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How social media enhances the customer experience

Stan Carlberg — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 20:46:20 +0000

As many companies are beginning to learn, social media is much more than building your brand and selling products and services online. It can also be used to protect and manage a company’s reputation.

Recently, there have been a number of articles about how social media helps businesses connect with customers and quickly resolve customer complaints before they gain momentum across the Internet.

In the article, “Turning to Twitter to fix restaurant complaints,” the popular food chain Chipotle describes how a customer Tweeted on the spot their disappointment that a Fort Worth, Texas, location didn’t have corn tortillas. Chipotle, which has employees dedicated to social media, immediately had the Denver, Colo.-based corporate office call the local manager about the situation before the customer even left the restaurant. Now that’s customer service!

The reason businesses are taking notice stems from the idea that if someone with 1,000 followers writes a negative review about a company, 1,000 people will believe whatever is said about the company. Social media enables businesses to provide instantaneous customer service that can help curb problems and enhance the customer experience.

Because of these types of stories, organizations are beginning to catch on. In a recent survey by communication agency Cone, 86% of consumers now connect with companies on new media, an 8% jump from last year. As more and more businesses are building a presence on new media sites, corporate marketers should be forewarned about the increasing interest in brand engagement via new media.

Mike Hollywood, Cone’s director of new media, said “the best new media strategies are those that balance relevant content with timely promotions and ongoing company-consumer dialogue.”

With 59% of respondents saying they make purchases with companies they engaged through new media, it’s becoming increasingly clear that businesses should be making it a priority to include social media in their corporate marketing strategy to provide the level of customer service needed in today’s digital age.

Great marketing content deserves 9 lives

Stan Carlberg — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 23:52:52 +0000

So, you’ve written a great press release. Your announcement is getting some nice pickup online and you’ve even scheduled a couple of interviews with interested media. From a PR perspective, you can pat yourself on the back for a job well done. From a content marketing standpoint, however, it’s a job well started.

As the title suggests, great marketing content deserves nine lives. Having your marketing material sit idle in a single format — whether it’s a press release, white paper or case study — significantly limits the desired results for your corporate marketing campaign. The truth is, everyone absorbs information differently, and we all have different preferences on how we like to communicate online. Nowadays, limiting your content to a single medium might as well be considered a marketing crime because you’re probably losing money on opportunities that would otherwise present themselves through different social media tools.

With the content already written, the next step is to consider how you can repurpose the copy to get it in front of the real audience you’re targeting — your prospects and customers. With so many social media tools at your disposal, it is essential that you leverage them to increase your chances of reaching your target audience. The following are some of the top social media tools you should consider leveraging for all of your marketing content:

1. Website.

2. Blog. How can a company expect to get the good word out there if they aren’t blogging about it? They can’t. A blog is a critical outlet to voice your thoughts and tie your messages with your industry’s hottest topics.

3. Newsletter. In order to successfully develop a monthly newsletter, repurposing content you’ve recently developed provides a recap of company announcements, unique insights, and industry news you’ve blogged about that your customers might not have come across.

4. Twitter. It goes without saying that any time you blog or make an announcement, you should also Tweet about it. However, because Twitter is an interactive tool, simply posting it is not enough. Repurposing your content to strike up a conversation is essential to spreading the word and positioning yourself as a thought leader.

5. Powerpoint presentation. Industry information in the form of trends, stats or graphics that you’ve included in a white paper, case study or blog can be repurposed into effective Powerpoint slides you can use in customer meetings or webinars.

6. YouTube. Any time you’ve got visuals, whether it’s a compelling screenshot or a videotaped interview at a trade show, posting it on a popular shared-video website like YouTube is another way to get your message out there and position your company as an industry leader.

7. Customer email. We’re always looking for a reason to touch base with our customers and prospects. And there’s no better reason than providing them with useful or educational content they can use to solve problems or make better business decisions.

8. Facebook/LinkedIn, etc. Online social networks and communities no longer limit themselves to family photos of your recent summer vacation. As one of the fastest growing social media tools for companies, leveraging popular online social networks is essential to any marketing program.

9. Contributing article. Online publications are always looking for good material. While they never encourage content that is self-serving, they often publish educational articles from executives and other experts in a particular field. If someone in your company is writing a contributing article, chances are your marketing team has already developed materials that can help support the key points they are trying to make in the article.

So, the next time you make a company announcement or post a blog, consider how you can repurpose or customize existing content for another platform. By leveraging multiple social media tools and channels, you are giving your marketing content the nine lives it deserves to reach your target audience, create new opportunities, and nurture your leads through the sales process.

Getting value from your business blog – tagging to drive website content

Scott Olson — Wed, 12 May 2010 15:39:40 +0000

Wondering how you can get value out of your business blog. Here is an idea that I have seen clients and other sites using with great effectiveness. Use blog post tagging to automatically populate posts to relevant pages on your website.

Do you sell into different industries? Tag posts appropriately and design your industry page to pull the appropriate posts into a featured side bar.

Posting about product updates, feedback or features? Link those posts to your product page.

Your blog can be used in so many ways to create relevancy for your prospects, partners and customers. The content you create on your blog can be some of the most valuable web content you have because of its currency and relevancy to very specific topics. Whether you use it to nurture leads with email marketing, or to drive fresh web content, look for ways to use your blog across your business goals and you will make the most of your investment in this important marketing asset.

Using community to promote your product – A look at Seth Godin’s promotion of “Linchpin”

Scott Olson — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 18:45:21 +0000

There are all kinds of books and experts who will show you how to use social media and your community to promote your product. Certainly product promotion has changed, the power of advertising has diminished and leveraging the interconnected nature of your user community is a must for a social media launch.

Rather than generate another in a long line of posts of how to do this, I thought I point to a great example of someone doing this right now. Seth Godin is promoting his new book, “Linchpin“, and is leveraging his considerable network to get the word out.

In advance of the launch of his latest book, Seth Godin asked the followers on his blog to contribute $30 or more to the Acumen Fund and in return he would send the first 3,000 contributors an early copy to read and review. I signed up for my copy and should be receiving it this week.

This is a brilliant promotion and leverages grass roots support to get the word out about his book in contrast to traditional costly marketing campaigns. Now, Seth Godin is one of the top bloggers on the net and has a huge following, but here are some things we can all learn about his approach to generating buzz for his new book:

Begin with your fans – Seth began by posting this promotion on his own blog. This is a collection of the people most predisposed to already value what Seth has to say because he knows that they are already reading his blog.
Use scarcity to create value and generate a quick response – By limiting this promotion to 3,000 copies of his book, Seth simultaneously created a value in being one of the 3,000 and generated an immediate response. By responding quickly, I knew that I would be one of 3,000 people who had a chance to read this book early and post my review. Because there is relative scarcity, I knew that my review would have value to my own blog.
Make sure participants are invested – Requiring participants to contribute to the Acumen Fund made sure that the people who received the early copy of the book valued it and would be more likely to read and write an advance review of the book. A free promotion would likely yield watered down results.
Ask participants to talk about your product – The goal in all of this is to promote your product of course. Make it explicit. Seth Godin specifically asked the people who participated to read and review his book in advance of its release.
Connect participants with each other – Seth Godin and Acumen fund set up an online community for everyone who participated in this promotion and used it to generate anticipation for the book as well as promotion of the Acumen charity.
Communicate regularly in advance of the review – I have received regular e-mails both from Seth Godin’s team and the Accumen community that remind me about the upcoming delivery of the book so I have set aside the time to review it in my calendar.

I am looking forward to receiving, reading and reviewing Linchpin this week. That said, I think that there is as much to learn from the way Seth is promoting this book as what might be in the book itself. Translate some of these techniques into your own products and think about how they might be used to engage your community in promoting your latest product.

Guidelines for competitive positioning? Don’t emulate Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer.

Scott Olson — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 06:59:46 +0000

This is an old clip, but in honor of Apple’s iPhone officially passing Windows Mobile market share I thought it was worth pulling back up Steve Ballmer’s original reaction to the announcement of the iPhone.

This may be one of the worst examples of a CEO talking about a serious competitor that I have seen. The mocking laugh and outright disregard, for what anyone with any foresight could see was going to be a serious competitor, is inexcusable. If I were a shareholder of Microsoft, which I am not, I would be outside Ballmer’s office with torch and pitchfork for forfeiting a 9 year head start in the market to Apple because of lack of vision.

Want to avoid sticking your foot in your mouth? Here are some guidelines for positioning against the competition:

Understand your market. You ought to have an advantage with a given audience relative to your competition. If you don’t you are in big trouble. Hopefully this advantage can extend to a larger audience over time. Whether your advantage is technological, user experience, cost or another advantage make sure you understand that and communicate that.
Never underestimate your competition. Don’t believe your own marketing that you have the best solution in the market and that your position is safe. Your competition typically is far more capable that your internal team will give them credit for. Talk to customers where you lost deals to them to get a clearer picture.
Never belittle your competition. This is the one that I can’t believe that CEO Ballmer never learned. You never win when you do this. Essentially you are saying to undecided customers that they are stupid if they are still considering your competition. Is there any better way to drive away some of the key customers you want to capture?
Let the market belittle your competition. Looking for the best way to ruin your competition’s reputation? Build a kick ass product. With the advent of social media, crappy products can’t stand the light of day. If you build a far superior product than your competition and engage online with your audience your fans will quickly point out your strengths over the competition without you getting dirty.
Build a case for the importance of your strengths. If you are competing with a strong competitor, be sure to get out there and champion your strengths as a critical component of a good product in your space and make sure that they really are. Blog, write contributed articles, engage analysts and your prospects in this discussion. Make sure people are looking for products with your strengths.

Competitive positioning is never easy. Be honest, be clear, and be respectful and you will be on your way.

New PR book focuses on shift from information distribution to customer interaction

Scott Olson — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 17:15:56 +0000

I came across a post today on one of my favorite web sites, Online Marketing Blog, from Lee Odden reviewing a new PR book “Putting the Public Back in Public Relations.” It’s a good review and the content looks interesting enough that I ordered the book to take on my trip next week.

The essence of the book is something that I believe strongly in and have posted about several times, and that is PR has fundamentally changed. The book looks like it addresses the shift in PR from simple information distribution to a strategy that utilizes content creation and social participation more fully. As companies experience diminishing returns on the way they have historically run PR they will need to adapt to the new media environment. Certainly it looks like it’s worth a read.

Bend Venture Conference wrap up – reasons for startup optimism

Scott Olson — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 17:17:42 +0000

Had a great time at the Bend Venture Conference last week. Congratulations to Precision Plant Systems who won the day and received the prize of $125k in venture funding. My personal favorite company presenting was Second Porch, located right here in Portland, OR and who is busy connecting second home owners to their personal connections who might like to rent their property.

I met a lot of great people at the conference and will definitely plan on attending next year. If you are in the northwest and are involved at all with startups, this conference is a great value and worth your time.

Keynote speaker Paul Kedrosky (Twitter @pkedrosky) was great. He spoke to the reasons for optimism in the venture community and for entrepreneurs in general. His reasons for optimism focused first on the shift away from the FIRE (Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate) industry of our greatest minds. One stat he used was that 40% of MIT grads in 2003 (I’m not sure of the year, but think that was it) went to wall street instead of new business creation.

Following his illustration of the shift away from the FIRE industry he outlined that 3.5 other reasons for optimism:

Democratization of credit – With the decrease in costs required to start a new business, the universal access to credit will allow more people than ever to start new businesses. He used Google as an example and a quote from Sergey Brin that they started Google with $15,000 spread across three credit cards. Here’s the quote from the encyclopedia.com site:

‘During this time Page and Brin were running the project out of their dorm rooms at Stanford. Page’s room served as the data hub, while Brin’s was the business office. But they were reluctant entrepreneurs, not wanting to shelve their Ph.D. studies and join the dot-com rush of the era. In mid-1998 they finally relented. “Pretty soon, we had 10,000 searches a day,” Page told Newsweek ‘s Steven Levy. “And we figured, maybe this is really real.” They initially set out just to defray their costs. “We spent about $15,000 on a terabyte [one million megabytes] of disks,” Brin explained to McGarvey. “We spread that across three credit cards. Once we did that, we wrote up a business plan.”‘

Peak science – Unfortunately I can’t remember the exact number, but I believe that it was something like 50% of the scientists who have ever been alive are alive today. He contrasted this with the false stat that 90% of the lawyers who have ever been alive are alive today. That’s not true, it’s something more like 5-10%. At any rate, we have more scientists applying their considerable knowledge to solving the worlds problems and Paul feels this will translate into new, profitable and useful businesses.
Idea transmissibility – Paul use the spread of forest fires to illustrate the spread of ideas. It turns out that if you only have a 50% tree density in a forest that the forest fire will stay fairly constrained and won’t spread severly. Take that number to 53% and the results are devastating in contrast. He feels that we have passed a threshold of connectedness such that ideas will likewise spread to solve important problems. Scientists rapidly work off the advancements and information from their peers resulting in rapid innovation.
Biotech contrarinaism – Currently he feels that the venture industry is much more pragmatic about biotech, an industry that he claims has had negative returns in its combined history. He refers to this as an “attractive nuisance” and says that attitudes toward these companies has changed and that is worth half a point of optimism in his scoring mechanism.

All in all he made some compelling points. My main take away from his talk was that the obstacles to business creation have never been lower and our best and brightest minds ought to apply themselves with haste to solving the worlds biggest problems and creating wealth, jobs and success in the process.

There is certainly a lot of momentum for this type of thinking. It has never been easier to start a business, create a product, and reach your ideal customers than today. I share Paul’s optimism and hope to see better days ahead for the startup community in the near future.

Startup PR? Content with a side of outreach and influence please.

Scott Olson — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 23:04:26 +0000

This just in. PR is changing in a big way and companies better change the way they think about traditional PR services. It used to be that the biggest part of your PR strategy consisted of managing your press release calendar and outreach strategy to the press and industry analysts. For bigger news this often was accompanied by a press tour where you would hop on a plane and make your visit to the New York, Boston, San Francisco triumvirate. Line up a customer quote and interview and wait for the articles to roll in.

No longer.

The days of the press tour are all but over for startups except for the very biggest news. There are many reasons for this, but the biggest is that print media as we knew it is over. The holy grail of trophies for your marketing communications department, a magazine cover, simply doesn’t hold the sway it once did. How long has it been since you read a magazine cover to cover? Even some of the largest papers are folding or canceling print versions. Media isn’t the same and by extension, neither is PR.

What does this mean for the startup marketing department who is trying to figure out their PR strategy? Opportunity. It helps by remembering what PR was all about in the first place. PR wasn’t about magazine covers or articles, it was about reaching your ideal audience with your message and news. The opportunity to do that has never been greater than today.

There are three keys to reaching your audience in today’s environment; content, outreach, and influence.

Content – Think like your own specialized publisher. Blogs, podcast interviews, webinars, and YouTube videos are all important to producing content that will be interesting to your ideal audience. Strong interesting content was always the key to reaching your audience. What has changed today is that you don’t have to rely upon print or other media to deliver that message. Every company should be self publishing on their own blog and other media channels like YouTube where appropriate.

Outreach – Outreach still includes the press. When you have a press release, a great reference customer, a new product launch, you should still engage the media and make your case. What has changed is that the avenue for your content is now much broader than just the press. Start with your marketing database. How large is that database? For startups this may be in the 10s of thousands and for larger companies the 100s of thousands or even the millions. What would you pay to reach a media audience like this with handpicked content that highlights your values and messaging? Your marketing database is an ideal audience for your quality content. Start with a monthly newsletter and fill it with your interesting original content. Highlight your top blog posts, interviews, videos, or webinars. Feature a customer story or upcoming events. Essentially you are publishing your own mini e-magazine with the same goal as other publications, content that is interesting to your audience. Distribute your content as well through Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube as appropriate.

Influence – Understand the key influencers in your industry and engage them. These can be analysts, press, bloggers or end users with an active social media presence. I am following a new company, Traackr, that just launched at DEMOfall09 who claims to help identify the key influencers for your industry. Once you understand who has influence in your industry, connect to them through social media. Reply to their tweets and blogs. Interview them for your own blog if possible. Invite them to look at your latest release or blog posting.

The media industry has changed forever and your PR strategy needs to change with it. Don’t forget the importance of your own original content, getting it to your ideal audience, and building connections to the key influencers for your industry and you will land yourself a large helping of success.

Blogging for business goals – followers vs. rich content

Scott Olson — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 21:46:05 +0000

I had a great conversation this morning with the executives of a successful startup about best practices for business blogging. We discussed many aspects of maintaining a business blog and one of the topics that arose was around whether comments were critical to blog success. I have blogged about comments as a metric of success for blogs before, but this time it took a little bit of a different angle.

The question was also directed at whether it was better to try to promote and build a following for company representatives as thought leaders, or whether it was more important to publish regular rich content that supported sales objectives. The answer to the question isn’t the same for every company.

Developing a following for your blog with significant link-backs, tweets, and comments can be valuable but is also a challenge. It requires that you invest in a full time person who’s primary responsibility is evangelizing your company, market and approaches to solving the problems in the industry you serve. I have rarely seen this done effectively by someone who holds a full time role in the company. The reason for this is that building a significant following requires full time attention, significant content, and ideally is complimented by speaking engagements and other public facing communication.

A famous example of someone who filled this role is Robert Scoble when he became the poster child of corporate blogging at Microsoft. The keys to his success aren’t easily duplicated.

First, he worked for the industry giant Microsoft. His initial influence was significantly bolstered by writing for one of the largest companies in the world about their products and addressing users questions directly. He invited feedback and even published his mobile phone number at one point.
Second, he was free to criticize Microsoft and be fully independent. At Microsoft this served to humanize the company and connect users to a company that could be seen as technical and aloof. This level of freedom doesn’t always work to a smaller company’s advantage when they don’t have the market clout of Microsoft.
Third, this was his main responsibility. Scoble’s title was technical evangelist and he made it a point to indicate his freedom and independence when it came to posting on his blog. The following is quoted from his old blog:

“Robert Scoble works at Microsoft (title: technical evangelist). Everything here, though, is his personal opinion and is not read or approved before it is posted. No warranties or other guarantees will be offered as to the quality of the opinions or anything else offered here.”

At smaller companies, this role can often be filled by a founder who is the visionary and chief evangelist for the company naturally, but they don’t always have the time or talents to fill this role, or they are occupied with another executive position. At the end of the day, because of the independence required to be successful at this, the blog can often become more valuable to the blogger than the company as evidenced when they ultimately leave as Scoble did after less than two years at Microsoft. If you start down this path, ensure that the blog supports the thought leadership at your company and team in general, not just the individual.

Because of these and other considerations, for most companies a blog is best used to develop rich and regular content in support of your sales objectives. In this case you don’t measure your success by comments or link backs, but rather by web traffic, search results and sales support.

Today’s individual typically doesn’t read an individual blog or news publication religiously. This is why so many papers and other periodicals are failing. Search, email and social media drives users to the content the ultimately consume through links to a specific article of interest. The key is ensuring that your company will be found when a prospect is looking for a solution to a problem you address.

If your company engages in blogging at a minimum of 1-2 times per week about topics relevant to the industry you serve, you will quickly find that the top search results for your key web terms will often point to blog entries. If you want to get the best results for your business keep the following items in mind:

Publish regularly – You need to publish a blog entry at least once or twice per week in order to get the most impact. If your blog posting frequency starts to approach one blog every two months or so, your blog can begin to have negative returns as it will appear to be inactive and may not reflect well on your business.
Keep SEO in mind – Blogs should cover topics that your prospects will be searching for. Clever topics are nice, but blog titles that match a prospects frequent search terms are even better.
Take the time for a quality post – This should go without saying, but your posts need to reflect well on your company. Take the time to share a unique insight or your perspective on a recent news item that will be of interest once your visitor is reading your post. Low quality repurposing of data sheets or other blatant marketing materials won’t have full impact.
Publicize your blog – Search is great, but you should also give your blog airtime through Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, email, on your website, and in any drip marketing like a newsletter. Blogs are fantastic tool for advancing a point of view that supports your sales team and lays traps for the competition.

Blogs are a tremendous tool for corporations to develop and deliver regular content to their ideal prospects. Whether you have the right makeup to support a blog with

Five marketing tools I use every day

Scott Olson — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 21:34:20 +0000

After putting up yesterday’s post on the five DEMOfall09 products that I will have to check out, I thought it would be good to post the top five tools I use every day to assist me with my web marketing tasks.

TweetDeck – TweetDeck was actually the eye opener for me about the value of Twitter. I currently use it to manage both my @scottdolson1 account and a personal account I am playing around with. I have a separate column to keep track of my Facebook feed and use it to cross post there as well. I am waiting for them to add the ability to update status on LinkedIn, but you can’t have everything. I have also looked at CoTweet, but I’m not currently managing multiple users on the same Twitter account so TweetDeck meets my needs perfectly.

Evernote – Evernote has significantly improved lately and I use it on my desktop computer as well as my iPhone. The synchronization between them makes it perfect to jot down notes and story ideas as well as any relevant business thoughts. Their integration into the browser is also very nice for tagging particular articles or sites you see.

The Hit List – This really isn’t a marketing tool, per se, but it is indispensable to me in task management. It does exactly what I need it to do and no more. I use it to track my projects with various clients and due dates. The interface is simple and takes no more than 10-15 minutes to figure out. My main complaint is that they don’t have an iPhone version yet. That prevents me from using this tool more regularly but it is still very valuable for me. Sorry Windows users, this is only a Mac tool.

Delicious – This is still a very valuable service for me that I use to tag online content and categorize it for different projects and ideas. I use this all the time to identify ideas for blogs, thoughts for clients and just to tag articles I want to go back to in the future.

WordPress – Whether you host your site on wordpress.com or on your own site using wordpress.org software, wordpress is a blogger/marketer’s best friend. It’s ease of use, extensibility and powerful built in analytics and Search Engine Optimization tools make this my own personal most important tool of choice.