How to Integrate Customer Service Into Social Media Marketing

Social media has changed customer service from being a support function to being an extension of marketing. In the social media ecosystem, customers want to know that you're listening and responding. As your organization's front line, customer service is where your company becomes real to prospects and buyers by engaging with the public and showing your firm is real and cares.

With social media, you have to win your prospects, customers, and fans with every interaction across platforms. As your company's point of interaction, customer service is critical to your social media marketing efforts. Zappos is the poster child of amazing customer service across social media outlets. From a customer service perspective, when it comes to social media networks, 46 percent of customers want to solve a problem and almost 40 percent want to give retailers their feedback according to research from Cone, Inc. Additionally, roughly four out of five customers seeks a special deal (Source : H.Cohen).

 

12 Ways Social Media Enhances Customer Service

Here are 12 ways social media supports customer service and extends your marketing efforts.

     1.     Gives business a human face. Social media's engagement and interaction makes online businesses more personable and shows that someone is home. This transparency starts building customer trust. To this end, it's important to have social media guidelines in place to help employees with their social media interactions.

2.     Listens to what customers are saying. With the help of social media monitoring tools, customer service can hear what consumers are asking, provide timely responses, and determine early warning signs of PR and other issues. (Note: social media monitoring may reside in different areas of an organization.) In the current social media ecosystem, it's critical to have a crisis management plan in place to mitigate potential problems.

3.     Proactively engages with prospects and customers. This interaction shows that the people behind your company are real and care. Accomplish this with a wide range of interactions such as tweets, Facebook postings, and boards as well as unilateral communications like blog posts. 

4.     Provides additional product-related content. Use a wide range of formats from online videos to blogs. In addition to specific purchase information, show how to use the products. Here is a consumer-made video explaining how to apply eye color.
  

5.     Answers product-related questions. Real-time and asynchronous conversations can occur on your website, a third-party media site, or a social media network like Facebook. One benefit is that other customers can respond to a confused customer with a direct answer. While the answer may not always be to your liking, it has the authority of being from another customer and reduces your customer service department's workload.

6.     Supplies alternative contact channel. Remember, prospects and customers will use any and every entrance to talk to a human and get answers to their questions. Social media-delivered customer service, at least for the short term, tends to be used less on a relative basis, translating to better service.

7.     Gives customers a channel to talk to each other. As a marketer, get over yourself! With social media, on your website or on a social networking site, it's not about you, it's about the overall customer-to-customer conversations. You just provide the environment that they want to visit.

8.     Shares customer feedback. Often it's ratings and reviews. The benefit is that reviews can help qualify and endorse your product in ways that your staff can't because customers trust other customers. The challenge is that negative issues like United Breaks Guitars' can be amplified due to social media's free media and distribution platforms.

9.     Celebrates your customers. By gathering your prospects, customers, and fans on social media platforms, you shine the spotlight on your customers. Oreos does a great job of this with its Facebook page that shows customers eating Oreos.

10.   Shows customers behind the scenes. Use social media to give customers a view of what your firm is like. Think broadly in terms of blogs, photographs on Flickr, online videos, presentations, e-books, and LinkedIn.

11.   Makes special offers. Social media presents another venue to share the love with your customers. One way to do this is through social media-only deals. Consider it an extension of customer service's ability to close and upsell customers.

12.   Create new purchase options. While many companies haven't started testing social commerce, it's a rapidly growing area.

5 Ways to Measure Social Media Customer Service

As with any marketing and/or social media effort, it's critical to set your objectives and create related metrics to assess your success. Here are five metrics to help you monitor integrating social media into your customer service delivery.

1.     Number of interactions. Track the number of fans and followers. Bear in mind you may need to entice consumers with special deals and bonuses. Additionally, understand how each platform works and how to be part of the community, or your actions will backfire.

2.     Number of issues identified and responded to. In addition to participating in the conversation on your website and tailored company outposts like Twitter and Facebook, use brand monitoring tools to find and reply to consumer issues.

3.     Content creation. Track the amount of content that users contribute in terms of ratings and reviews, social media interactions, photographs, videos, and other formats.

4.     Sales. Measure sales related to your social media customer service efforts. Have they contributed to your overall sales? Are these efforts helping customers decide what to purchase and do they contribute in a positive way to your brand association and company revenues?

5.     Customer service resources. Consider these three important elements. Are you reducing customer service inquiries via other channels? Social media translates to a lower cost channel in many cases. Are you allocating customer service headcount appropriately? Do you have enough people assigned to each channel? Also, monitor for increased usage as this channel becomes more efficient. People who didn't want to deal with customer service may do so on social media.

Social media has changed how consumers and companies view customer service. Now, customer service fulfills a variety of different functions including enhancing your marketing.

Is your firm ready to meet these new opportunities?

Are there any other customer service points that you'd add to this list ?.  If so, please include your perspective in the comments section below.

7 Ways To Harvest Free Traffic

He downfalls of many would-be successful internet marketers is that they just can’t get the revenue to expense ratio right. High on the list of culprits is paying too much to drive traffic to their websites. One way to fix this is to concentrate on free traffic and can the advertising altogether, as these 7 Tips will help you do.

Tip #1: Organic Search Engine Rankings. There are only three search engines you need to worry about and those are Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Conquering top search engine rankings in the big three starts with good keyword research. When you know what search terms you want to target, it’s then a matter of tailoring your site to match what these search engines are looking for.

With Google you need lots of original content (that is, large websites) and natural-looking incoming links. With Yahoo it’s pretty much the same except that you can use reprinted articles, otherwise known as duplicate content, in building your subpages. With MSN you can attain top spots with small mini-sites that simply use the search terms in the domain.

You need incoming links, known as backlinks, to move up in the rankings. Some popular ways to get these include using social bookmarking sites, posting comments and trackbacks on blogs (and other sites) that don’t use “no follow” meta tags, submitting articles to article directories, posting your URL on directory sites, and exchanging links with other sites.

Tip #2: Social Networks such as Myspace. This usually involves making multiple profiles and getting very social on the social network with other users. Automation software is often utilized to make mundane tasks such as sending friend requests, comments, and messages to other users much faster. Myspace allows their database to be sorted by a nice range of demographics, which is very helpful if you need a target list of prospects to promote your product or service to. You can also access members of groups who all have a shared interest in a certain subject.

Tip #3: Free Classified Ad Sites. This is getting to be a very effective free traffic method, but you do need to go about it with some tact and creativity. Craig’s List is the king of free online classifieds, and a properly tailored campaign can harvest hundreds of targeted prospects per day. Software is very handy for managing larger campaigns.

Tip #4: Video Hosting Sites. Anyone can harvest sales leads from video hosting sites these days. You can make a video using a digital camera or free screen recording software on your computer, or a combination of both. This is where the creative types will soar above the crowd.

You Tube is the undisputed king of online video hosting, and a smart marketer can reap thousands of views for his or her video per day from inside You Tube itself. All you need to do is drive people to your page, which can be done by commenting on other videos or other peoples pages, and sending friend requests. Software makes this process much more efficient.

Tip #5: Question and Answer Sites. These are becoming incredibly popular, with Yahoo Answers being the clear leader for the moment. Anyone can ask questions, anyone can answer questions, and as long as you don’t come across as a blatant spammer, dropping your links into both questions and answers is pretty easy. It’s certainly worth your time to market any niche through Yahoo Answers.

Tip #6: Forums. Message board forums exist on the internet for just about every topic imaginable. An advanced Google search using “message board forum” and your topic of interest will probably turn up several places where people discuss your subject. Join these forums, become active and helpful to others, then do subtle marketing through your signature (or even your user name).

Tip #7 Give-aways on auction sites. Auction sites such as ebay are a great opportunity to find customers for your niche. Write a 10-page report that has a few good tips and a great sales pitch for your product, and then give it away for free (or charge something like $1 for it). Hype it up with some good sales jargon so it moves well. Capture the emails of those downloading the book and add them to an autoresponder service so you can keep mailing them offers.

These tips are only the beginning of free traffic opportunities on the web. Plenty of marketers make a nice income without spending a dime on advertising. Will you become one of them?

HOW TO Create Brand Buzz Through Marketing Contest

Whether we admit it to ourselves or not, we want to be talked about. We want our customers to wake up thinking about us. We want to be charming, and alluring, and on the tip of their tongue. We want to get them hot and bothered. Because when you’ve teased someone to the point of explosion, you’re going to get them thinking and dreaming about you.  And then they’re going to go buzz to all their friends about it.

Contests are sexy. They give us something we all want. Brand buzz.

That’s the power of contest marketing. You get to grab their attention and keep it untilyou’re ready to let go.

One reason companies are so fond of contests is because it puts them in control of the terms. You get to decide when it starts, you decide what’s being offered up and you get to command their attention until you give them what they ultimately want – the prize. Make the prize juicy enough and they’ll stick around and wait for it all day. And while they’re waiting, you get a chance to make them fall madly in love with you. It’s genius. It’s marketing through contests.

But, of course, you can’t just throw up any old contest and expect it to work. A good contest takes some planning. Here are a few suggestions of things you’ll want to think about.

Coming up with the concept

The more time you spend planning your contest, the stronger it’s going to be. If you just launch the thing overnight with no thought involved, you’re gonna have no way to wrangle it in, take control and promote the living daylights out of it.   Before you do anything, you need to figure out what you want to get from your contest:

• Increased brand awareness?
• Email addresses?
• RSS subscribers?
• UGC content for your site?
• More media content like photos, video and sound?

You know what I didn’t put on that list? Go ahead and read it again.

Links! Yes. I know you want links. However, links should NOT be the end goal of your contest. If that’s all your worried about, then you may start veering off into skuzzy areas. Focus on all the other things you can get from running a contest and let the links be the nice bow at the end. You’ll appreciate them more that way. So will Google.

Once you know what you want, start brainstorming ideas for fun things you can do to capture people’s attention and get them talking. Think crazy, but manageable. You want to be reasonably innovative here, so do give it some thought. You’re not going to get any attention creating a “me too” contest replicating something your competitors have already done. What’s going to work best for your target market? Are they tech savvy? Creative? If so, maybe a video contest. If not, maybe they have to write something an essay or share an experience they had with your brand? Perhaps they can create a mashup for you to put on your site? Caption a funny photo? You get to tell them.

You want to think long term, but don’t limit yourself. Just because you sell wedding dresses, doesn’t mean you can’t create a contest asking people to send you their most compelling reasons NOT to get married or the most outrageous “why I called off the wedding” story they’ve heard or a video of someone destroying their couture wedding dress. The idea is to associate your brand with something fun, engaging and creative.  It’s not to see how well you can fit inside your box.

Getting sponsors to donate prizes

Don’t skimp on prizes. You don’t have to spend thousands, but do make it something people actually want. The sexier the prize, the more teasing people will put up with to win it. I mean, it’s Dating 101.

If you’re a small business, you may not have the budget to offer up something really dreamy. If you can’t afford an exciting prize on your own, try and find sponsors to help you obtain it. If your contest has any type of charity or humanitarian angle, they may offer up something for free.  If not, try and work out another arrangement.  Barter services or come up with other ways for the sponsor to receive some publicity and attention.  Perhaps you’ll mention the sponsor each time you mention the contest (with a Google-approved nofollow’d link) or the winner will be encouraged to work in the sponsor’s name in the mashup they’re set to create.  A lot of times companies will simply donate merchandise to spread some goodwill and awareness for the brand.

Another great thing about getting sponsors is that you also start building your free promotional army.  This is key for turning your contest viral. The more people you can include in your contest, the more people who will naturally help you pimp it out.  By making themselves look good, they may you look good, as well. Marketing, win!

How Long Will It Run

How long are you going to give yourself to create, maintain and take advantage of the buzz, keeping in mind that you’ll have to promote your contest for the entire length its running? How long can you handle it? How long will people put up with it?

Obviously, if you’re asking people to recall a past experience or to write a quick blog post, they won’t need as much time as if you’re asking them to create a video or some type of brand mashup. Consider all the elements involved with participating and then time accordingly. The best contests give people just enough time to do what you’re asking, without annoying them when the thing refuses to end. Remember when Rae was in the running for Startup Nation’s Leading Moms in Business contest? We love Startup Nation and we love Rae, but the voting for that thing stretched out over months. I’m just saying. I almost unfollowed Rae on Twitter. Then I’d remember she’d cut me in my sleep.

Creating Buzz

Creating a contest is great. Creating a contest that no one hears about because you failed to promote it, is not great.

Which outlets will you use to promote your contest and get people excited about it? Are you going to write a press release and then stick on your site? Maybe a single blog post?  That’s cute. What else are you going to do?

You’re going to elect a panel of judges for your contest. Judges that are well known in your industry and whose involvement will (a) get you more exposure and (b) ensure that you add to your free promotional army. If you get a bunch of bloggers to act as judges, you can bet your butt they’re going to blog and whore out their involvement on their own sites and in social media. They’re going to want to get something out of the association too.

You also want to take the promotion to Twitter. You want to talk about it on Facebook. You want to pass it around the relevant LinkedIn groups. You want to mention in local IRL groups. You want to create a high energy video on your site that announces the contest and is so full of excitement that people are practically tripping over themselves by the time it ends. Even if you can’t get them to enter, you at least want them to pass it around to their friends and talk about it.  You want to make the contest as enticing as you possibly can. The sexier it is, the more engaged people are going to be and the more they’re going to spread it FOR you. Getting people to do your head patting is what marketing is all about.

Using the attention

The contest is nice and your community will probably enjoy it. However, that’s really only half of what you’re after.

Right now you have everyone’s attention. You’re attracting a whole new audience and a different set of eyeballs as you create buzz around your contest. People who didn’t know you existed yesterday, are now suddenly interested. They’re clicking through the rest of your site to see what you’re about. They’re looking around, trying to get a feel for you. Use this time to be the sexiest you’ve ever been. This is where you make them fall in love with you and capture their hearts forever.  Huzzah!

While you’re in heavy promotion mode for your contests, you also want to be unleashing your best content. You want to be the best version of yourself you can be. You want to release your smartest posts, your greatest theories, and the stuff that makes you stand out in a positive light. Yes, chances are some of these people still won’t care and are just waiting for the prize, but a lot of them will. Now that you’re on their radar, they may subscribe to your blog (especially if that’s part of the contest rules…), they may start getting your email newsletter, etc. Think beyond just the contest and use the attention you’re getting right now to build your brand in the future. Harness it and bring people over to your camp.  This is something people DON’T do when they’re overly focused on links. (Thanks to Lisa)

Social Media History

Is Your Social Media Strategy Really a good Strategy ?

The ecommerce industry is aflutter with social media buzz. This is understandable – social media usage has grown faster than the adoption of television. With this in mind, many small online businesses are flocking to social media – in fact, one report states that utilization of social media by small businesses has doubled since 2009. Here’s a few reasons why:

• Social media is a cost-effective way to establish relationships with customers.
• Social media serves as a great source of open feedback and competitor intelligence.
• Fans/Followers of branded social media pages are more likely to buy from that company and recommend it to friends and family.
• Everyone else is doing it.

Wait, “everyone else is doing it?” That doesn’t seem like a very good reason to start a social media campaign!

Unfortunately this is the rationale many small online business owners use when entering the social space. But the problem with an “everyone else is doing it” approach is it typically leads to a haphazard social presence.

Sound familiar? If so, it’s quite possible that your social media strategy isn’t a strategy at all. Instead, it’s more of a mix of tactics thrown together under the guise of a strategy. But what’s the difference?

A strategy is a comprehensive plan meant to achieve a long-term objective. A tactic, on the other hand, is a specific action within a strategy intended to help reach the designated goal.

Now that you know the distinction, here’s a step by step guide to ensure your social media efforts form an actual strategy:

1. Set your social media objectives.

What do you ultimately want your business to achieve from social media? Some ideas include: brand awareness, thought leadership, networking opportunities and SEO benefits. While it’s tempting to set your strategic objective to “all of the above,” you need to pick one and stick with it – other positive results will coincide with your growing social presence.

2. Choose the right channels to meet your objectives.

Next, take a holistic approach of integrating various social media channels to achieve your set objective. This means that you need to carefully select which tactics to use within your campaign – you can’t be everywhere at once, so choose the channels that will best help reach your goal.

Here’s some aspects of various social tactics to help guide your pairings:

Blog:

• Serves as premier outlet for offering fresh content that’s pertinent to your defined audience
• Lays foundation for spreading unique content across the web

Facebook:

• Establishes a “face” for your brand via addition of photos and personal information
• Facilitates an interactive community with wall posts, discussion boards, fan photos and likes

Twitter:

• Presents chance to expand social network and find influencers in specific industries
• Lets users share your content, including blog posts, articles, etc.

LinkedIn:

• Provides location to establish business credibility and share business information
• Offers place to join relevant groups and make connections with other thought leaders

YouTube:

• Allows for repurposing of customer videos, product tutorials, testimonials, etc.
• Supplies vehicle to comment on others’ videos and reach out to those with similar interests

As an example, if the objective of my social media strategy is to establish thought leadership within my industry, I would start with my blog to create unique, relevant content and use Facebook and Twitter to spread that content. I’d also use YouTube to create educational videos related to my blog. As you can see, by purposefully mixing various tactics, I’ve put together a comprehensive strategy to achieve my thought leadership objective.

3. Establish a timeline for completion.

Another integral part of any strategy is creating a timeline to reach your goal. By setting monthly or quarterly benchmarks, you can objectively gauge your progress. The key to this step is establishing smaller goals within each tactic for measurement against your deadline.

Going back to our thought leadership example, you could set benchmarks of establishing 5 blog relationships and posting 8 articles on your blog by the end of July. And by the end of August you could set a benchmark of making 3 guest blog appearances and posting 2 educational videos on YouTube. Of course the numbers will vary on a case by case basis, but you get the idea.

While creating your benchmarks, it’s advised to dedicate a certain amount of time to executing your strategy. Far too many small online business owners strongly launch a social campaign, only to drop off the face of the earth 6 weeks later. Just like any strategy, social media takes time, so make sure you’re ready to make the long-term investment before diving in the pool.

4. Put together your metrics.

To provide a legitimate strategy, you must establish metrics to gauge your progress. The easiest way to do so is creating key performance indicators, or KPIs, for each of your tactics. Some KPIs include: number of Twitter followers, number of YouTube views, number of blog subscribers and growth patterns for each metric.

It’s easy to fall into a trap of setting arbitrary numbers for your KPIs. Hitting 500 Twitter followers sounds nice, but what does that really mean? Instead, it’s best to base your KPIs on your objectives, so perhaps setting a KPI of adding 50 influential Twitter followers is better aligned with a thought leadership goal.

Whatever the case, be sure to track results against your metrics to see how you’re performing in each of your channels – this will allow you to make proper adjustments.

5. Deploy, measure, adjust.

The entire point of setting objectives and benchmarking them is to make sure that your strategy stays on course. If you’re exceeding your KPIs in one channel and are way behind in another, you have an opportunity to evaluate your execution and make alterations as necessary.

It’s okay to shift course if things aren’t working as planned – the beauty of a true strategy is that you can make changes along the way to better achieve social media success.

And there you have it – a five step plan to legitimize your social media efforts! If you haven’t gone through this process or you identified with the “everybody else is doing it” mentality, it’s a good bet that your social media strategy isn’t really a strategy after all.

Fortunately, in this ever-evolving medium, your online business can quickly adjust to better maximize the bountiful benefits social media has to offer.

Happy business

What is the role of Community Manager ?

1 - Set target heart, with a concern about quality because it is essential not to miss the real influencers. For example, for a niche we can estimate it is enough to identify 15 to 20 bloggers to begin to relay a communication on a small target. 

2 - Define the dating scene (Facebook, Twitter ...) and see what are the expectations and opinions are influencers (eg analyze the old notes for a blog). 

3 - Make the day on its theme, via Netvibes, Wikio, Google, Kartoo, Twitter ... as well as sites that stand out on Google (eg Wikipedia). 

4 - Enter into the conversation by sending information on behalf of the brand, sharing exclusive content (or not), make events, offer testing products ... 

Being a Community Manager is not thou attitude and have moved, but have a good sense of propriety ... and think about the other before thinking about his interest. Indeed, despite the 'spirit web' we must continue to be professional. 

Example: there is always a good idea to say that we appreciate the work of a blogger, but do not propose at the first mail to the promotion of the brand! 

Sending press releases "rough" is not a good idea, you must have an individual approach and focused. So it must offer content republish (videos, articles ...). 

What to do: be an incentive, interesting, interactive, attentive ... 

What not to do: wait until you come to talk about the brand, have a top-down approach, do not live the brand on the Web, not to build lasting relationships with its community ... 

For Community Management, it is recommended to have someone internally in the company that controls a communications agency that is responsible for the day, maintain relationships with influencers ... because it's a very time consuming.

Médias sociaux, si vous pensez que c'est juste un effet de mode, méfiez-vous !

Créer des relations en ligne qui ont un effet positif sur les résultats de votre entreprise peut être assez difficile. Tester les différentes approches au sein des médias sociaux et le marketing en ligne aidera à consolider la bonne stratégie pour votre entreprise. Aujourd’hui, avec la réduction des budgets en raison de la récession, le marketing est souvent le premier budget à être réduit. 

Être original et dynamique sont deux clés que toutes les sociétés doivent s'efforcer d'atteindre. 

Stratégie créative : 
Dans une étude récente, Citibank a révélé que 75% des propriétaires de petites entreprises ne trouvent pas les médias sociaux bénéfique pour générer des ventes. Ces entreprises ont également trouvé difficiles leurs tentatives d'utilisation des médias sociaux. Matthew Yeomans, directeur social media stratégy au Royaume-Uni  de l'entreprise Custom Communication, déclare: «Le maintien constant, et un véritable dialogue avec les clients qui sont sur Internet à toutes heures, peut prendre beaucoup de temps et peut être épuisant, celà peut nécessiter des ressources supplémentaires que les petites entreprises n'ont pas. "Dans notre expérience en tant que firme de marketing créatif, nous n'avons pas encore rencontrer une entreprise qui pouvait se permettre de ne pas avoir une présence en ligne. Souvent, les entreprises ne parviennent pas à élaborer et mettre en œuvre une stratégie de marketing créatif en ligne qui a du sens pour eux. Peut-être est-ce pour cela que 3 propriétaires d'entreprises sur 4  ont déclaré que leur marketing des médias sociaux était inefficace. 

La plupart des entreprises utilisant les médias sociaux aujourd'hui ne font que des expériences et n'ont pas une stratégie concrète. Pour beaucoup de personnes, il peut être déconcertant pour eux de commencer à adopter Twitter et Facebook, et d'abandonner leurs supports publicitaires traditionnels. Toutefois, il est essentiel pour les petites entreprises de comprendre que l'élaboration d'une campagne de média social prend du temps, et peut être un bon complément à leurs supports publicitaires traditionnels. 

Les médias sociaux devraient être davantage considéré comme une évolution plutôt qu'une révolution. Il s'agit de l'adoption de nouvelles voies de commercialisation et d'atteindre plus facilement qu'avant des clients potentiels. Dans le marché actuel, le marketing social des médias et une présence en ligne est un must, et devrait être intégrée dans le plan de chaque entreprise de marketing stratégique. Souvent, celà peut prendre de quelques mois à a peine un an pour commencer à ressentir les avantages et les effets positifs que les médias sociaux peuvent avoir sur votre entreprise. 

Marketing Evolution :

En ce qui concerne le marketing des médias sociaux, les entreprises seront obligées de faire ce saut, qu'elles soient prêtes ou non» avoir un compte Twitter et Facebook pour les entreprises sera bientôt aussi, sinon plus, important que de posséder un site web. Ce n'est plus une niche. C'est le passage obligé de la vie en ligne, et les entreprises qui s'adapteront seront les entreprises qui réussiront. " 

Si vous pensez que c'est juste un effet de mode, méfiez-vous !