Successful Social Media? You Bet!
The world’s Social Media Reputation Index has finally arrived. What I love about it most is that it’s an index that attempts to benchmark a brand’s popularity. For many of you who have tried to decipher reach recency and satisfaction recency online it’s definitely been a mystery for many of us. Reach is the noise around a brand, and satisfaction is about its popularity.
How many of us really want to know how brands are performing? Pretty much all of us, I’d say.
No big surprise that E-Bay leads the pack followed by Google, Blackberry and Amazon.
Social Media Reputation (SMR) score provides a benchmark to gauge a brands’ popularity. So, essentially you want your audience to stay engaged in your brand but they are are the ones changing the marketing landscape themselves.
So, I pose the question out there to marketers… Why is it such a struggle to get your campaigns off the ground? Many have to deal with disconnected systems and people. Doesn’t this all lead to frustration for the you and ultimately the consumer? Certain types of marketing as we know it have gone by the wayside. But there is a better solution…
The solution is to create a new world of customer engagement. Consumers face inconvenient telephone calls, irrelevant offers, and untargeted mail. By understanding your audience first, you can manage and optimise your campaigns, to engage the individual across multiple channels.
Consumers inboxes are being choked with untargeted email. Isn’t it better to make email a strategic channel? Analyse demographic and behavioral & real time data. Make every message relevant. Make every message count.
Consumers are tired of searching through irrelevant, static websites. Make your website engaging for the individual by understanding them when they visit and allowing your business users to create relevant content to engage them when they are there.
Consumers are talking about brands but brands aren’t listening. When you listen to how your brand is perceived by your audience across the entire social media landscape everything begins to change. Analyze the conversations and then engage in them, and feedback what you learned into your mainstream marketing.
The new world of customer engagement need not be so daunting! Is your brand successful in social media?
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Business Transparency & Social Media
With so many businesses of all sizes being aware of the benefits of social media optimization and implanting strategies to become more connected, social media is helping to forge a new era in business transparency and engagement, creating both new challenges and opportunities.
The days when companies could rely on carefully crafted press releases or flashy ad campaigns to communicate with their customers are long gone. Especially futile is an attempt to convince people that your products are the best in the field. In the age of social media, the rules have changed drastically, and people today demand a more honest and direct relationship with the companies with which they do business.
Companies now face a clear choice: wall themselves in and become increasingly controlled and hidden, or use social media and other means to reveal their human side, welcome transparency, and forge new relationships with their customers.
Below are the top four shifts that businesses are making due to social media optimization (SMO).
1. From “Trying to Sell” to “Making Connections”
The goal with SMO in most cases is not to sell more but to engage and connect with customers on a deeper level — and, as a result, through such engagement people feel more comfortable doing business with those companies.
The most popular brands in social media tend to post less about their products or services and more about things that help their customers get to know the people and personality of a company. Jeff Swartz, who is the President and CEO of the Timberland Company, is a great example of this. Swartz uses his Twitter account to show his personality by tweeting about his life and the social issues he is passionate about, rather than the shoes his company makes. He also links from his Twitter bio to Timberland’s Earthkeeper project that supports environmental awareness, rather than to the company homepage, in an effort to make a connection with people around something that goes beyond just the products Timberland sells.
Lesson: Rely less on PR tactics and grab at the opportunity to interact with your customers sincerely.
2. From “Large Campaigns” to “Small Acts”
Being able to communicate on such a wide-spanning platform also allows for small acts that express gratitude and a commitment to customer satisfaction. Sites like Facebook and Twitter provide businesses and their followers a broadcasting network, and businesses are beginning to see that rather than spending millions of dollars on traditional ad campaigns, small acts can be more valuable because people will inevitably share such experiences through the social web.
In the past, if we had a very bad or very good experience with a company, it could take days or weeks to tell all of our friends and relatives about it. Today, in a matter of minutes, we can let all our friends on Facebook or followers on Twitter know about what happened. When every customer experience can be easily and widely broadcast, small issues become extremely important.
Since bad experiences are broadcast just as fast and just as easily as the good, it pays for companies to pay attention to the one-on-one customer relationships forged via social media.
Lesson: Instead of only relying on big campaigns, make authentic, helpful relationships and communication the new campaign.
3. From “Controlling Our Image” to “Being Ourselves”
For generations businesses have stressed over the concept of image and maintaining a carefully crafted public persona. Of course companies need to have employee policies, and there is such a thing as bad press, but look at the most popular companies in the era of social media, and you’ll generally find the ones that give their employees freedom to be themselves in online spaces. The goal should no longer be to create a very controlled and polished image that everyone in a company tries to reinforce, but rather to give employees the means necessary to be human beings that can put a friendly face on the corporation.
Also important is being aware of what online perceptions of your business are. How people connect with your business dictates to a great extent the longevity and reliability of their association with your brand and service. Therefore, it’s not just about what you tell them about the business, it’s also about what political stances you take and what information you share and
Lesson: Leave the dated concept of company image behind and embrace your business’s differences and human qualities.
4. From “Hard to Reach” to “Available Everywhere”
To engage with customers, it is no longer enough to have an email address and customer service number on one’s website. Today, people want to interact with and engage businesses via their chosen means of communication, whether that is Twitter, Facebook, discussion forums, or a feedback site like Get Satisfaction.
However, this omnipresence also presents an added challenge: listening to what your customers want and implementing suggestions. Any expansive platform also adds extra responsibility to use the information gathered in a way that is both purposeful and helpful. This means that just as it is extremely important to reach this audience, it is also important to make the changes they are asking for. Keeping lines of communication open during this process is also helpful since feedback is available with every step.
Want To Improve Your Search Engine Results?
Despite there being a myriad of tactics and tools to properly implement SEO and boost your business, there are three fundamentals:
- Content and HTML that is effectively formatted
- Content that is not static and always informative and educational
- Links from reputable and recognized sites back to your original and invaluable content
The most challenging aspect of the SEO tactics described above is getting high quality links back to your site. Most major search engines place great weighting on these links because they demonstrate the reliability of your content.
An extremely powerful way of attracting attention to your site is by hosting content from respected guest writers and bloggers. People who have excelled in their fields and know what they’re talking about. These are entrepreneurs, experts, gurus, authors, speakers or professional writers whose words and opinions are valued by the community at large.
Also important is being invited to guest blog for a partner website. This validates the knowledge you are presenting on your own blog, as well as helps in creating powerful networks of entrepreneurs and bloggers, including yourself. After all, everything we are doing is relying on the ability to socialise with our peers.
Blogs come in very handy for this.
When you seek out blogs and publish high value content, with a link back to your site in the body of that content, you have likely produced one of the most valuable links you can acquire and the search engines will reward you for it.
Search engines value links that are embedded into a post’s body as opposed to links that appear in sidebars, blogrolls and comments.
In addition, having your content appear on other blogs should allow you to reap the benefit of additional traffic to your blog and a bump in readership from the exposure your host provides and also provides you with priceless feedback and comments.
It all starts with creating connections and relationships. By asking someone to guest blog on your site, or asking if you can blog on theirs, you are asking them to value your opinion. This doesn’t happen unless you are able to establish a trusting relationship with them. Firstly, look for blogs with quality content where you feel you can both contribute and learn. Start to learn about the writer and what it is they are trying to say with every post. Make comments and interact with the author through the site or through their Twitter account, if they have one. Invite them to view your site and give you feedback. Once you feel like a good bond has formed, invite them to write for you and ask if you could do the same.
Of course, like any other article on your blog, it all boils down to amplifying your words and reaching as many people as possible. Once the post is up, spread the word. Use tools like Twitter and Facebook and Digg to help attract attention to the post (and site). Always be mindful of linking everything back to your main portal.
And, apart from the extra readership, you’re also showing appreciation to your host or guest blogger, further cementing the relationship you’ve built.
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Here is a video of Skye’s meeting with Hiro Kaneko, an online business entrepreneur, at the M3 Wealth Conference in Dominican Republic. Skye contacted Hiro months ago through Facebook and was fortunate enough to create a connection with him through the power of social media.
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