via mashable.com
So it seems that there are mainly five ways for brands or startups to grow their presence on Twitter:
Sounds simple enough.
Here's TechCrunch's article on this and don't forget to check out the presentations slides as well.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/14/5-steps-for-startups-to-grow-their-brands-on-twitter/
Dell has set up a purpose-built social media 'command centre' at its Texas headquarters. Photo: Supplied
With many businesses paying greater attention to using social media to engage with customers, computer giant Dell has launched its own dedicated 'Social Media Listening Command Centre'. Dell opened the command centre at its Texas head office last month, in order to track, monitor and respond to consumer conversation on applications including Twitter and Facebook.
“You want to have big ears and be tuned in to what’s going on out there in the marketplace," says CEO Michael Dell. "Social media is a fantastic way for us to engage and listen to our customers. We have a lot of customers … so it makes sense for us to have capabilities in place to do that.”
He says small businesses should be taking advantage of social media, a "phenomenal trend allowing companies of all sizes to reach customers around the world".
Advertisement: Story continues belowWhat can small businesses learn?
Dell is mentioned a mammoth 22,000 times a day on the social web. While small businesses are not going to experience this kind of volume, they can still learn from what the company is doing, says Dell’s head of social media, Richard Binhammer.
“Social media is not a channel, it’s a tool,” he says. “It’s much like telephone and email in that anyone can use it to do a better job in their day-to-day professional activities.”
Dell trains its employees to interact using social media. In July 2010, it launched SMAC University (Social Media and Community) and has since trained 5000 staff in various aspects of social media.
In addition to individual employees interacting with customers on the social web, the company's command centre has multiple display screens and manned stations which track web mentions across the globe.
What are the key issues in your industry?
“There is so much data on the web and it’s all valuable,” says Binhammer. “So we considered how we continue to track that from a corporate perspective so that we don’t lose track of macro and micro trends. So that’s where the social media listening command centre comes in.”
Dell uses Radian 6, a social media monitoring and engagement tool, to do this. It’s a far cry from what Binhammer used when he first paid close attention to the role of social media in the company’s communications four years ago.
“At the time, we didn’t have Radian 6 or a command centre,” he says. “I mean, I was doing keyword searches – both for Dell and our industry – and Google blog alerts in order to bring in social media content. I was pulling that into an RSS reader and lifting that RSS feed into an Excel spreadsheet. Then I would work my way through it every day.”
Binhammer says simple RSS feeds can be used by small businesses to monitor conversations about their business. He says this can help business owners determine who their customers are - demographically and in terms of which social media tool they prefer. “Then you can go where your customers are and, based on what they are talking about, interact with them.”
Empowering your staff to use social media
For business owners who complain that they don’t have time to use social media, Binhammer says: “I’ll go back to the same principle we use at Dell. It doesn’t all have to be the work of the business owner. It can be the person in sales perhaps. Let the appropriate person in the small business respond. We give everyone a phone on their desk – so why not allow staff to connect with customers or suppliers with social media?”
Digital business strategist Kate Carruthers says that smaller businesses are often better placed to harness social media than larger organisations.
“Smaller businesses tend to be more nimble with less layers of approval required to get these things moving,” says Carruthers. “Social media also levels the playing field for smaller businesses, enabling them to compete more equally with larger ones. Social media enables smaller businesses to reach out to a much broader audience than they could afford using traditional media approaches.
“For a tiny fraction of the cost of a traditional above-the-line campaign a small business can implement a social media presence that truly engages with their audience and allows them to drive and track direct sales. This capability is unprecedented in business history and is a real game-changer for small business.”
Social media backlash
However, it’s important to use engage with customers authentically. Yesterday, electrical retail giant Bing Lee came under fire for cashing in on the Queensland floods. Its Facebook page states: “Bing Lee has decided to donate $1 for every fan we have on the Bing Lee Facebook page to the Queensland Flood Relief Appeal. Share this with everyone you know and let's aim for $10,000 worth of donations by the end of the month!!”
Providing people with an incentive to 'like' your Facebook page is not unusual. Many businesses do this with promises of discounts, vouchers or free promotional products. However, Twitter users were divided yesterday over Bing Lee’s actions. Some praised the retailer for the initiative, but the majority were negative.
Twitter user @acatinatree wrote: “Dear @ilikebinglee, I find your attempt to use the #qldfloods to build your Facebook database callous and crass. Please reconsider.”
Another user @fictillius wrote: “What @ilikebinglee is doing is disgraceful. Only a $1 from a large company? I'll personally donate $1 for everyone that RT's [retweets] this.”
The majority of their Facebook fans, however, have applauded the retailer. Following the Twitter backlash, Bing Lee posted: "We would like to clarify that the reasoning behind our decision to donate $1 for every fan is that this action will motivate people to raise awareness and share the message. The $1 donated from Bing Lee is not from us, but from your effort to support the cause. If in the process we have also inspired other people and businesses to take action, which it looks like we have, then this has been a good outcome. Bing Lee will donate the full $10,000 no matter how many fans we have. Having said that we do hope that you continue to take action and support the cause regardless."
Conversation, not broadcast channel
However, it’s not just controversial issues that small businesses need to navigate. Many small businesses use social media as a one-way broadcast when the medium is designed to start a “conversation” with customers. In other words, if you use social media, you actually need to engage.
At time of press, stationery retailer kikki.K’s Twitter profile has 1463 followers but is only following three people.
Carruthers says: “kikki.K is a classic broadcast/limited interaction Twitter approach; with some customer service included. This sends a low-engagement message to the consumers/audience; which is a pity since kikki.K has a highly engagement consumer group. It is OK as an approach but I do not think it really enables kikki.K to extract maximum value from their Twitter presence.
“However, it is easier for businesses to take this approach on Twitter as it consumes less resources, especially human resources. A more sophisticated approach - based on a listen, engage, act model - can take more investment of time and effort. It also requires set-up of monitoring to listen.
"Although this can be done using free tools many small businesses do not understand the power of this model. For high engagement brands like kikki.K the listen-engage-act model can be used to drive sales, especially cross-sell and up-sell.”
Carruthers adds that sometimes it takes a while for business people to understand a new medium like social media and to find out what really delivers results.
If you are actively engaged in social media, what tools do you use to “listen-engage-act”?
If you’re not using social media in your business, what’s stopping you?
Dell has set up a purpose-built social media 'command centre' at its Texas headquarters. Photo: Supplied
With many businesses paying greater attention to using social media to engage with customers, computer giant Dell has launched its own dedicated 'Social Media Listening Command Centre'. Dell opened the command centre at its Texas head office last month, in order to track, monitor and respond to consumer conversation on applications including Twitter and Facebook.
“You want to have big ears and be tuned in to what’s going on out there in the marketplace," says CEO Michael Dell. "Social media is a fantastic way for us to engage and listen to our customers. We have a lot of customers … so it makes sense for us to have capabilities in place to do that.”
He says small businesses should be taking advantage of social media, a "phenomenal trend allowing companies of all sizes to reach customers around the world".
Advertisement: Story continues belowWhat can small businesses learn?
Dell is mentioned a mammoth 22,000 times a day on the social web. While small businesses are not going to experience this kind of volume, they can still learn from what the company is doing, says Dell’s head of social media, Richard Binhammer.
“Social media is not a channel, it’s a tool,” he says. “It’s much like telephone and email in that anyone can use it to do a better job in their day-to-day professional activities.”
Dell trains its employees to interact using social media. In July 2010, it launched SMAC University (Social Media and Community) and has since trained 5000 staff in various aspects of social media.
In addition to individual employees interacting with customers on the social web, the company's command centre has multiple display screens and manned stations which track web mentions across the globe.
What are the key issues in your industry?
“There is so much data on the web and it’s all valuable,” says Binhammer. “So we considered how we continue to track that from a corporate perspective so that we don’t lose track of macro and micro trends. So that’s where the social media listening command centre comes in.”
Dell uses Radian 6, a social media monitoring and engagement tool, to do this. It’s a far cry from what Binhammer used when he first paid close attention to the role of social media in the company’s communications four years ago.
“At the time, we didn’t have Radian 6 or a command centre,” he says. “I mean, I was doing keyword searches – both for Dell and our industry – and Google blog alerts in order to bring in social media content. I was pulling that into an RSS reader and lifting that RSS feed into an Excel spreadsheet. Then I would work my way through it every day.”
Binhammer says simple RSS feeds can be used by small businesses to monitor conversations about their business. He says this can help business owners determine who their customers are - demographically and in terms of which social media tool they prefer. “Then you can go where your customers are and, based on what they are talking about, interact with them.”
Empowering your staff to use social media
For business owners who complain that they don’t have time to use social media, Binhammer says: “I’ll go back to the same principle we use at Dell. It doesn’t all have to be the work of the business owner. It can be the person in sales perhaps. Let the appropriate person in the small business respond. We give everyone a phone on their desk – so why not allow staff to connect with customers or suppliers with social media?”
Digital business strategist Kate Carruthers says that smaller businesses are often better placed to harness social media than larger organisations.
“Smaller businesses tend to be more nimble with less layers of approval required to get these things moving,” says Carruthers. “Social media also levels the playing field for smaller businesses, enabling them to compete more equally with larger ones. Social media enables smaller businesses to reach out to a much broader audience than they could afford using traditional media approaches.
“For a tiny fraction of the cost of a traditional above-the-line campaign a small business can implement a social media presence that truly engages with their audience and allows them to drive and track direct sales. This capability is unprecedented in business history and is a real game-changer for small business.”
Social media backlash
However, it’s important to use engage with customers authentically. Yesterday, electrical retail giant Bing Lee came under fire for cashing in on the Queensland floods. Its Facebook page states: “Bing Lee has decided to donate $1 for every fan we have on the Bing Lee Facebook page to the Queensland Flood Relief Appeal. Share this with everyone you know and let's aim for $10,000 worth of donations by the end of the month!!”
Providing people with an incentive to 'like' your Facebook page is not unusual. Many businesses do this with promises of discounts, vouchers or free promotional products. However, Twitter users were divided yesterday over Bing Lee’s actions. Some praised the retailer for the initiative, but the majority were negative.
Twitter user @acatinatree wrote: “Dear @ilikebinglee, I find your attempt to use the #qldfloods to build your Facebook database callous and crass. Please reconsider.”
Another user @fictillius wrote: “What @ilikebinglee is doing is disgraceful. Only a $1 from a large company? I'll personally donate $1 for everyone that RT's [retweets] this.”
The majority of their Facebook fans, however, have applauded the retailer. Following the Twitter backlash, Bing Lee posted: "We would like to clarify that the reasoning behind our decision to donate $1 for every fan is that this action will motivate people to raise awareness and share the message. The $1 donated from Bing Lee is not from us, but from your effort to support the cause. If in the process we have also inspired other people and businesses to take action, which it looks like we have, then this has been a good outcome. Bing Lee will donate the full $10,000 no matter how many fans we have. Having said that we do hope that you continue to take action and support the cause regardless."
Conversation, not broadcast channel
However, it’s not just controversial issues that small businesses need to navigate. Many small businesses use social media as a one-way broadcast when the medium is designed to start a “conversation” with customers. In other words, if you use social media, you actually need to engage.
At time of press, stationery retailer kikki.K’s Twitter profile has 1463 followers but is only following three people.
Carruthers says: “kikki.K is a classic broadcast/limited interaction Twitter approach; with some customer service included. This sends a low-engagement message to the consumers/audience; which is a pity since kikki.K has a highly engagement consumer group. It is OK as an approach but I do not think it really enables kikki.K to extract maximum value from their Twitter presence.
“However, it is easier for businesses to take this approach on Twitter as it consumes less resources, especially human resources. A more sophisticated approach - based on a listen, engage, act model - can take more investment of time and effort. It also requires set-up of monitoring to listen.
"Although this can be done using free tools many small businesses do not understand the power of this model. For high engagement brands like kikki.K the listen-engage-act model can be used to drive sales, especially cross-sell and up-sell.”
Carruthers adds that sometimes it takes a while for business people to understand a new medium like social media and to find out what really delivers results.
If you are actively engaged in social media, what tools do you use to “listen-engage-act”?
If you’re not using social media in your business, what’s stopping you?
If you’ve made any New Year’s resolutions to get fit in 2012, this detailed infographic from health-content startup Greatist may come in handy on your journey toward a healthier you.
The visual guide is packed with information compiled from Fittit, the fitness section of social news site Reddit where people help each other regarding diet and exercise. Fittit has more than 110,500 subscribers.
One “Fittiter” posted the infographic on Fittit, which has sparked a lively discussion about the guide’s content.
SEE ALSO: 13 Ways to Get in Shape With Digital Fitness Tools Are these tips helpful? What advice do you have for fellow readers? Sound off in the comments.
Great guide!
Layla Revis is vice president of digital influence at Ogilvy PR Worldwide. Her specialties include international affairs, tourism and multicultural marketing.
It takes years to build a good reputation, but seconds to damage it beyond repair, as executives at companies from Dell to Domino’s certainly have found out.
This was a sentiment echoed by executives at the Senior Corporate Communication Management Conference in New York when discussing social media and corporate reputation and how to embrace the new reality of immediate communications.
When you consider the sheer volume of earned media, or word of mouth generated on the Internet each and every day, it is clear that “controlling” messaging is no longer an option for large companies, who, for many years, have been in the driver’s seat when it comes to their own reputation.
So how can a reputation bashing be avoided on the social web? Open communications and speedy response are among the pointers for corporate communicators. Marcus Molina, SVP – Latin American Communications, MasterCard shared these classic examples of corporate crisis and advice on how manage them effectively.
Dell Computers
In 2005, Dell computer owners experienced problems with the company’s formerly excellent customer service. Jeff Jarvis, a Dell customer, went to war with Dell on his blog BuzzMachine. Jarvis’s campaign brought the power of blogs to international attention, but it’s important to keep in mind that, as Market Sentinal pointed out, corporate reputations are damaged not by bloggers, but by corporate missteps.
Dell’s problems arose from its failure to deliver on customer service promises, not from Jeff Jarvis’s blog. However, once the customer service problem became public, Dell committed a second error by failing to address in public the issues that Jeff Jarvis had raised. Dell later decided to engage by establishing Direct 2 Dell, it’s own blog channel to address the concerns head on.
United Airlines
When a country musician saw his guitar tossed by United air raft handlers and United refused to offer any reimbursement for his damaged instrument, he recorded a song and posted a video on YouTube which, to date, has garnered 11 million hits, and was picked up by major media outlets.
Netflix
Qwikster, an online streaming service intended to offer Netflix subscribers more convenience, instead forced the company’s nearly 12 million customers with streaming + DVD accounts to create two accounts at two different domain names with two different sets of ratings and preferences. In the grand scheme of things, it didn’t take long for Neflix to kill the idea after massive complaints. But in the three months it did take for Netflix to respond, its stock price fell from around $300/share to around $70/share.
Here are those critical steps to heed to avoid crises like those above.
1. Don’t Pretend a Crisis Is Not Happening
As Gemma Craven, EVP from Ogilvy’s 360 Digital Influence team says, “It’s no longer the Golden Hour, but the Golden Minute. Lack of a well crafted, well meaning response could cost you.”
Similarly, Robert DeFillippo, chief communications officer from Prudential Financial explains, “It’s just as dangerous to over respond as it is to under respond.”
2. Don’t Make an Empty Gesture
Apologizing for apologizing only comes across as lazy and uninspired.
3. Don’t Refuse to Backtrack
Netflix refused to go back to its original price and its stock still sags below what it used to be.
Social media should be used as a tool for honest communication. Admit your mistake, and speak directly to your customers about how you’ll be going back to fix things.
4. Develop Channels of Communication
Utilize or establish a blog, Twitter and Facebook networks and a strong company intranet to reassure customers and employees. This allows you to convey messaging through email, video, or webchats. It’s very democratic in nature. It’s a need in a world that evolves at the speed of light.
5. Establish a Crisis Communications Response Team
Companies must drive the messaging and response. Use listening platforms, monitor sentiment, and establish a dedicated team to inform and advise internal and external stakeholders of issues and responses.
6. Become Influential and Change Perceptions
Become influential. We are the centerpieces of this new world. If you don’t write, take speaking engagements, talk to your audiences and connect, you become irrelevant. You simply disappear.
Use these channels to focus the conversation around your brand so that when a crisis does arise, you have more control over the perception.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, iPandastudio
Building a good brand reputation is hard work but damaging it is easy. Ogilvy PR's Layla Revis listed six actions that companies should take to avert or respond to such crises.
Social and digital media seems poised to grow even bigger in 2012. Mashable posts five ways you can keep up.
Naise!
There'll be no sunlight if I lose you baby..
There'll be no clear skies if I lose you baby..
Just like the clouds, my eyes will do the same,
If you walk away, everyday it will rain..
