JitterJam – Integrated Social Marketing Software for Business

This Idea Spark blog post is the result of the discussion during our Friday morning Creativity Coffee. If you’d like to join us (in person or via web/phone conference), please sign up here. There’s no charge or obligation. We just love ideas and open discussion!

The last Creativity Coffee discussion centered around Social Etiquette. What rules do businesses and brands need to follow to ensure that they are not creating social SPAM? We had far too little time to fully cover the topic, so we continued the conversation by focusing on social etiquette for a single social channel—Facebook. Here are the highlights of the discussion.

1. A Facebook “fan” is like an annuity—a gift that keeps on giving.
• A Facebook fan provides an ongoing value stream.
• Your wall posts/updates are seen by all your fans, but also potentially by all your fans’ friends. One fan can fuel hundreds of brand impressions.
• The real “value” of a Facebook fan is an unknown. That is, until you begin to drive engagement with your fans.
2. Facebook outreach to non-fans is tricky. When is it okay? How do you do it without “freaking out” the consumer?
• As we discussed in our last session, Facebook’s closed networks and less-than-public personal updates make it a difficult platform to use for “discovery” of new brand fans. Search results are limited to those who choose to make all their status updates open to everyone.
• When you do come across a public (everyone) status update that is associated with your brand/market/product, what do you do?
• Use the context of the person’s update (and prior updates). Be respectful. If it’s a negative comment or a complaint, identify yourself and ask if you can be of assistance in resolving the situation. Remember that your posts/comments to a person’s wall is from YOU, the page admin, not BrandX, so identifying yourself is important.
• Offer value. If the status update is a positive comment, identify yourself (Facebook manager for BrandX), thank them enthusiastically for the comment, and invite them to “like” your page and opt-in for future offers. If the person tends to like offers (you can tell via their news stream), you might take the risk to provide a coupon or offer as well. This is really discretionary and should be used only when clearly appropriate.
3. There are coupon fans and non-fans. And they’re both on Facebook.
• Sometimes, it seems to be black or white, love or hate for “offers”. Listen before you engage. View the status updates from a person to see if they are amenable to receiving an offer before sending one to them. Make sure you have a plan, and a respectful one at that, for what triggers your brand to engage with a consumer on Facebook, BASED ON something they said from status update.
• Context is king. At times, people post on Facebook to be social and aren’t interested in potential “offers.” Other times, they are shopping, researching, chatting about brands and products, and it IS appropriate to engage them in your brand even further and even incent them to try your product. Use the info you know about a user, and offer them something targeted that will be meaningful to them. Send the appropriate message.
• While it’s fine to post incentive offers like coupon links, promotion codes and special “Facebook-only” deals on your fan page, make sure that these are NOT the only pieces of content you share on your Fan page. You want to draw people to engage, communicate and deepen the love of your brand. Don’t forget to be social, have discussions with fans, ask them questions, make them smile, provide them with a fun and lively place they want to visit often.
4. Let them opt-in.
• Facebook is a social network. While your fan page is a primary channel for your brand’s consumer engagement, it’s always good give your fans other ways to connect with you.
• Give your fans a way to opt-in to other communication channels (email, Twitter, mobile) and to other communication types (newsletter, coupons, events, etc.) JitterJam’s Make Me Happy™ permission marketing Facebook app works well here!
5. You don’t know what a fan is worth until you know.
• A fan or like you make today may not produce for months….stay the course, be patient, give to get.
• Example: Gary Vaynerchuk – the gift economy. If you don’t know someone, how to you get in their good graces..bring a gift. The same holds true for digital/Facebook etiquette. Come with a gift.
6. Make sure you’re ready for negative comments.
• Whether it’s about your product or about how you’re marketing via Facebook, make sure you’re ready to publicly handle negative comments in a positive way.
• Making decisions on what to say and how to handle potentially sensitive and explosive issues (e.g. the Capri Sun moldy drink debacle) shouldn’t be in the hands of an intern. Make sure you have a fast and effective process for escalation and resolution.
• Not everyone is going to love being contacted by your brand. Be respectful and always make sure you follow any requests to disengage swiftly. Don’t make a lost connection a bad connection.

How are you handling Facebook outreach and engagement? What have resulted in higher engagement by your fans? Please let us know!

Wonder where people find all those cool websites, videos and blog posts come from that show up as links on Twitter, Facebook and in your emails from your friends? Wonder how you can be the cool person who shares those links? Do you want to click to distraction and find wonderful content you can share with your community? Then try StumbleUpon—or try it again if you haven’t in a while.

StumbleUpon’s premise is simple—find something cool and mark whether you like it or not. That’s nice to help others that are using the platform to find neat things. But given the 10 million plus users of the service, you also have the opportunity to “stumble upon” sites that other people have rated. Click an interest, and let the site direct you to sites and content that other people have liked. It’s easy, it’s addictive (uh oh…) and it’s a great way for you to find sites and content that will wow your friends and contacts.

For you marketers out there, use these discoveries to feed your community. For instance, if you’re a food-oriented company, post links to sites that contain recipes, articles and luscious photos that will interest your current and potential customers. You’ll find that your posts will interest your followers and fans and draw new people to you on Twitter, Facebook and more.

I actually was thinking about the topic for today’s Fun Stuff Friday blog post, and I was stumped. I asked my colleague across the cube wall from me to feed me ideas, and he said, “I think I’ll look at StumbleUpon for some ideas.”

He sent me a link to a cool video, but the spark for this post was the idea that he used a crowdsourcing site like StumbleUpon to find something new. We all can use a spark of new, and StumbleUpon can give you just that.

What are people talking about on Twitter? Everything. And anything.

How do you find out what’s hot on Twitter? Take a look at what’s Trending. What’s fascinating is that real-time conversation is organic–it has its own life, and grows its own way, and the things people are talking about can sweep the globe–but also can be localized.

How do you find out what’s trending? Go to your http://twitter.com page and view the Trending list (scroll down and look below your searches and lists). What’s cool is that you can see what’s trending across the country, in various global regions or cities. You can change the location and see what’s hot in different areas. For instance, right now Waka Flocka is hot in Seattle. In London, it’s Andrew Lloyd Webber. Worlds apart in geography and in music!

How does this help your social marketing efforts? It’s good to know what people are talking about. If its related to what you do, the products you sell, the brands you market…well, you want to know what people are saying in your market. If it’s not related to what you do…well, it could be just for fun.

After all, it IS Fun Stuff Friday!