The Social Media Puzzle: Piece #2 How can you use social media to build customer loyalty?

 Here are five ways you can use social media to build customer loyalty:

1. Improve your product or service by listening to negative sentiment or suggestions posted on all relevant social media channels. People who say negative things or post about you will mostly have something valid to say. Why not listen to them, examine their issue, and fix them as soon as possible? A responsive firm fixes things. Most customers are aware that some things take time to fix too. As long as they know something is genuinely being done many people will accept the situation until then.
2. Ask people to recommend or retweet or re post something from you. People talk about "net promoter scores" as a key metric for understanding customer loyalty, but the percentage who are willing to take action to recommend or retweet should be a more reliable figure, as it’s not about stating your intentions, it’s about actions. You may say you will promote a service, but not actually do it. I suggest actions speak louder than words.
3. Offer updates & special offers to people who sign up to receive posts or Tweets. By making people feel part of a community in some way you will increase engagement and loyalty. Highly engaged customers become advocates too. A high percentage of them will recommend you to others. Your Facebook page can provide special offers and your Twitter & Pinterest feed can too. You can also make these offers and updates local by getting each of your branches or divisions to take part in this campaign, so that customers are building relationships with the nearest branch.
4. You can track if customers achieve their objectives using your product or service using social media. You can do this buy asking them direct questions, via surveys, and by monitoring any posts they create on the subject. This is being proactively interested in how your customers get on with your service. You may only be able to do this with a select group of customers, but the lessons learned should be applicable to all similar customers. Achieving objectives is a critical issue to remaining loyal and placing the maximum amount of business with you. If you are afraid to ask hard questions then your business will eventually have big problems.
5. Communicate the benefits of your product or service, not the technical features. This is an old adage salespeople use. Sell the sizzle not the stake. It’s true for social media too. Don’t focus on how to get button A to perform service B. Tell people how service B will benefit them. Then tell them how to get it to work.

My guide to social media is available from Amazon. Enjoy!

The Social Media Puzzle: Piece #3 Can you apply the Socratic method to social media?

The goal of this blog is to stimulate thinking about social media. I believe the Socratic method is an interesting tool for communication. It must therefore have applications in social media.

Here's my thoughts about using the Socratic method in social media:

1. Take a stance of skeptical ignorance. Enquire about others views on a subject.

2. Be conversational, but keep probing assumptions. 

3. Require definition of terms. This is where conversations often go wrong. Ask what people mean by X.

4. Use experience. Refer to your own experiences.

5. Draw implications & consequences. Talk about what will happen if X occurs.

Socrates was a classical Greek philosopher who proposed asking questions to test people's assumptions as a way to debate the truth of an assumption and to stimulate thought. 

Getting someone to see the problems with their assumptions was one of it's goals. It is one of the methods used in education to get engagement from reluctant learners and to test critical thinking skills.


For detailed info on Socratic method, as used in education and philosophy see here.

My guide to social media is available on Amazon. Enjoy!

7 Alternative Rules of Innovation

1. Think coalitions, new working teams. Choose home workers, part time workers, others based on talent, drive and results.

2. Become resilient through local funding first, investment in people, support networks.

3. Your greatest innovators may not even work for you, they may be your customers, your suppliers or your support network.

4. If you are a dinosaur, learn to dance. Don't wait. Don't be afraid of looking stupid. Otherwise you'll end up on the sidelines while the rest are at a party.

5. Offer clear value. Make it obvious.

6. Invest in your education. Do courses. Do them online, offline or inline. But do them.

7. Listen to your talent. Top down decision making is stone age thinking. Experiment with ideas.

Social Media is Dynamite for Sales

I worked in sales and sales management in the UK & Ireland for 25 years.

Social media, in my opinion, provides an unprecedented opportunity for people involved in sales to understand what is going on in prospect and client organisations. A new era of corporate openness and the widespread use of social media for customer service and stakeholder communications means that sales people, account managers of all types from national to global, have access to previously hidden data.

I have created a slideshow here: http://www.slideshare.net/SocialMediaisDynamite/social-media-is-dynamite4-sales

This describes in 7 slides the ways a major account manager/sales person can use social media to research prospects, identify problems within those accounts, listen to what is going on and to create material to propose solutions.

This ILC model (Identify - Listen - Create) can be used by all account mangers to help them sell more. It is also a model for a service to research prospects, clients and even competitors. Get in touch if you want more details.

Social media payback bullshit!

Someone said to me over the weekend, "In business we need proof that there will be a payoff before we invest in anything. We're pragmatic. We don't put money up without having a proven pay back."

What a crock of bullshit!

Most large businesses invest in PR and advertising. They pay to have press releases put out, to get stories in the media and to do BIG TV advertising where even the professionals say 50% of the budget is wasted, but they don't know which 50%! I wonder what the ROI argument is there? Let's do it 'cause it makes us look important?

Why is it that traditional PR, advertising and marketing are all allowed to get away with campaigns that spend money like water, sponsoring at the Olympics is just one area, but if you ask the same marketing managers to spend 10% of their budget on social media, a trackable & growing area, then they look at you as if you had two heads, at least?

Personally, I believe the reason for such shortsightedness is fear. They don't want to be told about the change that is looming. They want to keep doing what they've always done. They're scared. Well you know what that Darwin guy said, it ain't the clever or the strong that survive, it's the individuals who embrace change, dude!

Will we have to wait for a new generation of marketing heads and smart CEO's before social media takes off the way it should? What do you think? Are you scared too? Does this picture resonate? 

 

The Social Media Puzzle: Piece #5 Is there evidence that social media is worth all this time?

There has been a constant drum beat in the media over the past few years of Luddite criticism of social media. They claim that it is all a waste of time, that social media is banal and trivial.

For those of us who value technology there has to be more than blind faith to counter such views. Fortunately, a recent scientific study has shown that social media is linked to increased intelligence.

The study, by a team at Trinity College, Dublin, replicated the evolution of social interaction over 50,000 generations. It claims to have found a link between sociability and intelligence.

Professor Andrew Jackson and research student Luke McNally conducted the research. They used neural networks and games to simulate how humans interact in society and learn.

The findings will be published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the biological sciences journal of the Royal Society in London.

My personal view is that social media forces cooperation and openness. To do otherwise on social media would lead to being flamed as a troll. Cooperation and openness lead to increased learning, as your reading of this article illustrates, which will inevitably leads to increased intelligence.

Whether I can claim that reading this blog leads directly to increased intelligence is probably a step too far though! I don't think every Tweet or post is symbol of progress, but there are enough positive ones, I believe, to make it obvious that social media is of benefit to humanity overall.

To support this site - over 60 free posts so far on social media for you to explore - please buy one of my novels, The Istanbul Puzzle or The Jerusalem Puzzle or my guide to social media. And enjoy!

Interactivity on social media

Getting people to engage with you, to contribute to your blog or your Facebook page is an important element in getting social media right. Why? Because people are more likely to remember you and come back if they engage.

But how can you get people to engage?

1. Ask for participation often. Let people comment anonymously and by using their social media identities if they prefer.

2. Make engagement the centerpiece of the post or for a period on your site. Ask people to post their own links and to talk about what they do. Sure, you will get some people putting up advertising, but if the links are too much you can always simply delete the ones that breach your guidelines.

3. Ask people to post images. You can run a contest for the best photo of your product in a strange situation for instance.

4. Ask for text contributions or submissions of some type to win a review or some other real prize.

5. Build community in from the start. Facebook group are a perfect example of that. Start a group. People know what's expected on LinkedIn and Facebook groups and on other sites with groups or tribes.

6. Make your post about a burning issue. Take a stand and ask for contributions. Make it about something important and up to the minute and make your contribution genuine and open.

7. Be persistent. Don't give up if it's difficult at the start. Give it a reasonable amount of time, but don't forget to move on too, if you need to. Social media is about balancing experimentation with persistence.

In the spirit of this post, please make your own suggestions below as to how to improve interactivity and post a link to your own site so we can see what you do and visit you.

To support this site - over 60 free posts so far on social media for you to explore - please buy one of my novels, The Istanbul Puzzle or The Jerusalem Puzzle or my guide to social media. And enjoy!

Social Media in practice #2: An update: SM 4 a London premium property site

This post is the second in a series about putting social media theory into practice.

A small premium property agency in London has been looking to update their web site. Over a two day period I created the following blog:

http://allyttaproperty.wordpress.com/

It features a listing of properties prominently and is almost a crossover between a property listing site and a blog.

I then created two Twitter accounts - this is one:

https://twitter.com/AllyttaProperty

This post is an update on the results in the past two weeks. 

The blog/web site has had 263 views in two weeks. The best day was last Thursday, when 40 views were recorded. Here is a listing of where people have come from who viewed the site over the last few weeks:

Two Twitter accounts will slowly follow people interested in property in London. Already, within two weeks, they have 627 followers. A few of these will be likely clients. I don't expect much of a return for the time involved in setting all this up, Tweeting daily, and reporting on it all, until about three months has passed 

The Twitter account tweets a 50% mix of links to the Allytta blog and 50% London/property industry news.

The main benefits so far are probably more about good client relationships, but I do expect real business to be generated from the site and Twitter feeds soon. What do you think?


Come back here each month and I will update you on progress on this real life example of the use of social media for an SME business in the UK.