In December I read an article in the Vancouver Sun that inspired me.  The article, called “How Social Media Have Globalized the Shopping Experience”, related how the writer, Gillian Shaw, simply had to Twitter about her choice for next car and lo and behold she got a response from a GM dealer offering her a test drive. Here’s an excerpt:

My Social Media Experiment

So, I decided to try this out for myself to see whether organisations using social media are actually doing a good job of listening and responding to customers and prospects.

Twitter

First stop Twitter where I decided I would use the tool to plan a ski trip.  So I Twittered:

To date I haven’t had a response.  I tried a different tact and sent a Tweet to Sun Peaks who were listening to direct messages and did, thankfully, respond:

A few days later I got stuck in an elevator: what a perfect opportunity to see if anyone was listening and could help me.  So I posted my dilemma on Facebook and Twitter.  Followers we’re listening – I got 2 responses from friends, both in Alberta, both in no position to help me escape!

Facebook

On to Facebook, where I commented on the Marks & Spencer Page about my frustration with their delivery service (more often than not gifts for my family in the UK arrive broken or damaged):

Here was an opportunity for M&S to respond to my concern and to correct it in the public forum, to enhance their customer loyalty but again I had no response.  Very disappointing – this year I will find a more reliable supplier and M&S just lost a loyal customer of 20 odd years because they weren’t listening or were choosing to ignore my comments.

Shut Up and Listen

Whilst I might not have the following of a journalist like Gillian Shaw, I do have over 2000 Twitter followers and am very active online – I really expected to get more response to my social media comments.

What is my point here?  I have two:

1) Shut Up – First of all companies should realize that we are living in a new world, one where they can and should interact with their customers in these forums to build loyalty and improve customer service.  Your audience expects this and not doing so puts you at risk of negative exposure.   This is no longer a push to market model where companies bombard their audience with one way messages but a two way street where they can build loyal and valuable relationships with customers and prospects and enhance brand value.  Shut up about yourself already and focus instead on your audience and providing value for them.

2) Listen - the first step any company should take when approaching social media is to implement effective listening strategies.  Listen to what online communities have to say about your products or services, company, industry and competitors.   By doing so you will not only get a feel for what is appropriate (very useful when building your social media strategy) but you will also identify sales opportunities, chances to improve customer service and to build loyalty so that customers keep coming back.  Our article Are You Listening? talks about tools you can use to do this effectively.

Conclusion

I look forward to the day when companies stop talking about themselves and start listening to and fulfilling the needs of their audience on social media.  There is a vast source of information and opportunity about your company and your market online just waiting for you to tap into it.  What are you waiting for?  Shut up and listen!

Despite this being his busy season, Santa has been really active online:

Check out Santa’s trip on Twitter via NORAD and his Twitter profile.

On Facebook there are several Santas - its hard to see which is the real one but NORAD is on there too keeping track of his whereabouts.

Santa now ships to Canada – oh wait, I thought he lived here:  shifty You Tube promotion.  Ho ho ho.

Santa and Mrs Claus share some of their recipes on MySpace.

For more on Santa, check out his wikipedia listing.

And last but not least rumour has it that Santa uses an iphone app to track wish lists now.

I wonder how he finds the time.

Happy Holidays to all our readers.  We hope Santa is good to you!

This month we’ve invited some guest bloggers to contribute. The first is by friend and colleague Guacira Naves (Owner, The Online Strategy House):

The Whole is Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts

Over a decade ago, an online marketing strategy was comprised by separate tactics that had only one concern in mind: to drive traffic to a site. The game was relatively simple: a site would be built, it’d be supported by email newsletters, advertising, maybe some traditional media, and that was all that there was to it.

Then, marketers became aware of the importance of search engine optimization, and added that component to their plan. Today, social media marketing is the new kid on the block. Not only that – it’s changing how the other online marketing elements interact with each other.

Below is a sample of how this interdependence plays out – and how you can combine each individual channel for the greater good:

Twitter and Google:

• Google’s new real time search results mean that tweets with your brand may now appear in search results. So, a strong visibility on Twitter can very well influence your site’s exposure on Google. That’s another reason to maintain an active Twitter profile, and populate it with quality content.

Twitter and Customer Opinion:

• Not only is Twitter the most important micro-blogging network, it is increasingly used as a search tool. It is a channel where people go to find the online equivalent to “word of mouth” about a product, service, etc. On Twitter, frustrated customers often share their gripes, and loyal clients rave about their favourite brands.  Here’s an example:

Imagine if you were looking for reviews on Virgin Mobile and came across the two tweets above.  They may very well sway your decision-making.

However, Virgin Mobile could have stepped in to have their say. It’d potentially have an impact not only on the three individuals involved in that dialogue, but Virgin’s update would’ve been found in searches made for that brand.

Here’s a positive example of how proactive companies observe Twitter conversations, and interact with users: on December 10th, I decided to try Pearltrees. I then tweeted this update:

Minutes later, I received a reply from Pearltrees CEO, Patrice Lamothe, with this message:

That update was not only relevant to me, but to any other individual making a search query for “Pearltrees” around that time.

So, the lesson is: people are going to use Twitter’s search tool to find information on your products or services. You might as well help them find information that is as positive as possible.

YouTube and Search Engine Optimization:

• YouTube videos are prominently represented in Google’s search engine results.You do have a YouTube channel, don’t you? Then, make sure that, among other things, your videos titles and tags are optimized. And guess what – this will help your presence in search engines, too.

YouTube and other Social Networks:

• YouTube also gives viewers the option to share a video via Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, orkut and StumbleUpon, directly from the video’s YouTube page. You can also embed a video into your blog, and invite readers to share it – either by embedding into their own blogs, by adding it to Facebook, or inviting them to share it through social bookmarking sites like Reddit. Earlier today, I embedded this third-party YouTube video about Hewlett-Packard into my own Facebook profile:

I wasn’t the only one. According to the video statistics, it was watched an additional 279 times as a result of links from Facebook. Reddit, a popular content-sharing site, had also generated 1,317 views.

Blogs and Search Engine Optimization:

• By frequently adding fresh, relevant content to your company’s blog, not only will you improve your brand’s presence and clout in the blogosphere, but you will help your site become more appealing in Google’s eyes. That is because Google naturally gives more importance to sites that are updated on a regular basis.

Blogs and Twitter:

• Blogs can easily be set up to automatically promote a new post, as soon as it is published. You will be not only be driving traffic to the blog itself, but will also help to keep your Twitter profile active with new, original material.

I could go on and on. This just scratches the surface, but gives you an idea of how, nowadays, online marketing elements are so interdependent. When planned accordingly and executed in an orchestrated manner, these tactics will make the whole stronger than the sum of its parts.

About the author: Guacira Naves is an online marketing strategist who has 18 years of Internet experience. Her company, The Online Strategy House, develops and executes holistic online marketing strategies to help clients achieve their short, medium and long-term goals.

Thanks to Guacira for this.  If you are interested in contributing  a post – give us a shout!

The question has come up a few times lately as to how to import your blog so that it appears on Facebook.  With all the apps, tools and functionality Facebook provides, its difficult to know the right approach.

The best way is to use Facebook Notes to publish your blog RSS feed to your Page or Profile.  Here are 5 easy steps that will help you to easily do this:

Import your Blog to Facebook

Step 1 – Go to your Facebook Page or Profile,

Step 2 – Click “Edit Page” right below your profile picture, your Page editor screen will appear,

Step 3 – Scroll down the applications on your page until you see Notes – click to edit,

Step 4 – On the right hand sidebar you will see the option to “Import a Blog” – click on this,

Step 5 – Where prompted, add the web or RSS feed URL of your blog then click the permission check to begin importing your blog.

If you have done this right, your blog will automatically post to your Profile or Page and to the feeds of your friends or fans.  Good luck!

There have been a slew of changes to Facebook recently and there are more coming.   I wanted to document the most notable of them from a business use perspective.

Competitions
The first is the new rules regarding competitions. Earlier this month Facebook announced that you could no longer run any kind of competition on Facebook without getting prior consent from the company to do so (and good luck trying to get that). For more on that check out Mari Smith’s post – thanks Mari!   Also check out Facebook Promotions Guide.

Page Updates
Wondering where the update fans link went to? Up until a couple of days ago if you wanted to send an update to fans you would click on the link just below the image on your Facebook page. Now its gone but the capability is still there, you just need to look in another place to find it.

Click to edit your Facebook page. In the admin screen look on the right hand side bar then scroll to find the promote your page heading then click on “send an update to fans” there. The process is the same from there.

Privacy
Changes are also ongoing in the form of privacy settings. The goals is to make them easier to understand.  Here is some more info taken from the Facebook blog:

* Most of you liked that we removed more complicated technical and legal terms and replaced them with simpler language that everyone can understand.

* You preferred the structure of the new document, which provides key points at the beginning and easy links to jump to the different sections.

* A few of you asked for a redline version so you could compare the proposed revision to our current policy and see exactly what’s changed. We weren’t able to provide one this time because the policy was completely rewritten, but we think it’s a great idea and are committed to doing it for future proposed changes to our governing documents.

As more and more businesses begin to use Facebook to actively tap into an audience of over 300 million registered users there is some debate over the best aspects of Facebook to use to reach your intended audience. Companies can use Facebook groups or pages (or both) to build their social networking presence in this forum.  Here is a resume of the advantages of each – to help you decide on your best approach.

Facebook Groups versus Pages

Advantages of Facebook Pages over Groups:

- A page is more “corporate” and gives you more control of your brand.  It is the official page of the company on Facebook.

- Having a Facebook page gives you access to tools that allow you to track traffic to and interactions with your page.

- With a Facebook page can add applications like You Tube Box, Flickr, Twitter feeds to your page to make the content richer and attract more fans.

- Using Pages gives you increased exposure via  fans – their friends see any actions they take on your Facebook page and your potential audience is larger.

- Fan pages stand out better on profiles – better branding.

- Unlimited news/updates to fans (Facebook groups are limited to 1000-1500 per message.)

- You can create Facebook Ads  if you have a page– these ads are used to:

a) build more fans and followers in Facebook;

b) advertise company services and presence in this forum;

c) promote the  your company to end users.

Advantages of Facebook Groups:

- Good way to engage stakeholders and interested parties;

- Groups are easier to find by Facebook users;

- A Facebook group is like a forum or discussion area where you are more of a participant so this can lead to enhanced loyalty;

- Groups are discussion or event  centred and this can be a great means to attract feedback from customers as well as potential new customers to enable you to improve your offering.

With different options available to you in terms of Facebook Groups and Pages, its always best to start by asking the question who you want to reach, why and what your goals are? Knowing these will help you determine the most appropriate route.

There’s no reason, off course, not to have both a group and a page if you have time and resources to use these effectively but its always best to start with one and build from there -  especially if you are newcomers to social media – that way your message won’t get diluted.

Thanks to DodogoeSLR’s andLemonTwist for the great Flickr images.

Another Being Five Friday Funny.  Bored? – upload some Facebook pics why don’t you!

Twitter is a fabulous tool.  Case in fact: recently I connected with Andrea Baxter from Bratface Marketing on Twitter.  You might know Andrea from her success as part of the Smart Cookies team that shot to fame following their appearance on Oprah.

Andrea joins us to talk about that meteoric success, how Smart Cookies use social media and about her latest venture Bratface Marketing.  Enjoy!

[audio:http://www.out-smarts.com/podcast30.mp3]

Links to blogs sites mentioned:

Marketing Vox

Duct Tape Marketing.com

Start Up Nation

Podcast: Download

In the last post I talked about how to stay safe on Twitter in the face of the wave of spammy, scammy users out there who are looking to sell, or worse, to harm you online and whilst there does seem to be more people using these technologies for malicious reasons, there is also a growing trend in the opposite direction.  In fact I think more people online want to do good that otherwise.

Today I want to talk about the groundswell of philanthropic people  using social media. Social media, by its very nature facilitates social action because it allows people in distinct communities all over the world to connect, to join forces to do good and to have an impact.

Here are some great examples of new media being used to make the world a better place:

• Kiva – this online systems connects people who want to donate with entreprenuers in the developing world who need a leg up.
• Social media is quickly becoming the go to communication channel in the face of adversity.  Witness the wildfires raging in BC this week and the use of Twitter to communicate updates.
• Another example of Twitter being put to good use was the Twestival earlier this year which used Twitter to bring people from all over the world together to raise money for Charity:Water and to spread awareness of the world water crisis.  Twestival is organising another event on Sept 12th.
• Blogathons – a bloggathon is a fundrasing event where bloggers post regularly (usually every half hour over a 24 hour period) with the goal of raising awareness and donations for a specified cause.  This weekend local blogger Miss604 will be hosting Blogathon Vancouver the local Blogathon contingent along with other prominent local bloggers like Hummingbird604.
• Awareness Hubs – these are sights that spread awareness of causes and allow people to congregrate and share examples include, Treehugger (sustainability), Facebook causes like or own Hippo Roller one and Change.org.
• Join a campaign.  This summer Mashable is organising the Summer of Social Good aimed at using Facebook, Twitter, MySpace etc to raise money for charity.
• Looking to volunteer in your community – then try searching a local sites like Volunteer Canada or All for Good that connect volunteers with opportunities.
• Got too much stuff already?  Get the gift you want and contribute to a good cause simultaneously.  Dreambank lets you do this.

Technology is making it easier for people to connect with those interested in similar causes and together they can have more impact than they would individually.  Thanks to social media doing your good deed a day just got easier.  What good have you done today?  Share your stories here please.

Its been ages since we had a Friday Funny especially a Being Five one from George Sfarnas.  I thought this one quite apt.