Twitter and other social media are often regarded as “marketing” tools and are usually believed to be solely part of marketing’s sphere of influence, and it’s true, marketers are the most common users in many businesses, but that doesn’t mean that Twitter can’t be used effectively by sales teams to promote relevant conversations with leads.

1. Research companies and individuals. Before calling a lead you can do some research on the company website and on their twitter accounts. Doing this kind of research can make it easier for you to find out what employees say about the company, personal preferences, and even the company’s/employees ‘ pain points so you can start your conversation off on a more relevant note by showing that you understand the company’s needs.
2. Keep track of industry news and trends. Being aware of changes in your industry and your lead’s industry is a good way to ensure that you are up-to-date and current when heading into a sales conversation. Showing that you understand what’s going on in their space and that you’re dedicated to staying on top of current events can make for a great lead conversation, especially since Twitter often breaks news faster than the rest of the web.  
3. Learn the best times to contact leads. Are you having a hard time getting a hold of a lead? Or are you just looking for the best time for an initial call? Twitter can be a great resource for inside information about leads. Are you leads going on holidays? Are they in the office? Twitter can help you figure out exactly where you leads are, and what the best time is to start a conversation. 
4. Figure out what people are saying about your company. It is always useful for a sales representative to be aware of what people are saying about your company and more specifically your sales team. Is brand sentiment towards your company positive or negative?  Does a quick twitter search show that someone thought your sales team followed up too soon? Or too late? That kind of information can be invaluable for a sales teams’ success. 
5. Learn your lessons and improve your process. One of the best ways to use Twitter to tweak your sales process is to study your critics. There are most likely always going to be people who’ve had a somewhat negative experience with your company. Studying what these people have to say about your company and where you went wrong can be an excellent source of constructive information. 
6. Take a look at your competitors’ fans. This is almost the opposite of the point we mentioned above. Rather than using Twitter to search for what is being said about your company, search Twitter and see what positive things are being said about your competitors. This information can be especially useful for getting ideas on how your team can improve and how you can remain competitive.

Image by Tveskov on Flickr

Location-based social services are one of the hottest trends in social networking for the moment and have had a significant effect on how marketers use social media to reach their target audiences. Well, social network behemoth Facebook has finally joined in the fray with the recent launch of their newest feature, Facebook Places. The service, which is meant to be comparable with other location-based social networks like Foursquare and Gowalla, allows users to check in to offline locations to alert their friends to their location. The feature is currently available via iPhone as well as Facebook’s HTML5 mobile site.

How is Facebook Places different from other location-based services?

While Facebook Places sounds a lot like other services available today (Gowalla, Foursquare and Yelp to name a few) there are some fundamental differences that experts in the marketing field are predicting will have a significant impact on many businesses’ use of the service.

According to B.L Ochman, a popular social media blogger, one of the biggest differences is that Facebook users tend to provide far more personal details on their accounts including photos, relationships and employment (unlike other location-based services) and that this will cause some definite complications.

One of the largest of these complications will be that while other services of this nature allow you to check into offline locations, with Facebook Places your friends can check you in. This poses potential issues for every person who doesn’t want the entire Facebook user population (some 500 million people) to know their exact geographical location at any given time.  This, coupled with Facebook’s prior privacy issues, makes some experts question the service’s safety for users and business alike.

Why should you care?

For marketers this is a clear sign of the continuing (and growing) popularity of location-based services, which has already been indicated by the fact that Foursquare, one of the most popular services in the market today, had its number of users soar from 1 million at the end of March to 1.8 million as of mid-August (from BNET).

This is also proof of the increasing importance of understanding how your target audience uses social media and how you can use that information to grow your audience’s engagement with your brand. Location-based services are the “next big thing” and staying on top of current trends is one of the most essential aspects of social media strategy since social media success tends to be, by its own nature, driven by user preferences.

One of the biggest aspects of these services that help to make them popular, and will most likely give them significant staying power is the fact that they mesh social media functionality with gaming. Participating in check-ins is useful (people often receive free coupons on offers when the participate), but it also fun. This makes these kind of services ideal for event and last minutes campaigns for many businesses and helps companies to engage with their audience on a whole new level.

Invoke Solutions, a market research firm, recently performed a study on frequent social media users to determine which factors they feel makes social media trustworthy. The main results, which were discussed in a recent blog post on eMarketer, narrow down several main social media trust characteristics.

The main concern for social media users was that for a site to be deemed “trustworthy” it needs to be open to both positive and negative comments, the content provided needs to be high quality and needs to offer value to the audience, and the content author or contributor needs to be readily available and responsive.  As eMarketer goes on to discuss, all of these concerns point directly towards the best practices associated with social media including being engaged and authentic.

So how can you address these concerns by using best practices?

1. Be open to positive and negative Comments. One of the biggest mistakes that marketers often make when they begin using social media is that they are unprepared for the negative comments that come their way.  It’s important to fully understand that social media is an open communication platform and that by taking part you are opening your company up to both the good and the bad that open conversation is capable of. Now, before you get scared away, the other essential thing to remember is that being open to the negative is often an fabulous opportunity to create trust with your audience. By allowing your customers to see that you’re not perfect, but that you are willing to deal with the complaints that come your way quickly, openly, and honestly, you can help develop a strong brand reputation and increase brand reputation through trust.
2. Create quality content. One of the keys to doing this is to make sure that your content is valuable for your target audience. Try to ensure that your content is always educational and focuses on building and nurturing relationships rather than selling your product or services. 
3. Be open, responsive and authentic. At the end of the day, people like to buy from people. Being available and responsive to customer comments, questions or complaints is a an essential element for creating a relevant, authentic online presence, one of the key factors affecting whether or not your social media followers trust you and your brand or not.

If you want to read more on being authentic and transparent in your social media usage you can read our blog post, “Being Authentic and Transparent in Social Media: Getting it Right.”

Image from eMarketer

When a small bakery in Salt Lake City, Utah received a cease and desist from Pillsbury for trademark infringement, there was significant shock from the bakery, and its fans. After all, despite the fact that the bakery is named, "My Dough Girl" , its menu which is characterized by 1950's style pin-up characters rather than any kind of doughy cartoon character or mascot. In fact, when we first heard about the situation, it took us a while to make the connection between My Dough Girl's name and Pillsbury at all since Pillsbury's Dough Boy character is almost always associated directly with the Pillsbury name.

Unfortunately for Pillsbury, whether they have a legitimate reason for legal action or not (trademark law is meant to eliminate consumer confusion between established brands and new products) the public has turned against them in another case of social media activism.

When the fans of the bakery found out about the cease and desist, they rallied around the bakery’s cause creating a Facebook page titled, “My Dough Girl vs. Pillsbury Corporation” (below) which already has almost 2,000 fans willing to stand up for the small bakery and cut Pillsbury (an consequently General Mills, the conglomerate their owned by) down to size.



At the end of the day, the reason that this story has received attention is isn’t because the bakery is fighting back at all (the owner of the bakery isn’t responsible for the Facebook page) but because the bakery’s fans took to an outlet available to them, namely social media, and are willing to use the platform to fight back against what they see as the bullying of a small business by a large brand.

While no lawsuit has actually been filed against the bakery the threat in itself is dangerous enough to a small business (Pillsbury’s market capitalization is $23 billion), which probably accounts for the outpouring of support it’s receiving from its loyal fans. Ironically, a story published by Salt Lake City Weekly states that as part of the cease and desist, Pillsbury’s lawyer instructed the bakery’s owner that she couldn’t speak to the press in an attempt to keep the situation under wraps. Unfortunately for General Mills (who obviously doesn’t really understand the way that social media works), all that the situation has done is proven that even loyal fans of Pillsbury's brand are disgusted by their actions (see screenshot below), and that fans of My Dough Girl, are willing to fight for a brand they respect.

As one fan claiming to be a lifetime Pillsbury purchaser says, "I grew up on Pillsbury stuff. I'm disgusted about this whole thing with My Dough Girl. Sad. I will not be buying any pillsbury products again."



So the real question becomes, despite the supposed trademark infringement claimed by Pillsbury and General Mills, is the issue really worth the brand damage they seem to be facing? While the issue is still relatively small, when it comes to social media the chance than an issue will go viral is always just waiting to happen, and the more publicity an issue gets, the more likely it is that something like that will happen.

As of yet, neither Pillsbury or General Mills have deigned to respond to any of the comments that have been made on their Facebook pages (screenshot below), a huge mistake in our opinion. Pillsbury opened themselves up to this criticism (although it is likely they had no idea what turn the situation would take) and without using social media as a platform to address the issue and their disgruntled fans, they aren’t helping their brand reputation.

As one commenter on the General Mills Facebook Page says, "I wish General Mills wasn't so bent on running a mom-run business into the ground. They're
worried about icon branding confusion (My Dough Girl – 40s pin ups, Pillsbury Dough Boy… not a 40s pin up), well actions speak louder than words, and we’re
getting an up front view of just what their “Icon” stands for. Nothing but ...a bully. "



You can read other opinions on this situation at TechDirt, KSL.com and The Future Buzz.

If you're interested, you can read more about our opinion on managing your brand with social media or some tips on being authentic and transparent in your social media use.

We are always getting asked about the ROI of social media. Many of our customers or prospects are interested in getting on board with social media, but without tangible proof of its ROI, they are hesitant to get on board and worried that they won’t be able to validate their investments in this popular marketing channel.

We recently wrote a post on the incredibly successful Old Spice social media campaign featuring the “The Old Spice Guy” who cleverly responded to his Twitter followers' Tweets through tailor-made video responses. The problem with a campaign like this is that despite the attention that it’s getting, there often isn’t actual proof that the attention will turn into sales, and if your marketing efforts aren’t resulting in an increase in quality sales leads, then they aren’t really paying off.

Well according to a Nielsen report which was published in Brandweek, there has been significant evidence that the campaign has actually had a positive effect on Old Spice's sales.The report states that sales of Old Spice Body Wash have increased by as much as 55% over the last three months (around the time the original ad launched) and by a whopping 107% in the past month (the social media campaign was launched on July 13th). Those results are pretty telling, but the financial metrics are only one way of evaluating the effectiveness of the campaign.

According to a new report from research firm Forrester, when it comes to evaluating the ROI of social media, it’s important to remember that to properly judge the impact of your campaigns, marketers need to address social media ROI across several different areas including: financial, digital, brand and risk management and that marketers must not forget that social media delivers results that are much more substantial than just simple financial ROI.

In the report, Forrester states that because social media delivers such a wide range of advantages, it’s crucial for marketers to look at metrics in several different areas which are directly (or indirectly) financial, and to balance these metrics between the short and long term effects. The metrics look something like this:

1. Financial - Has revenue or profit increased or costs decreased? Have you had improved promotion responses for promotions that are posted on social media with trackable URLs? What other costs have you eliminated? have you reduced spending on other networking areas like conferences?
2. Digital – Has the company enhanced it owned and earned digital assets? Have you increased your search engine relevance? Are your digital assets having increased traction?
3. Brand – Have consumer feelings towards your brand improved? Are people more aware of your brand? Do they better brand association? Have you increased your fans online? Have you noticed improved word of mouth marketing from your social media following?
4. Risk Management – Is the organization better prepared to deal with attacks or problems that affect reputation? Has social media helped to eliminate the costs of potential PR issues? Have you reduced the likelihood the PR issues will occur in the first place?

All of these areas and metrics can help you determine the ROI of social media, and consequently, whether social media is a good initiative for your business. Remember, as we've said before, social media isn't right for every organization, and looking at metrics like this can help you understand whether it is a viable marketing channel for your business.


Image by bobster855 on Flickr.

Almost every consultant or web marketer will tell you that when using social media, transparency and authenticity are keys to a successful presence. However, being transparent and authentic aren’t necessarily the easiest things to do. For instance, being 100% transparent with your social media friends, would involve sharing every detail of your life on a daily basis, and being completely authentic, might, depending on your personality, actually be detrimental to your business. Once you realize those points, then the real question about social media authenticity and transparency becomes, how can you do it right.

Transparency

Being 100% transparent with your social media followers may not be the best business strategy. The fact is that every business has some things that their customers or fans probably just shouldn’t know. Most businesses aren't going to tell you all the intimate and specific details of every aspect of their business. What experts mean when they advise you to be “transparent” in social media is that you should be honest and open as often as you can and about the right things.

What are some of the ways that you can be transparent?

• Own up to your mistakes. When you make a mistake, people are going to know. Hiding the root of the issue or tip toeing around it and muddying the waters is an example of NOT being transparent. The beauty of this is that admitting your mistakes gives you a great opportunity to also be clear about you're doing to fix them.
• Acknowledge and respond publicly to customer concerns and questions. Don’t ignore customer concerns. Using social media allows you audience to have greater access to you and often they use that access to address their questions (good or bad) and concerns about your company. Acknowledging those comments and responding to them creates brand trust. Being transparent does NOT involve hiding your skeletons in the closet. Remember, the people who take to social networks to criticize you when they’re unhappy are often the people who will return to compliment you when they are happy and acknowledging those people and their concerns is a great way to build brand fans. 
• Let everyone know who’s doing the social media posting. It doesn’t matter who it is who's in charge of your social media communications,  your CEO, your marketing consultant, your VP,  your marketing intern or your social media manager, it just matters that the person is in fact, a person, and that putting a face behind a tweet or post keeps things clear for your followers.

Authenticity

When people tell you that you should be authentic in your social media interactions, they don’t necessarily mean that you should say every thought that pops into your head. What they really mean when they say, “be authentic” is that they don’t want you to be fake. Those may sound like the same things, but they’re not, not really. The reality is that there are some things about everyone’s personality that just wouldn’t suit social situations, whether online or offline, and understanding the fine line between being “real” and being “too real” is the most important part of being authentic on social media.

What are some tips on being authentic?

• Show some personality! All business and no play makes social users dull. It doesn’t have to be all work all the time. Feel free to post things that you find interesting, funny or amusing. Make comments that you think people will enjoy. Letting people see the entertaining side of your employees is a great way to be authentic, while at the same time building confidence and trust.
•  Apologize when you make a mistake. While acknowledging the fact that you've made a mistake in the first place is an aspect of being transparent, the way in which you apologize, admit your error (hey, we all make them, right?) and address your followers can definitely help you appear more authentic. 
• Get to know your followers. Starting conversations with your customers, asking them questions about their likes or dislikes, getting them to fill in customer surveys, all of these are excellent ways to customize the interactions that you have with your followers and to help build relationships.

Image by Ares1060 on Flickr

We're sure that by now many of you have heard about the Old Spice social media campaign that has become a viral sensation. The whole thing started with some brilliant, entertaining commercials for Old Spice Bodywash which featured former NFL wide receiver, Isaiah Mustafa as "the man your man could smell like," a suave, hyper-masculine Old Spice spokesman who is, according to Old Spice, the man all women wish they could be with, and all men wish they could be.

The commercials were such a success that Old Spice and the masterminds behind the original commercials, Wieden + Kennedy, decided to take the campaign to social media. On July 13 Old Spice tweeted the following and what resulted was a viral campaign that swept through social media.



For an entire day, July 13th, anyone who tweeted a message or question to @OldSpice had the chance to get a direct video response written personally for them and given by Mustafa on YouTube. The idea was an immediate hit and within a few hours Old Spice was one of the most popular trending topics on Twitter and millions of tweets were sent with the hopes of receiving a personalized response. During the course of the day, which eventually culminated in a final, "As with all good things, this too must end," farewell video, over 180 videos were produced.

What were some of the major results of the campaign?

• A Google search for Old Spice under "updates" (which are pulled from Twitter) showed over 10 million of results
• Old Spice's YouTube Channel is the #1 most viewed YouTube Channel this week and each response video has received between 100,000 and 2.7 million views in the first week, while the commercial that started it all, "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like" has earned over 14 million views
• Old Spice's official Twitter account @OldSpice increased its followers by over 1000% in less than a week

Obviously the campaign reached an enormous amount of people and was quickly spread through word of mouth helping the campaign go viral almost instantly, but why did it go viral? What was it about this campaign that encouraged people to spread it via word of mouth? Well, we've taken a look at the many different aspects of the campaign (and shamelessly watched a large quantity of the responses) and we've determined the following characteristics that helped the campaign have such success.

What made this campaign go viral?

1. They gave their audience something without asking for anything in return. All you had to do to get a response from Old Spice Guy was to tweet something to him. Pretty easy, huh? You didn't have to give them your information, sign up for a demo, or fill in a single form. All that they required from their audience was their engagement.
2. They chose their influencers wisely.The majority of the tweets that garnered responses were from well known influencers in the social media sphere. Everyone from Demi Moore, to Kevin Rose (the found of Digg), Gizmodo and Ellen Degeneres received responses. While there were responses sent to some average joes, most of them were sent to social media users with large followings, which helped the campaign spread quickly as those influencers that received responses retweeted them to their thousands of followers.
3. They engaged their audience in the campaign itself. This wasn't a passive advertising campaign. Old Spice took their campaign to their audience and challenged their social media friends, followers and fans to engage with the company to create the campaign from their interests.
4. They made the campaign feel personal. All of the responses had a personal feel, and included the original tweet to show the one-on-one nature of the conversation, despite the fact that it was streamed to millions of people.
5. They were funny.Nothing makes something spread faster than pure amusement. The videos themselves were ironic, funny and genuinely entertaining and regardless of the motives behind it, or the people chosen to spread it, this was most likely reason enough for the majority of people to pass it around.
6. They used a widely available platform. All of the videos were uploaded to YouTube a platform with a low barrier of entry so the responses were available to a wide range of people, quickly and easily.

If you want to see more about the developing of the campaign, and the original commercial you can view it here via TWiT Netcast Network on YouTube

You can view all the commercials and responses on Old Spice's YouTube Channel here.

We just finished out most recent webinar in our bi-weekly webinar series. Today's presentation was on how you can grow your business with social media and we've had great feedback thus far.

As usual we can't always get to everyone questions during the course of the presentation and we'll cover the remaining ones here.

Do you recommend having one employee in charge of social media, or should it be a collaborative effort?

As long as you have a definite strategy within your organization for social media usage, having multiple employees collaborate on social media is a great way to enhance your company's online presence and keep content fresh. However, if you haven't already laid out a strategy that determines what type of content you want to be posting, and how you would like your company to be perceived, it may be better to have one experienced social media professional.

If we allow people to comment on our company and they criticize us, won't that harm our business?

We get this question quite frequently with regards to social media. Many companies with traditional marketing strategies fear that opening themselves up to public opinion will have severe, negative consequences. The reality is that yes, the might criticize you, but the truth is that if a customer is disgruntled, then they are going to criticize you whether you have an active presence in social media or not. However, if you have a presence, you have also opened yourself up to the opportunity to respond to that criticism and you may just win over some previously dissatisfied customers.

How can we protect our intellectual property while using social media?

We suggest using a Creative Commons License on content that you are going to be posting regularly to social media sites. You can read more about Creative Commons Licenses here.

We hope you all found the webinar useful and informative! You can access a full recording of our "Growing Your Business with Social Media" webinar here.

Image by Antigone78 on Flickr

Microsoft has just released integration between Outlook and Facebook, available through the Outlook Social Connector for Outlook 2003, 2007 and 2010. The Social Connector, which was released some time ago, previously only integrated with LinkedIn.

This move helps Outlook get one step closer towards being a completely synchronized social media and email tool. The latest social connector upgrade allows you to interact with Facebook by viewing wall and status updates in an extra viewing pane.  Avid users of Facebook and the other social media that are now integrated with the connector like LinkedIn and Live Messenger, will most likely find this upgrade especially useful for creating a centralized communications hub.

The Outlook Social Connector appears as an additional viewing pane called the “People Pane” and it appears just under the email message that you’re currently viewing. The connector gathers real-time information from the social networks and displays it in this pane. This allows you to view your email contacts' social network profile updates as well as all your prior interactions with that contact including previously sent/received emails and meetings etc.

Many of you Outlook users who are interested in this integration will be happy to know that Outlook has decisively addressed the privacy issues surrounding the integration. Most likely due to the heady debates that have been circling the internet in past months, Outlook is taking particular care to ensure that social media users’ privacy remains intact. An official document released by Microsoft describing the Social Connector explains that the information that is pulled from social networks and displayed in the people pane is only the information that is shown based on the user’s privacy settings in that network.

Overall the integration is pretty interesting and no doubt many Outlook users will take advantage of it as a way to once more limit the amount of communication tools they use to stay in contact with their social network. However, we have noticed one major flaw in the upgrade as it stands right now. At this time you can’t actually update your Facebook account using Outlook and you can’t view Facebook profiles or accounts of anyone unless they send you an email first. This means that you can only view real-time updates if you have received an email from a contact, which isn't optimal from an integration standpoint.

For a look at the Facebook Outlook Social Connector Announcement Video, you can view it on Mashable.

Social media is a hugely popular marketing channel for B2C and B2B businesses. However, jumping into social media for the first time can be a little intimidating. To help reduce the anxiety related to getting your company involved in the social media sphere, here are some of our tried and true tips for getting started with social media.

1. Make sure you’re where your audience is. This might seem like a no-brainer, but it’s one of the most important tips on our list. If you’re active on social media sites that your target audience doesn’t frequent then you’re not doing yourself any favors and you’re most likely making more work for yourself than necessary. We suggest you do some research, find out where your key customers take part in conversations, and then get yourself to those sites as quickly as possible!
2. Promote your presence.  Once you’ve decided which sites to take part in and have created your accounts, it’s important to promote your presence. Adding links to your social media accounts on your website, in your email campaigns, and adding a “share-this” button to your site are great ways to drive traffic to your accounts. 
3. Don’t focus on selling. Focus on Relationships. Many companies that are just getting started with social media spend too much time trying to  sell their product by pushing coupons, offers, company news and information related only to their business, rather than providing content that will educate their followers and build relationships. While this might get more information about your company out in the social sphere,  it will also most likely annoy your followers, and it certainly won’t make you a go-to resource or improve your followers' opinions about your brand. 
4. Don’t worry about the numbers. Many times companies that are starting out in social media worry too much about their number of followers, mistakenly believing that a large following means a beneficial social media presence. What they should actually be focusing on is the relevance of their following and building authentic relationships with people who are genuinely interested in what their company has to say.
5. Don’t forget the niche websites. There are hundreds, maybe even thousands, of niche social media websites where you can promote your brand and make connections. Make sure you do your research to see if there are any relevant niche sites for your industry. Many times these sites have a smaller user-base so it can be easier to become an influencer on them than the big ones like Twitter or Facebook.

Image by benstein on Flickr.

Many of our bi-weekly presentations from our web marketing webinar series have related in some way to social media. Social media usage is pervasive to many of the different aspects of web marketing and we know that it is an important issue for many of our webinar attendees. We’d like to help clarify some of the many ways that social media can help you develop your business so our next webinar, on Thursday July 15th at 10:30 am Pacific is called, “Growing Your Business with Social Media.”

This informative webinar will last for 45 minutes and will cover:

• The history of word of mouth marketing
• Which social media tools will work for your business
• How to create a social media strategy that will work for your business
• How and what to measure to determine the ROI of social media for your organization

You can register for the webinar here. We hope to see you there!

We’re sure by now, that many of you have heard about British Petroluem’s (BP) fake PR account on Twitter (@BPGlobalPR). The account, which now has over 10 times the followers of the real BP Twitter account (@BP_America), has gained internet notoriety for its satirical criticism of the way that BP has handled the Gulf oil spill crisis, and despite attempts by BP to get the fake account shut down, the account remains active. Why? Because according to Twitter  the account is classified as a parody and therefore doesn’t infringe upon BP’s rights.  

Unfortunately for large corporations, Twitter has the power to not only highlight a company’s successes, but also open them up to the opportunity for customer criticism on a large scale, exhibit A and B being the new parody for AT&T (@ATT_Wiresless_PR) and the fake Steve Jobs account (@ceoSteveJobs). Since the release of the new iPhone 4, and the slew of problems and customer complaints that followed, AT&T, the iPhone 4-carrying company, and Apple have come under some serious social media attacks most of which have been leveled at them via Twitter and other social media.

Seems a little intimidating right? Well, before you all get scared away from using Twitter or any other social media site altogether, we have some tips for you on how you can manage your brand and handle a crisis successfully through social media (and hopefully avoid getting your own parody account in the process).

1. Be Transparent. Being authentic and genuine with your social media audience all the time can ensure that they trust you during a crisis. Building and creating trust on an ongoing basis can help you to manage a crisis when it arrives.
2. Address issues quickly. It’s important to take the time to consider carefully how you will respond to criticisms, but don’t take too long! Leaving criticizers to stew over an issue only makes the situation worse. Respond quickly and honestly and you should be able to calm an issue before it gets out of hand. 
3. Don’t be afraid to apologize. Every company makes mistakes every once in a while. The best way to deal with them is to acknowledge the issue, take responsibility and apologize. 
4. Make it up to them! When an issue does occur, make amends! Saying sorry isn’t always enough. Sometimes a situation requires proof of your contrition and your willingness to regain your customers’ good will. 
5. Listen, but take comments in stride. It is important to remember that there are dedicated customers out there who will complain in a genuine crisis, and then there are those who just like to complain. Not all criticism is constructive and recognizing the difference is an essential aspect of brand  and customer relationship management.

It’s important to remember that while social media is an effective medium for engaging with your customers, it is also a channel through which they can engage with you. Keeping this in mind can help you better manage your relationships with your customers and your brand through social media.

The 2010 FIFA World Cup began in South Africa on June 11th and for one month soccer fans all over the world will be glued to their TVs and computers to watch it. While the World Cup has always been one of the world’s most viewed sporting events, this year will be the first in which social media plays a major role.

According to Beet.tv , Akamai , the world’s largest operator of a network of computers, published on its website information showing that, "[The 11th (the first day of the World Cup 2010)] was the busiest day for bandwidth demand for news sites,” since the inception of the Net Usage Index for News (August 18, 2005).  According to their information there were, “11 million visitor requests per minute to its network, up 233 percent from the normal demand at [that] time,” and, “the previous record for bandwidth requests for news sites was the Election Day victory (11/5/08) of President Barack Obama where demand peaked at 8 million visitor requests per minute.”

The 2010 World Cup is the first cup since the enormous popularity growth of social media. The last FIFA World Cup, which took place in 2006, was too early to make use of some of the more popular social media tools like Twitter and Facebook (both which launched in 2006). Many social media experts predicted that this year’s cup would be the biggest sporting event ever to hit social media platforms due to its international appeal and social media's ability to share not only the events themselves, but also fans’ individual opinions and experiences which can be communicated in real-time. Now that the first week of the competition is finished, we can  see that those predictions are accurate. With the official FIFA Facebook Fanpage at well over 45,000 fans and @FIFAcom FIFA's Twitter account at almost 70,000 followers, it doesn't look like the tide of fans/followers flocking to these accounts for their event information fix will be slowing down anytime soon.

We will have to wait until the cup is over to get official stats on the role and impact of social media during the event, but it is pretty safe to say that it is an enormously popular trending topic in social media, and that as the matches come to a head, the World Cup's presence on social media platforms will only increase.

How Can You Watch the World Cup Using the Web and Social Media?

• Facebook – official group for worldwide fans of the World Cup 2010
• Twitter – official news from FIFA @FIFAcom and  each country’s team Twitter Feed
• Tweetbeat
• Worldcup Blog – the official World Cup 2010 Blog
• Live Streaming Video – ESPN3.com  (live streaming all but 10 of the 64 matches with ESPNradio and ESPN Mobile streaming the rest) and UnivisionFutbol.com (streaming every match)
• View game highlights and recaps on: Footytube, FIFA on YouTube, Fifa.com
• Mobile – ESPN 2010 World Cup App

Social media security and privacy are hot issues in the web marketing world right now. Many companies are (finally) becoming more aware of the business risks associated with social media and are adopting social media policies for their employees.

A recent security threat report by Sophos, an internet security company, has shown that many businesses are aware of this issue, even if they're not all taking many effective steps to protect themselves. The report found that:

• For 2009 there was a 70% increase in the proportion of businesses reporting spam and malware attacks originating from social network websites. Over one third of these businesses reported receiving malware attacks from social media sites (Sophos Security Threat Report, January 2010).
• For 2009, more than 72% of the firms surveyed feel that employee behavior on social media sites pose threats to the security of their business (Sophos Security Threat Report, Januay 2010)

To help you, here are our top tips for protecting your business:

1. Don't ignore the risk. Understanding and addressing the risks associated with social media is an important first step towards insulating your business from issues like malware and spam attacks.
2. Create and communicate social media policies to raise security awareness. Creating policies which dictate how your employees can use social media with regards to your business, and communicating them effectively to raise awareness, are great ways to help mitigate the potential risks your company faces from its employees use of social sites.
3. Be careful what you put out there. Remember, just because the contacts on your social media account are listed as your friends/followers/contacts doesn't mean they have protecting your organization's best interests at heart. Anything you put out in social media whether personal or professional can be read by these people and then spread with potentially disastrous consequences.
4. Keep your security software up-to-date! Hacking of social media sites has already proved to be a risk. Securing your organization's computers by making sure that your security software and firewalls are functioning properly can help you diminish the chances that your company's information will get stolen.
5. Commit to social monitoring. Monitoring  the social media sphere is an important aspect of any security strategy. Properly monitoring social media sites can help you not only be aware of the current security threats (new malware attacks etc) that are out there, but it can also help you address issues that arise as quickly and painlessly as possible and can help you determine if your employees are actually following your social media policies. 

Let’s face it, LinkedIn is probably one of the most overlooked social networks today in terms of marketing, and yet it is one of the best social media outlets available to connect with other businesses and professionals in your industry. LinkedIn allows you to develop a professional identity online and connect to your peers, contacts and other professionals to help generate leads and visibility for your business online. Here are our tips (that we've tried and tested) for using LinkedIn to market your business.

• Create events. LinkedIn Events are a great way to engage with your clients and leads online. Any event, whether online or offline can all be posted here, with a blurb about the event and a link to a register page (or instructions on how to register). The events can be created by anyone, including attendees, and you are able to invite anyone in your network to the event or just let them know about events you are attending or are interested in.


• Use groups and connect. LinkedIn groups can help you connect with other thought leaders in your industry, discuss events, news and issues in your space and to market your company and services. Many people join groups but don't really participate past the initial few days. A great way to avoid this is to start a group about a topic that interests you, invite your network and connections and grow a group where you can monitor and engage with your current connections, and potential customers.
• Increase your visibility. With LinkedIn it's easy to use your profile to generate leads (connections), establish partnerships with professionals that complement your business and expose your brand to others in your network.
• Optimize your profile for SEO. LinkedIn is actually a relatively good site to get inbound links from. Optimizing your profile with your website and blog (and including the proper anchor text like the example below) can help you get relevant, inbound links. A great opportunity to use this feature is to get every person in your company with a LinkedIn profile to include a link to your company's website with appropriate anchor text. This can help you rank higher in search engines, increase your inbound links, build targeted traffic to your site and help to improve your authority in your niche.

• Answer questions. The LinkedIn "Answers" feature is a good way to help you display your expertise and establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry. In this section you can answer questions from other LinkedIn users on specific topics that relate to your product or services, and you can drive readers to your website's educational content or blog posts as well. 

• Promote your blog on your company’s page. Your company profile has a "news" area that can connect to an RSS feed and automatically update your company profile with new blog posts. Promoting your blog on your company's profile can help increase inbound links, and drive traffic to your blog, while you establish yourself as a resource.

• Follow other companies that interest you. LinkedIn now allows you to follow other companies with LinkedIn profiles. If you type a company into the search box and arrive at their profile, it's simple to click follow and your profile is automatically linked to their list of followers. Following companies in your space can help you connect with other companies and potential clients (especially if you work in the B2B industry). 

This week's web marketing digest post is all about social media. We have a video, a great presentation from Chris Brogan on how you can implement social media as part of your marketing strategy, a graph showing the role that a CMO should have in social media and an infographic with some Facebook statistics that might surprise you.

This video on the social media revolution from Socialnomics discusses how social media may in fact be the biggest shift since the industrial revolution.

This presentation from Chris Brogan, demonstrates the ways that you can incorporate social media into your marketing strategy, and offers some good insight into social media as an effective marketing channel.

We think that infographics are a great way to share information and as a result, we often have graphics on many different aspects of web marketing in this weekly series. Today's infographic from Mashable is based on Facebook statistics. Take a look, you might see some statistics that surprise you.

Have you ever wondered what the role of your CMO should be in your social media initiatives? Or are you a CMO and you're not sure where you fit in? You might find this blog post and graphic from Forrester Research helpful.

Have a great weekend!

Image from Flickr

Social media is becoming a mainstream marketing tactic, but just because it’s a popular initiative (and a successful one for some companies) doesn’t mean it’s necessarily right for your small business.

If you're new to social media, or are in the process of trying to decide if it's right for your organization, hopefully this  list of our top 3 pros and cons will help give you an idea what some of the main benefits and challenges of this marketing channel can be.

Pro 1: Social Media is Free!

• Social media can be an extremely cost effective marketing channel
• With the exception of Facebook and Twitter advertisements you can get most of your social media marketing done with no cost at all

Con 1: It takes a lot of work, and that ain’t cheap!

• Social media takes continual time and effort to create a positive, relevant presence
• This can take time away from initiatives that might suit your business better
• If you can’t set aside the time and resources to maintain your social media accounts then it isn’t a worthwhile initiative

Pro 2: Social media can help create buzz around your company

• News travels quickly in the social media sphere and this can work to create an engaged audience for your brand
• Social media offers a platform for free publicity for your new products, resources etc.

Con 2: All news isn’t necessarily good news

• News sometimes travels too fast for you to keep up with the reactions (good or bad) from your followers
• Anyone can have a voice and they can use that voice to offer their opinions about your company, with or without your consent

Pro 3: Social media can help you improve relationships with existing customers

• Social media can help increase purchase frequency of existing customers and cement relationships
• Your customer retention levels can increase based on relationships nurtured through social media

Con 3: Social media isn’t ideal for customer acquisition

• If your main goal is immediate and quantifiable results for customer acquisitions you may not get the results you’d like

These are just a few of the many pros and cons of social media and these are simply the ones we think are most relevant for small businesses who are considering moving into the social media space. Remember: every business is different and while social media maybe an effective marketing channel for some, it doesn’t mean that every business should just jump right in! Social media takes time and commitment just like every other marketing strategy you currently use.

Image from Flickr