4 Ways ‘NOT’ using Social Media can ruin your Business!
Posted on 23. Jul, 2010 by Patrick Curl in Social Media
Image by Cambodia4Kids.org
Social media is great, and as a social media consultant of course I’m going to say everybody should be utilizing it. But the question today is “Can failure to use social media hurt your company?”.
I submit that it can, I’m gonna share my top reasons and ways not embracing social media can ruin your company.
1. Competitive Edge. People, especially the younger audiences, and geeks of the world tend to support and uphold businesses that are what they consider ‘forward thinkers’. A forward thinking company to them is one that appears to listen to their concerns, molds
itself around their needs, and is up-to-speed with the latest technolegies – which includes: social media, geo-location, and mobile devices / applications.
By not embracing new technology, you appear to lack the edginess that your competitors have, and you are hurting your image with possible clients. Even business to business companies and government agencies have facebook pages.
2. Missing the Conversations that matter. In this world of connectivity, everyone is increasingly spending more and more time on the internet. Whether by phone, laptop, desktop, ipad, or even car computers, game consoles, etc… When a customer feels upset, the new trend isn’t to call customer service and wait forever on hold. A lot of people are shy or have social anxieties that make phone calls and confrontations not a pleasant prospect. These people turn to the web, and specifically social networks like facebook, twitter, local directories, and blogs.
One bad review, write-up, comment, or youtube video can get wide mass attention and easily ruin a company. By being involved in social media, learning how to track specific keywords for usage on twitter, facebook, etc – you can see when your business is talked about online. If it’s in a positive light, be sure to thank the person, and offer that if they ever have need of anything to be sure to contact you.
If on the other hand someone opens a halestorm of negativity, there are generally six steps to handling this:
- Know it happened. This is to say, if you don’t have monitoring systems in place to track your brand, you’ll never know when someone talks negatively about your company.
- Own it. Its your word against theirs, and maybe they were having a bad day when they posted it, but by owning upto your mistake, essentially letting the customer know that they are right (and the customer is always right, right?), you can diffuse the comment.
- Apologize. Let the customer know that it isn’t the policy of your company to step over customers and that you take it personally that this happened at one of your stores.
- Make Restitution. Offer something in return, some kind of good will offering that will make that customer’s issue solved. Even if you lose a deal of money on it, it can lead to some positive PR.
- KEEP it PUBLIC. When addressing someone’s negative comments don’t do it in private, don’t do it blatantly as a ‘look at me’ stunt either, but you should keep it in the public eye so others know that if they have a problem that there are channels they can go through to get it resolved. The key here is to be as real and genuine as possible.
- Don’t over-do-it. It’s easily to beg and plead for someone to give you another chance to make it upto them, but you do still need to come off as a respectable company in the end, and at the end of the day all you can do is offer to help, if they still choose to be irate, then that’s just their nature, move-on and know that you did your best, and people who surf in and see the conversation and follow-ups will see that you at least tried to make amends.
3. Losing out on quality leads. Lead companies, and direct marketers know for a fact that having a social media presence can dramatically increase the number of qualified leads that they gather on a daily basis. If your business depends on leads, then if you’re not tapping into social media you’re really losing out on a huge business builder. Facebook for instance has cheap ads that you can buy on the sidebar. These ads can be extremely heavily targeted by that user’s tastes, likes, profile, gender, age group, etc…
If you know your audience then utilizing facebooks PPC ads can definitely increase awareness about your company and get you a ton more leads.
4. Losing your brand altogether. You’ve worked hard to secure your trademarks and copyrights. Yet, on social networks its so easy for any Tom, Dick, or Harry to register an account and pretend to be an official profile for your company. They can then wreak massive damage to your brand. Many social networks now have options in place for businesses and celebrities to ‘verify’ themselves as the true entity in question.
There’s a cool tool called Knowem where you can check your brand against 350 different social networks. Using online tools like these there are many ways to track and see who’s pretending to be you or your company.
All in all there are many reasons that social media can make or break your business, the biggest reason of all is that it is the cheapest, most cost effective way to reach out to millions of people, grab their ‘trust’, and protect against bad PR and corporate identity theft.
As far as I can tell there is only one reason not to embrace social media: Fear of the unknown.
I’m willing to bet that in the 90′s you had the same trepidation over creating a web site, but in the end you caved in and hired a web designer, and it just became a ‘standard’ thing that every business did.
Social media optimization and marketing – is the new web site. It’s not so much about a single presence online, but managing multiple presences that best reflect your target demographic, specific outreach goals, and finding ‘influencers’ and ‘brand ambassadors’ who have wide networks to grow awareness of your company. By getting involved now, you stand a chance of beating your competition to this new frontier. Even if your competitors are already using social media, its a good bet that they’re still learning, and you can still move ahead of them, or at least catchup if you act now.
Not sure where to start you social media marketing strategy? We can certainly help you get started on the right path. As a bonus we not only focus on social media, but also local web marketing, and mobile marketing – three very HUGE trends right now. Click here to contact us now, or give us a call at:
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Mobile Web Sites May Not Be Sexy But They Sure Are Useful
Posted on 14. Jul, 2010 by Brian in Blog, Mobile Marketing, Mobile Websites
Web designers and marketing team are used to creating a traditional web site experience that is that is full of brand elements, stunning design and tons of bells and whistles to engage your site visitors and to lead them along a carefully constructed path to achieve a “conversion.” Perhaps that conversion is a white paper download, or information request, or sales call request or the holy grail: a product purchase. And while it seems that there is a focused sales funnel leading to that conversion – there are often many possible distractions along the way – a banner ad here, a video there, a blog post there – yes all these elements may help you to engage with your site visitors on their widescreen desktop monitors, but what happens when a prospect visits your web site from their mobile phone?
Let’s take a look at American Airlines well traveled web site: AA.com.
Here is how AA.com looks in a desktop web browser:
Here is how AA.com looks on an Iphone when viewed in Full HTML mode:
You can see there are a lot of options that are work perfectly fine for desktop viewing but not so great on a mobile phone. You can accomplish most of the same tasks you can with the desktop version, except, for a user to navigate the site on their mobile phone, they will have to pinch, stretch and scroll around a lot. Not a real friendly experience. This is an example of how your web site may appear in a mobile browser if it has not been optimized for mobile.
Here is the mobile web site for AA.com
A couple of things to point out here.
1. Typing aa.com into the Safari mobile browser takes you right into the mobile web site rather than the full web site. Mobile device detection is used – immediately recognizing that I was asking to view on AA.com on my Iphone, as a result, the mobile web site was presented (all without me having to request a specific URL on my own)
2. This mobile web site is not sexy. It is not beautiful. It is not stunning. It is however very useful. Very useful for accessing the exact information customers need while they are on the go.
The key take away is not that mobile web sites should be ugly or that they shouldn’t contain brand elements because they can indeed represent your company and brand in a positive way – but the end goal is to ensure that your prospects and customers can interact with your web site while on the go – quickly and efficiently. In doing so, you will be providing a positive experience for your customers, that will ultimately benefit your company.
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Linked-in Answers is Your Answer to Becoming an Authority
Posted on 11. Jul, 2010 by Patrick Curl in Social Media
It never hurts to be known as an ‘authority’, or have a credibility boost. Super CEOs like Steve Jobs, Eric Schmidt, Mark Zuckerberg are famous of their own rights because of what they built.
You can become ‘Linked-in Famous’ because of what you share: The right answers, and lots of them.
The Answers section of Linked-in is an amazing resource for building connections, and getting your name our there in your field.
Here are some tips and tricks to getting the most out of Linked-in Answers.
1. Be a Linked-in Open Networker(LiON). Linked-in is about meeting other business people and sure some might be trying to sell you something, but a lot of time strategic partnerships can be formed where you might tell a customer about someone else’s services and they will refer their customers to you that have a need that they don’t fill.
Being an open networker basically means that you will give anyone a chance of connecting with you, if they prove to be spammers you can later on delete them. Be open to every connection, and you will expand your network and your business.
There’s a movement on Linked-in called ‘LiON’. It’s basically where you put ‘LiON’ in your description, so that people who see you answers, and activities on Linked-in will know that they can connect with you, and you will accept their connections and vice versa.
2. Stay on Topic. It’s important when using Linked-in answers, or any answers, or blog posts that you stay extremely focused on topics that are related to your industry. The more relevant it is the more likely people will start to notice you and will even recommend you for answers, give you the ‘best answer’ designation, and connect with you on linked-in.
These connections always have the opportunity of opening doors to future clients and customers and they also help to brand you as an expert in your field.
3. Use good formatting / grammar. Make sure to use a lot of white space if your Answer is rather long, it helps to break it up and make it easier to read. Also be sure to use proper spelling, grammar, and punctuation – some people are very nit-picky on that and it can make you look a lot more professional.
Also be sure to include some links from time to time to resources people can use to find more information. Sometimes you can include your own links in these, but I would shy against doing that on a regular basis as it could be considered spam.
4. Get to the top if you can. If you want to build a lot of credibility fast then becoming the top Answer submitter for the week is a good way to do this. Generally it takes about 300-400 answers a week to get you to this top spot, but it can get you a lot of new connections, and will help to make people ‘recognize’ your name which goes a long ways towards self-branding.
Don’t have time for that? Then at least try for the top 10 spots, as these will still give you some extra exposure.
Sharing Time: What success have you had with Linked-in Answers with regards to marketing your business?
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Writing your Social Media Policy + 100 Example Policies.
Posted on 09. Jul, 2010 by Patrick Curl in Social Media
Writing a social media policy is very important. It can set the tone of your business, and it can help you stay out of hot water.
Social media policies cover many different topics like: should you let your employees use social media on the job or not? Should they use social media for customer service issues? What is acceptable social media practices in the office?
It’s always recommended that you use a lawyer to finalize your social media policy and make sure that everything is legal binding, but figuring out what will work best for your company sometimes you need a boost in the right direction.
Ralph Paglia submitted a blog post over at Social Media Today listing 100 social media policies for employees. This is a great list to look over that will help you figure out what to include in your social media policy
. 
One last thing: Remember the worst social media policy, is NO social media policy. If you don’t have your social media policy completed yet, then there’s never been a better time to get started than today!
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What Questions do you Have about using Social Media in your specific business?
Posted on 09. Jul, 2010 by Patrick Curl in Social Media
Hey, I share information all the time on what I think you’d like to see here, but today I’m straight out asking: What business or field do you work in, and what questions do you have relating to social media marketing that you’d like to see featured on this blog?
Leave your questions in the comments area and I’ll be writing a follow up post relating to the questions submitted.
Also please share this page so people know that it exists. Thanks!
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Trending on Twitter: Cavaliers owner not too happy with Lebron James…and says so in Comic Sans Letter
Posted on 09. Jul, 2010 by Patrick Curl in Social Media
This is laughable. I’m an ohioan, not in Cleveland, but I’ve always liked the Cavs. I’m also a Utah Jazz fan, though.
Recently Dan Gilbert the majority owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers wrote a not too nice letter aimed at Lebron James basically calling him a coward, and betrayer. Which I agree with to some extent, but…. you can’t take someone seriously who writes in Comic Sans font…seriously!
I couldn’t make this up, I’m not that funny. Comic sans is not the font of choice for business communications or irate letters, in fact it generally softens the blow. You can’t really get mad or upset reading a letter using it. Sorry..but it’s the truth.
That’s why old ladies, children, chain letter senders use comic sans, because they either don’t know better, they think its cute, or their topic just isn’t to be taken serious.
Comic Sans is now a trending topic on twitter right above LeBron James. It’s just amazing how fast stupid news can travel via the internet.
One thing that Dan Gilbert did say was that he guarantees that Cleveland will win a championship before Lebron James does, and I sure hope he’s right. Ohio could use a championship win – they’re definitely due!
Read the letter here.
The takeaway for social media marketing is -with the spread of information so fast, you need to always double check that your content really fits the mold. Get some opinions if you need to but make sure that it doesn’t make you look stupid. I mean a lot of people are asking how someone who types in Comic Sans can possibly hope to manage an NBA team, and it really makes the rest of the ohio business community look bad.
On behalf of all Ohio business owners let me just say that the laughable Dan Gilbert does not speak for the rest of us, we know better than to submit a letter in silly fonts, and how to be professional.
[via TechCrunch]
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Social Media Demographics Infographic. Who uses Social Media?
Posted on 09. Jul, 2010 by Patrick Curl in Social Media
Flowtown released a very interesting infographic on social media usage. It details what demographics are using social media.
Check it out:
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Social Media, Mobile, and Local Marketing Tips to build a Thriving Massage Therapy Business.
Posted on 09. Jul, 2010 by Patrick Curl in Mobile Advertising, Mobile Marketing, Social Media
Photo credit: Emily Chang
I’m a graduate from Massage Therapy back in the day (2003). I graduated from the Utah College of Massage Therapy aka UCMT. Those were fun days, I loved going to massage school, due to health concerns I eventually was not able to follow up on Massage therapy, so instead I became a social media consultant (which I also love).
I still miss practicing massage on people, and doing energy work like Cranial Sacral, Shiatsu, Acupressure, etc…
As a marketer I often think up ways that “If I was a __fill in the blank____” I’d do this to get more customers or clients.. It’s something that’s fun for me, if a little geeky.
So for this blog post “If I was a ‘practicing’ massage therapist” I would do the following to market my business:
1. Social Shopping Services. Social Shopping services are literally popping up all over the place. By “Social Shopping” I mean sites like LivingSocial and Groupon. The premise is this – a bunch of people each agree to buy the same deal from a company. Because a whole bunch of people are buying the company gets some nice exposure from possible people who might not have been customers otherwise.
Example: Groupon or Living Social runs a campaign for your business. Your customers get a 50% off a massage. Say you charge $60 normally for massages, that means that your customers get a $30 dollar massage. Groupon or LivingSocial would then get a percent of that I believe it runs from 30%-50%.
The benefit is that they have a large user base and can get tons of new customers to try out your services. You’ll generally get a fraction of what you normally do – but to get new people trying out your services its often worth it.
2. Local Directories. There are tons of great local directories out there. I would make sure to list all your services and modalities in each and every single local directory that you can find. Some good ones are: Google Places, Localeze, CitySearch, Yelp, MerchantCircle, ShopCity, Local.com, Yellow Pages, Yahoo local,
Be sure to use lots of graphics, some sites will let you add coupons. Make sure that every little space and form field is filled out with very detailed information about your business.
Also be sure to ask your customers how they found you, and ask them to go back to that site and leave you a review if they have a chance.
Another great Local Marketing tactic is using new Local / Social services to market your business. Make sure your business is listed at Foursquare and Gowalla and suggest to your clients that if they check-in on foursquare they can receive some nice benefits. You could give $5 off for all foursquare users who checkin, and $15 off for the Mayor of your business.
3. Adwords and PPC ads. Pay-Per-Click is a great boon for business. For those non-techy, pay-per-click ads are the ads on google on the side that say ‘sponsored’. Users can bid on keywords and their ad will get shown in the order of their bid. So say you bid $1.00 per click for a keyword and someone else bid $1.10 per click. That means for each click to your website you will pay $1.00. It also means that the $1.10 advertiser will be above you on the page.
Don’t worry about it getting costly because you can set your price, you can pay as little as $.01 per click on some keywords. You can also set a daily budget of $5-10 or more to make sure that you’re not spending hundreds of dollars a month with monetary benefits coming back to your business.
Running adwords campaigns can be costly if competing for high profile keywords. The key to being successful with local adwords campaigns is to target smaller less-searched after keyword phrases. For example instead of ‘Massage Therapy’, I might try Orange County Massage Therapist, or Massage Therapist Chicago, IL; or New York Massage, or New York Shiatsu, ..insert the rest of your modalities. You can do hundreds of keywords and see which ones work the best for you.
The key to PPC is trial and error. Keep trying new keywords and new ad copy to see what works best for you. One additional trick is that you can also choose to only show up on results from people in your area, and you can set the hours of day that you want your ads to run. So you might just want them to run during your normal business hours, to get the maximum benefit and so people can call you right away to setup and appointment.
You can also use other services that may be cheaper and more cost effective that are essentially adword like campaigns but for mobile applications and websites. These are great because the person is already out travelling the neighborhood and new technologies are making it easier and easier to reach people who are with-in a couple city blocks of your business. A couple of good services to look into for this space is Admob, and iAD.
4. Social Media Marketing. Having a good social media marketing strategy is crucial to online success. Your strategy should feature a highly professional Facebook page, an active twitter account with a custom background for your profile, an Active blog that features blog posts about local health related topics.
When blogging its a good idea to mix general health related articles that feature keywords related to massage therapy with articles and blog posts about local businesses, local news, etc. Why? Because you’re a local business which means you need people to see your blog when they google local events and news topics. It’s a small trick that could help you get noticed more. Also make sure to cross-post all your blog posts to your social networks, and vice versa if possible. There are many great plugins available for wordpress that can help you accomplish this.
5. Reach out to Local Influencers. Join and find all the local business networking groups and run a special where each group can run a contest to give away a free massage. You could also do this for local bloggers. You could also give local bloggers a free massage in exchange for a good review of your service – they’re getting something free and would be more than willing to write about your Massage Therapy practice in exchange.
6. Mobile Marketing. SMS text marketing is a great way to connect with your customers, though it could be pricey, if you’re the owner of a massage clinic though it might work great. Basically this is where your customers opt-in to receive promotional messages via their cellphone’s text message capabilities. You could offer a chance to win a free massage every month to get them to stay members of your list.
Mobile coupons are another great mobile marketing tactic to reaching customers on mobile phones.
It’s also important that your website or blog has a mobile version for people who are on mobile phones. This is becoming more and more important as more and more people are using smartphones to navigate the web.
One final word of advice is to setup a google alert for your name, or business name. This way you’ll get emails sent when people review your business, or share it on facebook or twitter, or talk about you in a positive or negative way. This way you can respond to them in kind and thank them, or address their concern and see if you can do something to keep them as a customer.
It used to be that to get noticed you simply paid over $500 per year to get your business listed in the Yellow Pages, and hope people would choose your business over the other guy. Now, a listing in the Yellow Pages doesn’t mean diddly, being tops on google on the other hand will get you tons of foot traffic. To be a leader in your field for your local area you absolutely have to embrace all these new technologies and work hard to get your name out there more often, and on more sites than your competitors. That’s all it really boils down to.
The more content you put out there the more people will visit your blog, and subsequently your brick and mortar business.
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Why you Must have a Splash Page for Facebook Pages
Posted on 08. Jul, 2010 by Patrick Curl in Social Media
Why do you need a Splash Page for your Facebook Page?
When you visit out-of-the-box facebook pages that have just been created, you’re greeted
by their latest wall posts, maybe a catchy logo on the side. Often that’s is, and it leaves a lot to be desired.
See, in marketing standing out from the crowd gets you noticed.
In social media marketing you want to create a user action. Having a short, decisive welcome page
that has a good logo image, maybe a newsletter subscribe box, some of your latest blog posts, some of your
latest tweets, a youtube video, and more makes a big statement.
Take a look at MarketingOc’s Facebook page.
On it you will notice a major call to action right at the top. Before anything else we want people to click the ‘like’ button.
This allows us the opportunity to further engage with them. The first priority of all facebook pages in my opinion is to get that ‘like’ button clicked. Everything else is just gravy.
Next you’ll notice on the left I’ve added some ad-copy from marketingoc.com, and on the right is a very popular youtube video showing the benefits of social media, and some amazing social media statistics. Below the video is the last 3 tweets by marketingoc pulled in from twitter, and below that is another call to action to follow us on our other social and web presences.
It’s short, sweet, professional looking, and it has defined goals.
What are your goals with your Facebook Page? Are you accomplishing them?
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How Mobile Marketing Can Help Small Businesses
Posted on 06. Jul, 2010 by Brian in Blog, Mobile Marketing
It’s always exciting when we take the time to discover new case studies and means to present the value of mobile marketing to our clients – especially clients who consider themselves small businesses. Jakob Nielsen is a pioneer in web usability, and hearing him discuss the value of mobile marketing is inspiring to me and I believe beneficial to you. Have a listen to the first five minutes. The last few minutes are largely a commentary on the Ipad.
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