Even though this activity could certainly take time, depending on the level of listening that you need for your brand, there’s a very simple way to get started, building a platform in which you can keep track of all important conversations. All this can be done in less than ten minutes!

I made this short video on how you can customise Hootsuite.com to make it work for you as a true listening station, ensuring that the main part of your monitoring activity gets done in one spot

The video below will show you:

• Customization tactics
• How to add a social network, stream and tab
• How to filter conversations

Do you have any other listening tip on Hootsuite or suggestion? Leave a comment below.

It blows my mind how many companies still play catch up on absolutely everything, racing with their head facing sideways (to ensure they have a good view of their competitors) but never straight, looking into their present, their customers and their near future.

I’m a Groupon customer and  bought a few good deals already. The main reason why I like Groupon would be first, convenience (they are an effective middle man), but mainly because through their deals I get to do stuff that I would never do if I had to come up with the idea totally separately. Price comes last in the list.

Now that I got my customer view out of the way, I must say that unfortunately, many companies offering deals through Groupon barely think about customers. If Groupon doesn’t work with their partners, educating them on how to deal with hundreds of bookings and more importantly on how to you provide a good experience, the business will suffer very soon.
The truth is that many companies barely make money since they are in the quantity game, offering their products/services with a 70% off, so not too much room for a margin there, right? Here’s how everything goes to hell:

• Many companies that succeeded in making a deal irresistible and got loads of people buying it, make it terribly difficult for customers to book a spot for the experience
• They are not prepared at all to handle such volume
• They clearly don’t have a plan to deal with customer overflow
• They treat you like cattle: “this way please, you have only one hour, here’s the exit…Next!“
• They don’t even engage with you onsite (VERY important) (no questions from the staff, no interaction whatsoever, no live feedback) I wouldn’t be surprised if this doesn’t happen because 80% of the staff that day is not even official! (just hired for the event)

This is not a post about Groupon. The problems mentioned above apply to thousands of companies going through the same problems right now.

How could this be easily fixed to truly multiply your business?

First of all, when you have a strategic approach that aims at a very low price in order to hit a high amount of potential customers, what’s going to make all the difference is that you treat those hundreds of people as if they where already loyal customers. Give them your best, delight them, enchant them. You don’t get 500, 1000 people through that door everyday. Yes, you’re not making that much money either because everybody is coming with a huge discount… but that’s not the point.

If you ONLY focus on winning the heart of those hundreds of new people that decided to try your product or service, chances are that they’ll stick with you and the magic that started this post, “repeat customers/business” will naturally follow.

As you may imagine, you can only  make the time to care about your customers if you plan it:

• Know your limitations: It’s tempting to take 4 times the amount of bookings that you can handle. Set an expectation! Don’t play with people.
• Train your staff: They must share your passion for customer satisfaction and understand that without it, nobody has a job. Period. If you need to hire temps, you would need to take more time to ensure everybody executes well.
• Talk to people onsite: ask them how they like your product/service, look for stories, ask them if they came with friends, if they spread the word, if they were already into your service. Finally, smile (genuinely) and ask them to come back! They’ll always remember.
• Ask them to share their experience through their own social networks: Brands and companies are missing out on a HUGE opportunity. They should be eager to provide the best service and then ask them to share the love. Don’t be shy. They will do it for you! I promise (Ask them honestly, don’t push them or spam them later).
• Excel: These sort of experiences should be a great exercise for you and your staff. If customer service is in your company’s DNA, you’ll be ahead of the game. Execution and people’s perception mean everything.
• Thank people publicly: Those that spoke about you, thank them openly through the same social network (not privately). Make them a connection and start a proper relationship. Again, please don’t spam them after that. Self promotion should be under 10% of all your posts in the different social media streams. Remember: you’ll never win the race for attention.

What other ideas can you share? Please, leave a comment below.

1. The Marketing / Communications Department think that they need to do something about it.
2. During the next product launch they do everything the same.
3. At final stages they start wondering “how can they incorporate social media” to get more exposure.
4. Many of them waste even more time trying to get this “social media thing” approved by Legal or other departments before it can go live.

Does it sound familiar?

Some of you might know by now that this approach will simply not work at all, especially when social media is seen as a pure “advertising platform”.

I was reading yesterday an interview by Jesse Stanchak on social media strategy with Scott Monty (Head of Social Media, Ford Motors). He said:

“We start thinking about product launches and shows like this, that it’s baked in from the beginning. It’s not an afterthought, where you get the rubber stamp, “what are we doing for social media?” kind of thing”

This is one HUGE reason why companies like Ford are very successful spreading the word cleverly in social networks. Without this approach, it doesn’t matter if you have a big budget, your company would be wasting most of it (if not all).

If your business is getting ready to implement social media, make sure of the following:

Be open and patient

Don’t think about the Marketing or Communications Department only. There are more people within the company that will be more than happy to participate and share their creativity and social media ideas.
Also, don’t get discouraged if not everybody cooperates with the idea. One of the biggest obstacles for companies approaching social media are lack of knowledge and company culture.

Act creatively

Besides all the obvious points like having a goal, defined metrics, expectations… have a proper creative round with the team you put together for this project (maybe product launch). You will notice that this step will make a significant difference. Not all the ideas will make but you will nurture a good pipeline.
If anybody says: “I don’t have any good ideas”, answer, “tell me all the bad ones you have then”, as Seth Godin would say.

Think social

What is that same answer you deliver to clients everyday? What is your customers/prospects’ best topic/product? The answers to these questions would represent clearly “something of interest” and could be converted into “hot content“. In other words, if you are delivering that same daily answer to one person at a time by email, only one person at a time can benefit. Versus, you do a quick, creative (could be a screencast) blog post, or video of yourself/team explaining the solution and thousands of people will benefit and what’s best: more people will know that you exist
The majority of companies work very hard everyday to keep private what should be public.

Get found!

Once you incorporate the idea of social media from the very beginning, your team or Department will realise that is a lot simpler to think in terms “making quality pieces of content” (breadcrumbs) to be shared regularly (blog post, video, presentation, pictures, etc). Focus con leaving as many of these. Ensure to be there to talk with the people that will start feeling identified with your brand and content.

What’s your experience? What would you add?

Previously, every time you would click on “Like” or “Comment” on any Facebook post, the only way for others to see that would be through small calls-to-action that looked like this:

What’s new?

Now, every time you Like and/or Comment on a Facebook post, it will look like this!

NOTE: Keep in mind, this view only appears on the News Feed, not the Live stream (“Most Recent”)

We’re not sure 100% about the limitations yet but we did some research and the reach looks pretty broad. For example, in my News feed I could see comments and likes from my friends on pages that I’m not a fan of. That’s cool!

What do you think about this new addition? Share your comments below!

The first one was : “How to build your business network with social media” and as promised, we compiled all the relevant info below:

• Full recording of the webinar
• The slides
• The conversation thread under the Twitter tag #sm4biz
• Some questions…

Subscribe to Channelship’s You Tube channel

The slides are already available on our Slideshare account!

My Power Point slides also contributed to the Twitter conversation
Have a look at what was said during the webinar by clicking on the image below:

Thanks very much to everyone that helped us spread the word in the different social networks.
We’re looking forward to have you on our next free monthly webinar:  “Social Media for Sales & Marketing Departments“.

Got questions or comments? Add them to the thread below!

We’d like to share with you an overview of our 2010 social media strategy. It’s a good opportunity to help you start with your own plan, give you some ideas or at least point you in the right direction
We are absolutely open to suggestions so remember to leave your comment at the end of the post!!

Blogging

Focus: Build authority / Expand community /  Increase US & UK readership / spark conversations / *Networking / Improve search engine rankings

* This year we’ll choose to read and comment on 10 blogs: 5 will be to follow trends and stay up to date, the other 5 will be strictly for business networking.

Blog topics (Tip: Define categories first)

Reviews, Video tips, Internet marketing, Social media

Blog’s ideas sandbox:

Ask on LinkedIn Q&A, Read other blogs (listen)/ reblog, Reviews (books, events, apps, etc), Web trends/ Search / video tips

Characteristics

• Frequency: Twice a week
• Posts must offer value
• Must include images and/or video
• Time allocated per post (research, writing, marketing) = 2 to 3 hours

Blog post Marketing

• Include relevant trackbacks in the post
• Send tweets throughout the week to promote the content
• Bookmark: delicious.com, bookmarks.yahoo.com, stumbleupon.com
• Submit post to: Bizsugar.com, Digg.com and Reddit.com
• Send post only to relevant LinkedIn groups and “follow” articles (this way you’ll be notified if someone makes a comment so you can follow up)
• Submit blog feed to 5/10 RSS news feeds weekly

Video & Photo content

Photos will be uploaded to FlickR and Facebook (automatic to Twitter).
Videos will be uploaded to You Tube / Tube Mogul, then Facebook (automatic to Twitter).

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Facebook

Focus: Share engaging photo and video content / Build authority / Expand community /  Increase US & UK fans/ multiply interactions / Networking / Company-Industry communications

Building the community

• Friend relevant contacts from Twitter and LinkedIn (profile)
• Pump good photo and video content
• Listen: reply to any question or comment ASAP. Keep the conversation
• Interact: Make comments / “like” status updates
• Facebook ads campaign: targeted to people in marketing and communications

Time allocated: 4 to 6 hours weekly

Twitter

Focus: Share helpful-engaging links / Listen to random and selected conversations / Build authority / Expand US & UK community/ increase conversations / Networking / Company-Industry communications

Building the community

• Follow contacts from LinkedIn
• Follow back relevant contacts
• Follow people especially traditional marketing and communications
• Proactively do Q&A
• Chit-chat
• Share GOOD stuff! try to always include a link to good content

Time allocated: 6 to 8 hours weekly

LinkedIn

Focus: Share helpful-engaging status updates / Build authority / Expand US & UK network/ increase group interactions / Business networking / Company-Industry communications / Increase business opportunities

Building the community

• Follow contacts also on Twitter
• Join US/UK strategic groups
• Send blog posts only to relevant groups and “follow” the article.
• Read groups’ digest and engage in relevant threads.
• LinkedIn Q&A: offer value answering selected questions. Ask industry questions also.
• Keep personal/business information and LinkedIn apps on profile up to date.

Time allocated: 6 to 8 hours weekly

Email Marketing

Focus: Share helpful-engaging content/ Build authority / Expand US & UK awareness/ increase business opportunities / Company-Industry communications / webinars main promotional tool

• Platform: Mailchimp
• Grow email database using website, webinars and offline networking.
• Segment database!!! (don’t send every single person the same information!)
• Newsletter will contain three topics: best blog post/s, Great tips or social media case study and invitation to monthly webinar
• Frequency: Once a month

Time allocated: 5 to 10 hours monthly (depending on the campaign)

Have you found the strategy useful? Go ahead, and share below what worked for you last year or how can this strategy be improved!!

Best,

Fred

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What if you could contribute to that Twitter conversation by having each slide in your presentation send a tweet for you? And also, wouldn’t it be great to know, while on stage, what are people saying about you?

The video below will show you:

1. How to embed twitter into your Power Point
2. How to send auto-tweets from each slide
3. How to emebe the conversation from a Twitter #hashtag into your slide

Subscribe to Channelship’s You Tube channel

Have you enjoyed the video? Go ahead, make a comment below!

Best,

Fred

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Twitter has helped us many times but people only have 140 characters.
LinkedIn Question & Answers is a very good choice. I know some people might be aware of it, but every time I ask if they use it at all (or use it properly)… they really don’t.
With the current economic climate these are paths that will make you connect and network with more business professionals and what’s best, get the best advise for free!
We recently needed help selecting the right technology for online meeting and webinars…

I’m amazed at the level of answers. Even someone from the official Microsoft Outreach team contacted me! Click on the image above to benefit from all the answers.

My partner was looking for the right online project management tool…

We received fantastic feedback that helped us made a decision.  Have a look at the answers yourself by clicking on the image above.

We also ANSWER loads of questions on LinkedIn. This is a huge benefit. Not only it feels great to help others but when someone votes your answer as “Best” it’s a great way to sweeten your profile and spread your expertise.
One of my answers got featured in a very important online publication in Norway and Sweden back in June. Also, a few weeks ago, a publisher in the South of Florida was so happy with my answer that she’s now putting together an e-book about LinkedIn and she’ll feature me there. Her e-books are downloaded by a few thousand people. Not bad. All this happened because I took the time to answer a question…

What do you think about this kind of approaches? If you’re already using LinkedIn Q&A what’s your experience? Go ahead, leave a comment below.

Best,

Fred

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In this case, after going through a bunch of different platforms, I’d like to share with you two very valuable tools that could transform your business now or in the near future. The majority of businesses I see, have not considered/implemented video yet so, what are you waiting for?

Video Lobby

These guys don’t offer a real time video tool, they already hooked up with video experts such as Qik, Ustream and Justin.tv. Their value covers something specific and very important, especially when making videos for business:  “a branded, unique site”. So basically, you can use any of the sites mentioned above to broadcast live but you put on a branded mask that will make your company’s channel look 1,000 times more professional.

This free service also pulls in comments automatically  from Twitter and Facebook, and allows users to submit questions directly from the show’s page!

Unfortunately, their video is not on You Tube yet, so you can click on the image below that will take you to the Video Lobby home page and then click on “See Video Lobby in Action” on your left.

6 Rounds

These guys are giving a very interesting spin to video chatting.
By now, I guess the majority of the people got the message about social media and “interaction, people with their own voice, etc, etc”. Now,  6 Rounds are taking that usual message to the next level.

With 6 Rounds you can do things from co-browsing YouTube to playing games, adding funny effects to a live video conference (really cool!), interacting on Facebook together with your contacts or even shopping for things online together with your friends or family members. It’s focused on social interaction, however follow every second of the video and if it’s necessary pause it and think about how could that be used for your business (Twitter and Facebook were never created exclusively for business and look at what happened now?) . If you start testing/implementing any of these tools early enough, you will be a BIG step ahead in your industry

Enjoy the post? Come on, make a comment below and share this!

Best,

Fred

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Facebook copying Twitter

Back in March of this year, Facebook’s redesign offered a new experience… but wait a minute, didn’t that look like Twitter? Yes, so what? Even though that was immediately rejected by 94% of the users, Facebook felt it was the right decision and kept it. Soon, millions of users would get less passionate and forget about this “new design experience” and carry on enjoying the platform. From March ’09 to present, Facebook welcomed close to 100 million new and active users… looks like the Twitter thing worked out…

Facebook have also brought more Twitter stuff to the table: the “@mentions” that now appear as anchor text on the status updates. Great move. I wonder when will Twitter start adding some Facebook spice as “Like” on tweets for example. Blogs have adopted that in comments already. (Twitter and Facebook! what about a “Dislike” button?? Maybe too negative? Over to you…)

LinkedIn copying Twitter

First, they came up with status updates . Then, they made the most obvious change (and a great one I must say) that was including avatars! Recently they implemented the feature “follow” for LinkedIn groups (you can also follow people that you’re not necessarily connected with).
The most obvious one is the integration announced last week (An official partnership) about status updates from Twitter to LinkedIn and vice versa.  Furthermore, a Twitter client functionality (right from your LinkedIn homepage) was just added.

Orkut copying Twitter and Facebook

On October 30th, Orkut (Now owned by Google) relaunched with features very similar to their cousins Facebook and Twitter… Don’t even need to say more. Have a look…

The question is: Will a new trend setter appear or we’ll keep seeing this kind of predictable changes? Would Bebo, My Space and other sites need to integrate with their brothers or launch the same features to retain users or simply to survive?

Come on, tell us… What’s next?

Best,

Fred

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