I find that Twitter is slowly becoming a “last resort” for consumers who are having issues with businesses and cannot get them resolved through the normal means of phoning or emailing customer support. We’ve seen it time and time again, made famous by @Dooce and the Maytag washing machine incident, but repeated by many others, including myself which I documented in my how to deal with angry customers on Twitter post, that a tweet is the most direct and quickest way of getting out your message to the world in realtime when all else fails. As Twitter membership grew by …
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Social bookmarking websites always confuse my social media strategy customers. There seems to be an aura that somehow just posting all of your own content to these sites will somehow magically drive massive traffic to your website. Of course, it doesn’t work that way. And unless you have a certain objective or niche demographic that tends to find a large population of your targeted users using sites like Digg, Reddit, or Delicious, my advice is simply to concentrate efforts on other more popular sites. I will make one exception, though: StumbleUpon. First of all, StumbleUpon is not a niche site. …
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As I consult with more clients on social media strategy, I am always amazed after I do a competitive analysis to find out that most American companies that I run across don’t seem like they know what they are doing on the likes of Facebook and Twitter. I’m not talking about the big consumer brands like Starbucks and Coca Cola that have gathered lots of Facebook Fans and are truly engaging with their customers. I’m talking about most B2B companies as well as those B2C brands that don’t necessarily fall into the Fortune 500. According to Hubspot, 72% of businesses have …
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Let’s face it: Since email as we know it today started developing from the 1960s, a lot has changed. The way we use email, the way that businesses try to get our email addresses to opt-us-in to their newsletters, and the fact that we tend to use email less and less as we send more and more messages through social media websites means that it may be time to start looking for more convenient forms of representing our virtual mailboxes beyond email that might exist. In fact, a recent report by Hubspot mentioned that Facebook is now our most popular …
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Over the past several months there has been a significant increase in the number of social media-related events occurring nationwide. These events range from formal educational seminars and full-day events with multiple speakers to networking social events and tweetups over lunch or on a weeknight. If the target audience for your business is using social media, which is increasingly the case, it makes business sense for your company to start participating in these events through event sponsorship. If you have been a blog reader of mine from the past, you’ll know that I am a co-founder of ConnectOC, a group …
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I recently got asked a great question in my Windmill Networking LinkedIn Group: Neal, what is one of the most recent insights you have learned about LinkedIn that can help us? Since I wrote the book on LinkedIn, although 90% of the functionality of the site is still the same, I am finding the “Follow” features that LinkedIn have introduced to be of value for some. While this “feature” may still be a mystery to many, here is my advice on how you can strategically use it by thinking outside of the box. For instance:
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While everyone was talking about the new Facebook Places application last week, I wanted to wait until I had a chance to actually experiment with it myself and report firsthand back to you on my analysis. A little bit of historical perspective can’t hurt any analysis either: A few days in social media seems like a few months in real life. Now that a few days have passed and I’ve had a chance to take the Places application out for a test spin, I realize what Facebook is trying to do: Become the default social aggregator of your information at …
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Social media and your privacy is an intriguing topic that we should all be concerned about. On the one hand, Pete Cashmore of Mashable has already rightfully declared some time ago that Privacy is Dead. On the other hand, there are those who are actually still afraid to join a social networking site because of privacy concerns. It is these people that I want to address in this blog post. This week I got this question from my reader: I have always used alias names and blind emails everywhere online to protect my personal info from ID Theft. Because I …
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Yesterday I wrote about how to sell social media to your marketing department, and as a follow-up to that question, I received another email from the same person indicating a big reason why internally their marketing department still doesn’t want to move forward: “After more in-depth discussions it became apparent that the real concern of our marketing department is protecting our “brand name” while employee’s use social media to, essentially further their own careers and successes. I hadn’t looked at it from that perspective but it does present some challenges.” The fear of how one’s employees will use sites such …
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Let’s face it: Social media in 2010, and the way we utilize it as professionals and businesses on a daily basis, is constantly changing. It is impossible for any single person to keep up with everything these days, which is why it is important to be seeking out additional points of view, case studies for reference, and the latest statistics. But where do you start seeking out this information? Instead of pressing that Google Search button for everything, why not start frequenting some top websites where definitive blog posts are being published by thought leaders in the industry? This question …
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