JitterJam® Social CRM

While following the Tour de France the other day, it occurred to me that this exhausting bike race shares many similarities with a company’s social media strategy.  Amidst the crowded peloton (the large central pack of racers), cyclists vie for position, but despite their best efforts they can easily get lost in the crowd.  Typically, the teams with the best performance over the course of the race succeed through consistency and leadership, and by dealing with bumps in the road smoothly (literally and figuratively).  Just as these characteristics allow elite cyclists to succeed, they are also the driving forces for strategic social media success within a company.

• Be Consistent – Like the Tour de France, social media success does not happen overnight.  Both challenges are long journeys that require continual effort, and with each day new successes and failures will emerge.  But don’t be intimidated!  A strong and constant social media presence will bring value to your brand and will be worth the investment.

• Adapt – From year to year the landscape of your competition will change.  In cycling improved riders will emerge each year, and less motivated riders will slow with time.  In social media this process can happen much faster due to the nature of the Internet.  You must be willing to adapt your social strategy to this change by expanding your social presence through another channel, beginning new practices to better serve your customers, or simply by getting better at what you currently do. Be vigilant and continue to emerge on the top.

• Manage Crises – When Lance Armstrong popped a tire on Stage 3 of this year’s race, he lost significant time; but his race team dealt with the situation quickly enough for him to still finish in the top twenty.  Your company’s social media presence is the infrastructure that allows them to listen to what your customers are saying, so you know immediately when a problem arises.  Responding to a crisis swiftly and properly will ensure that your company loses minimal ground, if any at all.  This is absolutely necessary in today’s culture where bad news spreads like wildfire.

• Unify – While one person wins the Tour de France, his team—which consists of many other cyclists—is largely responsible for the victory.  The team protects the biker from the competition and allows him to draft off of them, doing just as much work as the individual winner.  Similarly, effective social media strategy requires that your company or brand team unify and embrace a single strategy to move towards a common goal.

There are many other social media lessons we can learn from this cycling race and from other sporting events, but these are some of the main pillars of an effective social media strategy.  Fortunately for us, we don’t have to burn 10,000 calories a day to learn these lessons!  What other lessons have you learned about social media from real-world events?

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

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.

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.

Businesses looking to engage new individuals on Twitter are often at a loss when determining which people and companies to follow, and how to find them. This is especially true for businesses just getting started with social marketing. The question of why to engage in social marketing has largely been answered—it opens up potential new markets, and provides a way to build deeper, more trusted relationships with an increasingly vocal customer base. But when it comes to the mechanics of social marketing, there are few answers to be found for the questions of how to engage, and whom to engage with.

Of course, JitterJam can help you with the process to find people to follow, but you still have to judge whom to follow. In this series of five blog posts, we’ll give you the rationale and steps in finding people to follow on Twitter—and getting more people to engage with your business.

The Five C’s of Following People on Twitter

1. Customer: Your current and potential customers
2. Credibility: People who provide you with an opportunity to learn
3. Content: Great stuff that your followers will love to read
4. Community: Business partners, channel partners, and other members of your business community
5. Competition: Keep an eye on what they’re doing

The First C: Customer

Twitter provides your business with a great opportunity to find out who your customers are—AND to develop direct communications with them. You also have the opportunity to find potential customers through searches and outreach. How?

Ask. Ask your customers to follow your business. Don’t forget to follow them back. Social media is all about being social, being part of the conversation. Make sure you ask on all your consumer-facing communications—on your website, in your advertising, on your collateral, prominently on your outbound promotional and personal emails. Create a fun graphic, or just say “Follow us on Twitter” with your Twitter ID and/or a link to your Twitter ID.

Search For Your Business’ Fans. Search Twitter for conversations that include your business’ name, brand and/or product and follow the people who are engaged in those conversations. People might be mentioning your brand, but if they’re talking about you and not to you, you might miss that opportunity to engage with your customer. JitterJam’s powerful social search function finds and saves these conversations for you and enables you to review them and act upon them when it’s convenient for you. Take the opportunity to engage these people in direct conversations (@ messages are nice—they’re public, and they enable others to see you engaging with your customers).

Get Permission. If you’re going to use Twitter as a marketing channel as well as a communications channel, make sure that you ask permission to market to them through Twitter before you send a Twitter direct message (DM) or @ message with a promotional message. Using best practices to market to consumers—regardless of the channel—is essential to building trust with your current and prospective customers. JitterJam’s Make Me Happy™ permission marketing system makes this easy and puts the consumer in control.

The next blog post in this series will cover the Second C: Credibility

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 addition to my work at JitterJam, I teach creative writing at Lesley University. And one of the principles I harp on in my lectures there is the concept of the ideal reader. The ideal reader is the person who we are trying most to reach and to please every time we sit down to write. We can’t have a million ideal readers, I tell my students. We have to pick just one.

Too often, we blast messages out with too general an audience in mind. We do it because it’s easier, and because we don’t always know who among our audience is interested in what. But, in today’s world of personalization and customization, that approach just doesn’t cut it. As marketers, we need to identify an ideal reader for each and every message we send.

This is where database-driven social media platforms like JitterJam can help. Database-driven applications allow us to capture and continuously update details on when and where customers are willing to be contacted, and, most importantly, on what they’re interested in being contacted about. This is the key to deploying content tailored to specific groups within your larger audience.

Here’s a game plan:

1. Gather preferences. Whether you enter the preferences into the system yourself or you implement a public-facing customer preferences panel (like the Make Me Happy™ page found in JitterJam), make a point to gather information on customer interests and preferences as soon as possible after your initial contact. Then establish a customer communications schedule (where you’ll ask your contacts to update their records) to help keep that data up-to-date.

2. Write/speak with a specific audience in mind. Identify the ideal reader or recipient of your message early, and shape your content accordingly. If a group of contacts loves your widgets but doesn’t want to hear anything about your gizmos, be sure to scrub your message of any gizmo-related promotions. If you’re sending a video out to a group of contacts who prefer to be reached by Twitter, embrace their appreciation of brevity and make it short. Or, if you are speaking with a group of your staunchest advocates, take care to avoid the introductory verbiage they may have heard or read a thousand times before.

3. Customize even the standard messages. Every company has templates for standard communications like welcome messages and monthly newsletters. And while the bulk of the text of those messages isn’t customizable, I think it’s almost always possible to throw a little personal attention into the mix. Even if all you do is add a sentence or two at the top of the message, acknowledging the recipient’s business or field of interest, you’ve gone a long way toward proving to that person that they are more to you than just a name and an e-mail address on a long list of other names and e-mail addresses.

Last month, I wrote about the importance of measurement in social media campaigns. In that post, I identified three things you should be tracking in particular: the buzz building around your company and industry; the ROI on the special promotions you’re running; and trends in the development of your contact list.

We’ve already talked about trends in the development of your contact list. This time, let’s focus on the buzz building around your company and industry. Here are three tips on how to handle it.

Contribute without selling. Don’t enter into the conversation looking to sell. As with any social media interaction, enter the room with the aim of being helpful first and foremost. Be subtle and tactful as you try to raise awareness of your product or service. This is especially crucial if the conversation is about your industry in general and not your company specifically.

Don’t duck in and duck out. Become a presence in the conversation, not just the person who sneaks into the picture to get noticed, then leaves. This ties in with the point above: Show your potential customers that you are engaged in this conversation for the long haul, and that your first interaction was not just a token appearance or some kind of marketing stunt or trick.

Research the origins of the buzz. A key piece of reacting to buzz is anticipating and reacting quickly. If you didn’t react as swiftly as you’d like this time, the key to reacting quicker next time is in understanding where the buzz started, how it started, and who started it. If you’re seeing buzz consistently originate from the same people or sites, it might be time to start tracking what they’re saying more carefully. Use tagging or segmentation features in your marketing platform (like those found in JitterJam) to create a group of contacts you should be checking in on more regularly.

Those are just a couple of the strategies that come immediately to mind when thinking about buzz management. Have anything to add? Drop a note in the comments below.

Creating a compelling, reusable email template should be a high priority on every marketing department’s social media To Do List. After all, in the words of eMarketer senior analyst Debra Aho Williamson, “[social media and email] can help each other, offering the opportunity for marketers to create deeper connections.” So, here are a few tips on what a good template should include.

Social Links. Wherever you put them—the header, the footer, or the sidebar—make sure to include links to your Facebook and Twitter pages. For the JitterJam email template I’ve been setting up over the past week, I’ve also included a link to our Make Me Happy contact preferences page, where contacts can tell us through which channel they prefer to be contacted (as well as how often they wish to be contacted). Give your readers every opportunity to extend the conversation beyond their inboxes.

Plenty of White Space. Don’t cram your profile full of extra content. Do make sure to include social links and a logo, but don’t over-embellish. In my experience, a busy, headache-inducing email is an email swiftly deleted. Leave room for the content to speak for itself. And be sure to use a big enough font! Don’t make your readers strain their eyes to see your message.

A Compelling Plain-Text Alternative. Not every email client is capable of displaying HTML emails, and not every user is interested in reading HTML emails even if their client is capable of it. So, be sure to take some time to craft a compelling plain-text alternative to your message (assuming the email broadcasting platform you’re using is capable of including one).

Once you’ve crafted your template, don’t forget to test, test, test, and then test again. Test different desktop clients on different operating systems, plus every Webmail client you can get your hands on. Make sure that your message is going to look beautiful and be intelligible when it reaches your readers.

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.