JitterJam® Social CRM

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 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.

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.

With services like Ping.fm, it’s easy enough to blast all of your digital marketing channels with the same message. But is that the best idea? Each channel has its own advantages and disadvantages when it comes to the dissemination of content. So, why not tailor your messages accordingly?

Facebook: Facebook has a lot in common with the dry erase boards my classmates hung on their dorm room doors back in college. As long as you had access to the walled community of our campus—and as long as the dry-erase marker hadn’t run out of ink—you could write on the wall of anyone you chose. Conversations were focused and easy to follow. And because these things were so ubiquitous, you could communicate with almost anyone in the community.

If you extend that metaphor to include the notice boards that dotted campus hallways, it was also theoretically possible to communicate with organizations you were a part of (groups) or a fan of (fan pages).

Facebook, like those dorm room doors of old and their bulletin board counterparts, also has the advantage of being able to hold additional content alongside text. So, in addition to near ubiquity, the service offers the opportunity to communicate through a variety of media. The same can’t be said for Twitter and mobile marketing, and can barely be said for email.

The service’s major disadvantage is the wall that surrounds it. On Facebook, you have to be invited to join a conversation, or you have to start one yourself (and recruit others to join in). This may change in the future, but, for now, it’s much harder to serendipitously stumble across a relevant discussion than it is on Twitter.

Key Takeaways: Posting your Twitter feed to your Facebook Fan Page and doing nothing more with it is not taking advantage of all that the platform can do. Try including photos, audio, and video. And take advantage of Facebook’s ability to handle multiple links if it makes sense. Also, remember that your audience is limited to those who have already signed up to receive your updates. So, target accordingly.

Twitter: Twitter is like an enormous open-invite party where you can join a conversation about just about any topic, so long as you listen carefully enough to find it.  And, because conversations on Twitter can be shared and discovered much easier than they can be on Facebook, there is a potential for wide, fast dissemination of content.  Quantity of followers on Twitter counts for far less than quality. A select group of influencers can help spread your message much further than you could by yourself within the walled garden of your Facebook Fan Page or group.

Of course, the upside of Twitter is also its downside. Because everyone in the room is talking, all at once, it’s much harder for one voice to be heard. Your efforts on Twitter need to begin with a small conversation over in the most relevant and receptive corner of that overcrowded party hall. You should never begin by pulling out your megaphone and trying to get everyone’s attention all at once. On Twitter, anyone can turn your personal volume knob down to zero. And once one person’s done it, it’s likely that more will follow. Remember that.

Key Takeaways: Content posted to Twitter should be short, relevant (and/or entertaining), and easy to pass on. Yes, you technically have 140 characters to play with. But, if you use all 140 characters, you’re making it that much harder for your followers to pass your message on via retweet. And the viral nature of Twitter is one of its key strengths.

And, while you should certainly take advantage of Twitter’s ability to include links, you should make sure those links aren’t always sales pitches. Don’t be that guy (or gal). Be helpful, be educational, and, most of all, be cordial—eventually, someone will ask you what you do, and then you’ll have your chance to pounce.

In 140 characters or less, of course.

Tomorrow: Part 2: Email and Mobile

If you’ve just signed up for a Twitter account for yourself or for your business, figuring out who to follow can seem daunting. Aside from friends or customers who are already on the service and businesses you patronize or partner with, it’s not immediately obvious who’s worth adding to your Twitter stream. So, here are four tips to get you started:

Create Social Searches
First and foremost, run social searches on the subjects surrounding your brand or product, your market, and the communities you serve. This is an ideal place to find individuals and organizations to follow. And, while you’re at it, be sure to try following “conversation trails” (see our previous post on finding relevant social conversations). If one person or company tweets about something of interest, search for anyone who retweets that message. And if a link to a blog post arrives in your stream, check the comments section and see if there are any people leaving comments who seem worth following up with.

Find Recommendations
If you have contacts who are well established on Twitter, visit their profile pages and check out any Twitter lists they’ve created. This is especially useful for those individuals or companies who are following a lot of people and who aren’t likely to remember every name worth mentioning when you’re asking them for suggestions over a drink or a cup of coffee.

If there are just too many lists to plow through, consider checking out the Mr. Tweet service. It suggests users for you to follow, based on the people and companies you’re already following.

Follow Local Users
Services like Twellow, Localtweeps, and Twitter Local can help you uncover Twitter users in your area who you are not already connected to. When I began to consciously expand my network in the spring of 2008, Twitter Local was one of the places I spent a lot of time, and here’s why: I was much more likely to bump into a local user in the real world, and real world interactions were a primary goal for me as an author and self-publisher/distributor. As I’ve written before, I believe translating online relationships into real world transactions should be a primary goal of any social media marketing campaign. So, get local!

Manage Your List
Services like Manage Twitter and Friend or Follow are springing up to help those of us whose Twitter streams have grown out of control. Both services allow you to easily see which of the folks you’re following aren’t following you, which followers of yours you aren’t following, and more.

But, while a service like Manage Twitter can be useful, it doesn’t offer the kind of rich contact information that an integrated marketing platform can. Maybe there’s a reason you aren’t following @So-and-So anymore. Manage Twitter can’t tell you why, but a system tied to an intelligent contact database (like JitterJam) might shed a bit more light on the subject.

Got any tips on who to follow on Twitter? Please leave a comment below and let us know.