Social Media: It's all about baby steps

Whilst it was soooo 2009, I still seem to get asked by friends and work colleagues about social media - 'what is it?' 'Is it just setting up a corporate Twitter account?' and 'What can I do with SM to help me bowl over my sales/job targets?

There are endless definitions of social media, with the most common being the 'creation of dialogue between a business and its customers via technology.' I recently read a great quote that said social media is now a catalyst for 'word of finger' as oppose to word of mouth. 

This is now very true as in this day in age, if a customer wants to complement or whinge about a company they can ring the call centre, (press 4 to complain....) write a letter to the company (write a what?) compose an email that may end up in the inbox of 'the newbie' to reply to or...jump onto twitter and let rip.

Now of course every man and his dog now utilises social media with some great and not so great success stories but if you're under pressure to get into the SM arena, where do you begin?

• Is your company looking to just bypass legal departments and blab to the world in 140 characters? (contrary to belief, the legal ramifications of SM are far greater online rather than offline, simply put, you can't undo anything on the web...not quickly anyway)
• Are blogs just a more trendy medium for companies to casually mingle among their customers (yet a lot of the time, disable customer feedback to posts or just ramble on about brand values?) 

So what are your objectives for getting into SM? If it is just to jump on the bandwagon or that you think its the 'in' section of marketing to get into..think again. Like most things, anyone can create a run of the mill marketing campaign, but only few can create one that lingers on forever and rolls in the cash and/or brand recognition.

If you're looking to get your business into SM, follow these simple steps to ease your way into a solid SM strategy:

Step 1: Just Listen First..

There are a number of great tools out there, my favourite for the moment being TweetBeep that searches the world of twitter and sends an email with tweets related to your chosen keywords. You can do this for Google etc. as well for news and blog posts. This allows you to actually get first hand, uncensored feedback from your customers. It's free insight and can often alert you of issues much faster than via a survey or market research.

This simple process can lead to continuous product improvement, enhanced customer experience, simply allow you to really know what customers think of you or be alerted of brewing public relations storms.

Step 2: Start to talk back but focus on customer service, not marketing

Whilst its very tempting to create the obligatory Facebook and Twitter pages for your company and push out the latest specials every hour...customers don't care. The most popular social media apps are used by users for social purposes, they are there to check what their friends are doing and to also tell the world they just cooked a piece of toast. Users aren't interested in reading something they can easily read in a newspaper.

Instead of flogging specials, respond to tweets that users have posted using your official Twitter/Facebook account. Just remember a few things when replying:

• Who ever is replying should know the response context blindfolded. Eg. if a customer is complaining about a product, run your response by someone in your product area and understand the procurement & sales process so you can give a concise but correct answer
• Know your boundaries - If someone is complaining about their superannuation - make sure your author is actually qualified to give advice or a solution
• Remember Privacy - Never ask for personal details etc. over SM channels. Always give generic advice and also include an appropriate call to action so the user can follow this up utilising a secure channel. (It's also good to ensure you have a good customer relations page on your website so you can easily post a shortened url link in your post)

Step 3 - Use the power of SM and user generated content to enhance your online marketing

There have been some great uses of social media driven websites to entice user input such as makeofficebetter.com (which isn't up anymore) that allowed users to make suggestions to improve Microsoft Office. 

Customers enjoy giving tips to a business that is willing to listen to them and if you can demonstrate that you have taken their feedback on board, you'll go a long way with your customers.

If you have a campaign out there for a particular product or service, think of reasons of how any why users would respond to your product and then incorporate that into your campaign call to actions. That way, apart from the usual push brochureware content, users can actually respond to you which creates better brand recall and most of all, enhances conversion for a sale.