JitterJam – Integrated Social Marketing Software for Business

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.

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.

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.

Video is perhaps the most powerful tool available in our multimedia toolbox. And, if you’re not already putting video up on your Website, blog, or Facebook Fan Page, here are a few ideas on what you might do with the medium.

Product Demos

This is a pretty obvious one, and lots of companies are doing this, but what about pushing yourself go in a different direction here? Back in the summer of 2008, Squarespace garnered a fair bit of attention for a series of time-lapsed product demos that showed how they were able to replicate well-known blogs with their platform in twenty minutes or less. There were no voiceovers, only an instrumental soundtrack powering along beneath the frantic on-screen action. And these things worked. Internet television network Revision 3 soon picked up Squarespace as a sponsor, and they are now sponsoring several of the Web’s most influential tech podcasts.

Personality Pieces

It doesn’t always have to be about the company or the product either. Sometimes it’s quite alright to put together a video that’s all about the personalities behind your business. Last month, EllisLab CEO Rick Ellis posted a video of himself playing “All Along the Watchtower” in what he described as his “most ridiculous hat.” This was filmed for “Do Something Silly Tuesday” on Twitter and highlighted his guitar playing chops, an aspect of the executive’s personality that isn’t particularly well known. Fan site EE Insider then picked it up and ran with it.

A Little of Both

Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV excels at using video to market his brand, and he manages to make his videos do a little of both of the things I’ve already mentioned. An episode of Wine Library TV is always chock-full of personality, but every episode is also a product demo. Gary’s store may not sell every wine he tastes, but his knowledge and expertise in his subject area are a strong selling point for the store in general.

Got any tips on how to best use video online? Leave a comment below! And make sure to get out and so some fun stuff on this Fun Stuff Friday.

Every company engaged in social media should have a list of high-risk words they’re monitoring. And whenever your company or brand is mentioned in conjunction with one of the words on your list, you should be alerted. Responses to high-risk comments and conversations should be swift, but well reasoned. They should be consistent with company policy and tone, but should never be cold or emotionless. And your responses to high-risk conversations should always make it plain that you’ve been listening to the customer—your messages should never sound like canned or automated apologies.

Here are a few other things to keep in mind:

Bad isn’t always bad. Be aware of your audience and of how they speak and write. In certain situations, something that’s “bad” is actually good. And it’s always possible that the word in question is being used in a comparative way, casting a competitor in a negative light while promoting you (“Brand Y is a total fail! Brand X FTW!”).

Customers can forget you’re out there. In the heat of a rant about a bad cable installation experience or a failed DVR, it’s easy enough for consumers to forget that Comcast is out there. Remind them! Remind them that you are there to listen and help, even though they may have been unsuccessful in getting through to a sympathetic human being via your other customer service channels. And, if you can—and if it makes sense—do this publicly. That way you remind all of your other customers (or potential customers), as well.

Some things just can’t be fixed. Southwest Airlines found themselves in a no-win situation recently, after film director Kevin Smith was removed from one of their flights for being “too fat to fly” (Smith’s words, not SWA’s). Smith was so embarrassed and so upset that it was essentially impossible for Southwest to fix the situation. The director was all over Twitter within minutes of his ejection, recorded two podcasts on the debacle within the week, and publicly picked apart every blog post and tweet that SWA offered in response to his complaint. Could Southwest have handled things more honestly, more intelligently, and with more transparency? Certainly. But, even if they had, there are certain situations where things are so out of a company’s control that to try and control them might do more harm than good. Attempts should be made to fix any situation, but every company needs to establish parameters for when they absolutely must stop trying to fix the unfixable.

How do you monitor and react to high-risk conversations? If you have tips, please share them in the comments below.