JitterJam® Social CRM

In this series, we’re detailing the steps you should take to find new people to follow on Twitter and to get them to engage with your business. So far, we’ve covered the First C: Customer, the Second C: Credibility, the Third C: Content, and the Fourth C: Community. Today, we conclude the series with the Fifth C: Competition.

The Fifth C: Competition

If your business is on Twitter, there is a good chance that your competitors are too. And, while it may not be prudent to follow a competitor publicly, monitoring their feed privately can provide valuable insights. By keeping an eye on whom they’re talking with and who’s talking about them, you can uncover potential customers, other potential competitors, and journalists to engage with. Here’s how to get started.

Public vs. Private. Make a decision about following your competitors publicly vs. monitoring them privately. If you follow publicly, remember that following someone on Twitter can be viewed as an endorsement of the account being followed, thereby introducing confusion to potential customers. Private monitoring addresses this concern, and hides from public view those companies your business perceives as threats. Yes, the public follow is the more natural, built-in Twitter action, but products like JitterJam make it exceptionally easy to set up social searches that will monitor competitors privately.

Search for Journalists. Begin by searching on terms specific to your market. Group any journalists you find into a Twitter list that you’ll check regularly for mentions of new competitors. You should also consider setting up searches on the journalists themselves, and watching for retweets and mentions to determine whom to target for maximum reach during your next product launch.

Both Positive and Negative. Search for both positive and negative mentions of the competition, and follow users who have something substantial to say either way. Track the features the advocates and power users are shouting about by tagging them in your contact database, and set up searches on the features the critics complain are missing. Engage users who are comparison-shopping or who are actively expressing their disappointment with a competitor, suggesting demos or free trials of your products as appropriate.

The JitterJam multichannel marketing platform is an excellent way to take full advantage of these Five C’s, and to turn social conversations into trusted customer relationships. For a demo, click here. Or, to start a month-long free trial immediately, click here

Google, well-known for releasing special versions of its iconic logo to commemorate holidays, anniversaries, and the lives of luminaries, this morning released its most interactive “doodle” to date: a fully playable version of the 1980s video game Pac-Man, with the Google logo for a backdrop. The release, which coincides with the 30th anniversary of Pac-Man’s debut, is currently dominating Twitter’s trending topics.

Celebrating holidays, birthdays, and historic events with your customers—particularly those events most relevant to your business or market—is an excellent way to demonstrate knowledge and appreciation of culture, history, and the bigger picture. But there is another benefit. On their site, Google admits that, “[w]hile the doodle is primarily a fun way for the company to recognize events and notable people, it also illustrates the creative and innovative personality of the company itself.”

So, how might your business illustrate creativity and innovation in this way? What about a custom homepage or Twitter background? Depending on the design of your Website, you could add an occasion-specific splash page or a banner image. And don’t forget about offline opportunities! A subtle change in packaging for a special celebration or event can build consumer interest and online buzz as well. Make some aspect of your product or brand collectible, and collect it your advocates will. Google reports that some of their users actually collect their custom logos!

And if you’re running out of ideas, get your customers involved! Google invites customers to submit their own ideas for logos, and has even run a contest for K-12 students to bring in new ideas. The Jones Soda company invites its customers to submit photographs to be used on the company’s bottled beverages.

There are, of course, some things to be cautious about. As Google points out in answering the question of why they don’t release doodles for certain holidays, “We have to balance [the doodle calendar] with the need to maintain the consistency of the Google homepage.” So, brand consistency is an issue to consider. Another issue is the potential to be offensive. Events or occasions that are obviously somber should be avoided, as should any that might be misinterpreted by your customers or prospects.

But, those caveats aside, why not give an idea like Google’s doodles a try? Have you already? Let us know in the comments, and then get outside and have yourself and amazingly fun Fun Stuff Friday.

In this series, we’re detailing the steps you should take to find new people to follow on Twitter and to get them to engage with your business. So far, we’ve covered the First C: Customer, the Second C: Credibility, and the Third C: Content. Today, we move on to the Fourth C: Community.

The Fourth C: Community

Just as Twitter is a great way for customers to keep track of and keep in touch with your business, it is a great way for you to keep track of the businesses and organizations you partner and interact with on a regular basis. If your business and channel partners are using the service, Twitter is an ideal platform for keeping track of any retail, advertising, distribution, or supply chain issues which might affect your organization. It is also an excellent place to emphasize the human side of your business. Whether you’re congratulating partners on their accomplishments or supporting them as they struggle through challenging times, the public nature of the Twitter provides an exceptional opportunity to build or reinforce your business’s reputation as a positive member of your community. How do you begin building a business community on Twitter?

Ask. Ask your business and channel partners to follow your business. Don’t forget to follow them back. Make sure to prominently feature your business’s Twitter ID in the footer area of your outbound e-mail messages, as well as on your corporate letterhead and stationery.

Recruit. Recruit members of your existing business community who aren’t on Twitter. Contact them through a channel you’ve used in the past (e-mail, direct mail, text messaging, etc.), explain to them the benefits of the service, and ask them to join you. Suggest the possibility of a market- or geographic-specific Twitter chat using an agreed-upon hash-tag to help the new recruits build their own following.

Search. Search for mentions of professional organizations that your business belongs to, and follow businesses and individuals talking about them. Beyond that, search for terms related to your geographical area and business market. Follow local personalities and pundits, members of the press covering your industry, and any civic or other community group or leader that seems relevant.

The next and final blog post in this series will cover the Fifth C: Competition.

The JitterJam multichannel marketing platform is an excellent way to take full advantage of these Five C’s, and to turn social conversations into trusted customer relationships. For a demo, click here. Or, to start a month-long free trial immediately, click here.

In this series, we’re detailing the steps you should take to find new people to follow on Twitter and to get them to engage with your business. Part one covered the First C: Customer, part two covered the Second C: Credibility, and today we’re discussing the Third C: Content.

The Third C: Content

Twitter is an extraordinary tool for sharing compelling, relevant content with your customers and prospects. The trick is to find time to write that content yourself or to find reliable sources that are regularly producing content you judge to be worth sharing. How do you do that? You can evaluate worthiness based on the pure volume of tweets about a user’s content, but that strategy ignores the fact that part of the usefulness of Twitter is its ability to help users discover and connect with new voices. Certainly you should be highlighting the users and content that are widely agreed to be worth reading, but injecting a healthy dose of fresh perspectives into your followers’ streams is a way to differentiate your business and provide added value.

Start With Who You Read, But Go Further. If they’re on Twitter, follow the blogs and news sources you’re learning from outside of the service. As we recommended when discussing the Second C: Credibility, check for “Follow Us on Twitter” links in their sidebars, footers, and headers. But go further than that! If the blog features multiple writers, examine the author list, click on the names, and see if there are links to individual profiles there. If there are not, use a Google search to conduct a search on the author’s name alongside the word Twitter. These authors may be writing for other blogs that you haven’t discovered yet.

Find New Voices & New Perspectives. Search for industry-specific keywords, and make sure to require the abbreviation http in order to bring back only those results that include links. JitterJam’s powerful social search capabilities offer decided advantages for blog consumption over RSS readers. First, if you’re already using Twitter in other areas of your business, using it as your primary content discovery tool means you’ll have one less application to open. And second, discovering the new voices we discussed above is far easier with a social search than it is with an RSS reader—with an RSS reader, your potential discoveries are limited to those new voices recommended by the bloggers you’re already following.

Make It Easy. Create a Twitter list to group all content providers together for easy access. Not everyone you follow will be a providing content on a regular basis. Group together those who are providing content regularly and make it easy for yourself to find something to tweet when you need something to tweet.

The next blog post in this series will cover the Fourth C: Community.

The JitterJam multichannel marketing platform is an excellent way to take full advantage of these Five C’s, and to turn social conversations into trusted customer relationships. For a demo, click here. Or, to start a month-long free trial immediately, click here.

Brings Social Media Marketing, Mobile Marketing, and an Intelligent Contact Database to iContact Users

Durham, NC (Vocus/PRWEB ) May 18, 2010 — iContact, an industry leader in email marketing services for small and mid-sized businesses, and JitterJam, a pioneering social marketing software provider, today announced a partnership to help businesses build trusted relationships with their current and potential customers.

This collaboration combines iContact’s feature-rich email marketing solutions with JitterJam’s unique social media, email, and mobile engagement platform and intelligent contact database. Businesses now have the ability to easily create multi-channel campaigns on a single platform using their existing iContact email lists and templates along with the contacts they’ve cultivated across other social and mobile channels.

“We were looking for an email marketing partner that provides powerful features and capabilities for our customers and a world-class API for deep integration with our platform,” said Ric Pratte, President and CEO of JitterJam. “iContact provides JitterJam customers with all the tools they need to easily create impactful email marketing campaigns along with their social media and mobile outreach, and the integration makes it easy for current iContact customers to expand their marketing outreach to the real-time web seamlessly and without having yet another silo of customer data.”

JitterJam is a comprehensive web-based integrated social marketing platform for multi-channel engagement and marketing. Its rich feature set includes social monitoring and engagement through Twitter, Facebook, email and FriendFeed; email marketing integration with iContact; mobile marketing through a native text messaging campaign tool; multi-channel message and campaign creation, scheduling and measurement; the Make Me Happy™ permission marketing system; and much more. JitterJam’s capabilities enable businesses to develop trusted relationships with their current and potential customers, and to communicate with them through the channels they most prefer.

“We are pleased to partner with JitterJam to provide our customers with the ability to integrate iContact functionality with social media and mobile marketing. JitterJam’s unique capabilities will help businesses develop deeper and more trusted relationships with their contacts,” said Jeff Taylor, Director of Business Development for iContact. “Email continues to be a cornerstone for businesses to drive consumer engagement and adoption, and we’re proud that JitterJam selected iContact for deep integration into their revolutionary platform.”

The iContact integration has been completed and is commercially available for use within the JitterJam platform.

About JitterJam
Founded in 2008, JitterJam empowers consumer-facing businesses to leverage social marketing and have it perform in concert with their other marketing initiatives. JitterJam is a comprehensive platform 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.

For media inquiries, contact Margaret Donnelly, VP of Marketing & Business Development, Margaret.donnelly(at)jitterjam(dot)com or 603.782.4909.

Connect with us via Twitter @jittergram, via the JitterJam LinkedIn Group and our Facebook Fan Page.

About iContact
With more than 63,000 customers, iContact provides email marketing for SMBs and non-profits. iContact allows for easy creation of email newsletters, surveys, and autoresponders. Market leaders like Intuit, Vonage, Symantec, International Paper, LG Electronics and ReMax, use iContact to build stronger relationships with their customers and prospects at a fraction of the cost of traditional marketing methods.

iContact, designed for the Small Business market is available at www.iContact.com; iContactPlus, a suite of custom and managed services designed for mid-sized organizations, is available at www.iContactPlus.com.

For media inquiries, contact Chuck Hester, APR, Communications Director,
Chuck(at)iContact(dot)com or 919.459.1451.

Visit us on Twitter @iContactCorp, iContact Linkedin Group, and our Facebook Fan Page.

Pitching a business or product in person is a skill that every marketer and salesperson works hard to perfect. But often the circumstances under which you are required to make your pitch are out of your control. That’s why the ability to think on your feet is crucial. And perhaps this is why we’ve seen a rise in so-called presentation challenges in recent years. With the growing popularity of PechaKucha and Battledecks, there has never been a better time to hone your improvisational skills.

PechaKucha is a challenge to presenters to present their ideas with just 20 slides, which they are allowed to display for no more than 20 seconds each. Events have been held in 304 cities across the globe since February 2003.

Battledecks takes the PechaKucha concept one step further by requiring presenters to improvise a presentation based on a set of slides they’ve never seen before. It’s been a big hit at the South By Southwest Interactive Festival and at Podcamp events in both Boston and New Hampshire.

Both challenges force presenters out of their comfort zones and provide an excellent opportunity to improve on a presenter’s ability to think fast and adjust to unfamiliar situations. If you have the opportunity to present during either of these events, do take the time to do so.

Have yourself an amazingly fun Fun Stuff Friday!

In this series, we’re detailing the steps you should take to find new people to follow on Twitter and to get them to engage with your business. In part one, we discussed the First C of Following People on Twitter: Customer. In today’s follow-up, we’re covering the Second C: Credibility.

The Second C: Credibility

In the years since its debut in 2006, Twitter has provided an excellent platform for helpful, knowledgeable users to establish themselves as thought leaders and subject matter experts. By tweeting tips and best practices on a regular basis, and by utilizing the public (and therefore searchable) @ message system to engage directly with followers, Twitterers like Tamar Weinberg and Jason Falls have established themselves as leading authorities on social media. Weinberg has authored the book The New Community Rules and provided consulting in Internet marketing for M80 (whose clients include Ford and Microsoft), while Falls has consulted for major brands like Louisville Slugger and Jim Beam, as well as for organizations such as The National Center for Family Literacy. And those are just two of the more high profile examples. Twitter is an ideal place for your business to learn more about social media, about your marketplace and about how those two things intersect.

Start With Who You Know. If they’re on Twitter, follow the people you are learning from through other channels. Check the sidebars, footers, and headers of their websites for “Follow Me on Twitter” links. Look for similar information on the covers or inside flaps of any books they have written. And, when all else fails, use Google to conduct a search on the individual’s name alongside the word Twitter.

Search For People You Should Know. Search for industry-specific conversations and take note of the users whose content is being constantly and consistently retweeted. You can follow these users with just two clicks from within one of JitterJam’s powerful social searches.

Ask For Further Suggestions. Use Twitter’s @ message feature to ask the influencers, experts and thought leaders you follow already who they trust most and who they are learning from. If they prove difficult to reach, examine any Twitter lists they may be following for clues. They may have a VIPs list, an Inspiration list, or a list specific to your industry. Once you have the list’s name, you can use JitterJam’s social search functionality to monitor all tweets by members of that list, and to add any user of particular interest to your database.

The next blog post in this series will cover the Third C: Content.

The JitterJam multichannel marketing platform is an excellent way to take full advantage of these Five C’s, and to turn social conversations into trusted customer relationships. For a demo, click here. Or, to start a month-long free trial immediately, click here.

Show and Tell - explaining the rain game, by woodleywonderworks on Flickr. CC BY.

Much of social media is a giant game of show and tell. Whether users are sharing photos on Facebook or brief anecdotes on Twitter, they are, to one extent or another, doing the same thing they did when they stood in front of the class in elementary school to explain why they loved their new Transformer toy so much. Businesses engaged in social media can use this predisposition toward sharing and storytelling to discover new, valuable information on consumers. The key is to get directive.

What if, once a week, your business encouraged its customers to engage in a game of show and tell with some specific parameters? Here are a few examples:

• A performing arts center might encourage its patrons to describe the best concert they’ve ever attended, and then use that information to tweak and modify the concertgoing experience accordingly.
• A health-conscious food company might solicit its customers for their guiltiest culinary pleasures, then post healthier alternatives that utilize the company’s products.
• An outdoor supply company might ask its following about the one piece of camping gear that’s saved the day more than any other over the years, then highlight that item (and items like it) more prominently in their online store.

Yes, this is what businesses are doing every day when they ask questions on Twitter, on Facebook, and on their blogs. But by framing the question as a game, by calling back to an activity that many customers will remember from their childhoods, businesses can develop intelligence on their consumer base in a fun, unique, and far less overtly sales-driven way.

What do you think? Let us know, then get out there and have an amazingly fun Fun Stuff Friday!

As Chris Penttila wisely pointed out in a July 2000 article for Entrepreneur magazine, “Giving employees a change of scenery—even something as simple as walking around the block—can help trigger new ideas, new enthusiasm and a boost in morale that will have at least short-term benefits for your organization.” The company retreat, once just “another inflated part of the [dot-com] bubble”, need not be elaborate to be effective. eHow.com provides a ten-step plan for “balancing productive meetings and social merriment,” while Meetingsnet offers tips on how to avoid The 7 Deadly Sins of Business Retreats.

Here, from the Entrepreneur article, is one example of a low-key off-site meeting that led to great results:

When it came time to revise the marketing strategy at Crawford & Associates, Crawford held the staff meeting at her home. Employees brainstormed and wrote various ideas on a giant piece of butcher paper. “There was a great stream of consciousness in that meeting that we could never have had at the office,” Crawford says. “Being in a different place allowed us to get rid of distractions and pay attention.”

Company retreats can also be highly effective for building team unity in an age when telecommuting and a widespread workforce are becoming more prevalent. The team from WooThemes.com is distributed across the globe, but earlier this year they got together for “a week-long working ski trip in the Austrian Alps,” a productive business trip they also managed to turn into a social media success.

Whether you bring your team out to a patch of grass behind your building, to the coffee shop down the street, or to a mountain resort, getting them out of the office from time to time is an excellent way to boost morale and encourage creative, outside-the-box thinking.

Have yourself an amazingly fun Fun Stuff Friday!

Thanks to Chiff.com for providing some of these links.

Today we announced JitterJam’s integration with Google Apps™, as well as the addition of the product to the Google Apps Marketplace™. JitterJam’s integration with Google Apps allows users to sign on to JitterJam with a Google account or Google Apps e-mail address; to connect to Google Calendar to record all outbound communications and promotions; and to cull new contacts from a Gmail inbox with JitterJam’s powerful database and communications tools.

Here are some details on how we think each of these new features will benefit you and your business.

Single Login
Users can take full advantage of Google’s single sign-on capability to access JitterJam without an additional user ID or password to remember and manage. If you are one of  the 25 million employees whose employers are already utilizing Google Apps, or one of the 176 million individuals who use Gmail, this is great news. If you’re signed on to Gmail or Google Apps already, then logging into your JitterJam account doesn’t even require you to enter a password.

Gmail Integration
JitterJam’s integration with Gmail provides a powerful way to identify potential new customers from within your inbox. Set JitterJam to search for leads it finds in mailing lists and groups, or automate the process of entering prospects who have e-mailed you into the database. Imagine collecting contact information for active participants of an industry-specific LinkedIn group with just one click. These are enthusiastic, committed prospects, and with JitterJam’s Gmail integration it’s now that much easier to begin the process of developing and deepening those relationships.

Integration With Google Calendar
JitterJam updates Google Calendar every time you send or schedule an outbound communication. This allows your team to monitor what messages are being sent and when, keeping every team member updated and informed. Those team members who are not as active in social media will be able to keep track of what messaging is being sent, from within a product that they are already using to keep track of their meetings and other engagements. And those team members who are active in social media will be able to see where their efforts are aligning with the efforts of the rest of the business.

Easy Configuration
Just a few clicks and you’re ready to go. Integration with Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google’s single sign-on capability is easy to implement, easy to use, and will make it that much easier for you to succeed with JitterJam.

Intrigued? We hope so. If you haven’t already experienced all that JitterJam has to offer, please consider scheduling a demo or signing up for our one month free trial.