This is the second article of the two part series by Eric Mitchellette, business coach and consultant, reporting on the recent Twin Cities seminar titled, “Reputations” by Chris Brogan, co-author of Trust Agents (New York Times bestseller on social media), speaker, trainer and all around social media guru. See the first part, Social Media – Building Influence, Reputation & Profits.
Chris stresses that to make the best use of social media, businesses and individuals must be helpful to those with whom they interact. That means they must listen, connect, and then publish. We will address each of these key topics individually.
Listening
The Internet and social media offer tools such as Twitter, blogs, Facebook et al, through which businesses can “listen” to what is being said about them. The economic downturn was partially caused by companies not listening to the real needs of customers and just pushing inappropriate home mortgages and related financial products on them.
Make no mistake about it. If you have been in business for any length of time, conversation about you and/or your company is taking place on the internet. But how can you engage and participate if you know nothing about it? There are free monitoring services you can use to help you listen to things related to your company.
Google Alerts will quickly alert you when something is posted about you (your name), your company (company name) and your blog/website (domain name).
TweetBeep will quickly alert you when someone on Twitter tweets about you (name or username), your company (company name) and your blog (blog name).
BackTweets will alert you when someone tweets about something on your blog and/or website using your domain.
Connecting
You can learn about “third-party influencers”, also known as “trust agents” on social networking sites such as LinkedIn. Get to know these people and their interests. When tweeting those with whom you do business, remember that it’s all about “them”, not about selling your products. It is not good social media practice to use Twitter as just another means to dispense coupons. Obvious promotional attempts to sell to followers will not go over well.
When using social media, talk about others first; talk about yourself or business last. A good ratio is 12 to 1 if you want to gain trust and credibility. Use e-mail newsletters and articles to aid in gaining that trust. Additionally, talk up competitors and/or competing products, which will add to your business’s credibility. Talking up competitors/products is not only a courtesy but a reality.
Chris gave the example of the CEO of a Japanese electronics company who, during a public meeting, brought out a competitor’s product and admired it in front of all in attendance. The CEO owned the competitor’s product and used it in addition to the products his own company offered. The reality is that customers in many cases have a complementary mix of products from more than one company of the same product family.
Social media can be used by companies to develop new products by finding out how customers use their existing products to solve problems. No need for assembling customer focus groups. Customers will actually create their own products ahead of a company’s R&D team. When businesses track how customers use their products – through their online order pages or social media sites – new products or uses come into view.
Company blogs for only company business are useless and a turn-off. Companies MUST go and find where customers and clients are, not where the company wants them to be. Companies must also anticipate where customers and clients will be in the future.
Give-away products and services can attract interest and be very profitable. An example is Red Hat software: they give away their product but sell billions in service offerings.
Publishing
Offer various ways to connect by posting videos and other content. The primary goal is to make sure that you are listening to the customer when offering content in any form.
Companies do not own their reputations. Their customers, current and former employees and interested others own it. However, a company may be able to manage their reputation. Who will your company employ to help manage its online reputation?
Social media will influence the candidates who apply to your company. Know what others are saying about the work environment in the company. A company’s culture is of interest to web influencers. They determine the size and caliber of the candidate pool available to a business.
Traditional and online media can complement each other in order to drive website traffic, build reputation, trust, customer lists, revenue, and profits. The key is finding the right balance of resource commitments using both forms of media.
Last November, Chris spoke for a few minutes at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York and in the previous article of this series I promised you the video. So enjoy!
In conclusion, social media requires a thick skin. However, it is an opportunity to address issues and fix problems publicly. Many companies fail in the eyes of reputation builders (customers or interested others) because they take too long to correct problems by simply being too slow and reactionary. Companies must have plans in place to respond quickly to publicity and news events, whether good or bad. Correcting problems publicly online demonstrates to the web community that a company is engaged and cares.
Thank you Eric for bringing us this two part series. If you would like to contact Eric, you can do so by emailing him at emitchellette@comcast.net or visiting his LinkedIn page.
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Social Media – Building Influence, Reputation & Profits
If you would like to contact me, you can do so by emailing me at mike.clough@bestbizpractices.org or visiting my LinkedIn page.
Posted by: Mike Clough
