How To Become Your Customers Friend

It has to make sense. We can't run around trying to track every single Key Performance Indicator that we can extract from Social Media, in a desperate attempt to justify it's use. It's already justified.
When social media blew up a couple of years ago, everyone thought it was free. Now I think it's safe to say that most executives have realized it's NOT free.
Qualified manpower, applications for your fan page, blog tools, prizes for contests and monitoring tools all ads up.

It's a swift of doing business. It shouldn't be treated as normal business, cus it's simply not.
In traditional business you pay 10 euros for marketing and plan on getting 20 back within a short period of time.
Social media is first of all a complete change of mentality that very few have yet understood. Almost a type of friendship. Like us, belong to us, follow us, check in with us...For what?
The easy way would say, for building a base of people to blast your marketing at.
The different way of doing business model would say - To create a bond. To be human. To get into their lives and have them let you be a part of theirs.

When we make friends we are humble. We listen to our friends, we don't yell. We invite them for a coffee, and in return they invite us back next time. If they treat us well we invite them for dinner at our house and when they need our help, we are by their side.
Friendship is not about exploiting eachother, trying to get the best and most out of the other person.
And friendship IS a win-win deal at the end.
This is what you want to ashieve as a brand doing business in a new and innovative way. You want to get invited to your customers home (their Facebook wall or Twitter feed), you want them to have your back and be loyal when a competitor offers them a better price. You want them to genuinely like you. Not change you for the first best option.
How do you do that? Be genuin, be nice, don't rush for the sale, be human, always over perform and happily surprise your customer, apologize if you mess up...

A KPI should be Online Reputation Management. How are people talking about us online?
A KPI should be engagement metrics, how are people sharing our content online?
A KPI should be referal traffic to your hub (website)
A KPI should be returning customers.

The sales come later, and maybe they´re not even direct sales. People are 71% more likely to purchase based on social media referrals. Maybe a person checks you out on twitter and 3 days later makes a sale because they had you in the back of your head, they were familiare with you already.

So do you engagement, be a brand evangelist, create a champion persona of your brand online, and the rest will come...Tweet

My Favourite Social Media Management Tool

This is the post I would have loved to read a few months ago. If you're looking for social media listening and monitoring tools, this post is my christmas gift to you :-)

When I started my current job I did a major reserach of social media monitoring tools.
I'm a big fan of aggregating content and having it on one place and being able to handle various accounts from the same base camp.
However it quickly turned into a nightmare trying out tools and discovering that my dads words "There is nothing called cheap" were true.
You get what you pay for, as always.

In my opinion there are 3 levels of these tools, and nothing in between, except for ONE; Sprout Social

These levels are: Free tools such as Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, Rowfeeder e.t.c. The free
tools have one advantage, they're free. But just as I hesitate picking the cheapest tomatoes in the super market, I seriously doubt low prices. "Something's gotta be bad".

Free tools don't give you the amount of content availible online and they usually dont filter the relevant stuff.
They don't offer reporting, the ability to export data and create nice graphs that will make your boss think he understands social media.

In the middle level you find tools that have a price tag of in between 100-200 eur. These are usually tools that try to offer the same as the highlevel tools (600-1000 eur/month) but again, there is no cheap, something's gotta go.
I used PeopleBrowser for a while. Started out well and I liked it, until they raised the price tag from 70 eur to 400(!)

In my opinion what puts me off with many tools is the complexity and the technical failures that keep happening. They're often not stabil enough, you need to reload the page, sign in and out 10 times for them to get your data well. The interface is usually complex because they try to fit in as much as possible to show they offer an advanced tool with many of the same features as the Radian 6 or Meltwater Buzz tools.

To me it's about sophistication and simplicity.
Rather a few great things than many OK things.

So what does Sprout Social offer me that was different?

First of all there integration of Google Reader inside the tool. Can I just say one thing: Brilliant!
Gone are the days of copy paste links, importing them into hootsuite and then programming them into Tweets.
Above each news piece there is an "Expand" and "Share" button. Click share and program that tweet instantaneously.

Next thing I love is the Discovery tab. Here I set up my searches and can join conversations in the matter on a click, answer questions from people searching for my product or simply monitoring what people are saying.

The Report Tab is my Friday friend (Fridays I calculate the weekly KPI's). This is a great place to get a quick answer to the number of Mentions, Retweets and other valuable information. You pick the date range yourself and everything just WORKS and works WELL.



The MESSAGE tab has a neat feature under the Sent message sub tab which lets you see how many have clicked or engaged with your Tweets.


These are just a few things that make Sprout Social a great tool. Add to that a fantastic customer service center that helps you faster than you could ever expect.
I'm based in Spain and despite the time difference they always answer within a few minutes. I haven't even mentioned the iPhone app that works superb...

Price? For 2 "seats" (administrators) and the Delux plan we end up with a bill of around 80 usd/month. Well worth it!

Related posts: 

Choosing a social media listening tool

3 tools I use daily

Tweet

Social Media - A Central Role Inside The Company

Where should a Social Media Manager be based in a company? Marketing? Corporate communications?

Social Media is many things. It's Marketing, communications, customer service, PR, sales and human resources. Maybe it's slightly more marketing than anything else but the social media profile in your company should be deeply integrated into every department.
This person should attend the weekly staff meetings in offline marketing to know what campaigns are about to launch, to be able to back them up online.
Also he should know where online marketing is investing their time for example to coordinate the email marketing campaigns with social media campaigns.
He/she should know if the human resource department is hiring, to be able to post that on Linked In or Twitter.
The person should know the general direction of the company to know the tone of voice, the direction, the general feeling of where the company is and is going.

He should also be very close to communications to have access to press releases and have someone to secure the outgoing messages with, so that all are on the same line.
He should know how sales are going and if there are products that can be used for contests or sweepstakes.
He should know what's going on in the customer service department to know what questions are coming in and how the company is replying. AND coordinate the channels for that.
He or she should have support from a copy writer to craft engaging blog posts and he should have an easy to reach person from the legal department (new school preferably) to exchange ideas and secure the usage of email addresses, terms&conditions of contests e.t.c.
He should also be very close to the designers (the product department) to maximize the company's products for social media, may it be logos, messages or website design.
The list can go on, but my point is that Social media doesn't really belong in one place. Which is why I think it's becoming more and more important to have this profile in-house.
If we externalize social media we don't really care enough about it and at the end we don't really care enough about our customers.
An agency is great for many things but I'm against hiring an agency for social media communications.
Hire the agency to design the Facebook page landing page, the blog or to come up with a great contest idea, but care enough about your customer to let them be handled by the brand they think they're being handled by.
Social Media is trust, it's fast and it's a 2-way communication, NOT 3-way. Meaning, talk directly to the customer, it's faster, it's more genuine and it gives you more control of the quality of what's being said.Tweet