photo credit: x-ray delta one

“Oh no. Have you seen what this guy said about us on Twitter?”

Words to strike dread into any Marketer.

“Stop what you’re doing, we need to fix this. Now”

If you monitor social media mentions of your brand, you’ve probably experienced a variation of this scenario yourself. It’s not fun and depending on what’s happened it can be a small inconvenience or a major headache. Like any good social media-aware marketer this is why you monitor and you know how you need to respond.

You have a strategy for dealing with negative comments and feedback – that’s great, you definitely need one.

But what about your strategy for dealing with positive feedback?

Huh? Come again?

Silence is not golden

It’s very easy to focus on the negative but what are you doing with your positive feedback?

• Are you acknowledging it?
• How are you using it?

Let me tell you a story.

Earlier this year my wife and I took our first overseas holiday with our toddler. We wanted to simplify the journey by removing any hassles – such as the shuttle bus journey from Long Stay parking to Departures at the airport.

We researched online for chauffeur services to collect our car at Departures and return it to the door on our return. There wasn’t much info around and no notable brand names in the market, so we had no pre-established ‘trust’. It was difficult to choose, especially when pricing was similar. So we went with the cheapest one and thankfully we had a great experience.

At both ends of the journey, we had waiting for us friendly, helpful chauffeurs – polite, reassuring and ready to answer any questions we had. These two guys, probably amongst the lowest paid in the company, convinced us through their manner and actions to use the service again. They cared about our experience and it showed.

So impressed, my wife felt compelled to write to the company to thank them for the great service. And their response?

Nothing.

“What a wasted opportunity” said my wife.

Sharing the love

So what could they have done? Or more to the point, what could you do in your business to ensure you don’t miss a similar opportunity?

1. Acknowledge it

• Firstly, ask yourself this: who in your organisation will receive the feedback initially? Do they know what to do with it or who to pass it to? You have your onsite feedback form or email address which sends customer comments to a designated person in your business, but what happens if they write you a letter like my wife did? Who opens the mail? Do they know who to pass it to?

• You need to acknowledge the feedback. People tend not to bother to pass on positive feedback, so if anyone goes to the effort of doing so, make sure you respond. At the very least thank them. It’ll cement the good feeling they have just associated with your brand.

• How about doing something a little special and give them something? Along with your note, it could be a discount on their next purchase or an invite to an exclusive event.

2. Use it

If you’re in a crowded, price sensitive market with little brand loyalty, how can you stand out? Your margins probably don’t allow for another price cut, so why not be known for a great customer experience?

Firstly, you really do have to have a great customer experience if that is going to be your USP. You can’t blag that one. You have to examine your whole customer-facing service to see what works and what doesn’t, including speaking with your customers, and then make positive changes. Yes, it may mean spending a little money now, but it is an investment in repeat business in the future.

Okay, so you offer a great service and your customers love you for it. In fact, they love you so much they can’t help but talk about you. So how can you harness that?

• Testimonials – stick them on your site. It’s Social Proof. People hitting your site from a Google search may have no idea who you are or whether they should trust you with their personal information or credit card details. So show them what other customers – people just like them – think of you. When in doubt, people will follow the crowd when making decisions. Make it easier to see the crowd.

• Video testimonials – talking of which, actually SHOW them the crowd. Ask your happy customers to give genuine, unscripted endorsements for your service, using short video clips. Retail sites using video on product pages often experience an uplift in conversions because of it. Try it with testimonials on your landing pages.

• The great thing about videos on your site is that they’ll show up in Google results for searches on your brand name (assuming you optimise them correctly). A nice proof point for anyone checking out your reputability

• Use them in your email newsletter or reactivation emails. If you’re trying to get previous customers back to purchase, add in recent customer comments into your email comms. It may have been some time since they’ve used your service and they may need reminding of how great you are (or you might want to repair your reputation if you weren’t so great in the distant past).

• Testimonials don’t just need to go on your own site. There is a lot of value – both social proof and SEO – in gaining positive reviews on sites such as Google Places, Yelp and foursquare. Customers won’t always come to your site to form an opinion, they’ll check out what their peers say on review sites too. Why not add a link on your site to Google Places (Google incorporate review data into their search listings, great if you have a good score) or include a link in your reply to their Thank You email, saying how much you appreciate the positive words and would they mind helping out by posting a similar review on Google Places (or whichever is appropriate to your business).

• If customers are saying nice things about you in Social spaces, such as Twitter and Facebook, share them with your own Followers. Just don’t overdo it –a stream of ‘look how great we are tweets’ can be annoying. Do it subtly and occasionally, just enough to remind people that their peers appreciate your service/product.Harness the positivity of your new advocates – invite them to participate in shaping your brand and offering. Create a group that can either meeting in person or online to discuss ideas, issues and new creative. Make them part of the process and it’ll strengthen their advocacy. Remember, don’t blindly follow their requests, but understand their needs and incorporate those ideas that make sense for your business and your customers (win-win).

•  Share the good new inside your business. Chances are your colleagues don’t get to see much of the feedback from customers – though they might hear about the problems. Let them know about the good stuff and show them how they’re contributing to the positive experiences of your customers.

It’s very easy to be held hostage by negativity; afraid a criticism may damage your business. But focusing only on the negative is just fire-fighting. By addressing the problems AND harnessing the positives you’ll enable your business to both improve and grow.

How have you used positive feedback? I’d love to know. Please feel free to share your experiences in the Comment section below.

Related posts:

1. Unfollow the anti-social media policy
2. Social Media Innovation

In his post ‘Social Media requires a different perspective on talent – developing a social workforce’, Felix Wetzel referenced a comment from Brian Halligan’s (Hubspot) presentation at Dreamforce:

‘No traditional marketing skills and background are required, instead “hire people who speak digital without an accent. Hire people that blog, have twitter followers and are on G+”’

I’m sure it’s a bold and contentious statement for many, but from where I’m sitting it has merit.

For me, Social and Digital are about attitude. The skills can be learned, but it’s more about whether you ‘get it’. We’ve long since passed the point where we should be discussing the potential of the internet as commerce and communication channels, yet to some the thought of discussing – let alone doing – social media, ecommerce or digital is worse than a trip to the dentist. The words ‘tweeting’, ‘klout’ and ‘conversion optimisation’ don’t even appear in their vocabulary.

No, to be a success in the digital age you need to freely and readily embrace change.

The attitude I mentioned, includes the ability to question and experiment. Any of those pioneers at the dawn of the commercial internet had that ability in spades. They looked at the web and saw a way to challenge the norm, the traditional, and do something in a new and better way.

And because they needed staff to make their venture work, they hired people with the right attitude and skills – but not necessarily internet experience – who figured out a way to make it happen.

When I joined Jobsite in 1999, I was an unemployed photographer; our Marketing Executive was a part time doorman and our SEO expert was hired out of the kitchens of the local army barracks. None of us had any marketing experience, let alone any internet history.

Over the subsequent years, as the internet community and talent pool has grown, new hires into the team came with valuable web experience. Regardless of background, the ones who truly made a mark are those that continued the tradition of curiosity.

Today, as I welcome two new recruits to the team I now lead 12 years later, I urge them to question the way things are done, bring alive their ideas and not to be wary of experimentation. Standing still is no longer an option. Neither is being afraid of change.

And change is coming. Like the internet was a catalyst for change in traditional commerce, now social and mobile are changing the web. As traditional marketers were afraid of digital, now their counterparts must in turn face their own challenge. You cannot be a marketer today and not embrace social media. You cannot be a marketer if you can’t see how Mobile is totally changing how your customers are going to be using your product. Stand up and face the oncoming storm, throw open your arms and embrace it.

As Felix concludes:

‘Depending on where you stand, it’s either beautiful or scary.’

From where I’m standing, it’s a bit of both. And that’s why it’s so exciting, right?

Related posts:

1. Top 10 It’s Digital Marketing Posts of 2009
2. Who needs talent when you have technology?
3. Does it make the boat go faster?

photo credit: Joelk75

It irritates me when I hear Twitter, Facebook et al, blamed for loss of productivity and foot in mouth faux pas by employees. That inevitably leads to the discussion regarding banning the networks from the workplace or the introduction of a lengthy social media policy within the business.

Stop blaming the tools – it’s the people using them.

Extra Thick Crust, Hold the Common Sense

As Scott Stratton (@unmarketing) put it at Jobsite’s FreshThinking seminar, “Stop hiring morons”.

That may seem a little harsh, but let’s look at an example.

Dominos staff filmed themselves doing disgusting things to food in the kitchen before serving up to customers. They posted it on Youtube and were promptly fired and arrested for their endeavours. That wasn’t Youtube’s fault, it was the morons messing with the pizza.

Every time something like this happens, I just shake my head. Didn’t it occur to them that sharing this publicly meant it wasn’t going to end well for them? It’s common sense. Well, for most of us.

The Unpleasant Aftertaste

So what happens? Businesses panic, and before you know it, access to social sites are restricted or banned from the workplace and/or stringent social media policies are introduced in an effort to control employee activity (which ironically, is the opposite of being social).

This backfires on multiple levels:

• Your staff will hate you. That won’t look good on your employee satisfaction report.
• It won’t stop them. You know those shiny smartphones everyone has now? Makes your restricted access network at little redundant, doesn’t it?
• You’ll lose their trust. You’re effectively saying they’ll only say something stupid so best shut up and let you do the talking.
• You’re hurting your business by restricting your employees’ development. Get over the whole ‘it’s just people talking about what they had for breakfast’ nonsense. If you’re hiring the right people, they’re using it to learn from others through article sharing and discussion, they’re monitoring your competitors and the industry, and they’re making connections and forming relationships with potential new customers or employees. And if they mention what they did at the weekend, well, it makes them – and your brand – more human. And when was that such a bad thing?
• And the biggest blow to your business? You’re oppressing the best source of ambassadors of your brand.  You could have people freely talking about the great stuff you’re doing, but if you’d rather be in control of the message that’s fine. Oh wait, did I mention you can’t control the message? People are saying whatever they want about your brand, whether you like it or not. You could perhaps influence that conversation by participating…oh wait, you can’t, you’ve cut off access to those that care about your brand the most. This social stuff is difficult, isn’t it?

Actually, no it’s not. We just make it that way.

The Ultimate Topping

Stop hiring morons and give your employees access to social media and forget about the rigid social media policy. Policies tend to be lengthy and focused on what you should not do. Instead, educate your staff. Show them how to use the tools – for their own benefit, not just for the business (it’ll pay off in the long run, as socially aware, responsible staff who enjoy their work, will just love talking about the great things you do).

Most importantly emphasise common sense when tweeting, posting, updating.  Take a leaf out of the Royal Navy’s book – their social media ‘policy’ consists of just two questions:

1. What would your mother think?
2. What would your commanding officer think?

If that doesn’t stop you from posting photos from the Stag/Hen weekend nothing will.

If you feel you need a little more reassurance than those two questions bring, consider writing a brief employee guide to social media use, rather than an epic, riling social media policy.

The guide should be short, focused on the positive and emphasise common sense. It should not be about restrictions, it should encourage use, authenticity and pride in the work you and your colleagues have achieved, whilst raising awareness of the individual’s responsibilities. Ultimately, it should encourage the exercising of good judgment.

Whatever your eventual approach, remember don’t blame the tools. Hire talented, responsible people and encourage them to get involved. If they believe in your product and actions, then you’ll have a strong advocate to help develop and grow your business.

And you’ll never have to look suspiciously at your slice of pizza.

Related posts:

1. Social Media: Are you listening to the good stuff too?
2. Social Media Innovation
3. Social Sports: the ball is in your court

Sport is big business. The competition on the field is nothing compared to the competition off it for fandom, viewership and in this economic climate, the fan’s dollar / pound. Recognising its potential, Sports businesses are looking to social media to help them reinforce and develop their relationships with fans – and of course to broadcast their product in as many different channels as possible.

Global brands such as New Jersey Nets, Manchester City (image above) and multi-billion dollar entities such as the NFL (3.1 million Facebook fans and counting) are already forging ahead with engagement via social media, including foursquare check-in competitions, Commissioner Q & As and team and player fan pages.

Whilst the Big Boys of sport are already finding success, would this work for other, smaller sports? What would this approach bring to leagues and clubs that are fighting to raise awareness and put bums on seats?

In his blog post ‘How football clubs can use mobile and social media to their advantage’, Felix Wetzel suggests “Opening up these channels would give live events a completely new dimension. It would bring even more energy and most importantly whet the appetite of all the people that are not in the stadium and consequently drive attendance for live matches in general”.

If this is indeed correct, are smaller leagues and clubs taking notice?

To put this to the test, I took a look at a minority sport here in the UK – Basketball – and looked to see how the top flight, the British Basketball League (BBL) utilise social media. I have a very limited familiarity with British Basketball having only seen a few games back in the ‘90s when there was a team nearby. So I was viewing this with fresh eyes.

There are two parts to my review – how the League uses social media on an ongoing basis and how it’s used for an event – in the latter’s case – the 2011 Playoffs Final in Birmingham, the showcase event of the season.

The Social Day-to-Day

Facebook Updates from the League

The BBL is clearly aware of the importance of having a social media presence. They have both a Facebook and Twitter account, and actively promote them in a prominent position on their website. They actually have both a Facebook Group (929 fans) and a newer Fan Page (611 fans), which is a little confusing , plus 633 followers on Twitter. I was a little surprised the Facebook figure was not higher given the 12 teams of the BBL have a combined 6,300 facebook fans.

Both channels are used to broadcast news stories from the league (all links point back into the article on the league website) and score updates during and after games. To a much lighter degree, Facebook has some conversational status updates (i.e. “Who do you think will win between X and Y tonight?”), whilst there are number of retweets of BBL Club accounts’ tweets on Twitter.

As such the league do a very good job of keeping fans up to date with news and events via two of the most popular social networks. Rather than rely on fans visiting the league website, they take the news to the places where their fans are hanging out. This is a good starting point.

Where they don’t do so well, is engagement. Their approach is broadcast, not conversation. I suspect a fair amount of automation in their social activity – likely due to resource, like many organisations. It looks like they use the RSS feed of articles posted on the league website to distribute to the social hubs (using Twitterfeed).

Whilst there is nothing wrong with streamlining activity to make it more efficient, the downside of this approach is that you can be unaware of what is happening in your online community if you’re not present. So you see a lot of news articles, some fan comments and questions, but no response from the league. Ignoring your fans is not a great way of developing a loyal customer base.

As an example, as a paying attendee to the Finals, I enquired via Facebook as to the schedule of events on the day. Attending with a small child, this information was important to me and not available on their website. Sadly the question went unanswered, probably due to an unmanned account.

The Finals Day

Let me just say the BBL Playoff Finals were one of the best, value for money sporting events I have attended. For £21 per ticket, you could see the Final, the All-Star game, a Schools Final, a French acrobatic Basketball Display Team and several other events. The day was very well organised and a great showcase for the BBL.

In terms of social media activity on the day, I had low expectations – and that is not anything to do with the BBL per se. Social media use as an event enhancement is still in its infancy. The NBA and Premier League examples mentioned above are more the exception than the rule, and I wouldn’t expect anything significant in a smaller league, particularly as geo-location adoption is still in an early (but rapid) growth phrase.

What I was pleasantly surprised to see leading up to the day was a fan photo tagging competition on Facebook, with a prize of tickets to the Final. It was encouraging to see them experimenting with this approach. Hopefully it proved successful, enabling more innovation in the future.

Upon arrival at the venue – the National Indoor Arena in Birmingham – I checked in on Foursquare. I was the only one, but it was early. Perhaps that would change nearer tip-off… It did, but sadly it peaked at 4 people. My chance at the ‘Swarm’ badge will have to wait a little longer. Maybe next year. It would be unfair to put this on the BBL. It’s a reflection of geo-location uptake generally.

A scan of Twitter around related terms revealed very little in the way of conversation from fans during and after the game, the majority being score and news article updates from the League or clubs.

Recommendations

The great thing about all the new social platforms, apps and technology is that there is so much to play with. It’s a great opportunity for an organisation to experiment and strengthen its customers’ loyalty towards it product or service. With the BBL, for starters, I would suggest:

• Monitor and participate in the conversion around the BBL brand (Radian6 is great for this). At very least, respond to direct questions via Twitter and Facebook. Preferably, start and encourage conversation.

• Merge the two Facebook accounts. You’re doubling your efforts and reducing your impact. Go with the newer Fan page (has benefit on being able to message all your fans) and don’t forget to switch the link on your website homepage

The NBA on Youtube

• Consider other social networks. A Youtube channel would be a great way to share what is a very exciting and visual sport. Check the NBA page on Youtube as an example. Put game footage up there. Let fans add their own videos. Perhaps run a fan video competition. The same approach could be taken with a Flickr photo account. In both instances, let the fans add content – make it theirs, not a corporate place – and you’ll strengthen their interest and connection

• Make it easy to share the website articles by adding social share buttons. Given the popularity of their networks, I’d certainly recommend a Twitter Tweet button (from either Twitter itself or Tweetmeme) and a selection of the Facebook suite of buttons (Like, Share, Send, etc.). This gives fans an avenue to share content of interest with their friends, removing the reliance on the league to be the only source of distribution.

• On game day during the season and at events, encourage the use of a hashtag, such as #bbluk or #bbl2011, so fans on Twitter can follow and join in the conversation (just don’t use #bbl as it means “Be back later” in Twitter parlance).

• Make use of geo-location technology by running a game day check-in competition. Using Facebook Places or Foursquare (or both), any fan who checks into the venue will be eligible for the competition – be it to win merchandise or perhaps a prize draw for entry into a half-time free throw competition.

Overall, I think the BBL are taking very positive steps into the social arena and it could pay dividends. Their approach going forward will be crucial. Social media use is growing at an astronomical rate and other sports are already staking their claim to space within it. If basketball in the UK is to thrive, the League should embrace social with a passion and view it as a central pillar of their acquisition and retention strategy.

How else could the BBL use social media to engage with its fans? What have you seen from other sports or clubs that has worked successfully? I love to hear your thoughts so please fill free to chip in via the comment section below.

If you liked this article, please stroke my fragile ego by clicking the ‘Like’  and/or Tweet button. It makes me smile.

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2. Twitter statistics: UK traffic increased 22-fold in year
3. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Customer Service via Twitter

"HE RECKONS IF YOU CAN'T SEE THE TWEET IT DOESN'T EXIST"

What’s worse – not providing customer service or providing poor customer service?

That’s a question I’ve pondered recently as a consumer, whilst experimenting with utilising Twitter as a means of contacting brands when I’ve needed assistance. It’s been an interesting and varied experience, something we as marketers should consider for our own businesses.

You don’t need me to tell you times are changing. With the prolific adoption of social media, companies that are not monitoring brand mentions are missing a huge opportunity to serve their customers or to build / repair their reputations.

The conversations about your brand are happening in the social space whether you like it or not. Making like an ostrich and sticking your head in the sand is not going to make it go away.

But why would you want it to? The benefits of monitoring the social sphere are plentiful. For instance:

• answering customer questions to aid use or encourage sale
• addressing / resolving customer complaints to improve satisfaction
• directing non-customers to useful services or info (both your own and others), as a longer term, value-based relationship builder
• crowdsourcing new product development ideas or improvements to existing products

The list could go on, including being a revenue generating source, if appropriate to your business (though I’d avoid the direct, hard sell approach).

It’s early days as a service medium however, and consequently customers are encountering a mixed bag of experiences. Here are 3 of my own:

The Good – LOVEFiLM

I love film and love the approach of this company. They clearly ‘get’ how to use this medium for relationship and brand building. Not only do they share film news, run competitions and converse in an engaging, cheerful manner, they provide bloody good customer service.

For example, having watched ‘Numb3rs – Season 1’ (sue me, it’s a guilty pleasure), I wanted to move on to Season 2 but it wasn’t listed on the site (though Season 3 was). A quick exchange of tweets with @LOVEFiLM and they’d dispatched an enquiry to their catalogue team with a promise to come back to me with an update. Crucially they did, less than 24 hours later I received a follow up tweet to say the DVD had been sourced and would be available shortly.

One happy customer.

The Bad – Halifax bank

The polar opposite of LOVEFiLM is the Halifax bank. They don’t even have a Twitter account. So when they changed their bank charges at the end of 2009 – a move that appeared to leave a large proportion of their current account customers worse off – the howls of protest online fell on deaf ears.

Now, could they have lessened the negativity by participating in the conversation? Maybe, maybe not. But wouldn’t that have been preferable to adding to the frustration by ignoring their customers?

(I switched to a much friendlier bank, by the way)

The Ugly – BT

BT has a customer service account – @BTCare – though many would agree with my assertion that the name is a fabulous oxymoron.

They clearly try to provide a good service, having invested time, money and resource into their solution. For this they must be commended. However, they may want to review its application.

When I tweeted about the trouble I was having with my internet connection, they were quick to respond with a tweet within a couple of hours – even though it was the weekend. Their apology and offer of help was appreciated. Ignoring my reply was not.

When I did finally get a response a couple of days later (following more tweets), it was evident I was being dealt with by someone who had no record of our earlier conversation (or didn’t look it up). Then when I had to switch the conversation over to the telephone I had to start my conversation all over again.

I found the whole process incredibly frustrating. When you can’t get something to work and someone comes to your rescue offering a solution, only to disappear, then reappear with some kind of amnesia and no solution, your hopes are cruelly dashed.

It doesn’t help that they seem to have a lot of problems with their service. A thankless task for their customer service people, if I ever did see one.

Make my day

So, back to my original question – which is worse? Not providing any service like the Halifax or having a poor experience such as the one with BT?

In a vacuum I’d probably say no service, but in reality I was more annoyed with BT. Of course, I’d love it if all companies I dealt with were like LOVEFiLM. Sadly, they’re not, but its something we as marketers should aspire to with our own businesses.

What are your best experiences with businesses using Twitter? What about the worse? Please add your comments below, I’d love to know your thoughts.

If you aren’t monitoring your brand in social media and would be interested in finding out more, I’d recommend speaking with the good folks over at 6Consulting, the UK partner of Radian6.

Related posts:

1. Cut your advertising budget by 10% and invest in customer service
2. Social Sports: the ball is in your court
3. Salesperson of the Month: your Customer

photo credit: coquetboy

And that was 2009.

Hopefully yours was a good one, it certainly was for me.  On reflection, much happened in 2009 – both from a personal and web perspective. So much, in fact, it’s hard to imagine it all happened in just 365 days.

I felt like I learnt a lot this year. Much of which, I can say was due to Twitter. On the 5th of January 2009 I wrote my first blog post, entitled ‘What’s the point of Twitter?‘. I’d heard about it, wasn’t overly enthusiastic about it, but thought it was worth a go for a month. I never looked back and now check it at least a trillion times a day via my laptop or iPhone.

Twitter gave me access to the minds of brilliant people. Particular favourites being Chris Brogan, Brent Payne, Brian Clark, Lisa Barone, Scott Stratten and Steve Rubel. I’ve learnt a tremendous amount from them all (many thanks!), impacting my day job and the handful of personal endeavours that have spawned over the year. It’s been an incredibly enriching experience.

It makes me very excited about the prospect of 2010 – what on earth will we learn and acheive this year?

As we close the book on 2009, I’d like to thank everyone that has read my blog this year (or at the very least, come looking for images to re-use). It’s been a very enjoyable experience – one that I need to dedicate much more time to this year.

For one final look at 2009, I’d like to share with you the Top 10 It’s Digital Marketing posts this year. Enjoy!

1. Twitter Statistics: UK traffic increased 22-fold in a year (24th June)

2. Google Profiles to take on Monster.com in job market? (7th May)

3. 10 Insider Tips to win a Search Agency pitch (2nd March)

4. Ryanair: Cheap flights and cheap service (24th Feb)

5. Building an App for Twitter (2nd July)

6. 10 Signs you’re addicted to Twitter (25th March)

7. Social Proof: The wisdom of crowds (15th Sept)

8. To find a job think like a SEO (13th Feb)

9. Sex, Drugs & Rock & Roll: Google Maps Mashup Style (23rd Nov)

10. Social Media Innovation (9th Oct)

Have a happy and prosperous 2010 everybody!

Gary

Related posts:

1. Digital talent: riding the wave of change
2. Ryanair Cheap Flights and Cheap Service
3. Is Search Marketing Really That Important?

Now is the time to innovate, not stick your head in the sand and wait for the storm to pass by.

That is the theme of my article on social media innovation in this quarter’s edition of Figaro Digital Magazine.

Front Cover design by pod1

The takeaway thought from the article was that whilst budgets are being cut left, right and centre, that doesn’t mean that you should just bide your time and wait for the sales figures to look a little rosier before you start being creative again.

In fact, if you do that it will probably be too late. At least one of your competitors would have had the gumption to use this difficult time wisely by experimenting. As soon as the market picks up they will be able to break into a full stride whilst you’re still crouching to tie your laces.

You may be thinking that you can’t afford to experiment when your budgets are so low, but who said anything about spending big? You don’t even have to take big risks. You just need to do something different.

For instance, look at where you spend you budgets right now. Like the majority of marketers you’ve probably had to reduce budgets over this past year. What did you cut? Did you look at your activities and wonder what their return was? Did you keep some things because ‘we’ve always done that’?

It might be worth having a look again. It’s very easy to keep doing the same old things, but as the saying goes you can’t really expect a different outcome if you keep putting the same stuff in.

As noted in the article, you can do something very different for your company – and at little expense – if you can get involved in social media. It’s a wild frontier land at the moment, where the rules are fluid and the pitfalls and rewards are as diverse as the possibilities.

In essence, it’s an opportunity. You can shape, innovate or change. You can influence your company’s reputation, your can engage with a new breed of customer and you can discover incredible new ways to do business.

And you can do that without spending a penny.

Related posts:

1. Unfollow the anti-social media policy
2. Social Media: Are you listening to the good stuff too?
3. Social Sports: the ball is in your court

Has Twitter killed long form blog writing?

Is ‘traditional’ blogging already redundant in this micro-blog world?

Is it convenience that makes us tweet rather than blog or is it lack of something to say?

Has today’s bite sized dumbed down media reduced our attention span to the point we can’t focus beyond 140 characters anymore?

Do you spend more time skim reading tweets of those you’re following but less time reading the article they link to?

Is it better to write blogs in snippets of thoughts no longer than 140 characters at a time?

Is Twitter a reflection of how we think, in scattered, abbreviated sentences?

Has Twitter trained our minds to filter information in headlines, sifting the wheat from the chaff?

I’m efficient with words. I get to the point. Halve your words and halve again – isn’t that what @nickusborne taught us?

Isn’t it gr8 that we can shrtn wrds w/o u losin plot? Or is it just me that thinks that takes longer to read?

If @mashable @Techcrunch @econsultancy @mattcutts hang up their keyboards & newspapers really do die who will we RT?

What’s better a blog post of 204 words or 12 tweets of 140 characters? Thoughts?

photo credit: luc legay

Related posts:

1. 10 Signs You’re Addicted To Twitter

Robin Goad, Research Director of Hitwise UK revealed some interesting statistics regarding the growth of Twitter today.

Writing on his Hitwise blog, Goad reported UK traffic to the micro-blogging site has increased 22-fold in the last 12 months. That growth has meant that Twitter.com has leapt from the 969th most visited site (May ’08)  in the UK to 38th (May ’09). The most impressive aspect of that growth is the fact that 93% of it has come in the first five months of 2009 alone.

As Goad rightly pointed out, that number in all likelihood should be even higher if you factor in the vast number of third party applications such as Seesmic, Tweetdeck and Twitterific that people use to access Twitter remotely.

On the same day it was reported that the number of companies using Facebook’s automated advertising system has tripled over the last year.

According to the article on WARC.com,

‘Brand owners are increasingly attempting to utilise the developing range of social media tools to connect with consumers, with Coca-Cola, Kraft and Starbucks among the most successful proponents of this strategy on Facebook thus far.

The website – which has 200 million users worldwide – is expected to generate ad revenues of over $300 million (€214m; £184m) in 2009, enhancing its position at the expense of rivals such as MySpace.’

Which leads me to think that if the guys at Twitter want to make any money they had better move quickly with a monetisation model to capitalise on the social network’s massive growth. Many would argue that they have already squandered an opportunity by observing this popularity tipping point rather than acting when the signs were there at the beginning of the year.

An ad supported service is a highly contenious issue that never fails to produce polar opposite opinions. But Twitter only needs to look towards MySpace to realise that sometimes your time in the sun can be finite and that perhaps now is the time to act.

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1. Social Sports: the ball is in your court
2. Twitter killed the blogging star
3. Mobile statistics: Building a case for your mobile site & app

Depending on your Twitter Follow list, you may have already seen the buzz over changes to Google Profiles recently. Whilst the product has been around for a while (in relative obscurity), two recent announcements have fixed the spotlight firmly upon it.

First off was a relatively low key announcement a few weeks ago, revealing that you could personalize your Google Profile URL to include your name (nicely termed a vanity URL). Then followed an announcement that Profiles are to start appearing in the Google search listings.

Cue a whole bunch of savvy people flocking to Google to ensure they could secure their ideal vanity url before someone sharing their name (or a cybersquatter) grabbed it. The news from Danny Sullivan that Google Profiles pass PageRank might just have contributed to the rush.

Since then there has been a lot of speculation regarding Google’s intent with its Profiles. A popular theory is that it is the start of a manoeuvre to take on the social network giants, Facebook and LinkedIn. There are many arguments for and against such theories, but it would certainly be quite a feat to unseat either colossus when you consider their size and integration into their users’ lives.

Highly Targeted Advertising

The most interesting theory I have read came from Slate’s Farhad Manjoo. In posing the question ‘Why would Google want a social network?’ he suggests that the motive is “to get to know you better – and thus, to serve you more profitable ads”.

The theory being that Google already knows so much about you through your use of search, Gmail, YouTube and your exposure to it’s advertising network, that it can already paint a pretty good picture of who you are and serve you appropriate ads. However, once you start adding links to your social network pages and blogs to your Google Profile, it can start to view you in the context of your relationships.

To quote directly from Farhad’s article:

“And you might find yourself giving Google a lot of personal info, too. In setting up my profile, I handed Google the links to my pages at Twitter, Facebook, and Friendfeed. By analyzing those sites—not to mention everything that it already knows about my contacts through my activity at Gmail and Google Voice—the company could probably create a startlingly precise map of my friends and family. You can think of it as a shadow social network: All of a sudden, Google has the ability to traverse my entire social circle, and I didn’t even have to approve a single friend request.”

A Monster Mash?

So if Facebook, LinkedIn and advertising are the most likely (or newsworthy) applications for Google Profiles, what else could Google use them for?

Slightly less sexy, but entirely possible, would be a new recruitment service – GoogleJobs.

Now it’s probably worth pointing out that is just a possible application, I have no evidence to suggest this is in Google’s plans. Consider it an option.

If you take a moment to consider what a Google Profile actually is – a page listing your personal details, job title, company, and interests/achievements (via links to your blog, LinkedIn and other social network sites) – then it’s not far removed (from a data perspective) from the CV / resume that you upload to sites such as Monster, Careerbuilder or Jobsite.

By applying a similar thought process to Farhad’s advertising theory, the Google Profile content and its subsequent linked pages would enable Google to construct a far more comprehensive biographical essay of your professional life than you could probably attempt in writing your own CV / resume.

By compiling this data for each Google Profile user, Google would have the potential to create a CV / resume database of a volume to challenge those of global recruitment giants such as Adecco or Monster.

When you consider Google’s penchant for providing services for free (see Gmail, Google Analytics, Google Docs, etc.), developing this database and opening it up to the world’s recruiters would pose a significant threat to those operating in the online recruitment market.

It wouldn’t necessarily even need to be entirely free to recruiters. There are services provided by LinkedIn that could be replicated / modified for GoogleJobs – such as InMail, LinkedIn’s brokered communication channel that enables you to contact users directly with career opportunities. A Google variant would provide a payment model, whereby recruiters would pay for direct access to Google Profile users (not to mention all the on-page advertising opportunities throughout the process).

The Sticking Points

Obviously this is just an idea and not without its issues. Volume, for a start, is a significant hurdle. Prior to the recent announcements, Google Profiles had seen a rather underwhelming take up rate. That has likely jumped in the last couple of weeks but is without doubt still some way off LinkedIn’s 40 million global members.

However, if we’ve only learned one thing in the decade since Larry and Sergey first announced ‘We’ll call it Google”, it’s this – Google have a habit of building products that become very, very, very popular. When you consider all the moves they are making to join their disparate products up, it is inevitable that a common element throughout will be a Google account – the first part of the puzzle. If they can convert those to Google Profiles then you can tick off the volume issue.

The other issue is one of privacy. It’s unlikely that Google would legally be able to add every Google Profile owner into a jobseeker database without the appropriate permissions. Plain and simple, not everyone is looking for a job or wants to be contacted with unsolicited offers. The Google Profile sign up process would need to provide an opt-in process (an opt-out approach would like cause many legal hassles around the globe) to enable a user to express their preferences. This would likely mean a significant portion of the Google Profile user list would not be available to search. This takes you back to issue #1 – a need to increase the volume again (at least while you’re working on your conversion rates) – probably much to the relief of those currently operating in the recruitment industry.

As I said, just an idea. We’ll wait and see what happens next.

Related posts:

1. Google Profiles in UK Search Results
2. Top 10 Brands Account for 45% of UK Internet Time