JitterJam – Integrated Social Marketing Software for Business

We’ve started a Social Marketing coffee hour every Friday morning here at JitterJam HQ. The purpose of the coffee hour is to have free discussion and brainstorming to get our creative juices flowing and to spark new ideas that will help our customers, partners, friends and ourselves.

Last Friday, we decided to spark some ideas for our Entertainment Venue customers to help them increase their customer base, discover and engage new consumers, and utilize new tactics to increase the buzz around their business. Here are some ideas.

1. Create location-based social searches to find local people who are talking about the artists/acts that are playing your venue within the next 90 days.
• Let these people know that their favorite artist will be appearing soon!
• Invite them to get on a specific mailing list for that artist using JitterJam's Make Me Happy™ permission marketing system. Tag those people who sign up through that Make Me Happy link with that particular artist and perform regular outreach prior to drive ticket sales.
2. Utilize your current marketing lists to gather more targeted information from your contacts.
• Create a contest and send it out to your current lists. Get people to not only enter the contest, but also allow them to provide multiple contact addresses, their communications preferences and their list of interest. Utilize the intelligence you've built about your customer base to drive repeat business, deeper engagement and advocacy.
3. Promote yourself during your events.
• Ask people attending an event to text a code to join your marketing list through on-stage announcements, electronic and print signage, on beverage napkins, etc.
• Use an on-site contest with a public winner to increase participation in your opt-in program (e.g. meet the band).
• Update what's happening at your venue during your live events. Make sure you publish photos (barring any copyright issues) of the event as they occur.
• Encourage attendees to update their friends and fans about the event as it happens. Encourage the use of a unique #hashtag to develop your brand identity.
4. Make sure your website reflects all your communication activities.
• Ensure that your Make Me Happy link is available on every web page. Make it easy for your web visitors to opt-in to your marketing programs.
• Stream Twitter and Facebook comments about you and your venue on your site and ensure that your visitors can easily "Like" or "Follow" you!
5. Utilize crowdsourcing applications like FourSquare to get your "fans" to promote you.
• Claim your business on FourSquare and use the Make Me Happy landing page as a way for visitors to get discounts.
• Encourage people to try to create a FourSquare swarm at events and get others to join in.

Would you like to attend our Creativity Coffee? We'd love to have you join us in our discussion!

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.

Many businesses looking to engage customers and prospects via social media channels have a limited amount of time and resources to devote to that task on a daily basis. But a lot can be accomplished in just thirty minutes a day. Here is a three-step plan for managing your company’s social media to-do list.

Build a list of manageable, actionable items. At minimum, this list should include replying to Twitter @ replies and direct messages; to wall posts left on your business’s Facebook Fan Page; and to mentions of your company, brand, and products made across the Web on both social networks and blogs.

Populate your list automatically. Set your social marketing platform to push all of the interactions listed above directly to your to-do list. If possible, have it flag high risk items (based on the inclusion of a specified word or phrase in a search result) and do whatever it else it can to create priority levels for you.

Review your process regularly and revise it accordingly. Identify tasks you are spending a lot of time on, as well as which efforts are paying off and which are not. If you only have thirty minutes a day to work on social media, you need to spend that time wisely. Don’t get caught up in a routine that isn’t working. Always be on the lookout for ways to improve and streamline your process.

Earlier today, we posted a new video to our homepage that illustrates how JitterJam can help you with managing your social media to-do list, and much more. I hope you’ll give it a look, and then consider signing up a free trial or a personalized demo.

When you track your social media relationships in an intelligent contact database like the one that’s at the heart of JitterJam, it’s important to periodically clean up your database to make developing legitimate prospects into customers a more efficient process. Here are three tips:

Identify Spammers. Any good contact database that’s pulling data from Twitter is going to bring in both the contacts you are following and the contacts who are following you. This maximizes the number of potential customers you have to work with, but it also introduces the possibility of spammers making their way into your database. Identify them by querying the database to create a list of contacts who you don’t follow and who don’t follow you. Among this list, you are likely to find spammers who unfollowed you at a certain point, once they determined you weren’t going to reciprocate. Confirm that they’re spammers in a couple of ways. First, look at their profile pictures. If they haven’t bothered to upload a profile photo, delete them. Second, if they’re constantly retweeting things without providing any insight or context, and posting very little else, delete them. And third, if the content they’re posting isn’t relevant to your business, delete them. Cut out the noise!

Analyze One-Way Relationships. Are there people who are following you, who you haven’t followed back, but who you should be following? And what about the people you’re following who aren’t following you back? Are they worth continuing to follow? If they are worth following, is there anything you can do to get them to finally reciprocate? Analyze all of the one-way relationships in your database, and scrub the list accordingly.

Tag Contacts for Follow-Up. Are there contacts who you don’t feel comfortable deleting right now, but who might be worth getting rid of in the future? Use your database’s tagging system and create a group of contacts to pay closer attention to in the coming months. Then review this group first-thing, the next time you clean your database.

Have you cleaned your social media lists and databases yet this spring? Is it something you plan on doing this year? Drop us a note in the comments, and let us know what you did, and how it’s working out for you.

When it comes to listening in social media, searches on common terms can produce an ear-splitting amount of volume. Here at JitterJam, we’re trying to sell a product that incorporates social media listening and engagement, and that means that we’re searching social media channels for the term “social media,” which, it turns out, is a term that gets used a whole lot.

A human being can only participate in so many conversations per day, and a search on “social media” alone brings in too many results to be useful to us, so refining our social searches makes the conversation load much more manageable.

Possible refinements include adding words (like marketing and best practices), and modifying words (like searching on “social CRM” or “social marketing” instead of “social media”). But something I hadn’t experimented with as much before today was adding limiting words to a search to restrict results.

What’s the biggest cause of clutter for us when listening for mentions of the words “social media”? Links. Plain and simple, the amount of links being shared via social media about social media is immense. This is useful to us when we’re looking for great content to share. But, when we’re looking for people and companies who we think could benefit from the use of our product, the links get in the way. So, this afternoon, I did something simple and tried excluding “http” from a search.

The results narrowed substantially, but were still so vast that I needed to further refine them. I added the word “help” (figuring that this would bring up users searching for help with their social media efforts) and Bingo, I had a manageable search (about 300 results expected per day) to begin mining for potential customers.

What search terms are giving you fits or have given you fits in the past? How have you refined your searches to get more useful results? Let us know.

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.