Why Pinterest is Where Your Business Needs to Be

A sample of the beautiful content to be found on Pinterest.                                    Image: Tokens of Living

Pinterest was heralded as the fastest growing website ever in February of this year reaching 11.7 million unique monthly users after having only 7.5 million in December of the previous year. As of September 2012 the social sharing website had around 23 million users. Pinterest just about doubled their massive user base in less than a year. What’s the take away from all these stats? People like Pinterest!

People like Pinterest because of the gorgeous visual content they can find on the site. The images on the site are sumptuous, stunning, a feast for the eyes! And the holidays are a sumptuous time of year. There are lights and ornaments and lots of rich food enticingly presented. A feast for the eyes. There is no better time to time than right now to take your business to Pinterest and start engaging and contributing to the web’s most popular visual smorgasbord.

Now not every business may benefit from a Pinterest presence. If your product or service cannot be presented in beautiful, visually exciting way, then Pinterest is not the Social site for you. But barring that, get on Pinterest!

The average Pinterest user spends nearly 90 minutes browsing the site, that’s 90 minutes in which they can find, like, and repin your content. And, according to venturebeat.com  “Pinterest generates over four times as much revenue per click (attributable to first touch) as Twitter and 27% more revenue per click than Facebook.” “Attributable to first touch” means that Pinterest is the social website that brings businesses more new customers than any other social networking site. (If that’s not a good reason to get on Pinterest I don’t know what is.)

Graph from venturebeat.com

So how will Pinterest build your revenue? Directly and indirectly.

• Directly, it will allow Pinterest users to view your pins and if they like what they see they will click on the image, and (if you have pinned from the purchasing page of your website) they will be taken directly to where they can buy your product.
• Indirectly, users will repin your content and others will see it from there and repin it themselves and some of those who come in contact with your content will buy from you. A solid Pinterest presence will also contribute to word of mouth marketing for your business, give you increased visibility and bolster your reputation as a trusted brand.

Still not convinced?

Let’s take a look at Pinterest in action. This is an example of how Pinterest can help your business:

This photo comes from the blog of the world’s current most popular pinner, Joy Cho. (The picture of the caramel was pinned on Pinterest. Crack caramel is the name of the brand that makes the candy in the image.) Below is a comment in response to the blog post:

Now, aside from the response to the personal story Cho has shared (which is a best practice on social by the way) the operative part of this comment is: “Now I have to check this new-found crack out”

Granted, this is a response to Cho’s blog and not her Pinterest account, this is a brilliant example of how Pinterest can work for you. While it may not be written down, this is how Pinterest users will react to seeing your products displayed beautifully and enticingly on Pinterest.

At the end of the day, Pinterest drives sales and is great free advertising, and that’s why your business needs to be on Pinterest. Now go and do!

ps. Stay tuned for my next post about how to use Pinterest and how to use online tools to help you use it better

Twitter Conspiracy Theory!

A little social media information to ruminate on.

Facebook has announced that it is changing the name of the ‘Subscribe’ feature to ‘Follow’. So effectively, we will no longer Subscribe to Mark Zuckerburg’s and our favourite celebrities’ Facebook streams, from now on we will be Following them.

Now why does that sound familiar? Oh, that’s right, because that’s what Twitter calls it!

For those of you who may not know, Subscribing to a person on Facebook is the way to stay informed of what a Facebook user, who is not your Friend, is up to. When you Subscribe to a person you will receive updates on your wall about the posts that they choose to make public.

So in terms of function, the Facebook Follow is not all that different from the Twitter Follow.

On top of this, Instagram, the extremely popular photo sharing app that was purchased by Facebook in April for $1 Billion, has recently disabled integration with Twitter Cards. This means that users can still share Instagram images on Twitter, but they look too big for the space provided and end up cropped in unflattering ways. To view an Instagram image in it’s entirety users must now be redirected to Instagram.com.

So what does this all mean? Are Instagram and its parent company Facebook trying to shut out and destroy Twitter? Maybe…it certainly does seem suspicious, these two changes happening so close together.

But the official story is that Facebook is changing the name of the Subscribe feature to avoid confusion, because subscribing is something that costs money and Facebook wants it to be clear that there is no charge to Subscribe to others streams. And as for Instagram disabling integration with Twitter cards, well that just comes down to eventually making money from the photo sharing sensation. Because directing all of the Twitter users viewing Instagram images to the offical Instagram website means a lot of traffic for that website. And a busy website lends itself to monetisation through advertising.

So, after a double whammy from Facebook and co. should Twitter be worried?…Probably not. People were tweeting before Instagram came along and will most likely keep tweeting after it becomes slightly less convenient to tweet Instagram photos. It will be interesting to watch in the coming months how good Instagram.com is at producing revenue.

What do you think? Is this a clever sneak attack on Facebook’s part or just good business?

p.s. Keep a weather eye out for my next blog about Pinterest and how to use it to benefit your business.

We Are Lazy, So Make it Easy!

A couple of quick tips to improve your social media engagement style:

1. Reduce the number of clicks it takes to consume your content
2. Make yourself and all of your social media streams very easily accessible

Gone are the days when we were all astounded by the speed of the internet and new digital technologies. Fast loading websites and speedy access to information are now things to be demanded and expected, not something we are impressed by.

‘Just a click away’ is becoming one click too many. We really do want it all, and we want it now.

One painless, and brilliant, thing you can do to improve your social media/ web presence is to identify every extraneous, pointless, click to a link and get rid of the thing! Ask yourself, is there any way to put this directly onto the webpage? If there is, then do it! Right now.

Another thing you must do is to make yourself unbelievably accessible. Every contact point should notify customers and consumers of every other contact point.

For example, if a person Likes this blog post a little clickable picture is displayed. And, once clicked, that picture takes you to a Gravatar profile. This profile is a golden opportunity to make yourself more accessible. You can add a link to your own blog, to your Facebook, to your Twitter, to your Linkedin, to your Pinterest!…one touchpoint sending consumers and fans to every other touchpoint.

This is my Gravatar profile click here to see it in the flesh

I’ve included a picture of my own Gravatar profile as an example and here’s a link to it so you can see what I mean about being unbelievably accessible. From seeing just my Gravatar account you can now reach me in 11 different ways!

You can promote your social media profiles everywhere – have links to your profiles on every page of your website, in print advertising, on your business cards and in television ads. Making yourself very accessible gives consumers the freedom to engage with you where they want to engage with you. They might not usually blog but they Facebook all the time, and having all your information available let’s consumers know quickly and easily that you are on Facebook too and that they can reach you there anytime. Without having to go through the hard work of copying and pasting your name into Facebook’s search box. (That’s about five clicks instead of one. Honestly, who can be bothered?)

Like I said, we are lazy. So increase your chances of connecting with your customers by making engaging with you and your content unbelievably easy.

The 2 Essential Questions to Ask Yourself Before (or after) Engaging on Social Media

Today I want to take a look at the fundamentals of engaging on social media. The root of the root. There’s a lot of noise out there about going Social and this can lead to confusion and confused thinking. To help you get into the right headspace for successful social media engagement I’m going to take you through the two essential questions you need to ask yourself before you start engaging on social media. (These questions will still be helpful even if you have already started engaging.)

 Why am I getting involved in social media?

If your answer to this question doesn’t come down to dollars and cents then, as a business, you are probably engaging for the wrong reasons. And starting off with the wrong reasons can negatively effect your whole Social strategy.

A good way to think about social media is to think of if like a networking event. What does your business get out of a networking event?

• Brand exposure

• Lead generation

• Free advertising

Your best outcome from a networking event is meeting an ideal customer that really wants to buy from us. That should be the goal for social.

Now, there are a lot of voices out there on the net telling you that you can’t sell on social media. Not true. You can sell, but only in the ways you would sell if you were at a networking event. Don’t be afraid to talk up your business. Just don’t go for the close. Nobody goes to a networking event to buy things. We go to make connections. This is the kind of attitude you want to enter the Social arena with. Anything else will just turn people off.

Imagine a pushy businessman cornering you at your next networking event. Maybe you do buy from him. But you won’t buy from him again. Why? Because you don’t appreciate an ambush. And that’s exactly the kind of attitude potential customers have on social media. You make the connection on Social, you close the sale elsewhere.

Meet that ideal customer on social media, then direct them to the places where your business closes sales. At the end of the day, your social media involvement should be making you money. Revenue is the ultimate goal. Relationships are the road to that goal.

What is my brand voice?

It’s time to ask yourself, who am I? No, I’m not getting existential, it’s important to know what your business and your brand stand for in order to make a lasting impact on your customers and on your social audience.

A brand voice goes beyond a logo and a jingle. A brand voice is the message and vibe that you impress upon your customers at every contact point. Your brand voice is what a customer thinks of when they think of you.

Social media is giving businesses and brands the opportunity to interact with customers like a whole and united person. It’s giving businesses a voice. Using this voice properly leads to deeper connection with and ultimately greater loyalty from your customers. But your customers can’t connect with you if your business is sending out mixed messages. Your brand voice needs to be consistent. You can’t be everything to everyone, as much as you might want to be. To create a brand voice you need one powerful, passionate, positive, message that you can consistently communicate to your customers and your audience through every piece of advertising and content you push out.

Not sure you have a brand voice? Here’s a great way to find out. Take every piece of advertising you’ve pushed out lately, traditional and social media, and spread it out in front of you. Include your business cards and maybe a printed screenshot of your website. Do you get one resounding message from all of that? 

If your answer is yes, then congratulations! You have a brand voice. Build on that voice as you post, comment, and tweet on social media.

If your answer is no, then congratulations! You now have the chance to be creative and insightful. Think about why you went into business in the first place, think about what your products or services offer your customers, imagine what you want them to associate with your brand.If that doesn’t help you create a brand voice you can always steal some ideas from your competitors!?! 

Your brand voice will help you determine the kind of content to send out and even what social networks to engage on. Take the time to develop a clear and meaningful voice.

One last word

This is not in the form of a question but it is essential to getting you in the right headspace for social media.

Fail fast and fail often. 

Engaging on social media is not hard, but it’s not easy. You need to be prepared to fail. You will probably get a lot of misses on your content before you start hitting home-runs. And that’s okay. That’s how you learn and refine your Social strategy.

Failing fast is the key here though, don’t wait to try a little something new on Social. The faster you fail, the faster you learn, and the faster you start getting some wins.

So there you have it. Two simple questions to get you on the right track to using social media successfully. Now go and do.

 

 

Inspiration for Social Media Engagement

“Good artists copy,

great artists steal.”

Pablo Picasso

Picasso was talking about looking around at the best ideas out there and making them your own. In this sense, to steal an idea is to take something of value and make it yours. It’s about nurturing borrowed seeds of inspiration until you have something genius and amazing that’s almost unrecognisable from the seeds you started out with.

With social media being a relatively new medium, hard and fast best practices are difficult to come by. Even so, there are many businesses out there who are engaging on social media incredibly successfully. I’d like to take a look at some of these organisation’s tactics, and see if there aren’t any great ideas there that we can steal.

Pepsico

• Don’t talk about yourself too much, but don’t talk about yourself too little! Having a healthy mix of brand-focused and non-brand-focused posts does not equal erring on the side of conversational, non-brand-centric posts. According to George Smith, Pepsico’s senior manager,social and CRM strategy, not posting a lot about your brand might be a mistake, because the reason users “Like” your brand is that they want to hear more about it.¹

• Attach your brand to popular content – In May 2012 Pepsi Brazil launched a campaign on Facebook in partnership with a Brazilian family made popular by a funny YouTube video. A mere nine days after the video was launched the Pepsi Brazil Facebook page reached more than 500,000 fans.²

The Pepsi brand uses this tactic on a grander scale with its involvement with the American TV talent show, The X factor. (There are social media competitions with X factor related prizes, such as a trip to the X factor set. Opinion polls, “Who do you think is going to win The X factor?” And Twitter feed panels on Pepsi.com featuring the best and most positive #Xfactor tweets.) But I chose the Pepsi Brazil example to better showcase how this tactic is within reach for both small and large businesses alike. You don’t have to sponsor a major TV production to reap benefits from popular content.

McDonald’s

In a brilliant podcast interview³ Rick Wion, Director of social media at McDonald’s, shares some fantastic insights into the McDonald’s Social strategy.

• Mini contests! – A genius idea from the fast food giant. Regularly schedule mini contests on your social media feeds, in the form of “The first 10 people to “Like” this will receive a coupon for a free X!” Reward your customers for engaging with your business without breaking the bank and encourage consumers to stay engaged with your brand.
• Leverage the networks of your existing fans to promote new products – Wion describes a new burger McDonald’s is rolling out and explains how they are going to run a mini contest and reward participants with coupons for the new burger. He says: “If they like it, then hopefully they’ll tweet about it, and then more people will see that, “Oh, this is a great sandwich. I’ve got to go buy it for myself.””
• Make friends with an avid blogger – Build relationships with influential bloggers that have the ear of your target demographic. They can help spread good feeling about your brand. Give these bloggers positive stories to tell about how your business sponsored their last conference for instance. Or if you’re a small business and can’t afford to sponsor a conference, just be human to them. Like their posts. Make insightful comments. Post links to their blog on your Facebook feed. Give and give lots before you ask for the get. Be genuine.

Starbucks

• Product co-creation through crowdsourcing – Ask the people what they want, then give it to them! Customer engagement, market research, experimentation and social media all in one beautiful package. Starbucks uses an individual website, “mystarbucksidea.force.com”, to gather consumer ideas but it is not strictly necessary to do so. A simple Facebook poll asking your customers whether they would prefer one new product or feature over another would be great place start.

Kraft Foods Oreo

• Be current –Talking about today’s most talked about issues will make customers want to talk about you!No person and no brand exists in a vacuum. Humanise your brand with posts and comments about current events. Customers are more likely to engage with and share posts from a social media feed where they can discuss the latest current events than one on which they can’t.

Oreo’s last Facebook campaign is a brilliant example of this. From June 25 to October 2, the Oreos creative team developed 100 pieces of content that featured celebrations, events and more – and in a way that showcased the product.⁴

• Spread some of your social media fame around – When your audience starts to build you can entangle them further by sharing the spotlight and making them feel valued and important. Oreo has come up with a fantastic way of doing this with their “Birthday of the Day” idea. By first Liking the Oreo Facebook page fans can upload a picture and have the chance to feature on the Oreo’s coverphoto.

Miscellaneous (but still good advice)

Be charitable – It’s good to be good. Generosity is a virtue and showing consumers that your brand is virtuous is never a bad idea. Find a cause that your consumers will care about and tie it in with your social media efforts. Helping people is a meaningful exercise. By allowing your consumers to help people by engaging with your brand you will make the engagement process meaningful. And deepen your relationship with your consumers. A couple of ways to go about this are:

• Encourage your customers to Like or Follow you by pledging to donate a certain amount for every person who does so.
• Donate to a charity and spread the word about your good deed through your social media channels. You could ask consumers to help spread the word about the charity by Sharing or Retweeting your post.

One Last Thing

No one has social media completely figured out yet. Give yourself and your employees permission to try something new. Be bold and adventurous and play with this new medium. The way we do business is in a state of change as every sector searches for the most effective ways to benefit from the Social platform. Now is the time for brilliance and innovation. We all have the chance to do something that has never been done before.

Inspired yet? Intrigued? Good. Now go and do!

1 http://www.businessinsider.com/pepsi-social-media-chiefs-strategy-homophily-2012-9#ixzz2CuOuRjU6

2http://www.pepsico.com/Story/PepsiCo-Brazils-social-media-strategies-gain-consumer-recognition05102012.html

3http://www.convinceandconvert.com/social-pros-podcast/how-mcdonalds-handles-thousands-of-social-mentions-per-day/

4http://www.facebook.com/oreo?fref=ts

The User Experience Needs a Holistic Approach

As social media becomes more pervasive in everyday life it needs to become more pervasive in business. I believe that in the coming years we are going to see a restructuring of ‘business as usual’ to include a social element in and across almost all departments. Social data is going to influence the decisions businesses are making right across the board. From product development right up to the big picture thinking of CEOs. Business is evolving and is going to evolve to fit into the digital-social era that we are moving into.

The aspect of ‘evolving business’ that I’d like to focus on today is User Experience, UX. Social media has added another element to this facet of the selling process. Today, we are better able to provide an exceptional user experience to more customers because of the social data that we have available. And we are also better able to reap more benefits from the exceptional experience we provide through the social spread of our consumers’ satisfaction with our brand.

Now, user experience is traditionally thought of as being made up of two features:

The user’s experience of the brand – advertising, customer service, sales, in-store experience (if you have a premises)

The user’s experience of the product(s) – aesthetics, ease of use, does it do what was promised? Did it break?

With the knowledge that social data affords us, our definition of UX needs to evolve to include these three new elements:

1. How the user felt about their experience – Sentiment is becoming a more important part of the purchasing process. In a Social world where relationships are king the feelings generated within these relationships will drive consumer behaviour. The more positive and meaningful your relationships are, the more loyal your customers are going to be.

I liken this to what I call the “the more things change, the more they stay the same”principle. Social media is bringing business back to its roots, but on a grander scale. The user experience that our grandparents and our parents had, being on a first name basis with the butcher and baker, is coming back into fashion. But instead of the butcher interacting with tens of well-loved customers, multinationals are interacting with tens of thousands of well-loved customers. In order to stay relevant and to ensure consumer loyalty we need to become friends with our customers.

2. What the user did in response to this experience – Monitoring what your customers do after interacting with your business will help you streamline your entire service process. The insights that you gain by investigating this element of the user experience will help you to provide a service and a product that is exactly what your consumers want.

Through the power of Big Data and predictive analytics, marketing has never-before-insight into what customers want and how they buy. By leveraging the knowledge that social data provides we can more effectively spot the point in the buying process where potential customers are dropping out. By changing our practices accordingly we can capture a sale, and from there a potential evangelist, where before there was a loss of interest.

3. What they will tell others – What brand or product stories will your customers spread? This, to me, is the most important element of the user experience. This is the element that all of the other user experience elements feed in to. In the new Social business era we are approaching, what your users tell other people is the facet of UX that will do your business the most good.

As social media takes the spread of information to new speeds and distances, digital word-of-mouth is becoming a marketing cornerstone.

With the average Facebook user having 130 friends¹, for every person that says something nice about your brand, that is potentially 130 people that feel better about your brand because of a favourable comment. 130 people that are more likely to buy from you because their friend recommends you.

As the social media revolution allows businesses to get to know their customers and their buying habits more intimately than ever before, the user experience will call for a more holistic approach. Not in the form of mind, body, spirit, but in the form of feelings, actions, story. A healthy balance between these three experience points will make for an optimal and profitable B2C relationship.

What other elements of business can you see that we need to change our understanding of? How is your business adapting to the social era? Comment below. I’d be glad to hear from you!

1http://www.digitalbuzzblog.com/social-media-statistics-stats-2012-infographic/

Turn Pain into Pleasure with Social Customer Service

 Pleasure and pain. The two great motivators.

When a business provides an excellent product or service, that business brings pleasure to their consumers. They generate good feelings. And these good feelings motivate praise, return business and recommendation.

In the Social world we now live in the power of recommendation is stronger than ever before. With the web 2.0 spreading information in real time to all four corners of the globe, word-of-mouth advertising is taking on new importance in the marketing scope of every business. A huge amount of benefit can be gained through the Social spread of good feelings about your business.

Unfortunately customer sentiment towards your brand will not always be 100% positive. Unavoidably, there will be times when your business is the cause of customer pain. And it is at these times when customer service, pain alleviation, comes in to play.

Today, the face of customer service is changing. With businesses being reachable through more and more channels, customers are now taking their pick as to which channel to engage on when it comes to customer service enquiries. Consumers are posting and tweeting complaints to commercial feeds regardless of whether or not a brand is set up for social care.

47% of consumers seek to connect with brands via social media for pain alleviation and complaint resolution. And 30% of consumers say that they prefer social care to the traditional customer service phone call. As social media becomes further and further integrated in our everyday lives these numbers are going to grow.

Integrating a Social element into your customer service department is the way to go to keep up with consumer demand and to stay relevant ahead of competitors in this dawning Social age.

Plus, social customer service is a great way to make lemonade out of lemons!

Consumers that receive excellent social care are 52%[1] more likely to recommend a brand than consumers receiving poor or no social care (ie. receiving no response).

By engaging thoughtfully and helpfully with your customers through the channel that they choose to engage your business on you can turn a naysayer into a loyal brand advocate. And this will change not only consumer sentiment, but how people perceive your brand. By embracing social customer service now before it becomes standard practice your brand can add cutting edge to its list of descriptors.

Here are three top tips to apply in your business when using social media for customer service:

        Be Personable – When it comes to Social interaction, consumers like to feel that they are being truly heard and not merely placated by some tin-hearted automated service. By adding the name of the customer service representative responding to the end of every tweet or Facebook post you will humanise both your brand and your brand’s social care process making for a more positive experience.

       Be timely – The immediacy of Social communication is the main motivator behind consumers attempting to contact businesses in this way. In order to wow dissatisfied consumers into becoming brand evangelists your response time needs to be low. The very best organisations that deliver social care boast an average initial response time of between 26 and 36 minutes.[2]

        Integrate – Social media efforts cannot exist as an independent branch of your business. Especially in the case of customer service, the Social element of this department needs to feed into and flow out of the traditional processes already in place. If those who monitor your social network feeds are not the same people as those who provide customer service then you need to have procedures in place to escalate issues as seamlessly as possible. This ensures a premium customer service experience that consumers will talk about.

 

Two years from now, a company without social care will look just as odd as one without a website looks now. Get ahead of the game! Don’t wait to make your business more responsive and customer-centric. Become known for your exceptional customer service. Invest in social care and make your brand famous for turning pain into pleasure.

 

 [1]    http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/new-study-reveals-that-todays-consumers-demand-customer-service-via-social-media-175781781.html

[2]   http://www.ignitesocialmedia.com/social-media-examples/top-brands-social-media-customer-service-facebook-twitter/

Excuses…Excuses – Why companies don’t engage on Social Media

The world is changing faster than it ever has before. It feels like everyday there’s a new gadget or feature or social network pushed out for us to play with. 30 years ago we didn’t have mobile phones, 20 years ago we didn’t have the internet. In less than a quarter of a lifetime we have the internet on our mobiles!

 All this technological advancement is changing the way people lead their everyday lives. Business is all about people. The way we do business needs to change as people change. Simple as that. That’s why it’s so baffling to me that so many companies are lagging behind when it comes to embracing social media. There just is no excuse not to go social. That’s why I’ve compiled a list of the most common excuses not to go social and explained why they won’t cut it.

 No ROI – One tweet in an engaged community vs a $20,000 ad in a newspaper. To debate no ROI in Social Media is to have a complete lack of sense of where the world is going

Metrics aren’t reliable – How reliable are the metrics on radio, or on a billboard or an ad in a newspaper – these are dramatically less reliable than social media stats.

 Social Media is too young – Social Media is relationship based marketing, you can’t just throw money at it later. Those that get the relationship first in this relationship world, will have the advantage. Don’t wait, because while you are waiting, someone else is grabbing those relationships.

Social Media is just another trend – Human beings want to communicate, it is an enabler to communication. Enough said.

 Need to control our message – Your customers can comment and take your message to another place. Tough! That is the way it is. Social is a conversation medium. Get your brand strategy right and engage more. Communicate with your followers. Turn negative feedback into opportunities.

 No time, no money – Do an audit on what you are spending your money on and change. Don’t just run a conventional ad, because that’s what you have always done. Change the game, re-invest your $$. The internet is still young, innovation is still coming. Trends are just starting. Smartphones are going to do more and more. These are the places your ads need to be.

 Doing fine without it – How many businesses have been put out of business by embracing innovation? Don’t wait, like Gerry Harvey of the failing Harvey Norman, did to get an online store. It’s so obvious where the world is going. Be the innovator. Get the relationships first.

 Tried it and it did not work – 90% of consumer products launched fail, do you stop launching new products? This is a long term strategy. Relationships do not get built overnight. Most ads fail, relationships don’t fail.

 Legal issues – Lawyers don’t run the company, executives do! It is the duty of the CEO, or COO to understand where the world is going and make this new reality work. Do what you have to do to make it work.

 Too long to pay off – This is short term thinking on a long term play. People who think this do not have the company’s best interests at heart. Building a brand, trust, and relationships, take time. Social media is no different.

 Only works for start ups – Human beings LIVE in Social Media. Go to where the conversation is being held. The reality is that Facebook accounts for 1 in every 11 internet visits.¹ And internet users spend nearly a quarter of their time online social networking.² Social networks are where you want to be.

 

 There. We’ve busted through all of the excuses. Now it’s time to dust yourself off and engage.

 Where to begin…

 Begin with yourself – The best campaigns start with the passionate person behind them. Do some research, get knowledgeable about social media and get passionate about it. This is a long term play but the juice is most definitely worth the squeeze and you need to keep your energy up and your passion blazing to power through the ups and downs of starting something new.

 Commit Whole Hog – If you are going to do this go all in. Assume steps will be missed, comments will be made that you will not like, lawyers will get involved, PR will get involved, that is the pain for the gain. People are making different decisions today, they are walking around with iPads, Kindles, Androids. People are not looking at billboards, they are looking at their social media. This is where you need to be. Commit to getting there.

 Set the tone – Executives need to lead by example. Get involved. Expand your world. Post something on Facebook, LinkedIn. Comment on a tweet. Get you Klout scores up. Social is about Authenticity. No one will heed you if you ask people to do what I say, not what I do.

 Invest in Employees – Don’t just hire people to take your business social. Invest in people and educate them on how to get involved in Social Media. This is not just young people. We need to train and support all employees on Social Media to make this scale.

 Trust your people – To be transparent and authentic, trust your people. PR is B2B, employees are B2C. Yes someone will Tweet something you won’t like. No consumer believes that one bad tweet should shut down a company. Train and trust. Be prepared and assume that something will go wrong, but a lot will go right and you will get that benefit.

 Be Authentic – Understand that consumers are very cynical today. The amount of content created is pounding consumers. You can’t just SELL to people, they can smell people trying to sell a mile away. You need to genuinely be their friend. One–on–one marketing.

 Social Media goes hand in hand with traditional media – People watch TV with a mobile device in their hand, listen to the radio with a mobile in their hand. Engage with them, engage with your community. Be creative. Don’t just sell to your community if you really care about them. BRING traditional advertising to Social. Don’t spam people online. Get them to respond to your traditional ads through social media. Make the process meaningful and consumer will respond.

 Thank you – Companies are really good at answering the complaints, but terrible at thanking the good comments and engaging with them, carrying that conversation further. Say, thank you! Build stronger relationships with your customers through agenda-less positive interaction.

 

Now go and do! There are no excuses left.

 

 

 

1http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/facebook-accounts-for-1-in-every-5-pageviews/8491

2http://thesocialskinny.com/216-social-media-and-internet-statistics-september-2012/

Embrace . . . Engage . . . Or die!

Great article. Traditionalists need to make room for the young champions to increase their profiles in the market place.

damienschulze

Embrace  . . .  Engage . . . Or die!

It is interesting catching up with business owners who debate the effectiveness or the need to embrace tech change.

In some discussions, it would seem fair to say that there is either a reluctance to embrace it or a genuine fear of all things digital and social.   The truth is, this change is not slowing down.   There is no time to sit back and wait.   The time to act is now.   But it takes a bit of convincing when you consider the hurdles that stare the traditional business owner in the face.   Consider a few of them here.

“We’ve tried and social media failed us!”   There are lots of things that don’t work the first time you try them.   But the idea is to get up and give it another go.   And it is important to “fail fast” so you…

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Do you know who We are?

Do you know who We are?.