Blog - Social Media

Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn get a lot of attention because they have grown so quickly in the past five years (and are still adding millions of users each month), leading businesses to see them as marketing opportunities. After all, if your customers are hooked on social media, that must be the best place to go and advertise or market to them… right?

In some cases that might be, but a lot of companies are finding that social sites are difficult places to spread marketing messages. In fact, it could be that social platforms have more value for customer service and CRM than they do for gaining new business. 

That's because social media profiles are built on relationships, not transactions. Here are a few ways to use your social profiles with customer service and CRM goals:

Solve problems and answer question publicly. When a customer e-mails you and you send a response, you benefit from keeping them satisfied or furthering a sales opportunity. When you do it publicly, however, on a social media site, you also answer that question and improve your visibility with dozens or hundreds of other buyers, too. That's why, so long as you aren't spreading sensitive information for all to see, your social profiles can be great for handling routine customer service inquiries.

Find distinct customer segments that you can market to. One of the underrated features of a strong social media campaign is the information you can find about buyers (or groups of prospects) simply by looking through profiles. Don't worry, we aren't talking about cyber-stalking; instead, we are encouraging you to find out more about your best customers, and notice similarities between them so you can find others just like them.

Create links between your social profiles and online CRM systems. There are any number of ways that you could tie Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to custom CRM systems, account updates to targeted marketing, and more. The fact that tens of millions of people use social media site on a daily basis should encourage you to find ways to move friends, fans, and followers from your profiles to other pages and customer management systems.

If you're looking for more ways to connect social media and customer service, or simply want new ideas for growing your business online, now is the perfect time to talk to the team at WebRevelation. Why not call or e-mail us today to arrange for free consultation?

1. Entrepreneur Motivation - as most of our clients are small to medium sized business owners, and who doesn’t need an added dose of COURAGE.
2. Social Media – this has to do with what is a point of interest for our clients as all of them are online and have at least heard the distant rumbling of the social marketing herd.
3. Customer Appreciation Gifts – as a business owner giving creative gifts to your clients is a PASSION of mine, so I want to share all of the goodies that I find.  Not only that, but I’ll be able to post items from our own clients to this board which does in turn create cross traffic for us.

Do you remember Ning.com? It was kind of a big deal back in the days when people could set up their social network for free.  But they had bills to pay, and they decided to supplement their ad revenue with charging for their services, and their popularity began to dwindle.  People figured out there was no need to pay for something on Ning when they could do almost the same thing on Facebook for free.

So their value began to dwindle (from $500M to $200M, according to some reports or maybe $150M, but who's counting? ), until they were bought this week by a site called Glam.com, which is pretty much what it sounds like it might be - a medium sized (according to Alexa) fashion news site. Oh, but not just a fashion news site - they are dreaming of being the future of media.  Not just social media - but media.  Well, always aim high, right? 

Through the acquistion, Glam gained Ning's technology (which was quite good), and remaining networks.  According to the Wall Street Journal:

 

...Closely-held Glam is the ninth largest Web property by unique U.S. visitors and ranks as the largest Internet company in the U.S. targeted at women, according to comScore Inc. Launched in 2005, the company sells advertising on its own sites as well as a network of 2,500 websites that reach a total of 85 million unique U.S. visitors.

The Ning deal provides Glam the opportunity to offer publishers tools to make their websites more social, such as blogs, photos, chats and buttons to post content on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. Founded in 2004, Ning sells a subscription-based service to more than 100,000 users.

“There is a huge shift happening on the Web right now. Users in the past would go to portals or search. More and more of the content sharing that is happening online is happening on social networks,” says well-known venture capitalist and Ning Chairman Marc Andreessen...

 

 The stats presentation is pretty creative - I'll give them credit for that.   Basically of companies that exist ONLY online in the U.S., they are the 9th largest, and supposedly the largest targeted at women.  This is simply not true.  Just off the top of my head, I thought to check BlogHer.com, and it's ranked a lot higher on Alexa than is Glam, as is DivineCaroline.com according to the Alexa rankings.  But, again, who's counting? The main point is that Glam wants to make inroads into socializing online brand management, by allowing products to develop their own networks on its site.  It's a good idea...I'm surprised no one has thought of that before.  Oh, wait  - they have!  If I remember correctly, MySpace in its heyday was all about the promotion of bands and music, and pretty much every product in the universe now has a Facebook page.  But they don't all have their own Ning network.  Will they want to? We'll see.

One thing limiting their growth as opposed to Facebook, and even compared to the independent Ning, is that they are focusing on women (and men who are really into fashion), whereas Ning and Facebook have a much wider demographic.  Personally I think the folks at Glam saw the overwhelming success of SmartGirllPolitics.com on Ning, and thought their colors would look fabulous together.

If you're a WebRev website owner, you probably saw that Tim Short shared this great Site Pro News article this week:  10 Biggest Social Media Myths Exposed.  Apparently great minds, think alike, because I had actually chosen the title of today's post BEFORE I saw this.  Seriously! It's true!

Anyway, here are the myths, which are debunked by David Jackson in his article:

1. Social Media is Nothing But a Bunch of Carnival Barkers
2. You Have to Be on Every Social Network
3. Anyone Can Succeed at Social Media
4. Social Media Will Replace Face-to-Face Networking
5. Social Media Can Replace Your Website
6. Blogging Doesn’t Work
7. You Can’t Measure Your Return on Investment With Social Media
8. Social Media is Time Consuming
9. Social Media Isn’t Right for Your Type of Business
10. Create a Profile Page and Forget It...read the article

I've been getting a lot of inquiries lately from people who are either just generally annoyed with the fact that people keep trying to contact them on them online using the social networks, and wnt to know how to stop it.  Now, yes, I understand that all of us only have 24 hours in a day, and that most of us (well, most of YOU, anyway) have lives outside of your computer.  I don't, but that's a whole different blog post.

There certainly are things you can do to save time online, including adjusting your settings on your various profiles to manage the type and frequency of your alerts, and also to automate some of the cross-posting from your website to your various social networks or vice-versa. 

HOWEVER, if you are simply using these time-saving features to avoid having to actually interact with your social networks, you're really missing the point of SOCIAL networking.  The term "social" implies communication.  That would be two-way communication.  If you are treating your website and blog and social networks as if they are simply low-cost or free venues for advertising, you're probably not really going to get that return on investment you're hoping for.  The real purpose of social networking is building relationships with your network.  In many cases, this network will be your peers, and you may not make direct sales from your network at all.  If the purpose of social networking is to keep in contact with your potential customers, that's great, too, but realize that your customers are only going to contact you online if that online relationship is beneficial to them, too - either in terms of receiving information they want, or getting discounts, or networking with other like-minded folks in your mutual network.

If you really aren't interested in relationship building online - there's no shame in that.  Just don't imagine yourself to be a social networker because you have a Twitter account or a Facebook page.  Those profiles and pages are still good for enhancing your online reputation, but without spending time communicating with and developing your network, you really aren't getting the benefits of "social media."  Your resources might be better spent on online ads.

Also see:  Social Networking is not Advertising

In case you were just thinking, "You know, I need one more place to post all of my information online, and one more log-in I.D. to remember," well About.me has a solution for you!

Actually, in spite of my sarcasm, I think this particular social-network integrator has potential.  It's super user-friendly, and allows you to post all of your social networks and other web links in one place. This service is a really good alternative to a blog for those who don't actually want to blog, as it provides what it calls a "splash page," for all of your social networks and online links, including an e-mail address.

This might be a good alternative to an e-profile for those who are job hunting, as you can easily link to your Linked-IN profile, and/or wherever you have your resume posted, as well as any other online profiles you would like your prospective employers to see.  The style is clean and slightly trendy, projecting a very professional image for those who want to demonstrate their technology skills are up-to-date.

Once you sign in you can hit the little "people" icon at the top, and browse other users' splash pages for inspiration on setting up your own.  Because you're able to customize the background, fonts,  and profile picture, your page can be as clean or as fancy as you like.  HERE are some examples on Google Images.

Time will tell if these about.me profiles begin helping users with page rank on the search engines.  Right now, there is an option to "promote" your profile to Google, but after considerable searching, I'm not yet able to find evidence that these profiles are showing up on the front page of the SERPs (search engine results pages).   However, this site has some promise, and if these profiles get more popular, it could be that they will eventually gain page rank, especially under the search term "about (name)".

Jennifer Pointer (e-mail) is in Tulsa, OK. She promotes a simple, a low-tech approach to effective online profile management, search engine optimization and social networking. 
 

There are avenues springing up on the web, for retailers to get their customers to network on their behalf.  In the good ol'days (circa 2005), you had to rely on getting lucky and having one of your posts or videos go viral to really make social media pay off directly.  (The true rewards are somewhat intangible and difficult ot quantify.)  But now, you can benefit for spamming your friends' newsfeeds.

Just for the record, when I start seeing "spammy" posts show up in my friends' Facebook or Twitter feeds, I block the app when that's possible.  When that's not possible (i.e. on Twitter), I either "hide" that person ( on Facebook) or "block" them if necessary on Facebook and the other sites.

I don't need to know what products my friends like, and now that I know they're most likely either getting paid or at least receiving free or discounted merchandize in return for recommending the services, their recommendations are meaningless to me.

While I would like to think that this is going to be3 a short-lived "fad" in social media, I remember the blog roll, and some people are STILL doing that in spite of evidence that it actually hurts their blog traffic.

So, one of these new companies capitalizing on the astro-turfed "word-of-mouth" trend which is getting some attention this week is  500Friends.   The concept is that companies can spend a portion of their advertising and marketing budgets on rewarding happy customers for "social actions," (tweets, Facebook updates, etc.), because everyone knows that word-of-mouth usually tends to skew negative.

The problem with this is that no one really has 500 "friends."  If he has 500+ connections on a social network, he's probably a really good networker, but it is unlikely he knows those 500+ well.  And it is unlikely that those contacts added him to their respective feeds to hear about what soft drink or online travel agent he uses.  If his tweets get too spammy or off-topic, they simply aren't going to read him anymore.  He'll be dropped from lists and feeds, and may not ever really understand what happened.  More and more of the social networks are now giving your friends a way to ignore someone without actually dropping him as a friend, so it's hard to know who is really paying attention and who isn't.

My advice?  Enjoy your favorite retailers, wear their T-Shirts, and it's even fine to occasionally tweet your undying affection, as long as your friends can tell you're just sharing your unsolicited joy - not getting paid or rewarded for spamming them.   

Jennifer Pointer (e-mail) is in Tulsa, OK. She promotes a simple, a low-tech approach to effective online profile management, search engine optimization and social networking.