Part I of II: Direct Engagement With a Twitter Contact

This is a “sister” blog post to Idea Spark: Social Marketing Use Case #4-Direct Customer Engagement & Feedback which answers the question, “Okay, so how do I actually do that in JitterJam?” Our Idea Spark blog posts are purposefully tool-neutral; they present best practices, engagement strategies and all types of, well, ideas! JitterJam Tips blog posts, on the other hand, are designed to help our clients transform concepts into practice and to show our prospects what is possible within the JitterJam platform.

Putting Engagement into Practice

Whether you are using or intend to use social media for building brand awareness, lead generation, customer service, sales promotions, or product engagement and feedback, the tactical steps are pretty much the same! Your numerous and effective JitterJam Social Searches should have plenty of relevant conversations streaming into the Listen•Engage area of JitterJam. It’s fantastic to see what people are saying about your brand, your company, your product(s) and your industry! There are tremendous benefits to having your corporate ear tuned to listen. But this post is about something deeper! To build relationships with the authors of these valuable nuggets, you’ll need to move into the engagement phase.

It’s at this point that you’ll have some decisions to make regarding the approach to use for an initial dialogue and subsequent engagement with these chatty consumers. Your approach will depend on your industry, your current use case for social media and the current perception and awareness of your brand among the community with which you hope to engage. We have a bunch of past blog posts (consolidated in the following list) that will help you settle on the approach that is best for you. Review these and then we’ll dive into the “How-to-do-it-in-JitterJam” stuff.

• Idea Spark: Starting a Dialogue With a Customer
• Idea Spark: Social Etiquette
• Idea Spark: Voice of the Brand Pt. 1—Who Is Talking?
• Idea Spark: Voice of the Brand Pt. 2: What is Your Brand’s Voice?
• Idea Spark: Social Communities

Your engagement tactics will depend on the channel on which a contact was discovered (Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, You Tube or a blog) and how much public social profile information JitterJam found for the contact you hope to engage with. The rest of this blog post is focused on engaging with contacts discovered on Twitter; Part II will cover the other channels.

How To Engage With a New Twitter Contact

A look at a few engagement scenarios …

1. Person-A tweeted that they tried your product and were happy with the results.
2. Person-B just checked in via Foursquare to one of your locations (and used Foursquare to tweet about it).
3. Person-C tweeted that he was looking for advice on selecting a product in the space where you compete!

Your response to each of these discovered Twitter “conversations” should probably be different. Let’s look at the response scenarios.

Responding to Person-A: Brand Mention
You know that Person-A tried your product and took the time to tweet about the positive experience. Because you know this, it is perfectly acceptable to follow Person-A on Twitter.

Using JitterJam:Click on the grey “birdie-bottom” icon near the profile information to start following someone new; the icon will turn blue to show that you’re now following them.

This is your first step of engagement. Following someone on Twitter will add that person into JitterJam’s intelligent contact database. Additionally, you’ll impress your brand presence onto this person when he/she is notified of their new follower (typically by email, depending on the individual’s Twitter settings). Depending on the social media approach you have settled upon, you might say nothing to the contact and let the Twitter ‘follow’ speak on its own or you might respond with a “Thanks” or another equally light-touch response… “Glad you enjoyed it!”, “Nice to hear, thanks for sharing”, etc. Your response over Twitter can also be a re-tweet of the conversation the contact authored about your brand, an @ mention or @ reply, or a Direct Message (DM) IF that person is already following you.

Using JitterJam: The image shows which icon to click depending on your desired action. The response actions available to you in JitterJam depend upon your relationship with the contact. If a response action is not available (e.g. you can’t DM a contact because they aren’t following you), the icon will not be visible.

The most common actions in this scenario are re-tweeting or sending an @ mention (or @ reply) message, both of which are public and therefore visible to some or all Twitter users. The contact made a public statement about your brand/company, and a public, light-touch response is a fine choice. However, if you surmise from reading this contact’s Twitter stream that he/she might be tentative about public engagement on social networks, a Twitter DM might be the better option. You can send a Twitter DM only if the contact is following you and the message is just between you and the contact; it is not visible to any other Twitter user. For more on the various Twitter messaging options, read our past post, Twitter: Mentions, DMs and Retweets (and When To Use Each).

Responding to Person-B: Foursquare Check In and Tweet
Person-B checked in (via Foursquare) at one of your locations and tweeted about it. It might be a bit presumptive to jump right into a dialog with this person and it might or might not be too bold to follow them on a first check-in. Again, this depends on a number of parameters and practices within your industry and the awareness/perception of your brand. However, if you add the contact to the JitterJam database without following them (by clicking on the Add to Database icon in the “Actions” column of Listen•Engage with two people as shown on the previous graphic), JitterJam will track all of their conversations that are picked up by your social searches and conversation topics; you’ll be able to see how often they check in, mention your product/brand/company, etc. Maybe you’ll decide to follow or initiate a dialogue with someone who has tweeted a check-in more than three (3) times. Your social practices are your decision; JitterJam makes it easy to apply them.

JitterJam Tip for Using Foursquare
Set up a social search to pull in all tweeted Foursquare check-ins for your business and assign these social search results to their own JitterJam Topic (e.g. “4Sq Checkins”). This way, by creating a new Contact Search (in Develop or Promote) you’ll be able to isolate all of your contacts who have checked in more than three times, more than five times, never … what ever threshold is right for you. With these contacts isolated you can follow them, apply a tag to them, or even reach out to kick off a dialog!

Responding to Person-C: Asking for Product Advice
It is pretty exciting to see the conversation from Person-C asking for advice on the best widget when you, in fact, sell the very best-darn widget around! However, make a good effort to temper your response so you don’t sound like a snake-oil salesman. Try something like, “I understand you are looking for widgets, ours might fit the bill – care for a demo?” Or, include the url to a review of your widget as you suggest that, “You might check this out: http://…“ Person-C was looking for some guidance; if your tweet provides that without a strong-arm approach it is likely to be well received.

What happens if a person is less than pleased with your company/brand?
This is certainly a possibility and something you should be prepared for. We have covered this topic in our Monitoring and Responding to High-Risk Conversations post. Most importantly, keep a level head and look upon about the situation with a 360-degree perspective.

What’s Next?
Since this post was quite Twitter-centric, I think it is important to point out other Twitter-specific posts we have for you to use as a resource. Here are five great ones … a post on each of The 5 C’s of Following People on Twitter: Customer, Credibility, Content, Community, Competition.

Part II of this topic will cover Direct Customer Engagement & Feedback over other social channels.

Ready to engage? Remember to step lightly and always be respectful.

Participation in social networks by the general public is expanding at an amazing pace. Not surprisingly, this is spurring companies to dip their toes into social spaces fully unknown to them mere months ago!

Initially, a company or brand is typically concerned with public perception and sentiment about their company/brand on the social ‘wires’. Social monitoring is, therefore, often the first toe into the water for companies making a foray into social media. In doing so, companies quickly come to realize that finding prospects or leads by listening to social conversations is also a strong possibility, and another couple toes (or both feet) slip into the water!

Regardless of where you are at in terms of your social media use or experience, discovering valuable and relevant conversations is likely to be on your task list, so enjoy this blog post and then get busy putting our tips into practice!

How to Get Started: The JitterJam Social Search!

Effective and numerous JitterJam Social Searches form the engine that drives the number and quality of your customer relationships. Social Searches discover relevant conversations occurring on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogs and Friendfeed. They also provide an inbound channel for SMS text messages, email and RSS feed subscriptions. If you don’t properly prime the pump (and keep it primed) by setting up and monitoring numerous, well-tuned Social Searches, the remainder of your efforts in JitterJam will not be as rewarding as they could be.

JitterJam Tip: Test Your Keyword Search
If you select a Keyword social search, be sure to test and refine your search definitions. Keep refining until you are discovering relevant conversations.

Here is a JitterJam Social Search definition screen:

When you select the option to Test your Social Search, you will be brought to this screen:

You’ll now be able to see a sample of the results found by your Social Search and you can continue to refine the keyword parameters until you narrow the results to your liking.

Discovering Brand/Company Mentions

As part of your JitterJam account set-up, you created your first Social Search; this search should be discovering mentions of your company or brand. Review the results in JitterJam’s Listen•Engage / Brand tab. Most Social Searches will need adjustment over time, so if the results are not what you expect, modify the criteria for this Social Search.

JitterJam Tip: How to Edit a Social Search
Navigate to Account / Social Searches. Click on the edit icon next to the Social Search you’d like to refine.

JitterJam Tip: Getting Online Help
For help and guidance on Social Search creation and modification, read the on-screen tips. Click on the Help icon to bring up our Help screen or click on the Video icon found when you’re editing your Social Search. Note that all instructional videos are also found under the Resources / Videos tab.

Discovering Relevant Community Conversations

Be sure to set up several Social Searches designed to discover conversations relating to:

• Your industry
• Your product category
• Activities related to your product (e.g. backpacking conversations for a portable stove manufacturer)
• Any other topic of interest that defines your target customer (e.g. conversations about eco-friendly products for an organic food brand)

The words you would expect to hear in these conversations are the potential keywords for the Social Searches you should set up. Test the waters—set up a few Social Searches around some of your hunches to see if you do, in fact, discover interesting and relevant conversations. After a new Social Search runs for a day or two, see if its focus needs to be narrowed or widened and adjust the criteria accordingly. There is a daily limit to the number of conversations JitterJam can discover for you so be sure to check these often to see if you have any run-away Social Searches.

Customer Resources

To learn more about JitterJam Social Searches, log in to your JitterJam account and check out these areas:

• Videos about “Discovery”: Go to the Resources / Videos tab; the video player has a “Discover” sub-tab that contains a few videos on Social Search creation
• Help: The context-sensitive help system is accessible by clicking on the Help icon throughout JitterJam
• Documentation and Guides: Topic-specific documentation in .pdf format is accessible from the Resources / Download tab

If you need additional help, we’re an email away (support@jitterjam.com) and are always eager to assist!

Ready, Set, Go! Establish and monitor your conversation discovery funnel and start reaping the benefits now! Challenge yourself to create four (4) new JitterJam Social Searches and you’ll be well on your way!

What possible social communities lurk out there that you should be listening to?

Diving Deeper into Consumer Interests

Part I in this series focused on the benefits of adding segmentation to the contacts stored in your JitterJam intelligent contact database and discussed segmenting by consumer interest. In Part II, we take a deeper dive into the broad category of consumer interests and cover that features of JitterJam that facilitate segmentation by interests—namely JitterJam Topics, Tags and Custom Fields.

Topics
“Topics” within the JitterJam platform allow you to segment your database and provide consumers the opportunity to specify their topics of interest when they opt-in to receive communications from you (via JitterJam’s Make Me Happy™ permission marketing system).

Expressed Consumer Interest(s): If you have a list of interests you would like to present to people for their consideration (in a form or a pick-list, for instance), you can designate these choices in a certain type of “Topic” called a “Consumer Interest”. In the Account / Administration area of JitterJam, you can quickly create new topics; clicking on the “Consumer Interest” check box will allow you to include it as one of the interests on the Make Me Happy subscription sign-up or customer preferences forms that you can easily create and customize within JitterJam. These expressed consumer interests are stored with each contact’s record in the JitterJam database.

Implied Consumer Interest(s): Here’s another use for JitterJam Topics…Because you assign each JitterJam social search to a Topic, the search results and their authors can be viewed/analyzed by the Topics (categories of conversations) that one or more social searches roll up into. Let’s say you sell health and beauty aid products and have set a goal to increase sales in your aromatherapy line, and you’ve created a number of social searches to find social conversations about your product and market. A consumer’s online chatter discovered by one of your JitterJam social searches is assigned to the Topic of “Aromatherapy.” Once this person is added to the JitterJam contact database, we’ll track this and any future conversation by this consumer which matches any of your social searches and count the number of times they posted a public comment on the various “Topics” you’re tracking. With this data, you can assume that this consumer may have an interest in one or more of your Aromatherapy products! By understanding the time frame and frequency that a contact converses about a Topic, you’ll be able to gauge their level of interest in your product category. This is what we refer to as implied consumer interest(s) instead of expressed consumer interest(s), as described earlier.

Combining these two uses of JitterJam Topics makes analysis and outreach very interesting! If you use a JitterJam Topic as both a consumer interest and have one or more of your JitterJam social searches assigned to it, you’ll be able to segment the contacts who have expressed an interest, implied an interest (complete with their degree of interest)—or both! This is powerful knowledge. Consider the people whose conversations about “Aromatherapy” are picked up a significant number of times by your social searches and who have also given permission to market and have checked a box expressing an interest in “Aromatherapy”—these could be your hot prospects!

Tags
A second way to store consumer interest information is by tagging all contacts for whom you discover specific interests, a particular role in your community (e.g. blogger) or a note-worthy affiliation. While the Topics feature automatically counts the number of times a contact has has conversed about a subject or has explicitly expressed interest in a topic, applying Tags to contacts is a bit more manual on the part of the JitterJam user but is incredibly valuable none-the-less.

While reading and analyzing discovered conversations, you will find people who are important to you in a number of different ways. You may discover a blogger in your industry, an expert in the field, or someone asking for product references. You may see communications by your competitors or from companies which have complimentary products to yours. You may find customers who love your product and some who are not very happy. You may discover new uses of your product or a way to customize it for a greater appeal. When you review all this important information, you can tag the contacts who authored the relevant content (click on their user name to open their profile) so this knowledge is at hand when you prepare future outbound marketing messages.

Additionally, you can automatically apply tags to all contacts who fill out a particular Make Me Happy form or whose conversations are picked up by a particular social search. You can import tags with contact information you might be pulling from another system or applied to a group of authors or contacts who share a set of common characteristics.

Custom Fields
A final way to represent consumer interests is with JitterJam Custom Fields. You can create up to ten custom fields in each JitterJam account to store any alphanumeric information at the contact level. Currently, these fields can be populated manually (data entry on contact edit form) and automatically by a programmatic call to the JitterJam API or by importing these values for your contacts. This data can indicate product and/or distribution channel preferences, sales volume or anything else that is meaningful to your business and that helps you market to and service your existing and expanding customer base.

Best Use Scenarios
Each of these distinct JitterJam segmentation features is capable of storing interest data, but each has their own strengths and best-use application.

• Spend a little time thinking about the scenarios presented in this post to help you determine the best configuration for you! Think about the types of subjects which people will talk about and/or be willing to express an interest in. JitterJam Topics is the best feature for this set of interests.
• Think about information garnered from your on-line sales or point-of-purchase systems and the data you’ve gathered from surveys. JitterJam Custom Fields might be the best feature for this set of interests/preferences/patterns.
• JitterJam Tags are the best feature if you are capturing a contact’s role in your industry (blogger, expert, analyst, competitor, complimentary product representative, etc.) or relationship to your company/brand/product (competitor, employee, season pass holder, etc.). Tags are also easily applied when you are mining sets of conversations or contacts in an attempt to find commonality among people as it relates to your product space. Once you hone in on the right set of people, you can quickly apply one or more tags to this group of authors or contacts.

Once you’ve started to use Topics, Tags and Custom Fields, the data gathered is readily available as segmentation tools so you can select and communicate with groups of contacts by any of the values stored in any of these numerous fields! The possibilities are immense, so jump in and get going!  As a word of advice, don’t let the decision of which JitterJam feature to use stop you from getting started. Tags can be removed, Custom Field values can be updated and Topics can be changed. Once you get started on an approach, the best configuration may become obvious; and we’re always here to help you think things through. Just email support@jitterjam.com with your rough thoughts and a structure you’ve been thinking about; we’ll get a dialog going to come up with a plan to meet your needs!

Be sure to tune in to Part III for additional segmentation options that are NOT related to consumer interests.  Promise!

What Do You Think?

Would you find it valuable to understand which activities, hobbies or past-times your consumers enjoy or participate in? If you knew this, what would you do differently?

As Client Success Director at JitterJam, I get the straight-up job of coming up with innovative, effective, creative and efficient ways to use our great feature set in the manner best fitting each unique business and situation. I want all JitterJam clients to be wildly successful; I hope the tips shared in this blog category will set you on that path.

Segmenting Your JitterJam Contacts (Part I)

This is part I in a series on segmentation and will cover benefits and how to get started. Part II will dive deeper into additional ways to segment and strategies to consider.

Why Segment?

If you’re a JitterJam client today, be sure to take full advantage of all the ways to segment your Twitter, Facebook, mobile, email and/or blogger contacts in your JitterJam intelligent contact database. Knowing who you are talking to can have a profound affect on your communication! Think about the categories of people who might be interested in your product or service. Is your ideal prospect an outdoorsy adventurer or a cuddle-up-with-a-good-book type? Who typically purchases your product/service—a caretaker of a senior, a medical doctor or a professor, a teacher or a technician, a HS or college age student, a parent of infants, toddlers or school age kids? Is this typically given as a gift or bought for personal consumption/use? Would a city-dweller or a suburbanite be a better fit—or doesn’t that matter? Is your product/service more popular with males or females?

These are all potential segmentation attributes that you can discover and store with each contact and utilize when creating focused messages to targeted populations to your database! Think about how different—and more effective—a communication that’s focused on the needs of a parent of school-age kids would be versus a generic message about the features of your product. Segmenting your contact database will help you define and reach the right people with the right message!

If your product/service can be used by a very diverse population, you may be thinking that you are out of the woods on segmentation.  Not so fast!  Think about all the types of people mentioned above; would you speak the exact same way to every one of those people if they walked into your showroom?  I didn’t think so. Applying segmentation allows you to customize your tone and language; lets you adjust the amount of slang, sarcasm or humor; it even enables you to present a customized special or promotion to match each segment you want to engage with!

Here’s an example of interests for people involved in home improvement projects. How can you utilize what you know (and learn) about your contacts to better segment your database?

How to Discover and Add Segmentation to Your JitterJam Contacts

Start with your contacts’ interests and where these intersect with your product or service. There are a variety of ways to learn about these interests.

1. Use keywords.

Listen to conversations your prospects are having. Pick up clues using keyword mentions of activities or interests they’re involved in. This can be done in a couple of ways:

• Use a new Social Search to find conversations and tag contacts. Create a new JitterJam Social Search to discover conversations containing key words or phrases that are frequently used by people talking about a specific topic of interest. Test this search (and tweak it if necessary) to eliminate non-relevant conversations and pick up a high percentage of good conversations. When you are creating the search, specify a tag for the search. This will act as an interest “flag”; when you review the social search results, if you add this person to your JitterJam database, JitterJam will automatically apply the appropriate tag to the contact!
• Analyze existing results for common keywords. Open your brand-specific social search and run the “Analyze Keywords” function to see if the conversations reveal the interests of the authors.  If they do, select all of the contacts with a specific interest and apply a tag to all the contacts at once (TIP: use the Gear icon at the upper left corner!)  Continue to work through any other interests which stood out while analyzing the conversations and tag each group of contacts with these interests.
2. Search through social profiles, bios and descriptions.
   • Most people on social networks provide key information in their public profiles. You can search through the profile descriptions of your JitterJam contacts and utilize the keywords and descriptions within those profiles to segment your contacts. Go to Develop/All in JitterJam. Open the “Advanced Filters” window (click on white bar below the sub-tabs). Find the Smart Search section and enter one or more key words.  Click on the “Update” button and all contacts who match your entered criteria are returned. From here, you can tag one, more or all of the contacts.  And just think—this is based on data your contacts have entered and made public about themselves!
3. Ask!
   • Our Make Me Happy™ permission marketing system enables you to ask your contacts how they would like to be contacted (Twitter, Facebook notification, email and/or SMS text message) and how frequently (once a week, once a month, etc.). Additionally, you can ask your contacts to specify their interests and even some demographic information. When you let your contacts know that you will use this data to create relevant offers in a way that adheres to their personal preferences, you will have made your contacts happy!

Need an Extra Nudge?

Consider this: As a consumer, aren’t you so much more willing to receive a marketing message offering a discount on something you’re definitely interested in than on, say, a product you would notice only if you physically tripped over it?! I know I am!  For instance, if you were listening on the social web and heard me mention that I have two sons who have both outgrown their ski equipment (uugghhh!) and were to toss me a 20% off promo code to use at your ski shop, I’d love you—truly!  Remember, just as easily as your prospects opted in to receive marketing communications from you, they can opt out. Don’t give them a reason to; instead, give them every opportunity and reason to stay!

What Do You Think?

Do you have any particular segmentation by which you would like to craft communications or offerings? How do you accomplish this today? Is this data stored in systems or lists within your company? Are you using this valuable data to reach your contacts?