In the world of social media it is all too common that people forget the importance of minding their manners. By cutting out the face-to-face interaction it’s incredibly easy to respond less earnestly to people or further- to just ignore them all together.  While it is necessary to make thoughtful and timely responses to your customers, you have to consider the size of your online following.  Your online social circle may extend to thousands or even millions of people.  While it is ideal to cater to each and every request, you need to find an efficient way to prioritize your responses so that they can remain thorough and engaging.

There is no doubt that ignoring customers is a recipe for disaster in terms of brand management for you and your company.  To provide proper customer service in a busy digital media landscape it is key to ensure people know you’re responding to their concerns.  It is crucial to respond to any and all questions, even if the answer is as simple as “Let us research your problem and get back to you.”

Each and every customer matters to your brand’s well being.  If a customer is loyal enough to engage with your social media platforms, he or she is doing you a favor by providing feedback that will help your business grow in a positive direction.  Quickly respond to customer requests so that they continue to provide you with direction.  Remember: if a customer came into your office with a question or complaint you wouldn’t just ignore them!

Obviously, there is a scalability issue here, along with influence analysis. While every legitimate question, or issue deserves a response it may not be possible to answer them quickly. Start by analyzing influence. If the customer in question has all of 12 Twitter followers, then they are obviously going to drop on the priority to list to someone with 1 million followers.

The initial response is what most consumers are looking for, so give them what they want and solve their problems when possible.

Customer relationship management is often laser-focused on email and social media. reducing customers’ needs, hopes, and pain points to data points and milestones. These components are obviously crucial, but it’s to easy to overlook one of the most basic means of communication available to us: the telephone. Truly effective CRM utilizes the power of the human voice in direct, real-time communication.

Case in point: my car has been in the shop for over a week now. The nature of the issue required an insurance adjustor to look at the car, and special ordering some parts–each of which contributed to a longer time frame for repair.

Rather than renting a car, the dealership gave me a brand new loaner car to drive in the interim. While this alone would’ve been enough to satisfy me, it’s been the communication that’s made me a customer for the foreseeable future, if not for life.

Every day since they’ve had my car, I have received a phone call around 4:00pm with a complete status update. I have not for one day been left to wonder what’s going on, nor have I had to pester the shop for information. I have been proactively provided with everything I need to know, often before I have had time to think of it.

Of course, I receive regular targeted emails and paper mail offering specials and advising me of new features, sales and events. I also follow two different Twitter feeds related to the brand. These are both helpful and informative, but I know these means of communication originate from the corporate office.

My local dealer knows my name, takes the time to catch up on general life events when I’m in their office, and reminds me through their actions that they value me as an individual. I’m not a target demographic, I’m not an email address with a customizable first name field in a SalesForce database: I’m a person, and I respond to personal attention. And unlike most people, when they say they’ll call they actually mean it and follow up.

The digital realm isn’t the be-all and end-all in CRM. As this anecdote illustrates, humans respond to humans. Your customers, regardless of industry, deserve this type high-end treatment. Even if you are a huge retailer with hundreds of thousands of customers, when a customer service issue arises that person should feel that their patronage is appreciated and their needs are addressed.

So take the time to sit down and talk. Don’t make them wait. Remember to call. Your customers will remember why they became customers in the first place.

Raidious is pleased to welcome our newest full-time employee, Kaitlin Coons. Kaitlin joined the team this week as Social Media Coordinator.

A native of Chesterton, Indiana on the astoundingly beautiful Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, Kaitlin comes to us as a recent graduate of Indiana University with a triple major in Psychology, Communications and Telecommunications.

Most recently Kaitlin managed Facebook and Twitter social media activity as an intern for the Grossbauer Group. She has done extensive volunteer work for the Middleway House Disabled Veterans Center, and continues to self-educate in intellectual property law.

Kaitlin is a smart, creative, energetic person and a talented writer. She’s also a gadget geek who loves her iPhone and her MacBook, so she’s fitting in very well.

We’re privileged and thrilled to have her on the team.

As brands grow and mature, they take on a life and personality all their own. Now that companies are expected to actively participate in social media, this personality–their brand voice–can be difficult to establish, leading some to balk at this newfound responsibility.

This difficult transition is akin to a child approaching their teen years. My girlfriend’s ten-year-old son–who, to protect his anonymity, we’ll call Tron (he’ll think that’s cool)–is at the age where he is testing the limits of his freedom and exploring his own priorities. In child psychology this period of questioning and challenging authority is referred to as “being a pain the patootie.”

While most of the time Tron is a cheerful, obedient boy, he has his moments of resistance when, rather than unquestioningly following directions, he pushes back. Many of these excuses sounded familiar to me, and I realized that they are often similar if not identical to those offered by companies adjusting to the “everyone is a publisher” reality of social media.

Let’s take a look at some of his more popular challenges. Do you hear yourself or your executive leadership in any of these? If so, it’s time to ask yourself if you are indeed smarter than a fourth-grader.

“I’ll do it during the next commercial.”

This one invariably comes up when it’s time for his nightly shower. Tron is ensconced in a TV show and promises to take a five-minute shower so he doesn’t miss the next exciting development taking place on the Disney Channel. Never mind that the same episode will air approximately 4,327 more times this week, or that we can DVR his favorite shows. He’s busy.

Many companies pay lip service to the importance of social media engagement, but in practice dedicate a minimal amount of time and attention to it. Five minutes out of your day isn’t going to accomplish any goals or solve any business problems whatsoever (or get your stinky ten-year-old clean). Well-planned, well-executed strategies aren’t accomplished in whatever free time you try to fit them.

“That’s not what I meant.”

I find myself channeling my mother when I tell Tron to “engage brain before engaging mouth.” Regardless there are times when his opinion comes flying out before giving any consideration to how it will sound to others. When such insensitivity is brought to his attention, he’ll often say, “That’s not what I meant.”

Regardless of intent, the power of expression lies within how words affect others. It may not be sticks and stones, but as we have seen recently with both accidental (Chrysler) and intentional (Kenneth Cole) missteps, the words we use on social networking sites can indeed hurt. In the case of a brand, the party usually most hurt by our poor choice of words is us. The court of public opinion looks unfavorably upon those who misuse or abuse the social media pulpit. It pays to be acutely aware of the possible connotations and power of your words.

“I don’t feel like talking about it.”

When Tron has a bad day at school–whether or not we’ve received a call or a note home from the teacher–we know it immediately. A usually upbeat, singing, dancing, babbling kid is replaced by a sullen, disinterested slug. No matter what the problem, no matter whose fault it was, we encourage him to tell us about it. Of course at times he is less than forthcoming, saying, “I don’t feel like talking about it.”

The issue here is transparency; it’s easy to share your triumphs with others when you’re happy and excited. When the chips are down and you’re dealing with trouble, the natural response is to clam up. In the case of social media, you must remember that everyone on the web is a publisher. If you don’t talk about what went wrong with your company, others will.

What if they’re wrong? What if they’re misinformed? It’s one thing to issue a press release in an attempt to spin or explain away whatever mistake your company may have made. It’s another thing entirely to get out in front of the issue using your owned media channels and turn a potential tragedy into an opportunity. Believe it or not, your customers and the world at large will respect you and your openness (see also ComcastCares).

“Do I have to?”

Yes.

Just like everyone’s mother always said, if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all. Or as my grandmother used to say, “Keep mouthing off like that and a bigger boy’s going to pop you one.”

The owned media vs. earned and paid media debate is apparently not immune from the same wisdom passed along by our elders: Google has officially popped Facebook right in the kisser for saying, well, not-so-nice things.

As has been widely reported all over the web, Facebook was caught red-handed engaging in a smear campaign against Google via public relations company Burson-Marsteller. After Facebook came clean on Wednesday, the PR firm admitted they had pitched stories to bloggers and other media with statements like “The American people must be made aware of the now immediate intrusions into their deeply personal lives Google is cataloging and broadcasting every minute of every day–without their permission.”

The source of Facebook’s ire is Google’s Social Circle, which permits users of Google Chat and Contacts to see public information about each other–including Facebook information, Twitter feeds, and personal websites.

To be fair, Google’s profiling isn’t exactly opt-in. Whether or not users have a Gmail or other Google service account, they must sign up for Google Profiles in order to customize and decide exactly what information is available to others.

But compare this to Facebook’s labyrinthine privacy and security settings, and the frequent complaints about user privacy issues and information sharing, and it seems like the pot calling the kettle black.

Facebook has since stated that it did not intend to engage in a “smear campagin,” but was merely trying to ensure the public was well informed. I don’t recall a public service announcement from Facebook “informing” people that they disclose user information to advertisers and other third parties.

Regardless of intent, in my mind it all comes down to the inherent transparency of owned media. Engaging a PR firm to propagate negative sentiment via earned media about another company, all the while asking that your company’s name be withheld, is a smear campaign whether you admit it or not.

Compare that tactic to using owned media channels to go beyond marketing your services to calling into question the business practices of a competitor. How far would you go, knowing that your official platforms were the source of potentially injurious (or worse, libelous) statements? Would you be more or less inclined to bite your tongue?

Not that any of this will ultimately matter to either company: users are more and more free with their personal information on the web, and to most people this is a non-story about two corporate behemoths pointing fingers at each other in the usual game of “Oh yeah? Well guess what they did!”

Despite the myriad complaints about privacy, Facebook isn’t losing users in droves, and people still depend on Google’s various services like they were oxygen.

White this is far from the first or last such incident, it is nonetheless embarrassing for any company to be outed for throwing such an obvious and ultimately useless low blow. If you’ve got something to say about a competitor and don’t have the sand to be completely transparent via owned media, do everyone a favor and heed mom’s advice.

In the past, digital marketing was all about “eyeballs,” making your website “sticky,” and drawing tons of traffic to your site. In today’s real-time, two-way distributed digital media environment, the notion of getting people in your front door and keeping them there is as dead as Dillinger.

The fact remains, however, that if you’re engaging in ecommerce you still need to attract users to your site and turn them into customers. So how do we do it?

It may seem illogical, but pushing your content–or rather, links to your content–out to as many sources as possible is the answer. Backlinking is one of the most fundamental components of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and now thanks to social media it can be one of the easiest.

Backlinking is, quite simply, putting descriptive links back to your website from somewhere else on the web. One heavily weighed factor in search is the quality of backlinks, meaning (among other things) that the site where the backlinks reside should be relevant, and the link should resolve on a relevant page on your site.

While there are still online directories, the link farming days of the past are long gone. Now, however, with so much emphasis on the social sharing of content it is possible to sow the seeds of your own link farm all over the fertile grounds of the web.

The Social Media Effect - click to enlarge

The smart folks at Social Reflexion created the infographic illustrating “The Social Media Effect” shown here in this post. Although it’s now dated due to the inclusion of Digg, the process and concept are still relevant.

The infographic shows the flow from initial content creation through Twitter and Facebook sharing to other blogs responding to your topic. Each of these steps along the path creates a link back to the original piece of content–yours.

Given that search engines index Twitter and Facebook, as well as the rest of the web, when shared properly and extensively your content unit has the potential not only to reach millions of potential visitors via the shared links but also to climb in search ranking. As Google, Bing, and other search engines index the web, they take into account the number of links back to a site or piece of content. If these links are reputable, your page’s ranking will increase.

If one major blog like Salon, The Huffington Post or Social Media Today (just to name a few) publishes a piece based on your content and includes a link, your ranking will climb even further. Your content is essentially being vetted for search engines by humans.

What this all means is that it’s absolutely essential to proactively share links to your content via social networking sites and platforms. The more interesting, relevant and valuable the content, the more likely it is to be shared by others, each with their own extent of reach and influence. The more quality backlinks that are created via these means, the more valuable your content will be in search.

This week’s tip is short and simple. Don’t be afraid to change directions on your social media campaign.

The bottom line is that a good social campaign cannot be treated like any other marketing campaign. A strategy developed in November, executed in February, and measured along the way is not always going to be accepted by your audience exactly as planned.

Courtesy of WikiCommons

We always talk about how important it is to measure the success of your social strategy, but the other half of that is to actually make changes to what you’re doing based on the reaction of your audience. If no one seems to care about what you’re saying, then change what your saying!

It all starts with the tip we put forth last week. Start by measuring the success of your content, then make changes to your content based on the results of those metrics.

Keep it social people!

This week’s tip is quick and simple. Metrics.

If you are going to use social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to market your business then you must be able to measure your success on those platforms.

With baseball season about to kick off this week, all I seem to be able to think about is numbers. If you’re a die-hard baseball fan, then you know what I mean. We are constantly thinking about numbers, and measuring the success of our team based on those numbers.

We are below .500, but why? We look at Earned Run Average (ERA), Batting Average (BA), On Base Percentage (OBP), Home Runs (HR), Slugging (SLG), On-Base Plus Slugging (OPS), etc.

In measuring social media, we have statistics like Likes, Recommendations, Retweets, Replies, Backlinks, and so on.

Measuring the success of your social media strategy easy when you have the right tools, and it’s vital to know what you need to do moving forward. Therefore my new catch phrase has become, “You can’t know what to say until you start listening.”

Creating content without a sound strategy is about as effective as entering into a feather throwing competition. No matter how hard you try and how sure you are you have the right methodology, everyone will still pretty much end up in the same place. Success and failure will be determined by things outside of your control.

Brands no longer simply have websites: they have an online presence. This is an important realization because at every point of that presence there is content. Even if there isn’t a company blog or a Twitter account, someone is probably writing and tweeting about them. Online, content is your product and how effective it is depends on the strategy.

Jeremy Baldwin breaks down a more holistic definition of content strategy into three parts:

• Editorial Strategy (themes and topics),
• Content Strategy (organizing and managing), and
• Content Marketing (drive conversation and engagement).

These require a cohesive group of people with different skill sets to guide and monitor the message at every point of presence. Think of your content as being the narrative of your brand. There must be a cohesive synergy between all platforms including interacting with people on social channels. There must be a consistent story or message being told at every step.

Janet Aronica has a great write-up on tracking metrics analyzing this narrative, as does our own Matt Chandler regarding Social Center. Feedback from these services will help answer the ultimate question of online content: are you giving the audience what they want? This isn’t a yes or no question. The answer must be to what degree is it effective and what can be done to make it better?

One thing that can greatly affect how far content goes is the medium by which it is presented. People can learn the same information in very different ways. If your posts aren’t seeing the traffic you think they deserve, try getting the message out in a different way. Try a short video or podcast, or turn it into a diagram. Don’t tie the message down to a single distribution method; it has to be free to move and grow through different venues.

It is a good sign that the industry as a whole is seeing how much value and time are lost when content is just thrown aimlessly around, hoping that it magically “goes viral,” and have instead embraced sound content strategy as a workflow. The more quality content being produced the better, and the better strategy there is for following and tracking the more people will learn from the bevy of knowledge being produced. This also means that the time for a comprehensive strategy is now, as more brands are implementing these ideas all the time.

Today in the AdAge blogs there is a post by Bob Garfield titled “Chrysler’s Twitter Controversy Teaches Us ‘Brand Journalism’ Is a Lie.” The post is worth a read, if only to reinforce the idea that it’s best to take the pontificating of experts with more than just a grain of salt.

Rather than eviscerating the post point-by-point, the counter-argument can be summed up simply: a misplaced Twitter post isn’t the same as brand journalism.

After taking time to mock the “dissolute musicians and inked-up hipsters in porkpie hats” in Austin, Texas, for SXSW, Mr. Garfield asserts that the person responsible for the Chrysler F-bomb incident was let go as punishment for his transparency.

… Chrysler, instead of stoning him to death, merely fired him. Fired him for being funny. Fired him for being spontaneous. Fired him for being relevant. Fired him for alighting ever so gently, like a canary taking its perch, on a dowel of human truth. You know — the way social media is supposed to be …

While I agree with Garfield’s overall point that the tweet in question was a nugget of honesty–one that hardly threatens Chrysler’s valuation or market position–I take exception with the generalization that the offender’s sacking means that the entire practice of brand engagement via social media is disingenuous.

Chrysler didn’t fire their social media agency simply because of the profanity (we’ve all heard it before). The agency wasn’t fired because the post was funny and relevant (it was neither). Nor were they fired because the post trained a spotlight on some fundamental human truth (who doesn’t have an opinion on the drivers in their city?).

No, Chrysler fired their social media agency because they were being paid to do a job, and they did it wrong.

Of course marketing is smoke and mirrors; the adage about selling “the sizzle not the steak” is a truism for a reason. We’re not saving sick babies, we’re in the business of selling stuff. Brands are dedicating our greater and greater percentages of their marketing budgets to digital. With the capacity for instantaneous communication comes an increased possibility for missteps. That’s why guardrails must be put in place during the planning process, to ensure that communications remain on message and on target.

Bigger than that, though, is this concept of brand journalism. If a brand is simply parroting their commercial messages through digital channels, they’re not engaging in brand journalism. True brand journalism is the creation of original content around a subject topography that is interesting, relevant, and valuable to a brand’s demographics. It is the practice of engaging in social listening and constructive, transparent response to customer issues. There are plenty of examples of brands at least making a valiant attempt in getting engagement right.

Digital agencies charged with speaking on behalf of a brand must be held accountable for what they say and do. Posting a hackneyed personal opinion with no connection to the brand or the campaign–however accidentally–is a mistake that proves the agency isn’t ready to handle the responsibility. It doesn’t mean there aren’t thoughtful, useful ways to engage in brand journalism.

Come on, Bob. I’ve heard your insights on NPR and listened intently. You founded ComcastMustDie.com, which arguably led directly to Comcast‘s concerted effort to improve their customer service–to the degree that ComcastMustDie.com itself died. Your position as a sought-after expert in marketing brings with it an enviable pulpit from which to preach. Painting an entire field with one broad brush is too easy, and I expect better.

After all, it was journalist and satirist Craig Brown who said, “Journalism could be described as turning one’s enemies into money.” Isn’t that what marketing is all about?