JitterJam® Social CRM

The ability to segment your contact list is critical when you’re trying to convert social media followers and friends into true prospects and customers. And while Twitter and Facebook do allow you to break down your list into groups, their options are severely limited. Yes, you can add all of your active customers to one group, and you can add all those customers interested in self-help books to another, but there’s no built-in way to produce a list of contacts who are both active customers and interested in self-help books (without manually creating a third list).

That’s where the Tags and Topics features in JitterJam come in handy. Topics will, of course, vary depending on your industry. But when it comes to tags, there are three basic kinds of tags that will be useful regardless of what kind of product or service you’re selling.

Type of Relationship: Customer, Competitor, Partner, Investor, Press

Relationship Status: Target, Active, Inactive

Level of Influence: Major, Minor, Insignificant

JitterJam can help you get your contact list in order. And it can help you do so much more. Sign up for a one month free trial, or click here to request more information.

And if you’ve got tips of your own to share, please do leave a comment below.

Twitter offers several different methods for direct communication with other users, and each method has its own specific uses. While opinions may vary on whether to use a particular method in a given situation, here are some general guidelines.

Mentions, also known as @ replies, are publicly viewable communications between two or more users. In conversations between two users, Mentions appear automatically in the streams of both participants in the conversation, as well as in the streams of users who follow both participants. Things get a bit murkier when conversations involve three or more participants, but the general rule of thumb here is that Mentions are public. Unless you have specifically privatized your account, Mentions are viewable by anyone who visits your Twitter profile page, and they are searchable both within Twitter and without.

Earlier in Twitter’s development, Mentions appeared in the streams of anyone who followed any user in the conversation. At that time, the common wisdom among many users was to limit conversations to topics that would be useful to the entire community, and to take any other conversations over to Direct Messaging or e-mail. That attitude seems to have changed, but I still recommend trying to provide as much context as you can when conversing with other users in public. The easier your stream of updates is to read and understand, the easier it will be for other users to determine if you or your business is worth following and interacting with.

Direct Messages. Communications made via Direct Message are visible only to those users participating in the conversation. Ideal for more sensitive, more personal, or potentially embarrassing customer service issues, the Direct Message is also an idea method for promoting offers to select groups of contacts (provided your marketing platform facilitates the easy distribution of Direct Messages to multiple recipients).

The Direct Message should not be used for all one-on-one communications, however. Keep in mind that any conversation you have which might benefit more than the person you are speaking with (and which doesn’t require the exchange of personal information such as an account number) might be better off held in public, via the Mention method described above. Whenever you have the opportunity to show yourself being helpful in public, you should take it.

Retweets. A variation on the Mention, the Retweet (often abbreviated RT) is useful for highlighting good content posted by customers and colleagues, but also for providing instant context in certain conversational situations. Any conversation held by the public Mention method provides context via meta-links included with each tweet (found below the tweet on the Twitter Website), but that context requires a click. A retweeted comment might be easier to follow. Users who still use the non-official, “old style” Retweet method—which involved nothing more than preceding a Mention with the initials RT or the word Via—are able to provide answers to questions posed in the retweeted comment, as well (depending on character limit). This allows for entire (albeit brief) conversations to be viewable within the span of a single update.

How are you using Twitter’s various communication methods in your business? Leave a comment below and let us know.

SANTA CLARA, CA–(Marketwire – March 29, 2010) –  OpSource™, the leader in enterprise cloud and SaaS hosting, today announced that JitterJam™ has selected OpSource Cloud™ to help deliver a new generation of sophisticated marketing solutions to small and medium businesses and the marketing, advertising and PR firms that service them. JitterJam chose OpSource Cloud because of its scalability and fast time to market. OpSource Cloud, available for purchase by the hour from www.opsourcecloud.net, is the first cloud computing solution to bring together the flexibility, availability and community of the public cloud with enterprise-class security, performance and control.

JitterJam is a revolutionary multi-channel marketing platform that launched on March 15, 2010. JitterJam integrates social media, e-mail, and mobile engagement with an intelligent contact database. It includes full integration with OpSource Billing CLM™ for customer on-boarding, automated billing and collections, and full self-service account management. The solution was fully integrated with and deployed on OpSource Cloud’s servers in less than eight weeks.

“It was critical to find an operational partner that could accelerate our time-to-market while bringing significant added value to our product and our customers,” said James St. Jean, Chief Technical Officer, JitterJam. “OpSource offered the most flexible computing platform for our SaaS product while providing significant pre-built infrastructure to manage the operational, billing, metering, invoicing, and collections needs of our solution.”

Forrester Research predicts the market size for social media marketing will be as large as email marketing by 2012, at more than $1.6B per year. It also predicts that the market will grow at 34 percent per year, three times the rate of growth of email marketing. “Given the huge addressable market and growth potential, deployment on a cloud platform was our only choice as we needed the cloud’s scalability and fast time to market,” said Ric Pratte, CEO, JitterJam. “OpSource was able to deliver for us, with the features we needed and on our timeline, as demonstrated by our reaching full production integration and deployment in less than two months.”

“With its explosive growth trajectory and always-on nature, social media is the perfect cloud application,” said Treb Ryan, CEO, OpSource. “There is a huge potential market for solutions like JitterJam, and we look forward to scaling with them as they grow.”

About OpSource Cloud

OpSource Cloud offers companies the true Cloud, combining the availability, flexibility and community of the public Cloud with the security, performance and control that the enterprise demands. OpSource Cloud is now in public Beta and available for on-line purchase by the hour from www.opsourcecloud.net.

Its features include:

Best of the Public Cloud

Easy online sign-up with infrastructure provisioning in minutes
Pay by the hour and only for what you use, with no commitment (unless so desired)
Community resources for sharing and collaboration, third party add-ins and configurations
Web interface plus complete set of APIs

Enterprise Security & Compliance

Virtual Private Clouds with user-specified public Internet connectivity
Unique customizable security for firewalls
User-level login/password and access control
SAS 70 Type II Audited Cloud
One hundred percent uptime SLA

Enterprise Performance

Multiple private networks on demand for multi-tier architecture
Guaranteed sub-millisecond latency between systems
Industry standard technology including VMware, Cisco, EMC, Microsoft and Red Hat
User selectable server configurations

Enterprise Controls

Centralized control and billing
Master and departmental management and controls
Sub-account permissions and budgeting
Complete reporting
24X7 phone support plus online community support and ticketing/status tracking

About JitterJam
JitterJam empowers consumer-facing companies in the mid- to small-business market by putting the sophistication and power of multi-channel integrated marketing within their reach. JitterJam is a comprehensive tool that integrates social media, e-mail, and mobile engagement with an intelligent contact database and the tools needed to turn social interaction into new opportunities for revenue growth. JitterJam is headquartered in Bedford, NH. For more information on JitterJam and to sign-up for a free trial, visit www.jitterjam.com.

About OpSource

OpSource™ provides complete cloud operations, infrastructure and services for companies of all sizes, from Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) ISVs to the enterprise, with hundreds of applications, millions of users and billions of transactions supported daily.

OpSource Cloud™ is the first cloud to bring together the flexibility, availability and community of the public cloud with the security, performance and control the enterprise demands. Emphasizing security, OpSource Cloud provides enterprise users with a Virtual Private Cloud within the public cloud, allowing them to determine their own degree of Internet connectivity. For more information, visit www.opsourcecloud.net.

OpSource On-Demand™ empowers SaaS ISVs to bring enterprise-class Cloud solutions to their end-users by quickly and securely delivering their applications and services over the Web. Going far beyond full-featured managed hosting, the comprehensive, award-winning Cloud operations solution includes the application and database management, compliance and business services that are necessary for on-demand business success.

Headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif., OpSource has cloud and web application delivery centers in Virginia, London and Bangalore. For more information about OpSource, visit www.opsource.net.

OpSource, OpSource Cloud, OpSource On-Demand, and the OpSource logo are trademarks of OpSource, Inc. All other trademarks and company names mentioned are protected by their respective owners.

The company mascot is a well-established tradition, as evidenced by Wikipedia’s fairly exhaustive list of them. And the tradition seems to be picking up steam in the social media age. Beginning with Twitter’s bird—not to mention its notorious fail whale—we seem to have entered into a sort of corporate mascot renaissance. Everywhere you turn there are owls and monkeys and bears—oh my!

Customers grow to care about these icons, too. Just last year, Stonyfield Farm floated the idea of removing their mascot, Gurt the Cow, from their logo. To quote Stonyfield CE-Yo Gary Hirshberg, they got “a real earful” from their community about that.

Response to mascots can vary—most of us remember Clippy, the Microsoft Office paperclip—but the best mascots are charming enough that, even when they occasionally annoy us, we can’t help but like them. And, if they’re not charming your customer base, makeovers and retirement are always an option. For an in-depth look at how Freddie the MailChimp monkey got himself a fresh new face back in 2008, check out this post by CEO Ben Chestnut.

Who are your favorite corporate mascots? What do they give or takeaway from the brands you love? Leave a comment below, then go out and have yourself a Fun Stuff Friday!

According to five separate surveys cited by eMarketer.com, site traffic was the number one metric that marketers used to measure social media marketing success in 2009. But, as eMarketer CEO Geoff Ramsey wrote in his company’s report “Seven Guidelines for Achieving ROI from Social Media,” site traffic “on its own it cannot justify heavier investment in social media.”

So, what other ways are there to measure success in social media marketing? What about contact growth? A contact means more than an IP address in Google Analytics, after all.

I’m not just talking about a growth in Twitter followers or Facebook friends here, however (though that’s part of it). What you really want when it comes to contact growth is a growth in your contact database. Whether you manually input intelligence on your social media contacts or you use a marketing platform that ties directly into a database (like JitterJam), it’s essential that you’re bringing data on your customers into a place where you’re in control, and where data can be stored for the long term (something Facebook and Twitter themselves aren’t particularly good at).  You need to able to add communication channels, to add intelligence, and to segment your contact list. Only then will you be able to effectively turn those followers and fans into customers. And a high conversion rate, of course, is a metric that would certainly justify a heavier investment in social media.

What do you think? How are you measuring your success? Leave a comment below to let us know.

Last month on the blog, we spent a Fun Stuff Friday talking about translating online relationships into real world transactions by attending local events. But sometimes there isn’t an event in the area to meet your needs. And, if that’s case, it might be time to plan one of your own. Here are a few tips on how to run a successful local event to promote your business or brand.

Build a good team. Even the simplest events require a lot of planning. Don’t attempt to tackle event planning on your own. Whether you recruit from within your organization, from your own personal network, or from a social network like Twitter or Facebook, be sure to find quality people you can delegate authority to. Ideally, you’ll have someone to handle A/V for the event, someone else to handle the food, and at least one someone (preferably more) to check people in upon arrival. Spread the work around. This will allow every member of your team more time to take advantage of the major benefit of running a live, local event: networking.

Serve all corners of your market. While the majority of your target audience might live and work in one specific location, don’t ignore potential customers who may be more remote. If your one-off event becomes a series, make every effort to bring that series to each corner of your market. If you have one audience on the coast, another audience around the capital, and a third on the other end of the state, try to find ways to get each of those groups involved in your events.

Partner carefully. When seeking out locations for your meeting or sponsors for food or entertainment, keep in mind that any partnership you form is, at the very least, a passive endorsement of the brand(s) you’re partnering with. Vet potential partners and sponsors carefully.

Got any tips of your own to share? Leave a comment below.

Launches Integrated Multi-Channel Marketing Platform, Changes Company Name

Bedford, NH (PRWEB) March 22, 2010 — JitterJam™ today announced the public availability of its revolutionary new multi-channel marketing platform that integrates social media, e-mail, and mobile engagement with an intelligent contact database. JitterJam’s groundbreaking combination of social listening and engagement, automated contact database development, multi-channel marketing tools and analytics brings true ROI to social engagement by enabling companies to develop the deep one-to-one customer relationships that consumers expect in today’s marketplace.

“Tools today focus on the conversation,” said Ric Pratte, President and CEO at JitterJam. “The JitterJam platform goes way beyond by enabling companies to focus on people. At its core is a sophisticated consumer database that automatically collects contact information and personal interests and measures a contact’s degree of engagement. Businesses now have the power to capture and use this data to pinpoint the most receptive audiences.”

JitterJam has just emerged from beta testing, where a host of clients were able to take advantage of this unique product while providing priceless feedback on how to improve it.

”JitterJam has taught us the value of social engagement,” said Perry Dowst, President of Jetboil. “In three months of using JitterJam, we doubled our number of Facebook fans and launched our Twitter presence. Our customers have opted-in to receive information and promotions through e-mail, text messages, Twitter and Facebook. We have far greater reach than we ever had before!”

“While few companies question the need for some sort of effective community engagement strategy, measuring that effectiveness (ROI) remains elusive,” said Rich Price, New Media Specialist at Select Design. “JitterJam provides clear data that can help shape a deliberate approach to social media and community building, as well as measure which marketing initiatives are sparking conversation.”

“Our summer season is coming up, and JitterJam is an essential part of our overall marketing strategy,” said Chris Lockwood, Director of Marketing for Meadowbrook U.S. Cellular Pavilion. “We love the versatility of the platform and the ability to more deeply engage our customers!”

JitterJam is a comprehensive integrated marketing platform for multi-channel engagement and marketing. Its rich feature set includes social engagement through Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed; e-mail marketing integration with Constant Contact and MailChimp; mobile marketing through a native text messaging campaign tool; tracking of campaigns on a per-message basis; multi-channel message creation and scheduling; targeted campaign creation and management; a multi-channel opt-in system; and much more.

Pricing for JitterJam starts at $290 (US) per month for up to 7,500 social contact points. To sign up for a trial, please visit www.jitterjam.com.

In conjunction with the new product launch, JitterJam changed its company name from JitterGram® to JitterJam. This name change reflects the company’s evolution from a mobile marketing tool to a comprehensive multi-channel integrated marketing platform.

About JitterJam
Founded in 2008 as JitterGram, Inc., JitterJam empowers consumer-facing companies in the mid- to small-business market by putting the sophistication and power of multi-channel integrated marketing within their reach. JitterJam, the company’s revolutionary new product, is a comprehensive tool that integrates social media, e-mail, and mobile engagement with an intelligent contact database and the tools needed to turn social interaction into new opportunities for revenue growth.

# # #
JitterJam, JitterGram and Turning Conversations Into Customers are registered trademarks or trademarks of JitterJam.

Spring Clean by himmelskratzer CC BY-NC-SA

Tomorrow marks the start of spring here in the northern hemisphere, and what better time than now to take a look around your Website and see if it would benefit from some spring cleaning.

Here are a couple of tips:

1. When was each section of your site last updated? Certain sections of your company’s Website, especially if the site is maintained by one person, are bound to get stale. This happened to me a lot during my last job, where I was the sole person in charge of the business’s Web presence (in addition to many other responsibilities). During your site’s annual spring cleaning, identify the sections of the site that need to be updated more often and set a timetable for getting that done. Delegate if you can. But, whoever does the work, make sure there is a plan in place for keeping things fresh in the days, weeks, and months to come. And if there’s a section that just doesn’t make sense anymore, don’t be afraid to cut it.

2. What about the little things? Check the footers and sidebars of your site for copyright dates you might have forgotten to changeover at the beginning of the year. Search for badges and other graphics—awards you may have received, associations you may have belonged to—and make sure that they are up-to-date and still relevant.

3. Could the site use a fresh coat of paint? What about a touch-up here or there? Ask yourself if any part of your site’s look and feel is out of date. If you find something wrong, write a list of small improvements that you might make without hiring a designer to start from scratch. Updating your site’s look and feel need not be an overhaul every time—in fact, too much change too often can be jarring to your customers. Incremental improvements are a growing trend.

Do you have any other tips to share on spring cleaning a Website? If so, leave them in the comments below.

Now, go out and have yourself an amazingly fun Fun Stuff Friday!

St. Patrick’s Day is upon us, and that seemed to me like a perfect excuse to bring Fun Stuff Friday to Wednesday. So, here’s a fun tip on using real world events to promote your brand and produce measurable results.

Every year in March, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) holds tournaments to decide the national champions in both men’s and women’s basketball. This is where the term March Madness comes from, of course. Last year, in March 2009, I put a spin on the phenomenon to help increase the number of user interactions on my pop culture blog, Geek Force Five.

Between March 10 and March 17 (the start of the tournament), Geek Force Five users submitted suggestions by e-mail to help determine the top 16 pop culture obsessions in four categories: Movies/TV, Games/Technology, Comics, and Music. These obsessions were then pitted against each other within four brackets, just as basketball squads are paired off in the real-life NCAA tournament. Users were asked to comment and vote to determine the eventual winner. There was a Sweet Sixteen, an Elite Eight, and, finally, a Final Four.

Over the course of those four weeks, user interactions numbered 1,534 (comments + votes). That represented a 12x increase in the number of user interactions versus the previous four-week period.  To say the promotion was a success would be an understatement. Several of the more prolific commentators from that month eventually became contributors to the site, and the rise in popularity over those four weeks was one factor which led to the site being awarded a Best of NH award in 2009 from New Hampshire Magazine. And all of this was the result of a well-timed promotion.

Have you had any success using real world events or holidays to help promote your business? Leave your success stories in the comments below.

And have a Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

In order to deliver a true return on your investment in social media, you need to turn your Twitter followers and Facebook fans into prospects and customers. And the best way to develop those relationships is to tie all of your social media interactions into a contact database that will help you add intelligence, segmentation factors, and channels through which you can connect with your contacts.

Adding Channels. Both you and your contacts should be able to add and modify the channels that are available to you for potential communications. Of course you should be able to enter information you collect from a business card, but your efforts can’t stop there. A customer-facing preferences panel is a must, if for no other reason than to reassure your contacts that they are participants in a conversation and not just the audience for your monologues and sales pitches. Let them decide how they wish to be contacted. Don’t be afraid of empowering your contacts. They just might thank you for that with a sale later on down the road.

Adding Intelligence. Your customer-facing preferences panel should also allow contacts to tell you what they want to be contacted about. It’s rare that every potential customer is interested in every widget you have on offer. Don’t clog their inboxes with irrelevant messages or soon they may deem your entire operation irrelevant to their increasingly busy lives.

Your system should also have the flexibility to allow you to enter intelligence that you uncover on contacts indirectly. If you see @So-and-So tweeting a lot about cupcakes one day, you might want to sign him up to receive notices on your new baking widget, something he might not have even known was available yet.

Adding Segmentation. On the most basic level, you should be segmenting your contact list into four categories: prospects, contacts, customers, and advocates. The goal, once those basic categories are in place, is to further segment to help you best determine how to turn contacts into prospects, prospects into customers, and customers into advocates. To that end, you should implement tags to refine your list.  Who are the bloggers? Who’s local? Who is reposting or retweeting your content the most? Tag them, and keep track!

Are you doing other things to develop your contact list? If you have any secrets you want to share, please leave them in the comments below.