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Review sites like Yelp can offer a helpful service to the general public and give small local businesses a chance to gain word-of-mouth momentum no ad money can buy.... But this open platform also means any grumpy customer can slam your business, affecting your reputation and, ultimately, sales. The good news is you are not powerless. Not only can you can make customer service lemons into lemonade by proactively mining your Yelp profile to address customer service issues before they break your business, but your active care and concern will gain you more social cred. So, if you’ve had a cranky customer slam you on Yelp, follow these 5 steps to get them back on your side — and maybe even add a few stars....
The After Action Review is a reflective practice that can be used for anything, but I find it especially valuable for social media pilots and experiments. The After Action Review (AAR) is a structured way to capture the lessons learned from any project, with the intent of improving future performance. It is an opportunity for a group to reflect on a project, activity, event or task so that they can do it better the next time. It can also be used in the middle of a project or strategy to learn while doing....
Lots has been written about the success of Tumblr. Hard not to love an easy to use blogging platform especially suited to visual content. Teens, trend setters, politicians and activists all love its simplicity, design flexibility and e-mail-or-text-based publishing system. Posts can automatically be shared via Facebook and Twitter and just announced features like Fan Mail (a interblog messaging service) reinforce the social aspect of Tumblr. So what’s the executive summary I share with our clients?... [Good snapshot of Tumblr - JD]
In case you haven’t heard, last night TechCrunch announced that Pinterest hit 11.7 million UMVs, becoming the fastest standalone site ever to surpass 10 million monthly uniques. This presents a huge opportunity for brands, as you might have already read about here. The #1 driver of consumer purchases is word of mouth recommendations from friends, and Pinterest holds the power to drive authentic “word of eye” recommendations in a way that is changing the landscape of social commerce.... [Useful analysis of Pinterest - JD]
A new study wants to help you tweet, better. The Most Annoying Tweet Imaginable, in other words, would be overly long. It would contain stale information. It would #totally #overuse #hashtags. It would be excessively personal. It would be aggressively mundane. It would be whiny. All this, at least, according to a new study, released today, that explores what we like in our tweets -- and what we find really, really off-putting. "Who Gives a Tweet: Evaluating Microblog Content Value" is the culmination of a year's worth of analysis conducted by the researchers Paul André of Carnegie Mellon, Michael Bernstein of MIT, and Kurt Luther of Georgia Tech as they set to find out what separates value from vagary in a Twitter post.... [Superb advice; PR 2.0 must-read - JD]
I love early adopters. They're like the American settlers who came West looking for gold. ...Again, I love early adopters and I really do appreciate this effort. I have no desire to disparage. Someone has to be a settler and brave the arrows, but this is fools gold, in my opinion.... [Caution suggested for early adopters - JD]
...There is a significant difference between customers and a social media fan base, says Abraham. “The people who you have historically always thought about as your franchise that you’re going out to build a business around are often very different from the ones who seek you out on social,” she said. The online fan base for Starbucks, for example, is strikingly younger than its regular customer base. Knowing the demographics of your fans is particularly important, Abraham said. “That has an impact on your messaging strategy, it has an impact on what you would want to say to these people, and how you want to say it,” she said....
Social networking is the #1 activity online. Even though Google gets the most visitors, Facebook is where most of us are spending our time. ...There might be saturation, but social media has changed the way we live. And this means social media is no longer a question for marketers. Companies of all sizes have accepted and even embraced the importance of social media. Investments are starting to increase and companies are now building teams to tackle the new risks and opportunities that social media has created.... [Excellent Slideshare and social media POV - JD]
LinkedIn Marketing seems to be an afterthought among the other high profile social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Google+. But there are some good reasons that your company should set up – and keep current – your own free LinkedIn Company Pages. LinkedIn calls the Company Page a company’s profile of record AND a powerful way to speak to millions of professionals through word-of-mouth recommendations and trusted testimonials.... [Great PR 2.0 reminder - JD]
You may already feel as though you are tweeting morning, noon and night as it is, but is this the right strategy for you? What time of the day and week that you tweet? As it turns out, the times you choose to tweet could have an impact on how those receiving your updates perceive you and your business. So is timing everything? Maybe not “everything,” but you can be sure it plays a vital role....
A solid social media community can be an enormous asset to any company, but don't expect to grow one overnight. Heed these 10 tested tips. Building a community around your startup can be one of the cheapest ways to create momentum for your product. A community is much more than a one-time marketing campaign, and can help you throughout your company’s life cycle if you take the time to grow it right. Here are 10 tips for getting started....
VATICAN CITY — Pope Benedict XVI praised new communications technologies like Twitter on Tuesday (Jan. 24), saying that even “concise phrases, often no longer than a verse from the Bible,” can convey “profound thoughts.” Benedict did not explicitly refer to Twitter in his yearly message for World Communications Day, but Monsignor Claudio Maria Celli, president of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, told reporters that “it’s safe to say that a reference to ‘tweets’ is there.” Benedict wrote that in today’s world, “various types of websites, applications and social networks” can help people “find time for reflection and authentic questioning.”... [AMEN! ;-) - JD]
Facebook have been talking quite a lot about their open graph service and frictionless sharing in recent days. With frictionless sharing becoming the focus for Facebook’s new open graph feature, there’s been a lot of talk about what developments will emerge from this. Apps have been the major talking point over the past week but another new development could see Facebook trying to play Google news at its own game. Technology site Fusible.com discovered that the social networking site has purchased a number of ‘Facebook Newsroom’ domain names recently. Three domain names were registered by the company: facebook-newsroom.com, facebook-newsroom.net, and facebook-newsroom.org....
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One question I hear from a number of clients: When a blogger sends us an email asking for product to review, how do we decide whether or not we should work with that blogger? ...I thought I’d share a few questions I usually suggest clients start with in evaluating bloggers when they reach out to the company. Below are 15 questions to ask before saying “yes” to that blogger....
Legal departments have long been a thorn in brand marketers' sides as they try to stay ahead of the social media curve. Will they ever get along? We’ve all seen it before: Marketers create an innovative social media campaign only to have it squashed by the legal department into a bland, lifeless lump of the original idea. Sadly, many archaic legal departments are wary of social media at best and digitally illiterate at worst. Their fear of embracing these tools can be a barrier for brands that want to interact with their audiences in authentic, transparent and engaging ways. But that doesn’t mean brands shouldn’t sacrifice creativity...
How to generate discussion when things get stale in your LinkedIn group. ...which makes it a very powerful tool for B2B communications. Further evidence of this is the report presented by HubSpot recently, which says that LinkedIn is almost 300 percent more effective when it comes to generating leads, compared with Facebook and Twitter....
Speak to any senior corporate comms exec about the barriers that prevent them from using social media more in their organization, and I guarantee that the issue of ‘risk’ will usually come close to the top of the list. This raises a couple of questions; what exactly are the risks posed by social media, and how can we negate, or at least mitigate, them?...
CNNFortune reported 100 million Twitter users log in at least once a month. Half of those, 50 million, log in every day. About 55% check in with mobile devices, while about 40% just check in without actually tweeting. But how do you take advantage of this growing audience of Twitter consumers? You have to become a power user. So here are 100 proven tips to help you do just that....
Is Quora still a significant social media destination? When the service was first launched, I was (like many others) flooded with notifications of new followers and invitations to follow back, to the point of annoyance. But that flood began to subside in about April of last year and had slowed to a trickle by late summer.... What do you think—are Quora’s best days still ahead? Will it go the way of MySpace? Or will it fill a niche and level off? In any case, here are a few of the best Quora how-to guides and insights of 2011....
Learn how brands who are in social media have better long term ROI:... The Social Media marketing return on investment is a major factor why businesses choose to step into social media marketing and the two communications here. Social media has proved in the past years that it can bring positive ROI when done right. Some successful examples are Intrepid Travel, Easy Lunch Boxes, SnapRetail just only to name some of them.... [Useful ROI stats - JD]
Many people think the main task of a journalist is to write. That's part of the job, of course, but sourcing and checking stories is probably as important.
This isn’t only about Facebook and Twitter; a professional network like LinkedIn can also prove very useful for reporters who know how to make the most of its advanced features. Here are a few tips you may want to try out... [Works great for PR too! - JD]
Social media marketing is now a mainstream business activity. The State of Social Report 2011 indicating that almost two-thirds of companies say they are now beyond the experimental phase, and are integrating social media efforts with other marketing channels and across business functions. This compares to just over 50% a year ago. Given this emphasis on social media marketing, in this post I’ll review what I see as some of the most important issues arising from marketplace and technology developments in 2011, that need to be considered as part of planning and implementing a social media strategy in 2012....
A look at the new social network's limitations and strengths. Google+ is a social network with huge potential for businesses, but its best value is for individuals. If it had any of the following features it might be a contender for businesses, but as it is today? No way. Though these tips show how you CAN use G+...
Everywhere I go now I see people advertising hasthtags and trying to get things trending on Twitter. I saw about ten examples at the weekend alone. Movie trailers. On outdoor advertising, pushed during TV shows. On food packaging and in restaurants. People have suddenly gone #hashtag mad. The aim that most people have is to create “word of mouth” marketing where lots of people are mentioning something with a hashtag and then linking it back to their product. Hashtags were actually created by the Twitter users themselves as a way of grouping conversations together, but it is marketeers who have embraced them most recently....
Content creation (23%), is the most time consuming task for community managers, beating out Facebook engagement (19%) and customer service (13%), according to a survey... ...released in January 2012 by Social Fresh. Another content-related task, managing an editorial calendar, came in fourth on the list, on par with comment moderation and Twitter engagement (all at 10%). Community engagement (5%) and analytics/reporting (3%) also appeared on the list, but were voted the most time consuming task by a much smaller proportion....
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