JitterJam® Social CRM

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!

Don’t Create Social SPAM

For businesses and brands, interacting on the social web isn’t easy. While individuals see social networks as a place to voice their opinions, post random thoughts, hold conversations or shout and rant, businesses who are trying to engage current and potential customers must tread carefully. Social networks are public venues, and any public communication could become a PR coup or a quickly escalating PR nightmare.

Given the thin ice that businesses and brands skate on in the public space, what rules do they follow to ensure that they are not creating social SPAM? Here are a few ideas that came out of our Creativity Coffee.

1. There’s a different expectation of privacy on Twitter versus on Facebook.
• People on Facebook have a greater perception of privacy even though their settings might make them more public than they desire. They believe that what they post is accessible by their friends (or network) but is not in the public domain.
• On Twitter, unless your tweets are protected, there is no expectation of privacy. The service in itself is a public forum for social commentary and communications.
• Brand outreach and engagement on Twitter is going to be a bit easier for “new” contacts due to the public nature of Twitter and the open environment. Facebook’s closed networks and less-than-public updates make it a difficult platform to use for “discovery” of new brand fans.
2. Example: A brand mention on Twitter vs. Facebook and the brand outreach possibilities
• A consumer, Mary, updates both her Twitter and Facebook status with “I love my Mazda.” Mazda does not have a prior social relationship with Mary. What can Mazda do to engage her?
• Twitter
• Mary’s tweet shows up on Mazda’s social search. Mazda is not following her and she’s not following Mazda.
• Mazda follows Mary. This is generally acceptable.
• Mazda retweets Mary’s comment. This is generally acceptable. The consumer may even notice the retweet and start following Mazda on Twitter.
• Mazda @ messages Mary with a “thank you”. This is generally acceptable.
• Mazda @ messages Mary with a promotional offer. This is very questionable. Mary has no prior relationship with Mazda, and she might see this as social SPAM and block Mazda from future communications.
• Mazda Direct Messages (DMs) Mary with a promotional offer. This is unacceptable. Mary has no prior relationship with Mazda and has not opted to receive promotional messages from them. This is social SPAM. Don’t do it.
• Facebook
• Mary’s Facebook status update shows up on Mazda’s social search. Mary is not a fan of Mazda’s Facebook page.
• There’s not much that Mazda can do from an outreach standpoint here. Any message sent directly to Mary (assuming that she is open to non-friends sending her messages) could be construed as SPAM. Messages sent by Mazda would actually be sent by the Mazda page administrator’s Facebook account to Mary, not by the Mazda page. Facebook was not created as a business-focused network, and the ability for brands to market TO Facebook members is limited to their page fans (I can’t say “likers” without snickering).
• The Mazda page administrator could try to “friend” Mary, but Mary would most likely not know this person and have no reason to friend the page admin.
• Mazda CAN use sophisticated tools to find out Mary’s social profile and try to contact her in a manner that is acceptable to her (perhaps Mary is on the Mazda email list and is open to offers). The best Mazda can do at this point is to understand what Mary is saying about them on Facebook and try to get Mary to Like their Facebook page in another way.
• Twitter is a much more friendly network for brands to discover new voices. However, Facebook DOES have advantages over Twitter as a gathering place for engaged consumers.
3. Permission is the key.
• You need to use the same kind of opt-ins for social marketing as you do for email marketing.
• You want to ensure that you don’t alienate a current/potential customer. It’s critical that you ask them to opt-in to receive promotional messages from you. If they don’t, do not send them promotional messages (DMs, Facebook messages).
• DMs are self-regulating. If you blow trust with your contact, they will sever their connection with you.
4. You need to be mindful of not only WHAT you say, but how often you speak.
• With Facebook, a your wall posts/updates will show up on your fans’ walls and will create a brand impression to all those who are friends with your fan. However, if you post to Facebook constantly, your fans may tire of the constant chatter and “unlike” your page. Make sure your content is valuable and not annoyingly frequent.
• Twitter is a little more forgiving, but your brand impressions may be less frequent due to the higher instance of chatter.
• In both cases, note that your status updates are fleeting; they pass by your fans and friends and may not register at all.

Facebook has lots of advantages for the brand once you get consumers to engage (“Like” your brand’s page). In this coming Friday’s Creativity Coffee, we’ll talk about Facebook Etiquette. Please join the conversation!

Do you have policies and procedures in place for your public social networks? What are you rules for social etiquette? Have you had an instance where your social outreach backfired? How did you handle it?

The Idea Spark discussion about Facebook Marketing was very lively last Friday during our Creativity Coffee Tweetup in celebration of the 5-year anniversary of @TechCrunch. The discussion surrounded how consumer-facing brands and businesses can gain more than just “fans” or “likes” from their presence on Facebook. Here are some ideas to spark your marketing creativity.

1. Facebook is a “game changer” that is appealing to a broad demographic of users that is mapping to the general population’s demographic make-up.
• Embrace Facebook for more than the youth market. In fact, the fastest growing segment of Facebook users is women 55+.
• Facebook is a great way to reach your target customers and draw them into deeper engagement with your brand. Try using Facebook Ads to begin finding new fans for specific target markets.
2. Post sharable content.
• Post videos, photos, links and other content that your fans will want to share with others—content that's interesting, entertaining or fun.
• Sharable content enables your brand to grow beyond your fan base and to be redistributed throughout (and beyond) Facebook.
3. Let your "fan" or "like" count be a goal—but not your only goal.
• DO drive people from your other marketing efforts (print, TV, direct mail, online ads, website, SEM, events, etc.) to engage on Facebook and through other social channels
• Getting people to "like" your brand is not that difficult. Getting people engaged with your brand and getting them to recommend and purchase—that is your ultimate goal. Use content, open conversation and conversion tools like promotions to engage them further.
4. Reward your fans for engaging with you.
• While fun content will keep your Facebook fans entertained and engaged, providing unique offers will drive measurable return of your social marketing efforts.
• Unique offers reward your Facebook fans for their loyalty and participation. Make sure that your offers are also sharable so your fans can invite others to participate as well.
• If your business has different locations, enable offers to drive revenue and participation at specific locations.
5. Let your fans be your guide.
• Even though your Facebook fans are engaged with you on one channel, make sure that you enable each individual to drive the channels, the frequency of communication and the content they'd like to receive from you. JitterJam's Make Me Happy™ permission marketing system does just that.

Would you like to join in our live discussions? We hold a Creativity Coffee hour every Friday morning at JitterJam's Bedford, NH office. Come by and join us! There's no charge, and no "sales" going on!

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.

Many of the products we use (or are advised to use) in social media are free to access. But no product, regardless of the price tag or lack thereof, is free to use. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about WordPress, Twitter, Facebook, or the latest and greatest service that bloggers, Twitterers, and Facebookers are raving about — there are always costs involved, particularly in staff time.

Here are four particular cost areas to consider:

Resources. You need people to make these things look good, and you need people to keep them running. WordPress blogs come out of the box looking very much like thousands of other WordPress blogs. They also end up looking like very lonely places if they’re not updated on a regular basis. It’s blatantly obvious to even the most casual Web user — whether they’re 100% conscious of this or not — when the blog or Website they’re looking at has a cookie-cutter design. And users are also well aware of the virtual tumbleweeds rolling by on sites where there’s less life than they’d find in a ghost town.

Setting up a Twitter account provides similar hurdles. And while it is theoretically easy to change your background, to fill out your full profile, and to tweet on a regular basis, theoretical ease isn’t quite the same as actual ease. You need to get it done, or you need someone to get it done for you. And it takes time!

Dedication. We live in the age of the Next Big Thing, in a world where it’s ridiculously easy to find something new to obsess over, something new to occupy our precious free time. If you’re not delivering constant content through your marketing channels, people will forget about you and move on. Regardless of your market, it is crucial to keep customers engaged in the product and the message year round, on a weekly (if not daily) basis.

The flip side of that, of course, is not to overdo it. But I’m a believer in going all-out, then listening to your audience, seeing if they’re feeling oversaturated, and only reigning things in as necessary.

Messaging. Just as press releases, white papers, and other more traditional marketing efforts require serious thought, so too do social media campaigns. It’s harder to create a meaningful message in 140 characters than you would think. And then there’s the issue of how well the information coming through these new channels is tying in with the rest of your marketing message. It’s easy enough to hand responsibility for your Twitter profile and your Facebook fan page off to an Intern. But if that Intern isn’t clued into the master plan, you could be sending out messages that are erroneous, poorly executed, or, in the worst-case scenario, flat-out false. Once something’s out there on the Internet, it’s out there to stay. And that means that, even if you do farm this work out to someone else, a portion of your workday is going to have to be devoted to making sure that the messages which come out from your brand, regardless of which channel they are distributed through, are on point.

Monitoring. You also need to track how effective these free messages you’re sending really are. Ask yourself: which posts, tweets, and status updates are driving the most traffic? Which are generating conversation in the comments section? And which are being shared on Facebook, or retweeted on Twitter? If you can’t answer these questions now, you need to find a way to answer them. Because, while these products might be free to access, there are always going to be costs associated with actually using them. And you need to be able to justify those costs, whether to yourself, or to your boss, or to your shareholders. Or else you may be out of a job. Or out of business.

Does this mean that you need a full-time staffer whose sole purpose is to execute your social media masterplan? Well, no. It would be nice, but it’s not 100% necessary. What you need, at minimum, is someone who is thinking constantly about how to put these free tools to good use, and how to get the most bang for your staff-time buck.

Photo Credit: free-sign by koka_sexton. CC BY.

Have you ever followed a person or a company on Twitter and received a “Thanks for the follow, here’s our website” direct message from that “person” in response?  Does that feel like an authentic voice or a pre-recorded message? Is this a business practice that you want to adopt for your first social outreach to a new contact?

Social media has enabled business to see first-hand what consumers are saying about them and to directly address, engage and captivate them. Yes, captivate. The practice of sending an automated response to a Twitter follower (or anyone who engages with your business through a social account) is contrary to what social media is about! To many consumers that are using social media, these automated responses are red flags; they signal that the business is focused on marketing to them rather than talking with them. The business has lost them at first touch.

Think about the last time you sent an email to a company and received an automated response. While it was nice to know that your message was received, did you glow with satisfaction? Putting that into a social context, is that the first impression you want to give to a current or potential customer? Social channels are about fostering open and direct communications with people. While the interesting content that you’d like to share with people is a great candidate for “scheduled” outbound communications, make sure your first interaction with someone is real, live and personal. You’ll begin to set the stage for a trusted, positive relationship.

In our last post, “What Do I Say?,” I wrote about how to become a member of the communities that you, as a business, serve. You want to engage potential customers that are talking about your markets, your products, your brands, and one of the best ways to do that is to be seen as a member who contributes to the conversations–not just one that pushes your own message and agenda to the masses.

You want to start engaging current and potential customers that are talking about your products, brands and markets, but you are overwhelmed at the sheer volume of conversations taking place on the real-time web. You search for conversations but are wading through the myriad of irrelevant chatter. So how do you find relevant conversations? You’ll find a few tips below that pertain to Twitter, blogs and some other social channel searches:

Check and adjust your criteria often. Searching for relevant conversations is more of an art than a science. Conversations change from day to day, and your search criteria will have to change with the ebbs and flows of the conversations. For instance, an outdoor gear products company that is searching for conversations about camping might suddenly be inundated with conversations that surround camping out to buy tickets for the Miley Cyrus tour. If you have created and saved a search that’s related to camping, you’re going to have to filter out this anomaly. NOT is your friend in a search.

Add keywords to focus your search. Camping might be a great keyword for your search, but it’s very general. That outdoors gear company might want to narrow in the conversations to ones that match “camping and gear not Miley” or even camping and trip and plan not Miley to focus on those people who might be planning a trip or looking for gear. Try out different mixes of keywords to see how these changes impact the quality of your results. Too few? Maybe the words are not the right ones. Too many? Try adding some additional words to pinpoint your focus.

Try following “conversation trails.” One way to find new people is to follow conversation trails. One person tweets about camping. Look at who re-tweeted the information. Look at who that person has on his/her Twitter camping list. Another person posted a blog entry about camping gear. A number of others commented and posted links to their blogs. And so on. Conversation trails = an informal community that has formed around a topic of interest–and one example of a community you can join and engage.

Try searching Twitter hashtags. Have you been curious about the little # tags that people have been placing in their tweets? Those tags are used by Twitter to make it easier for everyone to find tweets related to common interests. Brands create and use unique hashtags to not only help their customers find their content but to help others find content and people that are related to them as well. The #camping hashtag might help the outdoors gear company find people interested in camping or lead to new conversation trails.

Use your own voice to have others find you. You’re not the only one searching for relevant conversations. Post some interesting content to your blog, to Twitter, to your YouTube channel. Use keywords and hashtags to help others find you. And they will. The more you say that adds to the conversation, the more people will be interested in listening.

To those  of you who did a web search on Miley Cyrus tickets and ended up here, thanks for visiting.