Let’s look at feedback first. If you work in the travel industry and have previously not bothered to collect any customer feedback then you are in for a shock. These are the companies struggling to manage their Facebook pages. Their customers are finding that if they do not have another outlet this is a place to voice their views about any gripes they have with their customer service if they have not been listened to in the past.

 

Social media makes all things transparent and Google has started to make moves indicating that they also consider reviews to be very important to customer search. We are now finding that customer reviews shared on third party websites such as Trip Advisor and the Review Centre are now featuring in natural search. This means that if you have poor scores on these sites they are going to be all too visible when customers are doing online searches under your brand name. This is where reviews are going to affect your search engine rankings.

 

The implication of all this is that you need to make sure that you are encouraging your customers to complete a review on a third party review site.

 

OK, so why is engagement also important? For all those companies chasing numbers of fans the metric to really monitor is the level of engagement with fans. This is tracked easily on sites such as Facebook with their “Insights” analytics package. Anyone achieving anything close to a 5% active fan base is doing very well. Polls, and discussion boards will help but fans often want to be recognised for their contribution to the community. Ranking and signposting of customer posts is key to helping other fans to know what may be of interest and help engagement. This percentage is the most important one in terms of an early indicator as to the future success of your Facebook page.  What we are all waiting for is the holy grail which proves how positive reviews and high engagement levels ultimately influence brand advocacy and lead to higher customer revenues.

 

I have been reading an interesting research paper just published by Comblu[1] which is tracking best practice on the development of branded customer communities in the US. It shows that there are plenty of examples of “ghost communities” which started out with good intentions but quickly die as the company has not continued to engage with the customer. Travel is definitely not a lead industry with regard to community building but players like Virgin, Marriott, JetBlue and South West are starting to show some best practice. I recommend that anyone planning to start a customer community thinks carefully about the type of content that will engage their customers and ensure that they have a “Community Manager” or “Chief Listening Officer” as they are also known.

 

The key thing is to do some listening first to the conversations happening across the web. Only after you have spent a few months listening and making a content plan, would I recommend that you launch a community. It’s also advisable not to treat your fans and followers any differently from those who write or email you. There is an interesting case study[2] about TMobile and a disgruntled customer who only got a response to his complaint when tweeting all his followers. He then objected to the fact that he should not have received very different treatment just because he used a public channel. Social media will quickly show up any glaring discrepancies you have in your customer complaints policy. It’s best to get that in shape first so you are not one of those companies I alluded to initially who are suffering the wrath of their customers in the full glare of a Facebook page…..ooops … now that could be embarrassing.

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Knowing that Stephen Fry has still not rejoined the Twitter fraternity given his falling out with Twitter followers I thought I’d focus this week’s musings on why we should  bother to tweet at all. Some of you may be of the opinion that Twittering is only for rock stars or movie stars. There are now a growing number of businesses both large and small that are gaining traction and making money with Twitter. Dell is already claiming to be making $7m USD from its Twitter site.

 

Having just run a workshop on Twitter today and having all the commonly asked questions buzzing around in my head I thought it would be a good time to share some reasons, advice and feedback for those that have not yet ventured into tweeting,

 

My first comment for my delegates was to get a photo loaded as no one wants to converse with an egg shape and to make sure they load a short bio, ideally with a link to your website which could even be your public Linked in profile.

 

The team were asked to have a go at following each other and also make a tweet and re-tweet something on their page. One of the team inadvertently did a re-tweet in capital letters and I explained the dangers of “shouting online” when this may not be perceived as a friendly gesture when you’re just making your first connections.

 

There are plenty of resources to help you get started on Twitter including You Tube videos explaining for example how to create a list which is very helpful and can be viewed below.

 

I also attach some links from Social Media Examiner on great blogs to get the best out of Twitter which you may find of help:

 

The one key frustration for Twitter users will be the number of times that the site is not available as it is having capacity issues. These issues are not likely to go away with the forecast volume of traffic. Twitter already has 98m users and has had a bit of a growth spurt over the last few months.

Hashtags and lists were explained as a way of making it easier to follow conversations especially if you are using tools like Tweet Chat, Tweet Desk or Hootsuite. Lists act like directories and enable you to manage your followers into groups who are close friends and others who may be based around your study or work. Think of it as the equivalent of creating groups of contacts in Yahoo or Google. Several people have more than one Twitter ID to make it easier to manage their networks.

Half the team had the old style Twitter pages on their screens and half had the new style pages which offer a more visually appealing experience as you get to see mini images of each of your followers and those you follow and to see your lists. The new style pages also finds Twitterers who are like you, which works like Linked in where contacts are suggested to you.

 

Some team members were shocked to discover that they had people who had already invited themselves onto their pages and were keen to know how to block them. However some of them realised that there may have been a reason for having been targeted as they shared similar interests. There are now an increasing number of tools like Blast Follow allowing you to follow a lot of people. However caution is needed to only do one blast at a time so you are not seen to be a spammer.

 

One of the key ways that you can grow your network is to search for key people using the hashtags and key topics so that you can find people who have the same interests as

yourself and you can expect that around 40% of them will follow you back.

 

Twitter is not about getting as many followers as you can. The number of followers is meaningless if there is no meaningful communication between you. Sometimes it’s hard to see how the communication flows given the volume of tweets being published so this is where tools like Tweet Chat can help to make sense of them and why some followers tweet the same message up to 4 or 5 times a day. People may only dip into Twitter for 10-20 mins a day so this way their tweet gets better coverage.

Twitter is important as a very efficient way of doing the following:

-         Promoting attractive time constrained offers (e.g. unsold beds or seats for events). Jet Blue is one of the best examples of showing how their offers often sell out within hours and help to create excitement

-         Providing updates in the event of a crisis. QantasUSA has been making use of their Twitter site to update their passengers on their recent A380 engine problem

-         Sourcing useful tips and information and sharing with others in your network

-         Signposting things which are of help to your network which builds goodwill.

-         Keeping your brand awareness up with your customers without bombarding them with emails and direct mail. 

 

I wish you all the best with your Tweeting and remember that tweeting is no longer about what you had for breakfast and more about providing things that are of value to the reader that you want to engage with. Tweeting is also converging with all the other social media channels so you can now tweet happily on Facebook and other channels and see your tweets pop up in Linked In. It’s much easier to go “viral” with a tweet like never before to create some real engagement with your fans and followers.

 

No 1 - Find out how your customers are using social media

Most clients I have met want to use social media to reach customers in the channels they are using most frequently. There are thousands of social media sites and it’s important that your focus on the ones that are most widely used.by your customers.

 

I was interested to read the recent Hitwise recent report[1] on the profile of Twitter and Facebook fans against the UK’s Mosaic demographic database which prompted British Airways to use Twitter more than Facebook as it more closely matched the profile of their customers.

If you want to use it as a retention tool then measure retention and ensure you can measure forward from this benchmark level.

If you want to use social media as a way of engaging with your fans then use the Facebook insights package to measure the no of impressions and comments that each post creates, which will be given an index. Anything approaching 1% engagement level is seen as very good versus the norm.

If on the other hand you want to use it to build awareness then measure this through a customer survey so that you have a benchmark from which to measure improvements.

It’s relatively easy to ask a question “How did you hear about us?” and ensure your social media channels are mentioned.

Most businesses want to use social media to drive traffic to their website. In order to track what happens all links are best shortened using www.bit.ly or www.tiny.cc or using Google’s new service and tracked so that revenues per clickthrough can be measured.

If you have good content to put in your blogs then ensure you have a newsletter sign up on your blogs aswell as the ability to capture rank posts, add comments and feedback. Ensure that all your blogs and tweets can be retweeted or shared with others. Don’t forget to submit your blogs to feedburner and other sites to ensure they get maximum circulation across the web. Your existing customer newsletters may have rich content which would be of real interest to other web visitors so make them as accessible as possible by posting links to them and enable your customers to interact with them.

 

Remember that clickthroughs from your website to your Facebook page together with the number of daily likes will help to explain your conversion rate to likes and you can explore the gap between the two figures.

 

Ensure you have a friendly welcome page on Facebook with clear instructions on how to “like” your page so that you can maximise your opportunities to start a conversation. You can set your own preferences as to the level of interactivity you want with fans on Facebook but remember that fan content is likely to prove more engaging to a first time visitor than company posts and will build greater levels of trust.

Collecting fans is not productive if they do not do anything so the key metric to measure is how active they are in recommending others. For this reason you need to make it easy for customers, not just to “like” but to recommend your business not just in Facebook but also on your website. With the integration of social media channels  you can now “tweet” in Facebook and in your Yahoo email. Social sign ins will become more important as Search becomes Social with the tie up between Facebook and Bing so make sure you have optimised your website for social as much as possible. There are already 2 million websites with social sign ins so you want to have your listing in the search engines with any endorsements from your customers.

 

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