Mistake 1: Pretend you can do without it.
You may have already run into the Graying Skeptics, executives
who can’t understand why they should devote employee time and company
resources to social media, and who dismiss Facebook and Twitter as fads that amount
to little more than a waste of time and money.
Well, social media is here to stay, and the
rocketing growth of some outlets makes it foolish to ignore them. Facebook, the
largest, recently reached 300 million users worldwide — roughly the
population of the United States. And the largest demographic is the
35 to 49 set that most businesses are eager to reach. So listen to Sebastian
Gard of social marketing firm Context Optional when he
says bluntly: “You’re going to have a social-media strategy
whether you do it or not. It’s not up to you.”
Mistake 2: Play down the costs.
Sure, Twitter accounts, Facebook fan pages and YouTube
channels don’t cost a thing. But don’t think for a second
that you can do your social-media effort on the cheap. Getting the most out of
these tools requires time, attention and skill — none of which are
free.
Over time, however, social media does save you some money,
since you can use these outlets for efforts you might otherwise contract out to
PR firms, ad agencies or market researchers. Don’t expect to replace
them all. Instead, think of social media as a necessary and powerful complement
to your existing outreach.
Mistake 3: Act like you own the conversation
Social media is a conversation, and conversations —
more so than ads — require tact. “It all begins with
listening,” says Paul Chaney, an Internet marketing director who
bills himself as The Social Media Handyman.
Just as you wouldn’t walk into a cocktail party and start bragging
about yourself, Chaney says, you shouldn’t “just jump into
the conversation” in social-media channels, either.
So if your customers are talking about your stores online,
don’t just start blasting them with canned sale promotions —
unless, of course, you want to lose customers. Instead, get a feel for the vibe
of the conversation, then ease your way into it, for instance, by answering
general user questions, even if they don’t pertain directly to your
company or its brands. Let your social-media mavens become resources for these
customer micro-communities. Once your folks have earned some trust, they’ll
have the leeway to advance your business goals.
Dunkin’ Donuts
did this well when it set up a social-media presence last year on Facebook and
elsewhere. “We wanted to have conversations with our consumers, who
were already having these conversations themselves,” says David
Puner, a communications manager at the Canton, Mass.-based company. “Once
we got out there, people found us.” A year later, one million people
are fans of the official Dunkin’ Facebook page. The brand has its own
YouTube channel, and its Twitter feed, @dunkindonuts —
which Puner runs — has more than 35,000 followers.
Mistake 4: Fear empowering your employees
“A client once told me they were nervous about
letting customer-service employees speak to the public through Twitter,”
says David Griner, social-media strategist for Birmingham, Alabama-based ad
agency Luckie
& Co. “I asked, 'Would you trust these people to
talk to customers on the phone or face to face?' Of course they would. The key
is to think of social media more like a call center than a press release.”
The
href="http://about.zappos.com/our-unique-culture/zappos-core-values">online shoe store Zappos, now part of
Amazon, has a reputation for personalized customer service and communication —
and social media played a big role. Dozens of employees maintain blogs on the
company Web site; hundreds have Twitter accounts. It’s not just Web-only
companies that offer such empowerment, Dell, IBM, Sun Microsystems and
Southwest Airlines do as well. The common thread: All have corporate cultures
that value transparent relationships with customers.
Mistake 5: Assume you have little to learn
href="http://resources.bnet.com/topic/dell+computer+corp..html?tag=trackSynonyms;synonyms_short">Dell, however, joined the social media
revolution the hard way. When Jeff Jarvis, a prominent media blogger, did a series
of 2005 posts on his horrible customer-service experience with Dell —
posts that came to be known as “Dell
Hell” —
the company suddenly realized how powerful, and damaging, the voice of the
consumer could be. Spurred by the public relations disaster, CEO Michael Dell
blessed an effort to work his company into its customers’ conversations.
According to a case study on Dell in the book “
href="http://www.amazon.com/Groundswell-Winning-Transformed-Social-Technologies/dp/1422125009">Groundswell: Winning in a World
Transformed by Social Technologies,”
the listening effort helped Dell figure out, for instance, that it needed to
better coordinate technical support and customer service to quickly resolve
customer problems.
Mistake 6: Take negative feedback personally
Look, this is the Internet, where there are always going to
be trolls and other nasty
individuals who delight in saying unpleasant things about your company. Don’t
let it bug you. On the other hand, don’t overlook the opportunity to
address real concerns head-on.
Comcast began to repair its dismal
customer-service reputation several years ago by using Twitter to reach out to
complaining customers, offering to troubleshoot problems or sometimes offering
refunds. Frank Eliason, the director of digital care, originally manned the
account, @comcastcares; it’s now staffed by
a small platoon of Comcast employees. According to the
href="http://www.theacsi.org/">American
Customer Satisfaction Index, Comcast’s score is inching upward. “It’s still not where we would
like to see it, but we are happy it is heading in the right direction,”
Eliason says.
Mistake 7: Fret about return on investment
Solid return on investment in social media is tough to
measure. You can, however, evaluate your outreach efforts the same way you
might a PR or advertising campaign.
You can start by looking at simple tallies such as your
number of Facebook fans and Twitter followers, or how often people visit your
company’s blog. Other metrics, such as the number of blog comments
and the number of times consumers shared a link to your content, can show how
engaged users are with your brand.
That said, many companies still take the value of social
media largely on faith. Context Optional’s Sebastian Gard, who until
June was a social-media manager at Microsoft, admits, “The only way I
can tell you it’s effective [at Microsoft] is that they continue to
do more of it.”
Mistake 8: Underestimate the power of seemingly small efforts
Embracing social media isn’t about achieving
specific goals so much as it is establishing a real bond with your customers. Rick
Karp, president and “keeper of the karma” for the San
Francisco-based Cole Hardware chain, recently announced via
Twitter (@colehardware) that the company would
exchange a particular water bottle suspected of chemical contamination —
no questions asked. Within two weeks, consumers returned about 1,000 of the
bottles. “We lost money, but we gained so much [for our brand] by
virtue of our doing it,” he says. “I will do a lot to build
our brand, regardless of whether it pays off immediately economically or not.”
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