week on your company blog? If you're running a company blog, you're going to want to be vigilant anyway. Cleaning up some spam isn't that onerous of a job. You can also make your blog comments requiring approval before posting. The danger in this approach is the honest blog commenter is robbed of the instant gratification of seeing his/her words posted immediately. If you're trying to nurture engagement, it's a good way to snuff it out.

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.

The stats are pretty hard to deny. Blogging leads to more traffic and more leads. If you blog on at least a weekly basis, you can double the number of leads. With so much buzz about Twitter and Facebook, blogging seems downright old school. Social networking has not replaced blogging, any more so than cardio exercises replace strength training. They work very different aspects.

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.

What makes Wikipedia valuable is it's a quick and dirty tool is for many topics it's a great way to quickly get up to speed on certain topics. If used with the proper nuance, Wikipedia is an invaluable source of information.

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.