Social Media Mavens / Experts

It is becoming more and more important for corporations - as well as businesses of all sizes - to have a blog in today’s world where so many people own computers. But if your business has put off starting a blog for far too long, here is why you should really be blogging, and how it can be advantageous to your overall business marketing strategy.

Human face
You don’t really want people to think of your company as “big box” or “typical corporate America”. And blogging can actually put a human face to your company, since the company now has a voice it can relate to when it reads your blog. When you consider how much money companies put into creating a human face for their business, doing it with a company blog is a relatively inexpensive way to humanize your corporation.

Controlling the message
Public Relations tends to want to run far, far away from blogs. But now, more are embracing blogs as a way to control the company’s message and how they release it. You can now have a fireside chat with your company’s CEO in the format of a blog interview, where responses can be monitored. If there is a scandal or other negative publicity surrounding your company, you already have a platform ready to release information that doesn’t involve sending press releases to the media or subjecting your CEO or other employees to a press conference.

Excitement and anticipation
Companies can easily use a blog to give hints and tidbits about new product releases or services well before the actual launch so you can get people excited about what you are going to announce before you did it. Since press releases are rarely sent to announce something your company hasn’t done yet, a blog is an easy way to get the word out and build anticipation.

Fresh content
Having a blog adds new fresh original content to your site every time the blog is updated. And since this is something many corporate sites struggle with, it means you can add quality content as often as you like.

Soft selling
Now, you don’t want to do a hard sell in your company blog, but there is absolutely nothing wrong with soft selling products or services in a blog… in fact, many readers will expect it. Just don’t go overboard with every post being promotional in nature. But it can be a great way to market your products, particularly ones that people might not be as familiar with, whether lower sellers or simply new to the market.

Reminding
When you have people subscribed to your company blog, those are all people who will think of your company as a household name or brand everytime you post a new blog entry. And since blogging is such a low-cost marketing strategy compared to paid advertising, you are saving money to place your identity in front of people.

For all these reasons, corporate blogs are becoming more and more popular for companies. As long as you are approaching your blog in the right way, it can be an invaluable marketing tool.

Embracing blogs to connect with a company’s network of customers is fait accompli for the tech industry, but what about the rest of the planet that doesn’t put its every movement up on Twitter?

Here are four retailers that are using blogs and social media in an attempt to better connect with customers.

Revenue: $375 Billion
# Locations: 6,800
Notable URL: http://www.checkoutblog.com/
Notable post: “Great News About WalMart’s Milk” (over 230 comments)

After several failed attempts at blogging, most notably the reviled “WalMarting Across America” shill blog, the planet’s largest retailer might be starting to get its act together.  In 2007, the Bentonville, Arkansas company launched the “Checkout Blog,” a group blog penned by nine of its corporate buyers that covers topics from the garden to video games to sustainability.  A definite step in the right direction for the company, with actual employees communicating about their individual areas of interest, with minimal company shilling taking place.

Revenue: $23 Billion
# Locations: 30,000+
Notable URL: http://csr.blogs.mcdonalds.com/
Notable post: “A Trip Down Memory Lane” (Good handling of a troll in the comments)

WalMart wasn’t the only retailing behemoth to receive derision for its initial forays into blogging.  McDonald’s, too, had its challenges. (Hopefully, you missed the fake “Lincoln Fry” blog, about a french fry shaped like the 16th President of the United States.  Yes, it was as abysmal as it sounds.)

The company behind the golden arches now has a “Open for Discussion” blog with weekly postings on topics regarding “Corporate Social Responsibility.”  While certainly better than the LIncoln Fry, there are still some challenges here:

1)  It looks to me like someone at McDonald’s headquarters has committed to some sort of MBO of “one blog post per week.”   As such, the posts are infrequent and not heavily trafficked.

2)  While it’s great to spread the wealth, all the most recent posts on the site (March-April 200 are from different authors.  Accordingly, each post is starting with a “who I am and what my role is” statement.  This also means that the revolving cast of characters hasn’t a chance to connect with readers.  It’s drive-by blogging.

3) To their credit, comments on the blog are open.  However, the paucity of comments makes me think that either (a) the blog is receiving almost no traffic or (b) the comments are being heavily moderated.  The bold TERMS AND CONDITIONS of the blog also state: “McDonald’s owns any comments or other content that you post on this site. That means that McDonald’s has the right to make, have made, offer for sale, use, sell, copy, distribute, perform, transmit, display, modify, adapt and otherwise use your submission(s) throughout the world in perpetuity in any manner that it sees fit without compensation to you. McDonald’s also has the right to use your name in connection with any use of your submissions.”  This is not the best method to develop trust and a long-term relationship with a customer.

Revenue: $9 Billion
# Locations: 15,000+
Notable URL: http://mystarbucksidea.force.com/
Notable post: “Vote For All Day Bold” (Giving contrarian viewpoints their due)

Of the four retailers profiled here, Starbucks has gone the furthest with respect to using social media to not only connect the organization to its customers, but to enable customers to rally around ideas as a community.  Their “My Starbucks Idea” site is a venue where customers can submit suggestions to the organization, vote on the suggestions of other individuals, and see which ideas are going to actually be implemented by the organization.

The best part of the site is not the technical implementation but, rather, the cultural one.  Starbucks does not seem to be censoring comments about their organization in any way, even when the feedback is less-than-stellar.  For example,  one representative comment on the site states:

“Decaf drinkers want strong coffee also. I go (or used to go) to Starbucks because of the decaf Sumatra, Verona etc. I can get Pikes Piss coffee from Tim Horton’s or McDonald’s. My grandmother makes stronger coffee. Starting today I am no longer a customer of Starbuck’s coffee except for whole beans. I urge everyone reading this to follow my lead and make Starbuck’s understand that the reason we (used to) spend our money on their overpriced coffe is because it is the best and no one else offers a strong decaf. There is strength in numbers - walk away today!”

The key thing that Starbucks realizes is that these conversations are taking place anyway.  If this site didn’t exist, customers such as the individual above would be making these comments in other forums that were removed from the organization, or on his or her own blog.  With My Starbucks Idea, the organization is getting the feedback in realtime, and has the opportunity to address issues in a rational and constructive way.

Revenue: $4 Billion
# Locations: 270+
Notable URL: http://wholefoodsmarket.com/socialmedia/blogs/
Notable post: “Slow Down and Green Up” (Rich conversation)

Although their CEO got himself and the company in some hot water by commenting negatively about a competitor using a pseudonym (n.b. the investigation into his actions has now been concluded), Whole Foods has a farmer’s market full of blogs, podcasts and videos they are using to give customers a variety of methods to learn more about the organization.

Last week, I started reading more on how you can drive traffic to your website using Twitter. Several bloggers that I read use Twitter daily to help find new readers and meet new people. I really didn’t grasp it at first, but I definitely got sucked in to Twitter quickly.

For those who don’t know the Twitter factor, I will drop a few stats on you.

Last week, I started actively using Twitter. Not really to drive traffic to my site, but to find new blogs that I could personally read and start following.  Immediately, I noticed a huge traffic spike to the blog. So I decided to look into it a little further.

• Since I started actively using Twitter (last week), I have increased my RSS subscribers by 32. This isn’t an unheard of increase, but I know that most of those new readers should stay around awhile.
• My website views have increased by almost 300 hits a day. Once again, if you are a large blog, that might not seem like much. But for an upstart, that is quite a bit of traffic inflow.

Those are just the raw traffic numbers from the website. What I wasn’t expecting were the tons of compliments via Twitter, users going to my band websites from my About page and complimenting my music, and meeting several people who I have since had nice and meaningful conversations with. I have also found many, many new blogs which I have subscribed to and read daily.

So, how did I do it?

These are the steps I went through in order to build the traffic and increase my followers. There are a few people who look at these types of methods as spamming, but they key to it is to NOT spam, and use your newfound connections properly. I have yet to post a link in a tweet (which is a message) attempting to drive traffic to the website. I may from time to time, but this method works to build a grassroots following similar to how I used to promote my band on MySpace.  When I promoted my music on MySpace, I would find a similar artist to my music. I would go through and then attempt to add their friends and message them. The mindset was ‘If they like this artist, there is a better chance they would like my music than if I picked a random person off the street.’ Instead of spamming them, I would message them personally and ask them to check out my music. It worked well, until people took advantage of it and start spamming relentlessly. So far, I have found that not to be the case on Twitter. Here are the steps.

1. Make sure you profile has up to date links. I made sure that the blog I wanted people to go to was the first link on the profile. In the biography section of the Twitter profile, I added a link to the websites About page. This way if people wanted to find out about me, it would take them to my blog. (Keep in mind, I do not have advertisements on my site, I am more interested in sending them to the website so they can see what I write about, and if they like the content, will add my site to their RSS reader. However, if you are displaying ads, this is a good way to increase hits and traffic)
2. Find someone with a similar business or blog and attempt to add their followers. It seems pretty simple and it works fast. In my example, I immediately cruised over to the profile of Maki from DoshDosh. He has a wonderful social media blog, his writing is top notch, and I like his overall style. I went one by one and added every single follower. You can do it faster than you ever could add a MySpace friend. After I had added all his followers, I went to a few more profiles and added similar followers. My thinking is if someone is following another blog, they quite possibly could be interested in following my blog.
3. Download and install an application to help manage Twitter. I personally use Twhirl. It helps me manage replies and messages in a chat like setup. It is great for responding to messages.
4. Respond to every single message and tweet. You will get a fair amount of backlash from adding people so fast. The reason is because many assume that you will just be spamming them. Take interest and respond the messages. You will ease their mind and if they like your content and tweets, they may become a reader.
5. Don’t spam incessantly. One thing I have noticed, is the people who spam get removed very fast. So if you intend on building long lasting relationships and not just quick traffic spikes, make sure not to spam.
6. Give back as well as take. You will have an opportunity to meet a wonderful community and find many new friends and blogs. Make sure you give traffic and subscriptions back. I assure you that you will find something you’ll love.

I hope this continues and I am able to grow more relationships with bloggers!

So, Twitter. A “microblogging tool.” A way for you to tell the world what you are doing, right this second. (or at least your friends who want to know). Admittedly. when I initially read about Twitter in the SXSW web coverage, my first thought was “Who the heck would want to always tell everyone else what they were doing all the time? And who the heck would want to know that?” Then, after about 30 seconds, I slapped myself - gently - and thought “IT Support organizations, that’s who!”

Picture this scenario. You have a support team of 10 that handles incoming calls, and also provides deskside support to the main corporate site that the team resides in. Usually, you have three people performing deskside, with the remaining seven handling the phones and email. The typical daily chaos ensues. Nobody is sure where the deskside support folks are, or when they’ll be back, because they haven’t been seen for 40 minutes and didn’t leave a post-it note describing their whereabouts.

In addition, you have four third level support folks who are supposed to take warm transfers of difficult support calls from your front line staff whenever time and resources permit. It’s a pain to hand off support calls off to this team, because each of your first level support staff have to play “IM roulette” to see who is available to take a warm transfer, interrupting your third level support staff multiple times an hour with an endless barrage of IMs; and all the while your customer is waiting. What this situation needs is a way for everyone to see what everyone else is doing at that moment.

Twitter to the rescue. Here’s what you, as an IT manager, should do to get Twitter working for this support team.

1. Set everyone up with consistently named Twitter accounts (usernameXYZCorp, for example).
2. Get everyone on the support teams a feed reader, or an application like Twitbox
3. Get all the twitter feeds for your support team into everyone’s reader. This gives your team a consistent view of everyone elses twitter blogs.
4. Make sure you have everyone’s readers set to update often (1 or 2 minutes)
5. Explain to your support staff that you want them to be consistently updating their Twitter account with their current actions or tasks, and that it’s not optional.
6. Create a set of acronyms that support staff can use to describe what they are doing, so that sending “tweets” (micropost updates) only takes a couple of seconds.

Examples

OaC - On a call, and the estimated time until the call will end.
AfC - Available for Call
DSS - Desk Side Support visit, the name of the user being helped, and the estimated time until the support tech is back from the visit.
BR - Bathroom
Lunch - self evident
GCBMAYP - Getting Coffee, Bother Me at Your Peril

And so on and so forth.

You can also use Twitter to set up an impromptu deskside support queue, where your call takers place updates describing a needed deskside support visit. That feed can be piped to your deskside support teams mobile phones or Blackberries; letting them know about needed visits, without them having to return to their desks or call into your first level support agents.

With this kind of set up, the support team gains back all the time they used to burn trying to figure out what everyone on desk side and third level support was doing. That can be pretty significant over the course of a day.

As with any technological solution, there are pros and cons.

PROS

1. Twitter is a free service. No hit to the budget whatsoever
2. Setting up a configuration like this will take minimal time and training, especially if your people are familiar with RSS feeds and readers (and really, everyone should be.)
3. Low network and workstation resource requirements.

CONS

1. Twitter is an external service with no guarantee of uptime or service delivery.
2. Because Twitter is an external service, viewable by the public, it’s essential that proper security policies about content are adhered to. If it wouldn’t go in an email sent out to the public, it shouldn’t go in a tweet. This can limit the amount of useful information your team can send through Twitter.

Of course, a Twitter-like service would be relatively easy to set up internally, if you have people familiar with the common blogging software packages. But again, the advantage of Twitter here is that you can set it up as a proof-of-concept with minimal time investment, then change over to an internal solution later, should you get the needed server space and development time.

Now, I’m sure some of you are thinking “There are already tools that accomplish the same thing.” Fair enough. But let me ask you:

Are they as cheap as Twitter? (It’s pretty hard to beat free)
Are they as simple to set up as Twitter? (A few accounts piped to RSS readers?)
Can they be as rich information-wise while being as flexible as Twitter? (Free form text blogging with RSS feeds that can go pretty much anywhere. The possibilities are pretty broad.)

At the very least, if this doesn’t sound like a solution your support organization needs, I hope I got you thinking about how to leverage Twitter beyond basic social networking.

So, what are your ideas to use Twitter in a technical business setting?