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#Blogchat is coming to SXSW!

UPDATE: #Blogchat LIVE at SXSW is officially SOLD OUT.  If you are on the waiting list please come anyway as this is SXSW and no one’s schedule is set in stone.  We’ll get in everyone that we have room for.  The location of the Social Media Clubhouse is 601 Brushy #107, between East 6th and 7th (one block East of Highway 35). The meet and greet with attendees and sponsors starts at 4pm, and the official #Blogchat will start at 5pm.  Please arrive as soon as you can so you can pick the floor/co-hosts you want to join, and to get a good seat!  I am SO excited about this and cannot wait to see y’all!

I don’t think I’ve ever been as excited to write a post as this one.  Two years ago #Blogchat started by accident, and now it’s coming to the largest Social Media conference/event on the planet: South By Southwest Interactive.

Next month in Austin, on Sunday March the 13th, #Blogchat will be LIVE at SXSW.  From 4pm – 6pm we’ll have a live #Blogchat at the Social Media Clubhouse.  This event is made possible because of two amazing sponsors, and I wanted to introduce both of them to you now:

Main Sponsor of #Blogchat at SXSW: 1680PR

1680PR is a specialized firm that provides advice in the particular fields of Public Relations and Strategic Marketing: positioning, branding, and imaging. Departments of State and government heads; music, film, and television personalities; entertainment industry executives; Native American Tribes and native enterprises; non-profit organizations; and entrepreneurs continue to benefit from the expertise of its consultancy.

The firm commands a distinctive presence in the global arena, leveraging the interdisciplinary strengths of no less than eight departments under the 1680 brand: Public Relations (PR), Social Media (SM), Talent, Motion Pictures, Digital Entertainment, Creative, Entertainment, and Artist Management.  They have offices in Albuquerque, Atlanta and Los Angeles.

You can learn more about 1680PR by visiting their website, blog, YouTube Channel and PLEASE follow them on Twitter.

Technology Sponsor for #Blogchat at SXSW – Dell

For more than 26 years, Dell has empowered countries, communities, customers and people everywhere to use technology to realize their dreams. Customers trust Dell to deliver technology solutions that help them do and achieve more, whether they’re at home, work, school or anywhere in their world.

Additionally, Dell is a corporate Social Media pioneer, with arguably the largest new media footprint of any brand on the planet.  You can learn more about Dell’s Social media efforts by following its Direct2Dell blog or on Facebook or YouTube.

The #Blogchat LIVE at SXSW Format

What we’ll do is have a live discussion at the venue about this topic: What can company blogs learn from personal bloggers?  Think about the ways that personal bloggers develop community and content on their blogs, for example, and how company bloggers could take these lessons and apply it to their own efforts.  If you’ve attended SXSW before and are familiar with the Core Conversation sessions, the format will be similar to that.  Just a bunch of smart people in a room together conversating and learning from each other.

#Blogchat will be held at the Social Media Clubhouse, which will be located in a 4-story(!) townhouse just a few blocks from the Austin Convention Center.  Special thanks to Chris Heuer, Kristie Wells and the good folks at Social Media Club for helping us promote this event.

Now the Social Media Clubhouse will be a fabulous venue for #Blogchat, but there were a couple of considerations.  First, due to its capacity, attendance for the event has been capped at 100.  So if you want to attend, please make sure you register here ASAP!  Second, the max capacity for any floor is about 40, so that means we’d have to spread the conversation out over 2-3 floors!  Which also means that I can’t be the only host here, I need some help!  So without further adieu, here are your FIVE co-hosts that will be joining me to lead the conversations for #Blogchat – SXSW:

Ken Lingad – The driving force behind 1680PR, Ken is referenced in the global media arena as a “visionary impresario.” Ken Lingad (Isleta Pueblo) is overwhelmingly acknowledged as the sole “architect” behind the most successful public relations and strategic marketing campaigns ever fielded in Santa Fe’s Contemporary Native Arts arena.  And he gets to work with clients in the film, music and entertainment industries.  Yeah, I want that job!  You can learn more about Ken here.

Richard Binhammer – Besides being a Senior Manager at Dell, Richard is one of the most influential people in the corporate Social Media world, and since 2006 he’s been helping Dell’s Social Media and Digital teams connect with Dell’s customers.  And he’s played no small role in Dell being an amazing case study in how corporations can use Social Media effectively.  As he likes to say about Dell’s efforts, ‘We’re Listening’.  Oh and he’s a helluva nice guy to boot.

Shannon Paul – Shannon currently manages Social Media for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan.  Before that, she was the Social Media Specialist for Peak6 Online, and the New Media Manager for the NHL’s Detroit Red Wings.  Additionally, she is a former #Blogchat co-host, and remains one of the most popular and requested co-hosts #Blogchat has ever had.  And besides just radiating smartitude, she’s also one of my favorite people on the planet, and one of the nicest people you will ever meet.

C.C. Chapman – C.C. is truly one of the pioneers of social media.  He’s been immersed in using these tools for years, and was one of the first podcasters on the internet.  But that’s on the personal side of social media.  Additionally, he’s worked with some of the largest brands on the planet, such as Coca-Cola, HBO, American Eagle and Warner Bros to help them use New Media to connect with their customers and brand advocates.  He also co-wrote Content Rules with Ann Handley, the definitive book on creating amazing online content.

And we’ll be announcing one more co-host at the event!

From 4:00-5:00pm, we will have a meet and greet, just like we do every Sunday night at 7pm for an hour before the actual #Blogchat starts.  And here’s a hint: You’ll want to connect with Ken, Richard, Shannon and C.C. especially to learn more about the work they are doing.  Maybe you bloggers could even try to snag an interview with them?

Then at 5:00pm the fun starts and we’ll have conversations happening on 3 different floors of the Social Media Clubhouse, with Ken Richard, Shannon C.C. and myself leading the discussion on each floor.

So the schedule is:

Topic – What can company blogs learn from personal bloggers?

Meet and greet with sponsors, co-hosts and attendees – 4:00-5:00pm Central

#Blogchat LIVE at SXSW – 5:00-6:00pm

So please run (don’t walk) to the EventBrite page and register for #Blogchat LIVE at SXSW!  Remember, space is limited to the 1st 100 people, so please get in ASAP!  And if you can’t join us in Austin, don’t worry, Ken and I will be pulling double-duty on the 13th, and we will co-host #Blogchat on Twitter at its regular time starting at 8pm Central, covering the same topic, What can company blogs learn from personal bloggers?

Finally, let me close with this.

Thanks to all of you.  The past two years of #Blogchat have been a truly amazing experience.  It’s been truly humbling to see all of you embrace the idea of creating a place on Twitter where we can all come together and learn about blogging from each other, and together, create something larger than ourselves.  #Blogchat coming to SXSW is a testament to the power of your combined smartitude, and the size of the community that all of you have played a role in creating over the last two years.  I will miss every single of one you that can’t join us in Austin next month, but know that there will be more Live #Blogchat events in the future.  And I will also be bringing more amazing co-hosts and sponsors to #Blogchat that will help us all continue to grow what is the largest weekly Twitter chat on the planet.

All because of you.  Thank you.

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How Is Twitter Impacting Search and SEO? Here’s the (Visual) Proof

Yesterday’s post on Social Media Crisis Management was a bit of experiment to see how highly I could rank for the term “Social Media Crisis Management”.  I also wanted to share my results with you, so you can hopefully learn a bit more about the importance of SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

First, I picked a fairly specific term, in “Social Media Crisis Management”.  I checked prior to publishing yesterday’s post, and there were just a shade under 29,000 Google results for that term.  This is important because you need to pick the most specific term as possible, because this will result in less competition, and (if you’ve picked the right term for you) it means you will be more likely to get the ‘right’ kind of traffic.

Second, I made sure the term was in the title and mentioned a couple of times in the post.  I also made the term “Social Media Crisis Management” at the front of the post title, I originally had the title as “A No-Nonsense Guide to Social Media Crisis Management” but Amy wisely suggested that I flip it so the term I was targeting was at the front of the title.

Now, a note about keywords and phrases: You do need to pick and target specific keywords and phrases, but you also need to incorporate them into the post in a way that makes sense to the reader.  I only used that term in the post twice, because that’s all I felt it needed.  It might have helped the results to get it in there once or twice more, but I felt I would have had to compromise the flow of the post’s structure to do it, so I didn’t.  You always have to remember that you are writing for people, if the post doesn’t make sense to them, then it really doesn’t matter if it does well in search results.

So, when I published the post yesterday at 12:20pm, there were 28,900 Google results for the term “Social Media Crisis Management”.  I tweeted a link to it at that time.  Fifty minutes later at 1:10pm, the post was already showing up on the 3rd page for a Google search of #Social Media Crisis Management”:

Social Media Crisis Management, Twitter I tweeted out another link to the post around 2pm, and then at 2:30pm, it moved a bit further up the results on the 3rd page:

Social Media Crisis Management, TwitterThen 15 minutes later at 2:45pm I checked again, and 2 hours and 25 minutes after being published, the post is now on the 1st page of results for the term “Social Media Crisis Management”:

Social Media Crisis Management, TwitterAs you can see, the post was now at #7 on the internet for that term.  I searched one more time at 3:40pm, and the term had risen up to #6 on Google, and above the fold (barely):

Social media crisis management, Twitter

As of this writing it has settled back to #7.  But the interesting part is that all of the above screenshots were taken by me searching with Google with results for EVERYTHING, and when I was NOT signed into Google.

So at 3:20pm, I decided to check the Latest results for “Social Media Crisis Management”, and this is what I saw:

Social Media Crisis Management, TwitterTHIS is huge.  The Latest results factors in real-time linking behavior, so it is picking up all the tweets where my post was being RTed, and as a result, the top half of the Latest results for the term “Social Media Crisis Management” were completely devoted to MY post.

And this is what the same search showed me this morning at 9:20am:

Social Media Crisis Management, TwitterI couldn’t get all of the results in one screenshot but EVERY result from the above was about my post.  Every result in the latest column on the left, the Top Link on the Right, and the Top Updates under it.  My post owned the 1st page of Latest search results for the term “Social Media Crisis Management”.

That’s a perfect example of how Twitter and Facebook sharing is now impacting Google results.  And it’s also a wonderful illustration of the value of being active on Twitter.  I tweeted a link to that post several times yesterday and this morning, which was a big reason why it moved up the Google results so quickly, and a big reason why it dominated the Latest results for that term.

So those of you that are trying to sell your boss on why they should use Twitter, you just got another argument in your favor 😉

But there are two things I want you to take away from this:

1 – This was very basic SEO stuff that any of you can do.  It was simply a case of targeting a specific phrase, and inserting it in the post.  Now as far as my having a large and engaged Twitter network and readership here (thanks guys!), that definitely played a big factor in the post moving up the results so quickly.  But at a basic level, everything I did from a SEO perspective is what you can do with every post.  And you should.

2 – You can best learn by breaking stuff.  There are a gazillion ‘How to’ and ’10 Steps to…’ articles about using social media, and I have certainly written my fair share of these.  But the best way *I* learn is if you can show me the first 1 or 2 steps, then leave me alone and let me figure out the remaining 8 or 9 steps for myself.  Don’t just blindly follow my social media advice or anyone else’s.  Use the advice as a guide for how you can get started.  But there is no one RIGHT way to use social media.  Never forget that.  I can tell you what works for me and my clients, but you still need to tweak any advice so that it is perfect for you.  SEO geeks will no doubt see a ton of things that I could have done or altered in this experiment to get even better results.  And moving forward, I am going to continue to tweak and ‘break stuff’ in order to better figure out how all the moving parts work together.

So go forth, be social, and keep breaking stuff 😉

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Social Media Crisis Management: A No-Nonsense Guide

Past Social Media dramas involving The Red Cross, Groupon and Kenneth Cole are good reminders of the importance of having a solid social media crisis management plan in place.  At its very basic level, the proper handling of a social media crisis should consist of two thing:

1 – A quick response

2 – A proper response

Let’s look at both areas:

Responding quickly to a social media crisis

If you look back at many of the social media dramas that have played out for companies over the past couple of years, many of them were exacerbated by a slow response from the company or organization.  The delay in responding meant the people that were upset had more time to voice their displeasure with the company, to other people.  Which raised awareness of the problem, and made it far worse.  The Motrin Moms episode could have likely been defused very quickly, if Motrin and its agency had been proactive in responding to complaints on Twitter about one of its commercials.  But since the crisis occurred on the weekend, when the brand and agency weren’t monitoring Twitter, it was allowed to grow and fester.  By Sunday, most people were complaining more about Motrin’s lack of a response, than they were the commercial itself.

So you can’t respond quickly, unless you know what you are responding to.  That means you need to aggressively monitor your brand’s online mentions.  There’s no excuse for any company that conducts business online, to not monitor online mentions.  Even if you are a small company with a limited budget, there are still free tools you can use to monitor social media.  If you are a mid-sized to larger company, you should seriously consider investing in a premium monitoring suite that will track not only mentions, but trends and sentiment as well.  But the point is to know what is being said online about your company or organization.  Remember, when did Noah build the Ark?  Before the rains came, not after.

So now that you are monitoring online mentions, then you can see what is being said about your brand in (more or less) real-time.  This also means that when a situation arises that needs to be addressed, that you can quickly mobilize and formulate a response.  We’ll talk more about the tone of your response in a second, but another key benefit of monitoring is that it tells you WHERE you need to respond.  If there is a potential crisis developing on Twitter, then that’s where you need to respond.  If it’s on a single message board or forum, then you need to find a way to respond there.  The point is, you need to go to the source of the complaints, and interact with people there.

Responding properly to a social media crisis

So if you have identified a potential issue that you need to address, how should you respond?  Here are 4 common sense tips for handling complaints or negative online feedback:

1 – If someone is leaving negative comments about your company, respond. Even if they are intentionally attacking your company (or ‘trolling’), then invite them to please contact you directly so you can help them with their issues.  And remember, if someone is leaving comments that personally attack your employees or customers, or that contain profanity or inflammatory language, you should delete them.  Now if they are simply saying that they think your company sucks, deleting these type of comments will tend to draw more of the same.  People can see when someone has crossed the line with the tone of their comments, and they won’t fault a blogging company for deleting comments in this case.

2 – Be thankful and polite. Nothing escalates a negative comment into a full-bore flamewar faster than an ‘Oh yeah?!?’ reply from the company.  You have to always remember that the person commenting thinks their complaint is warranted.  And many times, they are right.

3 – If you are in the wrong, then apologize.  And mean it.  The two most magical words in putting out a social media crisis are ‘We’re sorry’.

4 – If commenters are jumping to the wrong conclusion about your company, kindly correct them with the proper information.  Just as you don’t have to accept profanity or attacking comments on your blog, you shouldn’t feel that you have to accept if a blogger or commenter is posting inaccurate information on another site.  But again, remember to correct the misinformation with a respectful tone.

5 – Thank them for their feedback, and encourage them to provide more. Leave your email address so they can contact you off the blog, if they choose.  This communicates to everyone that you WANT engagement and want to communicate with them.

Now for the elephant in the room

Even if you respond quickly and appropriately, you still have to fix the problem.  People are upset for a reason, and you still need to address that reason, and correct the problem.  It might not be a quick fix, but you need to let people know how you are handling the issue, and what steps will be taken to correct the problem.  This is where you can use your social media presences such a blog or Facebook page to communicate to customers and supporters what your plan is for handling the crisis.  But you need to have a plan, you need to communicate that plan (not every detail, obviously), then you need to execute it.

Does this help?  Also, to get another real-world example of social media crisis management, check out this video from @GaryVee on how he handled a social media crisis he found himself in.

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The 3 Critical Content Creation Questions You Must Ask (And Answer!)

content and blog creationHow many times have you heard the adage that ‘Content is King’?  Great content is extremely important, but when it comes to actually creating great content, there are three questions you need to ask, and answer:

1 – Who do you want to reach with your content?

2 – How will your content help you reach them?

3 – What action do you want them to take as a result of your content?

Now before we get into these questions, I wanted to tell you about a couple of posts I wrote.  The first post was a rant about the idea that ‘Content is King’.  A lot of people believe this is gospel, but I don’t, I think community is as important, if not moreso than simply good content.  So I wrote a post on this topic, with the provacative title of “The Idea That ‘Content is King’ in Blogging is Total Bullshit“.  I thought this post was a home run.  It got over 70 comments (at the time the most comments ever for one of my posts), and a few hundred ReTweets on Twitter.  And the day it was published, The Viral Garden had a record traffic day, up 900% over avg traffic.  In short, I was pretty damn proud of myself.

Then I got a letter from a friend, who said “I see you have created a lot of drama on Twitter today with that post.  Let me ask you something: How many clients did that post get you?”

Shit.  My friend was right, I didn’t get a single dollar’s worth of business from that post.  It got a TON of interaction and engagement, but didn’t create any business for me.  That’s when I realized that I hadn’t written it to connect with potential clients, I had written it to be a rant that would get attention, and that’s exactly what happened.  But since my blog was a business development tool, that post missed the mark.

Another example is a post I wrote a couple of years ago on using Google Analytics to better track your blog’s statistics, so that you can improve your blogging efforts.  I wrote this post specifically to help companies use GA to get a better handle on what’s happening on their blog, so they could improve their blogging efforts.  The post got a couple of comments, and a few RTs.  Very little engagement.

But a couple of months after I wrote that post, a potential client found it by doing a Google search on site analytics, and found the post to be valuable, and contacted me.  I ended up getting a $10,000 project with their agency, and later got a second $5,000 project with them.  Plus, the agency owner referred me to another business that has so far given me over $7,000 in work.  So that one post, which was written to solve a specific problem that blogging companies were having, has so far generated over $22,000 in business for me.

The point in both these examples is that you have to consider each of the three questions above when creating content.  Let look at each of them:

Who do you want to reach?

When you write that next blog post, when you create that next video, or even when you send that next tweet, think about who you want that content to connect with.  If you are a business or organization, you probably want to connect with potential customer or clients or vendors or partners.

Which ties back to my first example.  That post got a LOT of interaction and engagement, but the problem is that the engagement wasn’t with potential clients, it was with fellow marketers and consultants.  My friend Beth Harte often says that too many people in the ‘social media space’ aren’t writing for clients, they are writing for each other.  But a lot of us do this because we believe that we need to create content that gets a reaction.  We need to create content that gets the RIGHT type of reaction, and that comes from targeting the RIGHT people.

How will your content help you reach them?

If you want your target audience to find your content, then you either need to bring it to them, or you need to give them a reason to seek it out.  Recall my second example above of the post that I wrote that got me $22,000 worth of business.  This is a perfect example of what I mean, in that case, a client found my content because they were seeking it out.  They were looking for a solution to a problem they were having.

Which brings up another point to consider about engagement.  Just because your post isn’t getting comments or Likes or RTs doesn’t mean there isn’t engagement happening.  I had no idea that a potential client had read that 2nd post, till they emailed me.  Not everyone will comment or RT or Like a post, and sometimes the ones that don’t, are the most valuable.  Which brings up the 3rd question you need to ask…

What action do you want them to take?

Let’s assume you have figured out who you want to reach with your content, and that content has reached them.  Now, what do you want that person to do?  Let’s say you want that person to contact you about purchasing a product or service from you.  That means that with your content you need to either ask for the order, or you need to make sure that the content makes such a compelling case for your ability to help them, that they decide to contact you directly.

Now I know that some of you might be a bit uneasy about adding a ‘Call to Action’ to your content.  This can be something as simple as ‘Please leave a comment’ or more direct like ‘Call us now at 1-800-555-5555 to purchase yours!’  And I don’t think you need to add a call to action to every post, but you do need to give your readers some direction.

Remember this: If your content has created value for someone, then you have earned the right to add a call to action.  Because if your content is truly valuable to me, then I am WANTING to see a call to action.  I may not be ready to buy from you, but I probably want to subscribe to your blog, or at least want an option to share your content with my network.

So when you are creating content, keep those three questions in mind, who do you want to reach, how will your content help you reach them, and what action do you want them to take?

What about you?  Do you have rules you follow for the content you create?  Do you know who you are trying to reach and what action you want them to take?

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Which is better for your company, a blog or Facebook page?

Facebook pages and blogs for companiesThat’s the question that David Griner is going to help us answer at tonight’s #Blogchat, starting at 8pm Central.  #Blogchat is a weekly Twitter chat that happens every Sunday nite at 8pm Central where we discuss a different blogging topic.  This week, David Griner will be co-hosting as we discuss which is better for your company, a blog, or Facebook page?

David is a social media strategist for Luckie and Company, a Birmingham-based marketing agency that’s been crafting Facebook strategies for clients for years.  One of Luckie’s bigger successes is the social media marketing effort it has crafted for iconic Southern snack company Little Debbie, including a Facebook page with over 750,000 likes.

So David knows the power of Facebook for companies and organizations.  And since a lot of your companies are curious about whether a Facebook page or blog is right for them, I decided that would be the perfect topic to hash out tonite at #Blogchat.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

1 – Which is better for companies, a blog or Facebook page. David and I will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of both blogs and Facebook pages for companies.  We’ll need you to help us by giving us your thoughts on both.  We’ll stay with this topic till 8:30 CT, then we’ll shift to…

2 – If a company has both a blog AND Facebook page, what’s the best way to make them work together?  I think a lot of businesses have both, so if they do, how can they make them work together?  What’s the best way to use the FB page, and what should be the role of the blog?  And for those of you that work for companies or organizations that are using a blog and Facebook page together, we’ll need you to help us answer this question.

So join us at 8pm Central tonight for #Blogchat.  And before you do, make sure you are following David on Twitter, and that you have subscribed to his blog, The Social Path.  David recently wrote a post on the new Facebook redesign that’s been insanely popular, you’ll definitely want to check it out.

And if you’ve never joined #Blogchat, here’s what it’s all about.

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What happens when a brand evangelist’s message isn’t the same as the brand’s?

All week we’ve been talking about the value for companies and organizations of connecting with, and even embracing and empowering their brand evangelists.  But a recent post by Sean Howard raises a very valid question:  What if an brand evangelist creates content about a brand, that the brand might not approve of?  To illustrate his point, Sean even created a parody video about Marketing Profs, so I invite you to click over and check it out.

Here’s a couple of other possible examples that brands might object to:

  • A popular political blogger that’s an evangelist for a particular restaurant chain creates a post lauding the chain.  However, the post contains the blogger’s usual proliferation of 4-letter words, and the blogger actively supports several organizations that the restaurant chain’s founders are opposed to.
  • A video blogger creates a humor video where he does a ‘taste test’ of several different soft drinks, and spits each out, declaring that it tastes like (use your imagination here).  Then he finishes by drinking Pepsi, says it is amazing, and not at all like the other soft drinks.

The idea is, what should a company do if one of its brand evangelists creates promotional content for that brand, that the brand objects to?  How should they respond?

As I told Sean over at his place, I think it all starts with the connection that a company has with its evangelists.  The company/organziation has to make the effort to connect with its evangelists and communicate to them exactly what their branding is.  Companies and organizations can’t invite their evangelists to promote them, then try to slap their wrist if they create content on the brand’s behalf, that the brand doesn’t agree with.

Remember that evangelists WANT to see your company or organization succeed and they WANT to promote you.  And they WANT you to talk to them.  To give them direction.  To show them how they can best help you.  Take advantage of this to work WITH your evangelists to help them better do what they already want to do: Sing your praises.

How do you think companies and organizations can best communicate to their evangelists how their brand can best be promoted?  Should they?

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How The Red Cross defused a potential Social Media crisis situation

Coming off the heels of Kenneth Cole’s recent PR blunder on Twitter, the Red Cross found itself in a potential crisis situation on Twitter a couple of days ago.  Apparently, one of its employees that tweets from the @RedCross twitter account, inadvertently sent a tweet that was meant for her personal account in which she tweeted: “Ryan found two more 4 bottle packs of Dogfish Head’s Midas Touch beer… when we drink we do it right #gettngslizzerd”

To its credit, the Red Cross quickly acted on the ‘rogue tweet’, deleted it, and posted this response:


Now anyone that’s attempted to use multiple Twitter accounts, especially one for your employee or a client, knows how easily this can happen.  And then the employee that sent the ‘rogue tweet’ also acknowledged her mistake on her own Twitter account:

Now all week here we have been discussing the value that evangelists have for companies and organizations.  What happened next in this story perfectly illustrates today’s lesson: Your evangelists will come to your aid in a crisis situation.

The Red Cross’ evangelists on Twitter quickly latched onto the #gettngslizzerd hashtag, and used it to drive blood donations!  Many committed to donating blood and some even took pictures as they were:

And to their credit, @dogsfishbeer, which was mentioned in the ‘rogue’ tweet, also encouraged its followers to get involved in the donation drive:

One of the ways we talked about in the post on creating brand evangelists was speaking in a human voice.  The Red Cross did this, they quickly admitted their error, and apologized.  And did so with humility and a splash of humor.  Then Gloria tweeted out an explanation as well.  How the Red Cross handled this potential crisis situation went a long way in rallying its evangelists to come to its aid.  They quickly forgave Gloria for the tweet, then took the hashtag and used it to drive donations.

This is the power of connecting with your evangelists.  As we talked about earlier this week, they WANT to see you succeed.

What did you think of how the Red Cross handled this situation?  What did they get right? Is there any advice you could give them for avoiding a similar situation in the future?

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How Dell is using Social Media to connect with its brand evangelists and detractors

All week we have been talking about the value of brand evangelists and why companies should be connecting with them.  Today I wanted to look at a company that’s connecting with not only its evangelists, but some of its detractors as well.

Recently, Dell held a CAP Days event in Germany.  CAP stands for Customer Advisory Panel, and it is an event where Dell meets with some of its customers that have had both good and bad things to say about the company.  This is the 3rd CAP Days event that Dell has held.  I am partial to this event since I helped Dell facilitate the first one last Summer in Austin, but I also think it’s an amazing case of how social media can help businesses connect with brand evangelists.

I talked to Richard Binhammer a few days ago, and he said that the participants for all the CAP Days events (there have been 3 so far in the US, China and Germany, with plans to expand to other locations) were identified via the social media and online monitoring that Dell is already doing.  A good example of social media making existing business processes more efficient.

But back to the most recent CAP Days event that was held in Germany.  Dell met with 10 customers that all had feedback for Dell, both good and bad.  What I found fascinating was that Dell was extremely open with what it learned about connecting with its customers at this event.  Here are the takeaways from the company’s point of view, and when you read these, keep in mind that this was published on Dell’s Direct2Dell blog:

  1. Our customers seem to have lost the emotional connection to Dell. They no longer understand the benefit of our direct relationships with our customers.
  2. We have reliable products and good support (if they pick the right support option!), but our advertising is misguided and an annoyance to some of our customers.
  3. Listening can be incredibly powerful. It’s unusual that a company the size of Dell listens to customers in such an open forum. Customers had never experienced such open dialogue with a global company.
  4. Customers do care about Dell, and they are spending their own time helping other customers and defending Dell online.
  5. We must deliver a better customer experience. There are millions of customers out there who will be loyal to Dell and buy more if we up our game and deliver the best Customer Experience!

As I was reading this, it seemed as if this was being written as an internal reminder and lesson for Dell’s employees, as much as anything.  But note the bolded areas (which I added).  How often do you see a big brand talking this openly and honestly about themselves?  Not very.

And let’s remember that Dell has this honest feedback available to them because they sought it from their customers.  They monitored the online conversation around their brand, identified key participants, and met with them directly to learn from them how they can improve their business and customer service processes.  Now they are taking that feedback and not only improving existing business and customer service efforts, but the CAP Days program itself is becoming a more efficient way to connect with customers.

And it is becoming a way to convert detractors into evangelists.  Think about yesterday’s post and how we talked about the ways that companies can create brand evangelists.  We talked about how companies should monitor online conversations, how they should respond to customers and talk to them on their level, and how companies should understand who their companies are.  All of these are present in the CAP Days program.

When I was involved in the first CAP Days event last Summer, I was talking to one of Dell’s customers that had some issues and problems with Dell’s products and services.  I listened to him tell me about his problems, but then he added ‘Mack I want to see Dell succeed’.  And then he told me how being involved in that event had opened his eyes to the fact that even though Dell was making mistakes, that it showed that they were committed to finding those mistakes, and correcting them.  He had arrived at the event skeptical of Dell’s commitment to improvement, but left feeling much better about being a Dell customer.

In closing, I want to restate the supreme importance of monitoring online brand mentions for all companies.  Especially higher companies like Dell.  While I am thrilled with the progress Dell is making, I also see that it’s putting their competitors at a self-imposed disadvantage.  Dell is taking the scary step of connecting directly with its online customers, and they are reaping the rewards of their bravery.

Here’s some very basic (baby) steps that your company can take to better connect with your online customers:

1 – Start monitoring online mentions of your company, brand, competitors, and industry.  If you’re a larger brand that has hundreds if not thousands of new mentions daily, you should probably invest in a monitoring platform to help get deeper insights from the data.  Or if you’re a small business, you can probably get by with Google Alerts or a free option.  Here’s a post I wrote on how to set up Google Alerts in 5 mins.

BTW a big reason why I think it’s important for your company to monitor online mentions is to get a better understand of WHO your online customers are and WHAT they are saying.  I still think many companies live with a largely unfounded fear that bloggers are people that are going out of their way to slam their company.  This is almost always incorrect, and companies can see this by monitoring and uncovering exactly what customers are saying about them online.

2 – Start reaching out directly to customers that mention you, especially bloggers.  If you see a blogger that’s covering you, offer to connect them with someone at your company that can give them better information.  For example, Richard mentioned CAP Days in Germany to me, I told him I would like to do a post on it (this one), and he had Carly Tatum (who helped facilitate CAP Days Germany) to give me more information on it.

Your company should be doing the same thing, you should be reaching out to bloggers and other online customers that are talking about your brand, and interact with them.  This will help ensure that these customers get accurate information about your company, and if you handle the exchange correctly, it will encourage more coverage from bloggers.

3 – Act on feedback you get from online customers, and let them know you are doing this.  If a customer raises a valid point or complaint online, help them, but then you can use that exchange to let other customers know that you want their feedback as well.  By listening to customers and acting on their feedback, you are ensuring that you will get more (and better) feedback, but also, you will improve customer satisfaction.  Customers want to be respected and heard by the brands they buy from.  They appreciate the ones that show a willingness to do this.

So those are some ideas on how you can better listen to your customers’ online conversations, and act on them.  Oh and if you are curious, here is a short video (in German) that Dell created to document their CAP Days event in Germany.  It will give you an idea of how the event was structured.

What are your thoughts on how Dell is using CAP Days to directly connect with its evangelists, as well as detractors? Is this something that other big brands should be doing? What could be improved about the process?

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5 ways to create evangelists for your brand

In yesterday’s post, we made the business case for why connecting with your existing brand evangelists is better than trying to reach influencers.  Now I’m sure some of you were reading that post and thinking that your company doesn’t have a lot of brand evangelists, especially not online.  If this is the case, can you create brand evangelists?

I think you can, and here’s 5 tips for doing just that:

1 – Start internally by exciting your employees.  This will foreshadow a bit what’s to come with engaging externally with customers.  But so much of the affinity that people have for brands, comes from the people that represent that brand, especially in a retail setting.  How much of the devotion that Starbucks evangelists have for the brand is tied to the friendly service they get from baristas?  I recently read a blogger (wish I could remember who) that joked that when they were feeling down, they liked to call Zappos support cause they always made them feel better.

So it stands to reason, if your employees aren’t excited about your brand, your customers won’t be either.  One way to excite your employees is to listen to them, and to empower them to share their ideas and voice internally.  A perfect example of this is Best Buy’s Blue Shirt Nation, which is basically an internal socnet for Best Buy’s employees.  It’s a central place where the employees can come together, collaborate, share ideas, and see those ideas acted upon by management.  As co-founder Gary Koelling points out in my interview with him, this works because many of BBY’s employees are in their 20s, and fluent in using social media and expressing themselves via these tools.  So Best Buy, perhaps somewhat by sheer luck, has found a way to create a wonderful tool to let employees express themselves, and help each other.

2 – Understand who your customers are, and what draws them to your brand.  You likely have already done some research into who your customers are, and why they buy from you.  Are you tracking them online?  Do you know what they are saying about your brand?  It’s important to understand the good as well as the bad.

One of the quickest ways to create an evangelist for your brand is to quickly resolve a problem that a customer has.  And the wonderful thing about social media is that it has not only given customers all these sites and tools to express themselves, but companies have access to the same sites and tools.  If a customer vents online about a brand, the brand then has the opportunity to interact with that customer, and change their opinion of the brand.  And this often happens, companies such as Dell have seen firsthand that interacting with online customers and solving their problems, improves online perception.

3 – Interact with your customers on their level and in their voice.   As mentioned above, one of the attributes that many customers value in a brand is its voice.  We don’t want a stale and corporate voice, we want one that we can more easily relate to.  This is where the ‘be human’ advice comes from.  If a company is talking in a voice that’s consistent with the customer’s own, then the customer is more likely to listen.

This is where interaction is crucial.  The more engagement and interaction the brand has with its customers, the better both groups can understand the other.  And this engagement can be something as simple as interacting with customers on their blogs or Twitter pages.  But this engagement helps put both parties on the same level, which increases understanding, which increases trust, which increases the chance that a customer will become an evangelist for that brand.

4 – Monitor what customers are saying online, and respond. If you aren’t already, you should get a monitoring system in place to track what customers are saying about your brand, as well as where they are saying it, what they are talking about, etc.  This will give you great insights into how your customers are thinking.

But also, as you engage with your customers, that will encourage them to interact with you more.  Which gives you more feedback, and more chances to interact with customers, and improve their perception of your brand.  And give your customers multiple channels to leave you feedback.  It’s great to encourage blog comments, but give them your phone number, give them an email address.  By giving your customers multiple ways to talk to you, you are communicating to them that you DO want to talk to them.  That tells them that you actually value their opinion and feedback.  Which definitely helps improve the customer’s perception of your brand.

5 – Embrace and empower your existing evangelists to market for you.  The idea here is to make it easier for your biggest fans to do what they are already doing, singing your praises.  If you have customers that are singing your praises, then you need to give them a microphone, right?

And let’s be honest, who will be a better salesperson for the average brand; that brand, or an extremely satisfied customer of that brand?  We tend to trust fellow customers more than brands.  This goes back to the idea of speaking to customers in a voice they recognize.  We can relate to fellow customers more than we can relate to most brands.  Because customers speak in a human voice that we can relate to, where most brands speak in a salesy and promotional voice.

So those are some tips for how your brand can connect with your customers and create more evangelists for your brand.  To extend on this theme, tomorrow we’ll look at how one of the biggest brands in the world is going directly to its customers and evangelists to get the good, bad, and ugly from them.  And if I’ve sold you on the power of engaging and empowering your brand evangelists, please email me as I’d love to talk to you about how we can launch an evangelist engagement program for your brand.

Pic via Flickr user LoudTiger

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5 Reasons why Evangelists are better than Influencers

As you might have guessed by the volume of coverage it’s getting here, I am thrilled that the ‘online influencer’ debate is heating up.  Why?  Because it gives me plenty of chances to tell smart companies like yours why it makes far more business sense to empower and embrace your existing evangelists.

If smartly done, targeting influencers has real business value.  But it’s more for creating short-term buzz rather than sustainable growth.  And even IF you do target influencers, it should often be done in conjunction with connecting with your company’s evangelists.

Here’s 5 reasons why I think it’s better to target evangelists rather than influencers:

1 – Evangelists don’t have to be paid, just acknowledged. You don’t have to pay customer evangelists to promote you, they are already doing that.  And they aren’t doing it FOR the money, they are doing it because they love your company and believe in your products.  So you reward them by acknowledging them.  By pointing out who they are, and thanking them.  All that does is validate their love in you, and it motivates them to promote you to even more people.

2 – Evangelists have a vested interest in promoting you to their networks. With influencers, you are trying to give them something, usually cash or a gift, in an effort to convince them to promote you to the network that they have influence over.  But evangelists are already interested in promoting you to their networks.  Think about it, when we have a product that we love, that we buy consistently, we tell others about that product, right?  If you love your Honda, guess what happens when someone tells you they are in the market for a new car?  You tell them how much you love your Honda.

I love this quote from Bill Samuels, CEO of Maker’s Mark on the philosophy behind his company starting a brand ambassador program (emphasis addded): “We enjoy talking to our customers one-to-one. It really is in our nature. We never worry about the fact that this is inefficient because we are only talking to 50 or 60 or a thousand or ten thousand instead of a million. Which you do when you try to slap everybody on the ass with an advertising message. Because we know that our next customers are going to come from their efforts, not from our efforts.”

3 – Evangelists can help you reach your target market. In their groundbreaking business book Creating Customer Evangelists, Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba had a wonderful quote that illustrates why evangelists are your best salesforce.  They said “They know your target audience better than you because they are the target audience!”  How efficient would it be to have a direct and uncluttered line to the exact customers you are trying to reach?  That’s access that your evangelists have, and you have access to your evangelists.  All you need to do is make the connection and reap the rewards.

4 – Evangelists will tell you what you are screwing up, then they will help you fix it. One of the big fears that companies have about social media is that they fear hearing criticism from customers.  But evangelists are a different breed of customer.  Whereas other customers might blog that ‘You suck!’, an evangelist will say ‘I think Company X got it wrong here.  Here’s what they should have done.’  Evangelists may criticize, but they also offer solutions, and will help you IMPLEMENT their suggestions.

For example, my friend Melody is a HUGE Starbucks fan.  And she has one of the more popular Starbucks blogs on the planet, devoted to the company she loves.  Notice in this post, she reviews a new Starbucks drink, and explains that she’s not sure if ‘it will work’, then explains WHY she thinks this way.  She gives Starbucks actionable feedback because she cares about the brand.

But notice something else: That post has *72* comments!  Melody isn’t just blogging about her love of Starbucks, she has created a place where other Starbucks evangelists can gather and discuss the brand they love!  Passion attracts passion, and it’s on display in the comments section of every post Melody writes.  How valuable is the feedback that Melody and her readers leave via comments?

5 – Evangelists want to see you succeed. This might be the biggest misunderstanding that companies have toward evangelists.  These people really do love your company, and they want to see it be as successful as possible.  Why would you not do everything possible to embrace and empower these special customers?

To perfectly illustrate this point, I wanted to return to an example that Ben and Jackie shared in Creating Customer Evangelists.  As you might recall after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the airlines industry was devastated, as were all the airlines.  In October, SouthWest Airlines received a letter from one of its customers, Ann McGee-Cooper.  In that letter, McGee-Cooper told SouthWest that “We are encouraging our clients to fly Southwest Airlines.  We are buying more stock…and we stand ready to do anything else to help.  Count on our continuing support.”

And McGee-Cooper included something with that love letter to Southwest: A check for $500. With the check came an explanation that McGee-Cooper understood that at that time, Southwest needed the money “more than I do”.

How amazing is that?  This one example perfectly illustrates why evangelists are far more valuable to your company than influencers.  And a perfect love story since this is Valentine’s Day 😉

So there’s 5 reasons why I think evangelists are better than influencers.  If you would like to hire me to help your company use social media to connect with your online evangelists, click here to get more information, or email me so we can discuss your needs.

Wait…is your company looking for ways to create evangelists for your brand?  Check back here tomorrow and we’ll show you how!