MackCollier.com

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The Importance of Creating Your Own Blogging Path

It seems that a lot of people are wanting to copy the efforts of popular bloggers.  They want to figure out how to be the next Chris Brogan or Mashable or Jessica Northey.  I wanted to talk about why I think that’s wrong, but first I wanted to tell you about a couple of my favorite bloggers (and people).

The first is Gini Dietrich.  I’m sure most of you know and love Gini and her blog, Spin Sucks.  Gini is sharp as a tack, but what I love about her writing is that its business-oriented, but personal at the same time.  Even when she is talking business, she still writes in a way that makes you think you are listening to your best friend tell you how their weekend was.  Everyone loves her writing and her style, which is exactly why she has such a passionate community of readers.  She posts almost every day, usually TWICE a day if you count guest posts on Spin Sucks, and she averages dozens of comments on her posts.  Gini’s readers love her, and as she clarified in a post here, her readers are driving business to her.

The other person I wanted to point you toward is CK.  In contrast to Gini’s 2 days a day and dozens of comments a post, CK posts about twice a month, and gets about 1-2 comments per post.  But what CK also does is have a laser-sharp focus with the content she creates via her blog, and elsewhere.  Don’t believe me?  Google ‘B2B Mobile Marketing’ and see how many of the results on the 1st page are content that CK has created.

The point here is, both Gini and CK (and you both should know each other, BTW, consider this an introduction!) have created a content strategy that works for them.  Too many of us try to replicate what is already working for someone else.  That’s THEIR strategy.  We all need to come up with our own path and our own voice.  Look at Gini, she has created a wonderful community on her blog, and that community is helping to drive business for her.  On the flipside, CK is breaking one of the biggest ‘rules’ of successful business blogging: She’s only posting once or twice a month.  But it works for her because every post is optimized and helps her expand her online footprint in the B2B marketing space.

Think about this especially if you are a solopreneur.  You are completely responsible for your blogging strategy, so you have to consider what works for YOU more than what works for anyone else.  You can and SHOULD draw inspiration from other bloggers, and you should be aware of what’s working for them.  But you should NEVER attempt to copy someone else’s strategy and approach if it’s not right for you.

Here’s a personal example:  When I started blogging in 2005, everything I read about successful blogging said to blog like Seth Godin does.  Short, quick, to the point.  Write your post as if it’s an executive summary, because no one has the patience or attention span to read more than that.

I want to tell y’all, it took me FOUR DAYS to write my very first blog post.  Because I agonized over that post for 3 days and 23 hours and 30 mins because I had no idea how in the hell I was going to condense my first blog post down to 3 paragraphs.  Finally, I said ‘screw it!’ and wrote the post *I* wanted to write, in 30 mins.  As soon as I accepted that the ‘blogging rule’ about proper post length didn’t work for me, I wrote the post I wanted to write.

And that’s made all the difference.  The beauty of blogging is that it gives us all a way to share our voice.  I told my friends at the Live #Blogchat at the B2B Forum this, but I honestly believe that most people are smarter than they give themselves credit for.  I fear that too many bloggers feel that their posts will only be popular or ‘work’ if they mimic the way a particular blogger writes.  Five years ago when I started blogging there was no David Armano or Beth Harte or Shannon Paul that I could learn from.  And no doubt they were inspired by other bloggers, but they also found their own voice and their own blogging path.

If you are losing your passion and excitement for blogging, if could simply be because you are trying to walk someone else’s path, instead of your own.

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5 Steps to Giving Your Blog Clarity and Focus

One of the most common complaints that struggling bloggers have is ‘I don’t know what the blog’s focus is’.  This is a BIG problem for a lot of bloggers, but it’s one you need to overcome if you want to truly have a successful blog.  Here’s 5 steps to getting you past this roadblock:

1 – Figure out who you are writing for.  It all starts here.  Once you figure out who you are writing for, then your content strategy to reach that audience will fall into place.  For example, I am writing this blog for companies that want to learn more about how they can successfully use social media to connect with their customers.  That’s my primary audience.

Your primary audience could be potential employers, potential clients, or your friends and family.  But whoever it is, YOU need to figure it out, because if you don’t know who you are writing for, you can best bet that your readers won’t.  And you need to pick something more concrete than ‘people that want to read my stuff’.

2 – Pick your title and tagline.  After you’ve decided who you are writing for, then look at your blog’s title and tagline.  You might not be able to do much with the title, but your tagline should explain exactly what your blog is about.  Note that mine is ‘What are you doing?  Helping companies understand the ‘social’ part of social media.’  That tells them exactly what they are getting into.

3 – Use the 3-second rule.  If someone that doesn’t know you arrives on your blog, how long will it take them to figure out what the blog is about?  If it takes longer than 3 seconds, assume they will leave.  This again, is where the tagline can really help you, because when we arrive at a new blog, we immediately look for the blog’s title/tagline, and then any pictures.  If we are confused by the title/tagline, and don’t see any pictures of the blogger, we will probably leave.

4 – Keep your sidebars clean. On a lot of blogs the sidebars are a hot mess.  In fact on some, the fancy widgets etc are actually throwing off the formatting of the entire blog.

When it comes to the sidebars, think about how the content/information/widgets you put there will help you reach your blog’s goals.  You will have a TON of options for adding stuff to the sidebar(s), but that doesn’t mean you should.  Less is often more when it comes to sidebars.  Remember, the content is the star of the blog, don’t make it take a backseat to flashy widgets and such on the sidebar.

5 – Be careful with ads on your blog.  A lot of bloggers think that they aren’t a ‘pro’ blogger until they have ads on their blog.  Or that they won’t be viewed as being a ‘serious’ blogger without ads.  Horse-hockey, ads take up space that could be given to content that could help your readers.  Period, so don’t make that tradeoff unless those ads are worth your time, and that of your readers.  Remember, the purpose of ads on a blog is to ultimately ENHANCE the experience of the blogger AND the reader.  If the ads aren’t making you any money, and aren’t relevant to the reader, then they are a total waste of time.  I’m not saying that you shouldn’t have ads on your blog, but I am saying you should only keep them if they make sense for both you and your readers.

So there are 5 quick tips for bringing clarity and focus to your blogging efforts.  If you only follow one, PLEASE pay attention to #1 and decide who you are blogging for.  Everything else will flow from that.

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Turning failure into success

I was standing behind my podium, and I began our presentation.  A minute or two into introductions and laying out the reason for our talk, I lost my train of thought.  A second or two suddenly grew into a very noticeable and pregnant pause.  I glanced across the room at my co-presenter, who was standing behind another podium, hoping he would bail me out.  The look on his face told me I was on my own.  I glanced up at the audience, and the face of my instructor in the back row of the room.  She was looking over her glasses at me with a frown that screamed ‘you aren’t prepared, are you?’

I wasn’t.  I didn’t review my notes prior to the class, thinking it would go better if I ‘just winged it’.

In reality I stopped talking about 2.3 seconds ago, but it felt as if we were in Day Three of Mack’s Great Silence.  I glanced back down at my notes, and for a brief second I seriously considered running from the classroom, even giving the door a few feet from my podium a sideways glance.

Thankfully, I found enough composure to finish the presentation, and I believe I ended up with a B in the Business Communications course.  But I just wanted out of there and left knowing that if I never had to give another presentation in my life, I would be a happy camper.

Fast forward almost exactly 9 years to last week in Boston at the B2B Forum.  As I was talking to other attendees and we were discussing our favorite sessions and especially how good the keynotes were, I caught myself thinking ‘I really wish I was presenting here’.

The lesson I’ve learned from this is that your failures can lead to successes.  I used to hate public speaking, as most introverts do.  Now I love it, because I found a way to learn from my past failures, instead of letting them define my ability to speak in public.  I learned from that horrible experience in undergrad, and now prepare meticulously for every presentation.  I always know the material well enough that I can ‘just talk about it’, and that greatly improves the quality of my presentations.

Nine years ago I was so nervous in front of a room of undergrads that I seriously considered running from the room, now I love speaking, and get paid to do so.  Life can be funny sometimes.

What failures have you used to shape your current successes?

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Congrats to the 3 blogs we’ll be reviewing at #Blogchat

If you remember last month we reviewed 4 blogs during one of our #Blogchats, a new one every 15 mins.  That #Blogchat was very popular with y’all, so I decided to make it a monthly feature!  The 3rd Sunday of every month we will review 3 blogs from #Blogchat participants.  This is a VERY small way I can hopefully repaid you guys for helping to make #Blogchat so successful.  I really do appreciate every one of you!

Now, for how we will handle tonight’s #Blogchat:  Every 20 mins starting at 8:00pm Central, we will review one of the 3 blogs listed below (they will go in the order listed).  Each blogger has given us some feedback on the areas they want us to pay close attention to, but if you see something else that catches your eye, make note of that.  And feel free to be critical of the blogs (we are trying to help each other) but please also offer suggestions for improvement.  For example, if you tell a blogger that ‘your left sidebar is really weak’, explain to them how they can make it stronger.  Just try to make sure that every time you point out that something is broken, you follow up with ‘here’s how you can fix it…’

And without further adieu,  the winnahs are…

Todd Jordan’s The Broad Brush.

Here’s Todd’s feedback for us:

1) Sidebar -> is it relevant/interesting to my blog’s focus

2) Landing pages -> serious help needed here. What can I change/add/delete- HELP!

3) Contact page specifically.

 

The Nerd Connection.

Here is Allison’s feedback for us –

I’d love to have The Nerd Connection [http://allisondduncan.com] looked at for readability. I feel like the sidebar may be too cluttered and the articles may be too indepth to garner much readership.  I’m trying to reach bloggers in general, Nerds/techies as a niche, and wordpress users as a whole.

 

Senior Care Corner.

Here is the feedback Barry gave us (BTW Barry gave INCREDIBLE feedback, if you want to get your blog chosen for one of the future Blog Review #Blogchats, give as much information as Barry did here).

Our blog is written primarily for adults who have elderly family members for whom they are caring and/or about whom they care, often while living some distance apart. The blog is first an outlet for sharing information to help both the family members and the seniors about whom they care, which is an interest of ours from both personal experience and work. We would like to earn revenue by providing attractive products/services that solve problems faced by our audience but realize we need a larger regular audience to make it meaningful financially.

We value the #BlogChat community’s suggestions regarding design changes or feature we should consider to get more repeat visitors. From our stats, the overwhelming majority of our visitors are first-timers and we would like to get more of them to return or at least to follow our content through some means. Are we making it easy enough to get our information? Does the overall visual effect of our site turn off visitors or negatively impact their perception of the information we provide?

Many #BlogChat participants are either part of our target audience or will be at some point so the feedback would be valuable from that standpoint as well as their experience with successful blogs.

 

So those are our 3 blogs that we will be reviewing tonight! Thanks to everyone that submitted their blogs, if yours wasn’t picked, please resubmit it next month!  Please visit these blogs today and make some quick notes on what you would improve about each one, paying close attention to the areas that the bloggers asked for feedback on.  This will be a lot of fun and even if your blog isn’t being reviewed, you can still learn a ton from what others have to share!  See you tonight!

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How to grow your blog by leaving it

Beau wrote me an email asking the following: “Some time ago, you wrote a post called “40 Dead Simple Ways to Get More Comments on Your Blog.” This is a great post, and #27 in particular intrigues me: “Leave comments on other blogs.” You state: “The best way to grow your blog is to leave it.”

Could you share with me briefly just how this works? How is it that commenting on other blogs brings traffic back to one’s own blog? I suppose I could always leave my blog URL in a comment on someone else’s blog, but at a certain point this seems like spamming to me. My sense is that “URL-dropping” is not exactly what you had in mind here.”

Beau thanks for the question, and here is Beau’s blog.

Let me give you an example of this idea from 2005 when I started blogging. I was completely new to blogging, and I was writing on a group advertising blog Beyond Madison Avenue. Personally, I was hoping the blog could be a tool I could use to help me land a job. So I had a very vested interest in seeing it succeed.

Now I had no idea what blogging was about, but I knew I need a lot of visitors and a lot of comments. And BMA had neither. So I started reading all the supposed ‘best’ blogs, with the thinking being that I could learn from these other bloggers what the ‘secret’ to blogging success was, and then copy it for BMA.  So for the next few weeks, I started reading and studying the top blogs religiously. At the same time, I was writing every day for BMA, sometimes as many as 4 posts a day.  Nothing was happening.  No traffic, no comments, virtual tumbleweeds were rolling by and taunting me.

And I really wasn’t learning anything from the blogs I was reading, either. But as I was reading I was discovering new blogs that were interesting, and once in a while I’d even leave a comment on a post if I thought it was interesting. Over the next couple of weeks, I discovered more blogs, and left more comments on blog posts.

Then suddenly one day, BMA started getting comments.  At first it was only a couple, then every new post we wrote would start getting comments within an hour or two.  In a week we’d gone from a blog with zero comments from readers, to one where every new post was getting 5-10 comments!

Which was amazing, but I still had no idea what had prompted the change.  Then one day a reader left a comment and said that they were thanking me for the comment I had left on their blog, and wanted to come leave a comment on my blog.  That’s when it hit me: All these comments were coming from bloggers who wrote blogs that I had already commented on!  They had followed the link back in my comment to come check out my blog!

Beau thats when I learned one of the most fundamental truths of building engagement via social media: The more you participate, the more participation you get.  The more comments I left on other blogs, the more comments I got back on my blog. And it doesn’t work just for blogs, the more active I am on Twitter, the more tweets I get as well as followers.  And I don’t mean simply ‘name-dropping’ but actually participating in conversations and trying to build the discussion.

When you participate via social media, it raises your awareness.  It’s a way of getting your name out there, and getting people to notice you.

Now for increasing comments on your blog by leaving it, here would be my tips:

1 – Watch your referral traffic. If you don’t have a way to track your blog’s stats, there are many free options available. I use both SiteMeter and Google Analytics here.  But tracking your referral traffic will show you who is linking to your blog.  If you see from your referral traffic that another blogger has linked to your blog, go back to their blog and thank them.  Or even write them an email thanking them.  That simply encourages them to link to your blog again, plus comment on your blog.

2 – Leave comments on the blogs of readers that comment on your blog.  Same as above, this simply encourages them to leave more comments on your blog, because you are doing the same for them. It’s all about rewarding the type of behavior that you want to encourage.  This is one that I honestly don’t do as much as I should.

3 – Leave comments on blogs that are influential to your readers.  Think about where your readers are going now to get their information and connect with each other, and go there. By connecting with them there, leaving comments on posts, etc, you will get on their radars.  By participating in their space, that will encourage them to come check you out on your blog.

 

So those are some ideas on growing interaction on your blog, by leaving it. Again, the key to building interaction via social media is to participate. Great content will only help you if people know it exists, and that’s where interacting with others in THEIR space helps you build your own awareness.

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Review: #Blogchat LIVE at the B2B Forum

“So how does a Live #Blogchat work?”

I bet I heard that question fifty times this week, and my answer was always the same, “The same way #Blogchat works on Twitter”.

And it did. About 60 people showed up to Live #Blogchat, and we capped that number in order to have a smaller and more connected coversation.  What happened was a smart room full of people had a wonderful conversation and bounced ideas off each other and built on the ideas that others was sharing. It really was a perfect mirror to the online #Blogchat experience.  It even got to the point where smaller sub-conversations were developing (just like they do on Twitter), as people were going back to points someone else had made earlier to build on them.

To me, this represents among the best learning that can happen at conferences, when the attendees can connect with each other. As I said at the start of the #Blogchat, I think most people are smarter than they give themselves credit for, and I love that the Live #Blogchat was able to help facilitate these people to share their #smartitude.

And when it ended, I had several attendees tell me “You were right, it was just like it is on Twitter!”  Which was a very good thing 😉

Some of the main points we covered included:

  • Michael Brenner brought up a great point about content strategy in an enterprise environment. Should that strategy extend to govern how content is created no matter the tool?  Or should their be separate ‘rules’ governing content creation via different tools, such as a blog vs trade-show brochures? (Michael please chime in if you want to add to or clarify this point).
  • Bob Knorpp made the point that there is no ‘one size fits all’ rule when it comes to blogging.  He added that he is thinking of stopping his blog because he gets more traction on iTunes for his podcast.  Lou Imbriano countered that he thought every company should have a blog, and he talked about the impact his blog has made on his personal and professional life.
  • Matt Grant talked about how it can be hard to even determine exactly what a blog is, and how the tool is evolving over time.  He’s right, the line between a website and blog is getting blurry, and many people don’t consider it a blog if comments aren’t allowed.  I thought this point tied into Bob’s point about there not being a one-size-fits-all approach to blogging.

I definitely want to thank Marketing Profs for bringing the Live #Blogchat to the B2B Forum, and for Sensei Marketing and The Cooper Group for sponsoring the event.  Also, thanks to Sam Fiorella for co-hosting the Live #Blogchat, and for Brandie McCallum for live-tweeting the Live #Blogchat.  Click here to see the tweets from last night’s Live #Blogchat.  Thanks to everyone that attended the Live #Blogchat, and I wanted to share some of my favorite pictures below.  You can see all the pics in the set here.

 

How cool is this setup?
Meet and Greet before the smartitude starts!

 

Almost ready to get started!
A scholar and a gentleman, Lou Imbriano
It would not be a Marketing Profs event without CB Whittemore and Matt Grant

Seriously thanks to everyone that came, I love you guys!

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What impacts search traffic more, keywords in posts or post frequency?

So a couple of weeks ago I was blogging about how my search traffic seemed to be flat over the last few weeks.  I decided to do a 2-week experiment to try to see if posting frequency or posts with targeted keywords would have a bigger impact on increasing search traffic.  For the week 2 weeks ago, I posted 5 new posts during the week, but didn’t worry about targeting keywords in the post title or in the post itself.  Last week, I only posted 4 new posts, but I made more effort to target keywords and phrases in the post titles and the posts themselves.  Here’s a graph of search traffic over the life of this blog:

BTW, I promise my writing isn’t as terrible as it looks in this graph 😉  As you can see, there’s been a nice steady increase in traffic till the middle of April, and has been fairly flat since then.  The last two weeks at the end are with the red lines under the graph.

So two weeks ago I posted 5 times and didn’t worry about targeting keywords or phrases. I had 767 visitors from search the week before, and it fell to 705 2 weeks ago.  Now since 2 weeks ago included Memorial Day, that affected the search traffic a bit, but didn’t account for all of the drop.

Last week, search traffic rebounded nicely, up to 804 visitors from search, which was the 4th best week here ever for search traffic. And that was with only 4 new posts, but I made an effort in each post to target keywords and phrases in the title and post.

So what can we learn from this incredibly unscientific experiment? It seems that targeted keywords and phrases do a better job of increasing search traffic than simply posting more does.  BTW in case you were wondering, overall traffic last week was up over 50% over the previous week.  So the fewer posts with targeted keywords and phrases resulted in more overall traffic as well.

Writing this from the Huntsville Airport, so I hope to see some of you at the B2B Forum this week!

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Heading to Boston for the B2B Forum…

The B2B Forum is this week in Boston, and since its a Marketing Profs event, I know it will be stellar. If you are still wanting to attend, make sure you register via this link and use code BLOGCHAT to get a $100 discount. Remember that you have to attend the B2B Forum to participate in the LIVE #Blogchat on Tuesday the 14th.  Now if you can’t attend and still want to follow the sessions online, you can still register for viewing the B2B Forum online, use this link and register with code BLOGCHAT, that will give you a 30% discount!

I’m really looking forward to this event, and of course the second Live #Blogchat, which will be co-hosted by Sam Fiorella from Sensei Marketing, who is the main sponsor for this Live #Blogchat.  Thanks as well to The Cooper Group, who are also sponsoring this Live #Blogchat. If you cannot attend the Live #Blogchat (Bless your heart!), then please make sure you are following @SenseiMarketing on Twitter, as Brandie will be live-tweeting the Live #Blogchat on Tuesday night, just watch the #Blogchat hashtag!

Also, on July 1st I will have a special announcement of where the NEXT Live #Blogchat will be after B2B Forum. And what till you hear the venue that will be hosting it 😉

This week’s posting schedule will go like this: On Tuesday I will have a recap of my 2-week experiment on raising my search traffic by posting more vs targeting keywords.  We’ll look at the results, what worked and what didn’t.

On Wednesday, I will have a recap of the Live #Blogchat at the B2B Forum. On Thursday, I will have a recap of the B2B Forum. On Friday I will be back home and probably sleeping most of the day 😉

If you will be in Boston this week for the B2B Forum, please let me know! I’d love to connect with you and say hi!

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Delta’s latest PR episode details the need to engage your brand advocates

Steve Woodruff started an interesting discussion at his place about the latest PR quagmire that Delta Airlines finds itself in.  Apparently, some soldiers brought 4 bags onto their flights home, and were charged for those 4th bags, as per Delta’s policy.  The soldiers were assuming that they would not have to pay for the 4th checked bag, and were upset, and made a video about it (that has since been removed).

Delta, to its credit, was quick to address the situation on its blog, and has now changed its policy to allow for a 4th free checked bag for soldiers flying in economy.  But given what a hot-button issue this is, you can see in the comments that hundreds of people are outraged and angered over this issue.

And honestly, I feel sorry for Delta, especially the people on Delta’s blogging and social media team. They handled this issue about as well as they could, but they are still getting absolutely raked over the coals in the comments to their post.

But as I read through that post and scanned the wall of angry comments, I was looking for the one thing that I never saw: Comments from Delta’s brand advocates.  There are a few comments from people that are sympathetic to Delta’s position, but they are quickly targeted by multiple commenters siding with the soldiers.

And to be fair to Delta, they can’t stay and respond to the individual commenters. That would literally take them all day, and would likely generate even more angry comments.  Because this is an issue where most people, rightly or wrongly, are going to assume that Delta is in the wrong. And if any Delta representative tries to explain their side of the situation, more angry comments will be the result.

Which is why Delta should have its advocates speaking on its behalf. But Delta can’t rely on its advocates, because it hasnt invested time in connecting with and empowering them.

For example, let’s say Zappos caught itself in a PR nightmare similar to the one Delta is in now.  If angry customers started attacking Zappos, how soon would it be before Zappos’ fans would come to the brand’s defense? Pretty darn soon, and my guess is the number of negative comments against Zappos would decrease as a result. In the Delta example, in the absence of Delta’s advocates, the volume of negative comments seems to be increasing.

So my advice to Delta, who I am sure is scratching their heads wondering what they could have done differently, is to start today connecting with your brand advocates. Find your most passionate customers, and embrace them. Then the next time you have a PR fight like this one on your hands, you won’t be going it alone.

PS: And Delta if you or any other company is wondering how in the hell you embrace and empower your advocates, here’s your roadmap.

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Social Media is not a contingency plan for having a shitty product

For the last half decade, we’ve had it beaten over our heads that ‘it’s all about the conversation’. That all a company has to do is ‘be social’, to throw up a Twitter and Facebook account, and they have passed the marketing test. Add in a company blog for extra credit.

Of course, this is utter crap. If your product sucks today, it will still suck tomorrow if you start using social media. The only difference is that more people will know about it.

Now please understand that listening to your customers and monitoring what they are saying via social media is hugely important. But the quickest way to honk off your customers is to tell them ‘we’re listening’, and then prove to them that you are not.  You can’t simply monitor what your customers are saying, you need to apply their feedback and act on it.  You need to start a discussion with them.  You need to create a continuous feedback loop, so what your customers are saying about your product is understood internally at your company, and your company’s response is sent back to your customers.

The goal isn’t just to ‘be social’, it should be to establish connections with your customers that help you improve your existing products and business processes. For example, last year Dell had its first #DellCAP event in Austin.  This was where Dell brought in 30 customers that were actively using social media tools to discuss Dell and its products and services. Dell talked to these customers about several core areas of its business, as well as its products. Dell then took that feedback, and acted on it. A perfect example is its Facebook Tag Team app. One of the main feedback points that Dell customers gave during #DellCAP was that they would like a way to see how other customers are using Dell products. For example, if a Dell customer views himself as a hardcore gamer, he understands that fellow gamers will want Dell products that perform differently than a Dell customer that wants a PC to turn her home business.  So the Tag Team app was created with this feedback in mind. Here’s what Lionel Menchaca said when it was introduced:

Back when we invited customers to Dell for CAP Days, one of the clear requests we heard from customers regarding Dell.com is that we need to make it easier for them to find the system or accessories that will meet a specific set of needs.

Besides the request from CAP Days attendees, there’s  any number of studies that show most customers trust the opinions of their friends and family a heck of a lot more than what a company tells them. Here’s one of my favorite Hugh McLeod cartoons which illustrates that point beautifully.

How do we make it easier for customer to find the system they need based on how they plan to use it and augment that with content that’s written by our customers instead of us? The Tag Team app is our first attempt to bring those things together. We know a lot of our customers use Dell.com to research what kind of machine is right for them. That usually means starting with a product, browsing the product page, then digging into ratings and reviews from other customers.  With Tag Team, you can start by thinking about how you will use the machine and find the reviews from customers who are using reviews for that same thing.

 

Dell went beyond simply listening to the feedback its customers were giving, and actually used that feedback to improve its offerings based on its customers recommendations.  This is the difference between taking a crappy product and making it social, versus leveraging social media to improve your product.

Extra credit: Listening to your customers and then ACTING on their recommendations increases brand advocacy. Nothing impresses a customer more to tell them that you are listening, and to then prove that you are.

If you want to start using social media to actually improve your products and services, here’s some tips to get you started:

1 – Start monitoring what your customers are saying online. You should already be doing this, but if not, make sure you start ASAP.

2 – Make sure that information and feedback from Step 1 is collected and distributed internally within your company.  Marketing, PR, Product Design/Development, Customer Service, etc.

3 – Incorporate customer feedback as applicable. Just because one customer in Idaho says you should change a product feature does NOT mean you should spend millions of dollars to change your existing manufacturing process to accommodate one customers’s wish. But if thousands of customers are saying the same thing and many are saying they won’t buy your product as a result of this feature, then maybe its in your best interest to make the change.

4 – When changes are made based on customer feedback communicate that back to your customers. This will not only increase customer satisfaction once they see you are actually acting on their feedback, it will greatly increase the volume of feedback you get. And getting more feedback means the quality of that feedback improves. It becomes easier to distinguish between issues that are marginally important to your customers, versus ones that are affecting the majority, as illustrated in Step 3.

 

But make sure you push for Step 2, getting the feedback you collect via social media monitoring, distributed to relevant departments in your company or organization. That should get the ball rolling and help your customer move from being one that simply listens to social media conversations, to one that acts on them.